#i have no idea how to tag this so it reaches the target audience ill be honest

[ivory-obsidian]

Anyone have ideas on how saddles and other riding tack can be converted to mlp? Racing stockings are basically compression garments I think, but what about bridles, saddles, and etc? I just had a vision that saddles could be supportive garments like corsets (horsets if you will /j), with maybe some special flight ones to help pegasi glide for long periods of time, as well as medical ones for spinal issues and some just for fashion. I can only see bridles being used in the bedroom tho

[laithraihan]

I'm the anon who sent you the long message that apparently came off "pompous & infantilizing" and more to your followers.

I find it interesting that that message sparked such a flood of defenders, when I did not send it in bad faith at all. From your answer it seems I'm lacking context so sorry if I took some of your statements the wrong way, but nonetheless I just found the parental love addition strange and reacted to that, that was all there was to it. I clearly stated (three times) I'm not taking any issue with your headcanons.

By saying they are far removed from canon I did not mean to say they are "too unrealistic" or something is wrong with that, I literally said the opposite. I meant just that, that factually, this will not be a common interpretation for someone who is familiar with the source material but not your blog. This is not a statement that I made with any judgemental value and I thought I made that very clear but apparently not.

So I'm sorry for the additional ask.

Have a nice day.

Thank you for the response.

I was fully aware you said there was no issue with what I drew, but the way you wrote everything else sort of negated that statement. At least that's how me and many other people saw it.

If someone finds what I drew strange or confusing then they could always just... block me or ask me about it (and btw I expected people to be confused, otherwise I wouldnt have labeled it "non-coupling" as soon I posted it lol)

Someone did ask me about it, and you seem to have already seen that response, yet you still felt the need to send another message basically implying that an explanation wasn't enough (turns out it actually wasnt enough because people said I was lying and in denial) and that my explanation was weird too? Which is whatever I already ended up clarifying that, English is not my first language and I type things with the help of a translator (I wish people could actually keep this in mind. I only type in English because it'll reach a wider audience and it's the language most of my followers know. Often I have to google words people tell me online, or I ask my friends fluent in English to explain things for me)

You can say "that's not what I intended" but that's how it came across... you wrote a lot of nice words while also saying it was understandable that people were ganging up on me over a drawing, it seemed patronizing.

That's why me and others took offense to it, but I think it's difficult to tell tone through text so I don't want to keep nitpicking this any further. If you say you had no ill intent then I believe you.

The following will just be me adding more context and not necessarily aimed at you: Again I understand the lack of context of my account can make people confused about my art, Ive made that clear many times.

The art I made where I said "if your parents didnt love you then it's obvious" was a direct response to people who were mocking me specifically for tagging the art as "non-coupling" because they didnt believe me. They got the context and decided I was trying to hide a fetish because a kiss on the cheek was "obviously shippy". They proceeded to compare this to drawing NSFW of Mob and Reigen by labelling it "non-ship" as if it was comparable to tucking a child into bed, that's what upset me. I did absolutely nothing to these people, I dont know them, if they said this privately I wouldnt care but it was public, and they also targeted another friend of mine for no reason.

All Im gonna say is that my drawing shouldnt have caused this much controversy in the first place. I labeled it "non-coupling" as soon as I posted it, which should've been enough honestly. It's not like I posted porn or anything like that, I got the idea from something Ive experienced in my family as a teenager and I could easily google stock images of the exact same scenario to use as reference, like I really didnt think it was that bad.

Anyways I think I've explained myself many times already. Im not gonna be hostile and say to people "roh t9awed dont ever send me anything else related to this" but just.. check if Ive already answered your question so that it doesnt end up being repetitive. If you have a question about this that I havent answered yet, then feel free to ask.

[rawliverandcigarettes]

10 Questions

Tag time ! Thanks a lot to @illusivesoul for this :D It’s nice to feel included even though I’m still very new around. (this is going to be super long because I can’t seem to shut the hell up. :3) 1. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you like to live ? I guess I enjoy living where I live, which is France. The country is small but there are many landscapes to choose from, and you don’t even have to travel that much to find mountains, blue sea, cities or forests. I also enjoy poking fun at my own country and culture way too much for what would be decent. Foreign jokes about us are just too funny xD And even though we too are crippled with political and social issues, I look at some other countries (HMHM America), and yeah. It could be so much worse. 2. How did you discover Mass Effect ? I was a great KOTOR fan already, but I tend to stick to what I know, and I rarely venture to new stuff on my own. It was a combinaison of friends, good reviews and a very cheap copy on a shelf of my local store that finally made me play Mass Effect 2 for the first time (I started with the 2, then the third, and ended with the first one, which is definitively not how you play a trilogy). 3. Do you have any tattoos ? If you don’t, do you want any ? I don’t have any tattoos, and I’ve considered getting one many times. But given how expensive they are, I don’t think they’ll ever be enough of a priority for me to commit to this vague idea. I have many other expensive things I’d rather do first :3 4. Do you have any pets ? Kind of ! My parents own 4 cats, that I can’t help but consider my own too even though I moved out. They’re cute and insufferable, one of them is completely insane, looks like Dracula on steroids and is called “Le Mérovingien” like this french Matrix character that curses all the time, One of them lost a leg in a car accident, but hopefully he worked through the trauma and is perfectly healthy and energetic again. The two left hate each other’s guts and their war force us to separate them at all time. So my parents home is a very calm place as you have guessed. 5. If you could recommend 3 games from any genre, what would they be ? 1. The Beginner’s Guide This game has to be my all time favorite. It’s not a proper game so to speak, more like a narrative experience based on interactivity by the creator of The Stanley Parable. It’s not for everyone and generally you will either don’t get why it exists or you will be slapped so hard you won’t be able to express yourself for hours. It talks about creation, game creation specifically, toxic creative relationship, depression, the relationship between the creator, the creation and the public consuming it, and meaning. A masterful example on how narrative design can push further the boundaries of classic storytelling for consumerism and turn it to painful expression of artistic obsessions. I love this game so much. 2. Silent Hill 2 I am a huge survival horror fan, because in their essence they try to answer a crucial question in game development in the rawest way: how do you make the player react ? The survival horror genre is all about direct reaction, and reaching the player beyond the screen in their very comfort zone. You can go the easy, cheap way of throwing buckets of blood around and slap a few jumpscares here and there, or you can try to play with your medium and crawl right underneath the skin, which has always been Silent Hill’s way of throwing it down. But I think Silent Hill 2 is where the payoff is the greatest. It’s not an easy game, because it’s old and counter-intuitive in level design, camera and puzzles, and it gets easily frustrating. But some of the greatest, most creative ideas I’ve came across in term of narrative level design have been explored there. Plus the themes are actually very mature for the gaming public of 2000, as they deal with illness, sexual frustration, surviving abuse and alienation from society and your loved ones. It’s raw, it’s twisted, it’s haunting like a fever dream. And it’s actually very, very smart. 3. V4-11 HALL-A A very neat visual novel that didn’t do much noise besides specialized audience, and definitively deserve a shot ! In this game you are a barista in a cyberpunk society, and you encounter a various cast of characters that you befriend and serve. It’s super chill, the soundtrack is lovely, it’s bound to make you crave for a cocktail as you play. Maybe I am somewhat criticial on how it ends, but otherwise it’s a very heartwarming experience with slight sadder undertones. It goes on with the trend of “you witness big events from a NPC/civilian viewpoint”, which I adore. The game went out while my team and I were producing a game that share some of the concept, and it was a lovely surprise ! (it’s very cheap as well, and the creators need financial help !) 6. Song that you’ve listened a lot lately ? Careful What You Wish For, by Coil (it’s weird and somewhat depressing, you are warned) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHIlBk5vbVI 7. Guilty pleasure movie ? Mhhh. I’d say Sweeney Todd by Tim Burton. It’s over the top and very melodramatic with undiscussed sexist undertones when it comes to how female characters are depicted in this world, BUT what can I say. Gothic cheesiness mixed up with musical numbers never seem to stop being my jam. 8. Unpopular opinion about Mass Effect (optional) Ouh boy. I have so many it’s extremely hard to pick a single one. xD I’m going to settle for Andromeda and try to summarize my opinion, but I might do a very very long separate post to explain what I mean in lenghts later. I haven’t played Andromeda much because my computer is sad and dying, but from what I saw and what I undertsood from ulterior research, I think Andromeda’s worldbuilding is broken on many levels, and some narrative choices made very early by the team affect the stakes so much they’re basically nonexistent, and, at least for me, the lack of stakes drove the entire quest to be rather pointless. I’m a very nitpicking person, especially when it comes to themes, cohesion, society and space stuff, and a lot of what happens in the first hours prevented me to believe in the story and the characters inhabiting it before they even had a chance to do anything significant. :/ I understand why people can bypass that and enjoy the story and characters still, and I am sickened by the amount of abuse some of us spat towards Bioware, but my suspension of disbelief got shattered in the first hours of the game multiple times, and despite how much I wanted to like this new epic journey, I’m... not your target audience this time, Bioware. 9. Favorite books ? Argh. Mh. Good question. I can’t really say if any of them are my favorite, but I like them enough for them to be featured here -and I have stopped reading for years so I have trouble remembering any. So in no particular order, The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, Animal Farm by George Orwell, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell, the Ellana trilogy by Pierre Bottero, Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche... I can’t really tell to be fair. I need to read more. 10. Dream job ? Game developer, specifically in narrative design (how surprising I know). And I am very fortunate to be living the dream right now. <3 I am starting my very own indie company, and our very first game, Xenophever, is on the rails right now. I won’t lie ; it’s a hard life. Only time will tell if the sacrifices were worth it, but I bet they will be :D It’s over ! Thanks again for the tag ! I won’t tag everyone because I don’t know enough people yet, but feel free to hit me up if you want to do this so I can cook you up some neat questions :D

[hestiasroom]

Where Do We Go After Ferguson?

By Michael Eric Dyson

Nov. 29, 2014

367

WASHINGTON — WHEN Ferguson flared up this week after a grand jury failed to indict the white police officer Darren Wilson for killing the unarmed black youth Michael Brown, two realities were illuminated: Black and white people rarely view race in the same way or agree about how to resolve racial conflicts, and black people have furious moral debates among ourselves out of white earshot.

These colliding worlds of racial perception are why many Americans view the world so differently, and why recent comments by President Obama and the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani cut to the quick of black identity in America.

From the start, most African-Americans were convinced that Michael Brown’s death wouldn’t be fairly considered by Ferguson’s criminal justice system. There were doubts that the prosecution and defense were really on different teams. The prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, looked as if he were coaching an intramural scrimmage with the goal of keeping Officer Wilson from being tackled by indictment.

The trove of documents released after the grand jury’s decision included Officer Wilson’s four-hour testimony, in which the 6-foot-4-inch, 210-pound cop said that his encounter with the 6-foot-4-inch, 292-pound teenager left him feeling like “a 5-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan.” He used the impersonal pronoun “it” when he said that Michael Brown looked like a “demon” rushing him. To the police officer and to many whites, Michael Brown was the black menace writ large, the terrorizing phantom that stalks the white imagination.

These clashing perceptions underscore the physics of race, in which an observer effect operates: The instrument through which one perceives race — one’s culture, one’s experiences, one’s fears and fantasies — alters in crucial ways what it measures.

The novelist Ann Petry vividly captured this observer effect in her 1946 novel “The Street,” in which the African-American protagonist, Lutie Johnson, remarks that racial perceptions of blacks “depended on where you sat.” She explains that if “you looked at them from inside the framework of a fat weekly salary, and you thought of colored people as naturally criminal, then you didn’t really see what any Negro looked like,” because “the Negro was never an individual” but “a threat, or an animal, or a curse.”

Thanks for reading The Times.

Subscribe to The Times

After a black man is killed in a failed robbery, she notes that a reporter “saw a dead Negro who had attempted to hold up a store, and so he couldn’t really see what the man lying on the sidewalk looked like.” Instead, he saw “the picture he already had in his mind: a huge, brawny, blustering, ignorant, criminally disposed black man.”

Our American culture’s fearful dehumanizing of black men materialized once again when Officer Wilson saw Michael Brown as a demonic force who had to be vanquished in a hail of bullets.

IT is nearly impossible to convey the fear that strikes at the heart of black Americans every time a cop car pulls up. When I was 17, my brother and I and a childhood friend were pulled over by four Detroit cops in an unmarked police vehicle. This was in the mid-70s, in the shadow of the infamous Detroit Police Department task force called Stress (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), which was initiated after the 1967 riots. The unit lived up to its name and routinely targeted black people.

Editors’ Picks

The Top Doctor Who Aced the Coronavirus Test

‘Another Customer Was Appalled to Witness Such Blatant Favoritism’

The Hardest Part of Having a Nonbinary Kid Is Other People

As we assumed the position against the car, I announced to one of the plainclothes officers that I was reaching into my back pocket to fish the car’s registration from my wallet. He brought the butt of his gun sharply across my back and knocked me to the ground, promising, with a racial epithet, that he’d put a bullet through my head if I moved again. When I rose to my feet, cowering, showing complete deference, the officer permitted me to show the car’s registration. When the cops ran the tags, they concluded what we already knew: The car wasn’t stolen and we weren’t thieves. They sent us on without a hint of an apology.

My recent dust-up with Mr. Giuliani on national television tapped a deep vein of racially charged perception. In a discussion on “Meet the Press” of Ferguson and its racial fallout, Mr. Giuliani steered the conversation down the path of a conservative shibboleth: that the real problem facing black communities is not brutality at the hands of white cops but brutality in the grips of black thugs. He cited the fact that 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by black people; I argued that these murderers often go to jail, unlike the white cops who kill blacks with the backing of the government. What I didn’t have time to say was that 84 percent of white homicide victims are killed by white people, and yet no language of condemnation exists to frame a white-on-white malady that begs relief by violent policing.

This doesn’t mean that black people aren’t weary of death ravaging our communities. I witnessed it personally as I sat in a Detroit courtroom 25 years ago during the trial of my brother Everett for second-degree murder, and though I believe to this day that he is innocent, I watched him convicted by an all-black jury and sentenced to prison for the rest of his life.

Many whites who point to blacks killing blacks are moved less by concern for black communities than by a desire to fend off criticism of unjust white cops. They have the earnest belief that they are offering new ideas to black folk about the peril we foment in our own neighborhoods. This idea has also found a champion in Bill Cosby, who for the past decade has levied moral charges against the black poor with an ugly intensity endorsed by white critics as tough love and accepted by most black journalists as homegrown conservatism.

But Mr. Cosby’s put-downs are more pernicious than that. How could one ever defend his misogynistic indictment of black women’s lax morals and poor parenting skills? “Five, six children, same woman, eight, 10 different husbands or whatever,” he liked to recite. “Pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t know who this is; might be your grandmother.”

Journalistic mea culpas are now accompanying Mr. Cosby’s Shakespearean fall from grace. He has been recast as a leering king who is more sinner than sinned against as the allegations of drugging and raping women pile up. But these writers avoid mentioning the sexist blinders that kept them from seeing how hateful Mr. Cosby was toward black women long before he was accused of abusing mostly white women.

Bill Cosby didn’t invent the politics of respectability — the belief that good behavior and stern chiding will cure black ills and uplift black people and convince white people that we’re human and worthy of respect. But he certainly gave it a vernacular swagger that has since been polished by Barack Obama. The president has lectured black folk about our moral shortcomings before cheering audiences at college commencements and civil rights conventions. And yet his themes are shopworn and mix the innocuous and the insidious: pull your pants up, stop making racial excuses for failure, stop complaining about racism, turn off the television and the video games and study, don’t feed your kids fried chicken for breakfast, be a good father.

As big a fan as he is of respectability politics, Mr. Obama is the most eloquent reminder that they don’t work, that no matter how smart, sophisticated or upstanding one is, and no matter how much chastising black people pleases white ears, the suspicions about black identity persist. Despite his accomplishments and charisma, he is for millions the unalterable “other” of national life, the opposite of what they mean when they think of America.

Barack Obama, like Michael Brown, is changed before our eyes into a monstrous thing that lacks humanity: a monkey, a cipher, a black hole that kills light. One might expect the ultimate target of this black otherness to have sympathy for its lesser targets, who also have lesser standing and lesser protection, like the people in Ferguson, in Ohio, in New York, in Florida, and all around the country, who can’t keep their unarmed children from being cut down in the street by callous cops who leave their bodies to stiffen into rigor mortis in the presence of horrified onlookers.

President Obama’s clinical approach to race was cemented after the 2009 Henry Louis Gates Jr. incident — in which the Harvard professor and the white police officer who arrested him for breaking into his own house were invited to the White House to commune over a beer — convinced him that he should talk race only when his hand was forced.

He has employed a twin strategy: the “heroic explicit,” in which he deliberately and clearly assails black moral failure and poor cultural habits, and the “noble implicit,” in which he avoids linking whites to social distress or pathology and speaks in the broadest terms possible, in grammar both tentative and tortured, about the problems we all confront. It’s an effort that hinges on false equivalencies between black and white and the mistaken identification of effect for cause.

MR. OBAMA spoke twice in the aftermath of the Ferguson grand jury’s decision. He spoke Monday night about America as a nation of laws and said that we must respect the jury’s conclusion, even if we don’t agree with it, and make progress by working together — not by throwing bottles, smashing car windows or using anger as an excuse to vandalize property or hurt anyone.

On Tuesday, the president doubled down on his indictment of “criminal acts” and declared, “I do not have any sympathy” for those who destroy “your own communities.” While he avoided saying so, it was clear that his remarks were directed at the black people who looted and rioted in Ferguson. But their criminal activity is the effect of going unrecognized by the state for decades, a crime in itself. As for the plague of white cops who kill unarmed black youth, the facts of which are tediously and sickeningly repetitive and impose a psychological tariff on black minds, the president was vague, halting and sincerely noncommittal.

Instead, he lauded the racial progress that he said he had witnessed “in my own life,” substituting his life for ours, and signaled again how his story of advancement was ours, suggesting, sadly, that the sum of our political fortunes in his presidency may be lesser than the parts of our persistent suffering. Even when he sidled up to the truth and nudged it gently — “these are real issues,” the president acknowledged — he slipped back into an emotional blandness that underplayed the searing divide, saying there was “an impression that folks have” about unjust policing and “there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion.”

Whose impression is it, though that word hardly captures the fierce facts of the case? Who feels it? Who is the subject? Who is the recipient of the action? Mr. Obama’s treacherous balancing act between white and black, left and right, obscures who has held the power for the longest amount of time to make things the way they are. This is something, of course, he can never admit, but which nevertheless strains his words and turns an often eloquent word artist into a faltering, fumbling linguist. President Obama said that our nation was built on the rule of law. That is true, but incomplete. His life, and his career, too, are the product of broken laws: His parents would have committed a crime in most states at the time of their interracial union, and without Martin Luther King Jr. breaking what he deemed to be unjust laws, Mr. Obama wouldn’t be president today. He is the ultimate paradox: the product of a churning assault on the realm of power that he now represents.

No wonder he turns to his own body and story and life to narrate our bodies, our stories and our lives. The problem is that the ordinary black person possesses neither his protections against peril nor his triumphant trajectory that will continue long after he leaves office.

More than 45 years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded that we still lived in two societies, one white, one black, separate and still unequal. President Lyndon B. Johnson convened that commission while the flames that engulfed my native Detroit in the riot of 1967 still burned. If our president and our nation now don’t show the will and courage to speak the truth and remake the destinies of millions of beleaguered citizens, then we are doomed to watch the same sparks reignite, whenever and wherever injustice meets desperation.

[ramialkarmi]

Verizon insiders describe the fight to save go90, its video service that has spent $200+ million trying to catch the eye of millennials

The anticipation was palpable inside Verizon in the weeks leading up to the big launch.     

The forthcoming video service, to be called go90, was a quarter-billion-dollar bet that Verizon could evolve from a staid telecommunications company into a hip, Netflix-like digital native — and everybody wanted a piece of the shiny new toy.

The top brass from Verizon’s old guard jockeyed a bit with the executives at Verizon’s new AOL internet business for control of go90, but eventually it fell under Verizon veteran Brian Angiolet.

And while some insiders were skeptical that a millennial-focused app trying to bridge the gap between YouTube and Netflix would be commercially viable, many on the team also saw the magnitude of the opportunity.

“What attracted me was the potential reach, turning on the firehose” of Verizon, a former go90 staffer told Business Insider.

But in the first few months after go90’s October 2015 debut it became clear that the video service was not getting the expected traction, and the sentiment shifted inside Verizon from who could get the glory, to who would get the blame.

A year and a half after go90’s launch, Verizon is still trying to figure out the right chemistry to snag a massive audience for go90, after a series of missteps. The video service is still a big priority for Verizon, however, which sees it as the foundation for a variety of new video business models that will boost its topline.

But building an internet startup within the giant telecom company is no easy task and Verizon’s struggles are a case study in what can go wrong at the start. Go90’s launch was hampered by a lack of focus at a company eager to spend cash, but without a clear understanding of its audience, according to more than a dozen current and former members of the go90 team interviewed by Business Insider.

Verizon has taken steps in the last year to try and rectify the situation, including hiring key executives with experience in online video, as well as a total overhaul the guts of Go90’s technology, which debuted Wednesday, and is intended to fix some of the tech flaws that constrained the app.

That tech reboot came at a price: the firing of over 150 staffers in January, most of whom were the remnants of Verizon’s ~$200 million acquisition of OnCue in 2014. These OnCue staffers never saw their internet TV product go to market, but were the force behind the original go90 tech and product.

Verizon is trying to close that chapter.

This, as go90 GM Chip Canter puts it, is “go90 3.0,” and it’s probably the app’s last real shot to make it.

Just make it work

To understand why Verizon stumbled out of the gate with go90, a good touchpoint is a small team of around a dozen members, hired shortly after launch in New York to watch videos and input metadata.

When Verizon debuted go90, it had tens of thousands of videos ready for users to watch. Except, they weren’t exactly ready.

Verizon ran into its first big go90 tech problem immediately. It was nearly impossible for people to sift through videos on the app, since they weren’t tagged with enough data to make them easy to find. If the video wasn’t being featured on the front page, it was lost in the swamp. The triage was to hire contractors, most in their early to mid twenties, to solve it with mainly brute force data entry.

That project was supposed to last for only three months, but stretched on over a year before finally being completed in December 2016.

Beyond the length, there was a haphazard and confusing nature to the whole operation, according to multiple members of the team. Partway through the metadata project, all the team's contracts were supposed to end, but it was clear the job wasn’t complete. Management asked part of the team to stay on, but pretend like everyone was getting the axe.

“We all had to act like we were all leaving,” one former contractor said. “They asked us not to say anything.” Another former contractor confirmed that the half-dozen people on the metadata team who were staying on were told to lie, and act like the whole team was being let go.

From lying to coworkers to being unsure how long the project would last, it was an often baffling and disjointed experience for these contractors, and reflected an organization that was not prepared for the task at hand.

Guns blazing

Money was never the worry for the go90 team as it scrambled to create an advertising-supported video app designed to appeal broadly to “millennials.”

The idea was to serve up a mix of original shows and content licensed from other web and TV outlets. With a big checkbook and little oversight, Verizon spent more than $200 million on programming for the service, according to a former employee with knowledge of the matter.

Multi-million dollar content deals were made quickly, sometimes for big packages of shows that would run multiple years, another source explained. “They overpaid a lot,” the source said.

According to one former go90 staffer the large, rushed deals were a product of Verizon’s corporate culture. There was a sense that if the budget was not used, that money might be lost.

“They went in guns blazing [and] spent all the money,” a former employee said. The thesis was that if Verizon shelled out real money for quality shows, it would attract people to the platform. But the problem was that Verizon didn’t have a thorough understanding of the marketplace at the start, a former staffer explained.

Many go90 employees also felt a lack of focus in the target audience, which a former staffer said was once represented by a blue balloon and a pink balloon during a meeting.

And the initial studios producing shows for go90 were varied in how they viewed the platform. Some cared about viewership and the long-term prospects of the app, while others saw it as an opportunity to churn out one-off shows and grab the cash.

The initial content push was not an immediate success in attracting a lot of viewers, but did produce a few hits, former employees said. Originals “Guidance” and “t@gged,” a pair of high-school thrillers by Verizon investment AwesomenessTV, which appealed mainly to teen women, were touted as examples of what worked. Live sports, especially soccer, also proved popular.

But still, the general consensus on the team was, “Why would anyone come here?”

A different point of view

As the months wore on, however, go90’s management seemed to get a better handle on how to approach the market, insiders said. This was fueled by key hires of execs like Chip Canter, Ivana Kirkbride to run content acquisition in Los Angeles, and Steve Woolf, who all had deep experience with online video in places like NBCU, YouTube, and AwesomenessTV.

Canter agreed that, to some extent, the original go90 mandate was also too broad. Based on what has worked, go90 is now doing more specific targeting in areas that have show promise: live sports (and original shows around sports), sci-fi and gaming, music, and dramas (primarily focused on young women).

It took some experimentation to understand that. ”Some of the current-season TV that we thought would do really well” ended up flopping, Canter said, for example.

Go90 is also doing fewer “output deals,” which are for an entire slate of shows, and instead looking at individual shows or franchises, according to Canter. This more granular view works in tandem with a desire by go90 execs to program the service more like an entertainment company, where one show leads to another.

A few isolated hits isn’t going to cut it.

Another change in Verizon’s thinking was to not being so maniacally focused on the smartphone.

“I don’t think the position we will take over time is mobile-only,” Canter said.

Young people are watching a ton of video on their phones, but the freedom to watch on any screen is valuable as well. In this change in sentiment, it helps go90 that Verizon is eyeing a 5G future, where things like watching actual TV on wireless data could be more common.

3.0

But apart from the content, one aspect that has plagued go90 since launch is “discovery,” or how people actually navigate the app to find shows.

“The search functionality was very poor early on,” one former employee said. “A lot wasn’t searchable,” another agreed. Go90 had tens of thousands of videos, but people were ignoring 90% of them, partially because of the tech.

Now Verizon has a new weapon it hopes will knock out a bunch of its go90 tech woes in one swoop: Vessel.

In 2014, Verizon bought OnCue from Intel for about $200 million, but never actually went on to launch OnCue’s internet TV service. That San Jose team served as the backbone for go90. But in January, it was cut loose by Verizon, when the company laid off 155 people.

The reason: Verizon is betting that the tech team of another ill-fated video service, Vessel, will provide the needed spark for go90. It’s a pivot to the “small, amazing [Vessel] team that we brought on,” Canter explained.

Vessel, which was cofounded by former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, and launched in early 2015, was widely praised for its recommendation and discovery engine. The problem was it simply failed to find a big enough audience for its $2.99-a-month subscription model built around YouTube stars.

In October, Verizon bought Vessel, which had raised over $130 million from venture capitalists, for an undisclosed amount. Verizon then shut Vessel down.

In the few months since then, the Vessel team has “rebuilt the entire [go90] service,” Canter said, and the tech side is now run out of San Francisco instead of San Jose.

On Wednesday, go90 debuted the new tech, which Canter said will serve not just go90, but help fuel an entire suite of video apps Verizon will launch in the future. And while it does look different on the surface, many of changes aren’t things users will see, but are rather features on the backend.

It’s a “platform we can build upon,” Canter said.

Time to get going

With “3.0,” Go90 is at a crucial point in its existence. It has to distinguish itself — soon — as something that has long-term viability, as opposed to just something Verizon tried for a few years that didn’t work out.

One former go90 staffer described the cynicism of some veteran Verizon content people, on the go90 team, who felt they had been burned before. These people thought that, after its initial stumbles, go90 would “slog around for two to three years, and then die” when the money ran out.

“If you try to do everything, you don't really do anything,” one former go90 team member explained. There’s no point in spending hundreds of millions of dollars if people can’t watch it, or don’t develop a specific love for your brand.

Now Verizon is hoping to shift that vibe back to optimism, with a clarity about what audience niches it’s serving, and an ability for those audiences to easily find shows they’ll like. The tech and the content are finally coming together, with specificity and personalization, Canter said.

At least that’s the hope.

Go90 had over 2.1 million monthly active users in the US, on iPhone and Android, in February 2017, and grew 2.2x year-over-year, according to app analytics firm App Annie. (Verizon does not disclose user numbers.) But it will have to get a lot more than that to be considered a success.

This “3.0” reboot could be go90’s last chance to get that right.

If you have any more information about what it's like to work on or with go90, tip the author at nmcalone@businessinsider.com

SEE ALSO: How to make a new kind of hit TV show for the YouTube generation — from someone who did it

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Cristiano Ronaldo's statue in Madeira is being mercilessly mocked on Twitter