Microsoft is rolling out an update to the Xbox app for iOS and Android that includes a new social sharing feature. Players will be able to share screenshots, gameplay clips and achievements with their friends and others as Instagram- or Snapchat-style stories. You'll be able to respond to other people's stories with a reaction or message too.
You'll find the stories on the home screen of the app. To share a clip, screenshot or achievement, access the channel, tap the plus sign on your gamertag and choose what you want to post from the gallery. You'll be able to add a caption before sharing your story.
Although Instagram and Snapchat stories typically disappear after 24 hours, Xbox stories will be available for 72 hours. That means it's more likely that your friends will see your updates, as long as they can tear themselves away from the new Halo Infinite season for long enough.
There's another new feature for Xbox consoles as part of the May update. Microsoft calls it Quality of Service (QoS) tagging. It says this is a way of prioritizing "latency-sensitive outbound networking traffic such as party chat, console streaming and multiplayer." The company says this feature could help to maintain your gaming experience amid connection issues on congested networks.
You can manage QoS tags in the Settings app. After selecting the General option, go to network settings, then advanced settings. You'll then see the QoS tagging settings. DSCP tagging is enabled at the IPv4 and IPv6 packet level and works on both wired and wireless connections. WMM tagging works on the wireless packed level and is active only on Wi-Fi connections.
These updates are now live in Australia. Microsoft says they'll arrive in other regions soon.
I thought Apple’s car project had gone a little quiet, but it’s still a thing, according to Bloomberg.
The company has reportedly hired a longtime Ford engineer and executive to work on its car thought experiment, once called Project Titan. Desi Ujkashevic had been with the automaker since 1991 and was Ford's global director of automotive safety engineering.
Naturally, that means we’ve chewed over her work history and LinkedIn page, noting she’s worked on Ford's electric vehicles and regulatory issues — expertise Apple will love.
There have been rumors about Apple’s work on autonomous vehicles since 2015, but there have been more setbacks than announcements. Doug Field, who apparently led Project Titan, left Apple to rejoin Ford last September. Are they just swapping execs?
Razer is updating its Blade 15 laptop with an option for what it says is the first 240Hz OLED laptop display. You'll get the high responsiveness for an edge in multiplayer games, but you'll still have a color-accurate 1440p panel (100 percent of the DCI-P3 space) with deep contrast. You’ll need deep pockets: The upgraded Blade 15 will arrive before the end of the year for $3,500.
Paramount’s streaming service will arrive in the UK and Ireland on June 22nd. South Korea will also have access sometime in June. For everywhere else, you'll have to wait until the second half of 2022.
The company announced it added 6.8 million new Paramount+ subscribers in the first quarter of 2022, putting the platform now at almost 40 million customers. Despite Halo.
Work on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake hasn't gone as smoothly as Ubisoft hoped. The company has now put its Montreal studio in charge of the project, taking it away from Ubisoft’s Pune and Mumbai studios.
Ubisoft Montreal was "the very birthplace of the epic Sands of Time trilogy," the developers wrote in a message to fans. The original was released in 2003, which was a reboot of, well, 1989’s Prince of Persia. In the original, when you died, you stayed dead.
While this guide is for graduates planning trips post-college, I think a lot of us are thinking of going somewhere as travel restrictions relax, and we all start to feel more comfortable with the idea of long-distance travel. Here are some travel essentials to help you stay connected — and have more fun — on the road.
You might not have to tweet to all your followers (or the public) in the future. Twitter is testing a "Circle" feature that lets you limit tweets to a group of as many as 150 people. It's a not-so-subtle parallel to Instagram's Close Friends — you can ask for advice or share a personal event without unwelcome commentary.
The company told Engadget Circle is already available to a "small group" of Android, iOS and web users worldwide. It's not yet clear if or when Twitter might expand the test to a wider audience, although that will likely hinge on feedback.
Circle joins a number of features meant to control the reach of Twitter posts, including an option to restrict who can reply. It could help Twitter compete with Instagram and other services that let you be more selective about content sharing, and might help you protect your privacy without resorting to direct messages or a small follower list.
At the same time, there is a concern Circle might exacerbate echo chambers. If you frequently limit discussions to a small clique, you might be less inclined to tweet to a larger crowd or see what your more distant connections are saying. Even so, more granularity might be appreciated at a time when it's all too easy to be overwhelmed.
Some Tweets are for everyone & others are just for people you’ve picked.
We’re now testing Twitter Circle, which lets you add up to 150 people who can see your Tweets when you want to share with a smaller crowd.
A lot of people are paying for Paramount+ to watch Halo and Star Trek: Picard, even if neither series has been particularly outstanding. On Tuesday, Paramount Global (formerly ViacomCBS) announced that it added 6.8 million new Paramount+ subscribers in the first quarter of 2022. With those additions, the platform has almost 40 million customers. Among other content, the company credited its original programming, including the aforementioned Halo and Star Trek: Picard, for the continued growth of Paramount+.
In turn, that subscriber growth contributed to an increase in the company’s bottom line, with revenue from the service growing by 148 percent year-on-year to $585 million in Q1 2022. “The first quarter once again demonstrated the power and potential of Paramount’s unique assets and the company’s continued momentum,” said Paramount Global CEO and President Bob Bakish.”
Paramount’s success is particularly notable given Netflix’s recent struggles. Last month, the streaming giant announced that it lost about 200,000 customers in the first quarter of 2022, marking its first subscriber drop in a decade. The company has since embarked on a series of cost-cutting measures, canceling series like Space Forceand gutting the editorial staff of its Tudum fansite.
Last year, Google announced smart canvas, a suite of tools the company promised would make it easier for people to collaborate across its productivity apps. Since then, it has consistently introduced new “smart chips,” small modular features designed to further that goal. The latest adds a new tool for creating dropdown menus in Google Docs.
Google
As you can see from the GIF the company shared, you can use the feature to add customizable menus to your document. You’re free to decide how many items you want and the title and associated color of each one. Docs even allows you to save a menu as a template for later use. Speaking of templates, Google is adding ones for tables you can use for things like tracking a product roadmap.
With today’s additions, it’s easy to imagine a scenario where you could use Docs as a replacement for a paid project management tool like Asana. “We hope these features help you to create highly customized and organized documents in Google Docs, making it easier to collaborate and drive your project forward,” the company said of the new features.
Google
Google expects to roll them out to all Workspace and legacy G Suite customers, as well as all personal Google accounts, in the coming weeks. Once you have access, you can add a dropdown menu by selecting the “Dropdown” option from the “Insert” menu.
Facebook's podcast offerings are vanishing just a year after they launched. Parent company Meta has confirmed to Bloomberg that it will wind down podcasting, Soundbites and its general audio hub. It will no longer let podcasters add shows to Facebook as of this week, and will remove them entirely on June 3rd. The hub and Soundbites will close sometime in the "coming weeks," while Live Audio Rooms will fold into Facebook Live.
A Meta spokesperson characterized the move as a matter of concentration. The move will help Meta "focus on the most meaningful experiences," according to the representative.
There were hints in recent weeks that Meta was losing interest in podcasts and shifting attention to hotter products like Facebook's main feed and Instagram's Reels. There was a good response to audio services, a Meta spokesperson told Bloomberg in mid-April, but the news outlet's sources said the social media firm was more interested in highlighting the metaverse and shopping when talking to podcast partners. Simply speaking, Meta's interests in conquering AR, VR and rivals like TikTok may have pulled its attention away from audio.
Facebook also has fiercer competition in the sound-only realm. Podcast app operators like Apple and Spotify were already major threats, but there was also a flood of efforts to mimic Clubhouse in 2021. Meta had to pit Facebook's services against the likes of Twitter Spaces and Reddit Talk. There was no guarantee Facebook would stand out in this market, even with a well-known name and massive resources at its disposal.
Peacock has signed a multiyear deal to stream Lionsgate movies, starting in 2024. The agreement starts with the studio's 2022 slate and the first film that will reach Peacock as part of the deal is The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which stars Nicolas Cage.
Other Lionsgate movies that will eventually end up on Peacock for an exclusive streaming period include John Wick: Chapter 4, Borderlandsand Hunger Games prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. The deal also covers Expendables 4 (or, ugh, Expend4bles), Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and White Bird: A Wonder Story.
Peacock won't be the first to get its hands on these films, however, as they'll ping pong between various platforms in the coming years. They'll initially stream on Starz, and then for a while they'll be available to watch for free on The Roku Channel.
Also on Monday, Peacock announced that three movies from its NBCUniversal sibling Universal Pictures will debut as streaming exclusives in 2023. They include The Killer, John Woo's remake of his own classic 1989 thriller. Also on the way are Praise This (which stars Chloe Bailey) and Shooting Stars, a LeBron James biopic covering his years as a high school basketball player.
Swedish game company Embracer Group has just made a blockbuster deal to acquire Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal and Square Enix Montréal for what seems like a bargain $300 million price, the company confirmed in a press release. The deal includes a "catalogue of IPs including Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Thief, Legacy of Kain and more than 50 back-catalogue games from Square Enix Holdings," it wrote. The transaction is subject to regulatory approval.
Those studios represent around 1,100 employees across eight global locations, the company noted. When the deal is finalized, Embracer will have 14,000 employees, 10,000 game developers and 124 internal studios. It has more than 230 games in development, with 30 of those being AAA titles. "This acquisition will bring additional scale to Embracer’s current AAA segment, and Embracer will have one of the largest pipelines of PC/Console games content across the industry, across all genres," it said.
Today we have entered into agreement to welcome over 1000 new colleagues through the acquisition of @CrystalDynamics, @EidosMontreal, and @SquareEnixMtl with a fantastic catalog of IPs such as Tomb Raider and Deux Ex, to be part of our ecosystem.https://t.co/NqELDQKTGe
As part of the deal, Eidos Montreal plans to revive Deus Ex and use new Unreal Engine 5 technology, the studio said during the acquisition conference call, as Shack News reported. "At this time, we are crazy people who have decided to revive the Deus Ex IP as our first game," Eidos Montreal Studio Head David Anfossi said. "A new team, a very complex production, a new tech, and a new studio, an easy challenge." Anfossi noted that Deus Ex console sales have exceeded 12 million units.
Last month, Crystal Dynamics announced that it was developing a new Tomb Raider game, also based on Unreal Engine 5, with plans to "push the envelope of fidelity." The studio also developed Marvel's Avengers, among other titles. Eidos Montréal created Thief 4, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and more, and is "working on a host of AAA projects including both new releases from beloved franchises and original IP," according to the Embracer press release.
As we detailed in a feature last year, Embracer is perhaps "the biggest games publisher you've never heard of," founded by Swedish entrepreneur Lars Wingefors. It made a string of acquisitions over the last couple of years, most significantly purchasing Saber Interactive for $525 million and Gearbox Software for $1.3 billion.
It now own quite a list of iconic franchises, particularly in the classic category. On top of the newly acquired IP, it controls Saints Row, Goat Simulator, Dead Island, Metro, TimeSplitters, Borderlands, Darksiders, MX vs ATV, Kingdoms of Amalur, Satisfactory, Wreckfest, Insurgency and World War Z. For some of those like TimeSplitters, the company has promised new titles from the original developers.
There are reasons that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds exists beyond the need to keep the Trek content pumping so nobody thinks too hard about canceling Paramount+. It’s designed to quell some of the discontent in Star Trek's vast and vocal fanbase about the direction the live-action shows have traveled under the stewardship of uber-producer Alex Kurtzman. It’s also a slightly bewildered response to the criticism of its predecessors, Discovery and Picard, made by the same people behind those two shows. In short, it’s designed to appeal to people who, when asked what their favorite live-action Trek show is, unironically say The Orville.
We open on Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), the once-and-future captain of the Enterprise after his sojourn leading Discovery in its second season. There, a magic time crystal told him that, in less than a decade, he’ll be non-fatally blown up in a training accident. Armed with a standard-issue Grief Beard™, he refuses the call to return to the stars until the siren song of non-serialized space adventure becomes too great. It isn’t long before he and Spock are reunited to rescue Rebecca Romijn’s Number One from a spy mission on a pre-warp planet gone wrong. Sadly, Paramount’s restrictive embargo on discussing the first few episodes forbids me from discussing much of what I've seen, so things will get vaguer from here on out.
There are more refreshed Original Series characters than just Pike, Spock and Number One along for the ride. Babs Olusanmokun is playing a more fleshed-out version of Dr. M’Benga, while Jess Bush takes over for Christine Chapel. André Dae Kim is the new Chief Kyle, who has been promoted from intermittent extra to transporter chief. Then there’s Celia Rose Gooding as Cadet Uhura, whose semi-canonical backstory is now firmly enshrined as a Dead Parent / Troubled Childhood narrative. Uhura aside, most of these roles were so under-developed in the ‘60s that they’re effectively blank slates for the reboot. Oh, except that everyone is now Hot and Horny, because this isn’t just Star Trek, it’s Star Trek that isn’t afraid to show characters in bed with other people.
Rounding out the cast is Christina Chong as security chief La’an Noonien-Singh, a descendant of Khaaaaan! himself, Trek’s in-series Hitler analog. From what we learn of her so far, she also gets saddled with a Troubled Childhood / Dead Parent narrative, as well as a case of the nasties. I expect her character will soften further over time, but right now she’s officially the least fun character to spend time with. Of more interest is Melissa Navia’s hotshot pilot Erica Ortegas who can launch the odd quip into the mix when called upon, and Hemmer. Hemmer is a telepathic Aenar (a type of Androian first introduced in Enterprise) played by Bruce Horak. Horak plays Hemmer as an old-fashioned lovable grump and mentor figure for some of the other characters and will clearly become a fan-favorite.
And having now seen the first half of the first season (a second is already in production) I can say that Strange New Worlds will be a frustrating watch for fans. Frustrating because there are the bones of a really fun, interesting Star Trek series buried deep inside Strange New Worlds. Sadly, it’s trapped in the usual mix of faux-melodrama, clanging dialogue and dodgy plotting with the usual lapses in logic. Many writers are blind to their own flaws, which is why it’s so amusing that this is what Kurtzman and co. feel is a radical departure from their own work.
Maybe I’m being unfair, but this is the seventh season of live-action Star Trek released under Kurtzman’s purview. The three lead characters all had a full season of Discovery to bed in, too, so it’s not as if everyone’s starting from cold. But despite the gentlest of starts, the show still manages to stumble out of the gate, trying to do too much and not enough at the same time. The first four episodes, especially, feel as if someone’s trying to speed-read you through a whole season’s worth of plot in a bunch of partly-disconnected episodes.
An aside: Ever since the mid ‘80s, Paramount was desperate to reboot Star Trek with a younger cast to cash-in on that Kirk/Spock brand awareness. It eventually happened, but only in 2009 with J.J. Abrams’ not-entirely-successful attempt to reboot the series in cinemas. While a Young Kirk movie made sense in the ‘80s, mining that seam for nostalgia today seems very weird indeed. After all, most people under the age of 50 will likely associate TNG as the One True Star Trek. The fact that not-so-closet Trek fan Rihanna’s favorite character is Geordi La Forge speaks volumes about where millennial love lies. But I’d imagine a La Forge spin-off series was never going to fly with any generation of Paramount executives.
Now let’s talk about that emotional continuity, because while people will take their experiences with them, little effort has been made to pre-seed conflicts before they erupt. Arguably the weakest episode of the bunch tries to cram four (4!) A-plots into its slender runtime. One of which is a coming out narrative for one crewmember – and once they’ve come out, another character reveals a deep-seated antipathy toward that group. It would be nice, if we could have let this particular battle brew, but it’s introduced about 25 minutes in and resolved with a punchfight by minute 40. We’re not shown the person wrestling with the decision to come out and risk their professional and personal relationships beforehand, either. Just… punchfight.
A lot of these episodes don’t properly resolve themselves either, which is the standard problem for any 50-minute TV show. It’s hard to build a new world, flesh out new characters, establish and resolve their problems in the space of two episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. But at least three episodes feature conclusions that either aren’t clear or take place entirely off screen, explained away with a line of dialogue. I don’t know if it was a production problem, or if a majority of the show’s 22 (yes, twenty-two) credited producers signed off on it, but it feels a hell of a lot like cheating. It's almost as if the writers wanted to provoke surprise in the subsequent scene — how did this get resolved!? — over concocting a satisfying emotional and narrative catharsis on-screen.
In fact, I’m going to harp on about this one particular episode because it’s not content with just dropping one major character revelation. The episode basically stops 10 minutes early in order to – shock horror – drop another Kinda Dark Secret About A Crewmember You Barely Know. One thing I said when Discovery started was that if you never get to know the characters in their default state, it’s not valuable to see their bizarro-world counterparts straight away. It’s the same here, Strange New Worlds refuses to do the painstaking work of filling in these characters before they start changing as a result of their experiences together.
The cast is all solid, and clearly working hard to elevate the material they’ve been given, because the dialogue here is so rough that I think they all deserve danger money. Now, nü-Trek dialog has always been awkward and/or impenetrable, but it’s beyond dreadful here. Kurtzman and co. forgot the whole “show, don’t tell” nature of screenwriting, and so characters just stand there and tell you everything, constantly. This is made worse because rather than giving space for these talented, well-paid actors to act, they’re instead forced to say what they’re feeling.
Here’s an example of that: In one episode, a character is trying (and failing) to remember a key memory from a traumatic experience in childhood that holds the key to saving the day. But rather than use the performer to convey that, they have the actor in question stand there, blank-faced, and say “I am trauma blocked.” Then there are scenes in which two characters describe what’s happening in front of them with the sort of faux-gravitas that only Adam West could pull off.
Remember when I said there was promise? There really is, and you feel like if the writers could get out of their own way, things could improve massively. There’s one episode you could easily describe as the (actually fun) comedy romp of the season and it’s great. Every Trek fan knows that The One With The Whales is the most financially successful Trek property ever made. And yet whenever a new Trek property is made, it’s always with the promise of more grimness, more darkness, more grit, more realism. Yet here we are, with the fun episode reminding you why you watch Star Trek in the first place, and making the characters fun people to hang out with. If the series could continue in that slightly slower, more relaxed groove, then Strange New Worlds could be brilliant.
I haven’t talked much about the production design or effects, both of which are great – this new Enterprise is gorgeous inside and out. Nor the series music, with Nami Melumad’s score being smart, subtle and lush in all of the right places. That’s a compliment not shared with Jeff Russo’s now standard fare, which neither matches the delicacy of a good prestige drama intro nor the soaring bombast associated with Star Trek. The best and worst thing I can say about the intro theme is that it sounds like it came from one of Interplay’s mid ‘90s CD-ROM games.
Fundamentally, I can only really damn Strange New Worlds with the faintest of praise – it can be fun, every now and again. I would imagine, and hope, that things will improve as time goes on, and the show’s makers won’t indulge their worst impulses. Given that I walked away from Picard after the end of its first dreary-as-hell run, the fact I’m at least prepared to stick around here speaks volumes.
I spent about an hour hand-picking songs for my first Amazon AMP radio show. The social-audio-but-with-music app offers the chance to play radio DJ with just a phone and your imagination. I tried to pick a catchy name for my debut broadcast – “The best House Classics” or something like that. Like all music bores, I was confident I was about to blow some minds with my impeccable taste and hand-picked floor fillers. All that was left to do was click the “Go Live” button. Once you tap it, the app counts you down 5…4…3… . I cleared my throat and then… silence.
AMP was initially reported as something of a Clubhouse competitor, but that’s not really the best way to describe it. Yes, you can sorta-kinda use it as a live chat platform, but music is really the selling point here. When you create a “show” you can add songs from Amazon Music’s library and then stream them to your audience. In between hosts are doing anything from chatting about sports, to comedy skits, having guests call in or just letting the music play. On paper, it’s the app teenage me, with his dual cassette deck and microphone, had been waiting for all his life. It’s just a shame that, right now in its beta form, no one’s really listening.
I’ve spent the last week or two exploring the app and hosting shows and I barely peaked at four simultaneous listeners. Briefly. Usually I was lucky to get one or two people tuning in, but more often than not I was alone. And I definitely didn’t do a whole hour-long show talking to myself in between ‘90s drum & bass tracks. Definitely not a thing that happened. Twice.
Engadget
It’s hard to tell if this is a true reflection of the interest in AMP, given it’s in beta. It's not difficult to get in, as long as you have access to the US App Store / have an iPhone. Technically you also need an invite code, but given that the official AMP Twitter account has one right up top, the app is basically open to everyone who meets the first two criteria.
I speculated I am at a disadvantage being located in Europe, so my shows tend to fall in the middle of the American work day. But I checked the app regularly and even at typical US commute and evening times other people’s shows rarely had more than 10 listeners, usually half that. But again, this is a beta so not an indication of too much. I bring it up now though for the following reason: without a listener, you cannot play songs and that presents a problem. Hence the silence at the start of my big debut show.
In fact, there are a few more restrictions. Not only must you have at least one listener to play music, you can only play two songs from the same album or three songs from the same artist within a three hour period. These rules make some sense to prevent the free app being abused. But also that presents a big problem during the beta stage. If I have no listeners, I can’t play a song… so I can only talk. But what is the point of talking if no one is listening?
It certainly made for some intimate moments. I joined someone’s show when they currently had no listeners. I could practically hear the host excitedly rushing to play a song now that they could. I then enjoyed a 1-on-1 human-curated show of hip-hop. Likewise for my own shows, there were definitely some weird moments when I realized it’s just me playing songs for someone else. I ended up using a second account on a spare phone so I wouldn’t have to wait for someone to join (hence the DnB party for one) to fully test the service for this story. This should be less of a problem in the future, but it was frustrating at the start, waiting up to 30 minutes sometimes for a listener to join so you could kick a song off.
Amazon also imposes other curious rules that seem a little ornery if not hard to enforce. For example, you may not make a show consisting mostly of listener requests, you may not announce playlists ahead of time and you may not announce a song until just before it is being played. The difference between can and may I’ll leave up to you.
Setting up a show is straightforward. Tap the button top left, add a title, choose some topics (tags), type a description and then either add songs to a playlist or just throw caution to the wind and go live, adding songs later. I’d recommend having a playlist fleshed out because navigating the song menu screen isn’t very slick right now. You can only enter global search terms – there’s no filter by artist or song title or genre etc. – so finding what you want can sometimes be hit and miss.
More importantly, the library doesn’t seem to be fully fleshed out right now. AMP’s official help pages claim there are “tens of millions of songs” but I sometimes couldn’t find what I was looking for. To be fair, this was usually down to my weird taste in niche ‘90s dance music but I did find songs on decent-size labels that were absent.
For example, “Gold Dust” by DJ Fresh is on Amazon Music for sure, but it wasn’t available in AMP. This is a real crime as anyone who knows that track will attest. I did check again over a week later and saw that a remix had since been added, so it seems the library is growing in real time. More surprisingly, another time I looked for a track by Hot Chip and noticed only half of their albums were listed.
A related issue is that you can’t preview tracks before adding them to your playlist. In my case, that meant a few occasions where I had found a version of the song I wanted, but golly was it not the one I was expecting when I played it, making for a slightly awkward record scratch moment. If you have better taste in music than I, you’re probably fine, but if you were hoping to spin niche cuts or even some fairly well known synthpop you might want to revise that plan for now.
I know AMP is designed to be a mobile-first experience, but I do wish there were at least some tools to prep your show on desktop first. I often resorted to finding tunes on my PC and then just looking up tracks on the phone while setting up the show. I also learned the hard way that if you schedule a show for the future and then sleep through the time it was set for, the show and all the tracks you added to it disappears (I’d at least have liked the option to reschedule it!).
Relatedly, you can’t add tracks to some sort of “record box” or bookmark them for later shows. I found myself thinking of great tunes for other shows but had to just keep a notepad going for later reference. Likewise, once you finish a show, that’s it, poof… gone. There’s no way for people to go back and listen again or scroll through your feed to see what you tend to play etc.
Engadget
In its current state, the app also doesn’t offer any way to fade out a song or speak over it while it’s playing. This seems minor, but it does mean you either have to wait until the bitter end of a song before you talk (and then with no music “bed”) or cut a track off prematurely. I heard people doing both but it would be nice to have a more gentle way to transition tracks.
Once your show is over, AMP will give you a little slide show of stats. As you can imagine, this was a bit painful for me as it gleefully told me I peaked at two listeners and had one like, but this would definitely be cool once you have an audience.
Amazon has enlisted some popular creators to showcase the platform and give it some gravitas. These are instantly identifiable as they will be the only shows with a bunch of people listening. AMP promotes these accounts and they are featured on the website, but I do wonder where all these listeners go the rest of the time. The fact you can’t currently click on the show's listener count to see who’s tuning in means you can’t size up potential listeners for your own show.
I'm live @OnAmp_ but there's no way to share the link etc so have fun with that!
In fact, the “social media” element of the app is possibly the most limited part right now. For starters there’s no way to share a link to your show. I know the app is in beta, but given how open that is, I would have thought sharing links is a basic enough thing to enable. AMP offers links to recommended shows in its newsletters which you can adulterate to link to your own but you need the app installed for them to work so that’s still less than ideal.
Discovery is also not fully fleshed out at this point. When you open the app you’ll be presented with shows currently on air as you swipe through one by one. Then once you reach the end you’ll see what’s scheduled for the future, but right now there’s no real way to drill down by genre or topic. You can search, but a host needs to have scheduled shows for them to turn up in results.
It’s also clear that, right from the start, Amazon is trying to encourage diverse voices to join and host. The company was explicit about that in the run up to its launch, and it seems to be working. The types of show and the people behind them have all been refreshingly varied and this I feel is important to AMP finding its way to stand out. The music aspect alone makes it different from rivals like Clubhouse, Greenroom and even Twitter Spaces. But the voices it amplifies will be the secret sauce.
This for me was really the most rewarding part. I thought hosting my own shows would be fun, and it was, but it was the exposure to other music that was the most rewarding. I often joined shows with no listeners to allow them to kick off some tunes and then found myself staying. Other times I figured I’d dip into a show with a genre I don’t normally listen to and was more often than not surprised to find things I liked. Being a DJ is cool, but hearing new, hand-picked music is even cooler.
Rough edges aside, there’s a lot of promise here. It’s understandable that no one wants to listen to my favorite Happy Hardcore songs (the ones I could find on the app at least) at 2pm on a Wednesday. But if, like me, you kinda prefer the human touch over an algorithmic recommendation and the chance to stumble into new worlds of music then AMP makes a lot of sense. And of course, as with all such creator-based services as more people join, the culture and flavor of the platform starts to change organically (remember when TikTok was about people dancing to songs?). Once AMP is open to the public proper, it’ll be interesting to see where it goes. For now, if you want to hear rando dance music, I’ll be here… waiting.
