Building a Cross Platform 360-degree Video Experience at The New York Times

Building a Cross Platform 360-degree Video Experience at The New York Times(open.blogs.nytimes.com)

92 points by dayyvson 9 years ago | 15 comments

They are off investing time/money in bleeding edge tech, yet they won't innovate or improve the community/commenting system.

Discussion can be huge for engagement, and they have the reach and audience to set a new high watermark in this area.

Instead, you still can't even comment on most articles.

If anyone from NYT reads here I'd love to share some ideas.

egreene 9 years ago | |

The Times is also collaborating with Google Jigsaw on an experiment to automatically moderate comments:

http://www.nytco.com/the-times-is-partnering-with-jigsaw-to-...

https://medium.com/jigsaw/new-york-times-and-jigsaw-partner-...

aaronkrolik 9 years ago | |

You should check out the coral project: https://coralproject.net/

It's the next generation community platform that the Times is working on right now.

motoboi 9 years ago |

Those guys came from Globo, the biggest media conglomerate in Brazil.

Global has slowly and consistently built an open source software culture and a lead in web tech for media in Brazil.

Congrats!

hackuser 9 years ago |

I don't understand the NY Times' focus on future technologies which have little immediate application, over fundamentals they should (IMHO) have mastered ten years ago, such as making video and graphics first-class mediums alongside text.

pasbesoin 9 years ago |

And this "open. ..." blog is behind the paywall.

Oh, well.

watchdogtimer 9 years ago |

FWIW, the 360 videos aren't working on Debian using Firefox-ESR (which is 45.4.0). :( I'm getting the error "Your browser doesn't support 360 videos."

exodust 9 years ago | |

Doesn't work on iOS using Firefox either. Same error. Oddly enough it does sort of work on iOS Safari, but the experience is bad. Works fine in Firefox 33 on Windows btw.

thiagopnts 9 years ago | |

the webgl extensions used probably aren't available in this version, might still be behind a flag as wangchow mentioned

wangchow 9 years ago | |

Maybe there's an experimental feature that can be enabled to get it.

exodust 9 years ago |

Great to see 360 web video for once. I hate YouTube's "you need Chrome for this". My answer to that is "no Google, you need cross-browser 360 video".

I tried the NYT video on iOS Safari and while it worked, it was a bad experience. When swiping up to look up and down, the whole page scrolled instead of the video pitching up/down. The video was choppy too. I'm impressed they got it working on iOS Safari though. Apple would prefer you repeat the phrase "there's an app for that", and it's no surprise their browser well short of its potential for handling such things.

phmagic 9 years ago |

I love this! There is no reason why the NYTimes can't be a media-tech powerhouse 10x what it is now.

jshevek 9 years ago | |

I love the use of technology, but can't get excited about the NYT, specifically, being a "media-tech powerhouse 10x what it is now" given their lack of ethics.