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pikemoreno · 5 years ago

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if you ever wanna be in love

Chapter V: Lightning Strikes

a/n: it’s startingggg. it might be good to read up on the events of the mentalist... to avoid any confusion for the next few chapters... i’ll just say that. also the lightning metaphor is a callback to chapter 1. it’s been a while so i wouldn’t blame you for not recalling

pairing: marcus pike x f!reader

word count: 4k

warnings: none, and i don’t expect there to really be any serious ones in upcoming chapters either... well actually, there’s a wee bit of angst here...

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The sun was hardly over the tree-lined horizon when you pulled up to the Elizabet Ney Museum. It was a consequence of your team being requested to come before the museum opened, allowing business hours to go on as usual during the investigation. That was making you wonder exactly how busy they thought this place was going to get on a Monday morning during the school year-- and how they expected the investigation to be successful when they had guests tramping all over the scene-- but you didn't question it.

Being a few minutes early, you took some time to traipse around the property to see if anything looked note-worthy. The sand-colored castle-like complex was bathed in soft early morning light and a haunting fog; the grass was dewy and squeaked against your shoes as you circled the grand building. The most likely entry and exit points-- the door and windows on the far side-- yielded nothing. Nothing on the wooden door nor the brassy knob was broken, and there was no sign of trampled dirt around it, nor was there anything amiss with the paned windows. However, the security camera just above the back-door threshold made you raise an eyebrow. They had full security cam coverage and couldn't determine how their stuff had been stolen? Odd.

You were far too distracted with your thoughts as you walked that you didn't hear the car pull in out front or the person getting out of it or the footsteps coming around the side of the building. So when Marcus appeared right in front of you as he rounded the corner, he had to grab your arm to steady you as you almost fell on your ass in surprise. You almost ripped your arm out of his grasp as the electricity of the touch shot through your arm, surprising you far more than his sudden appearance.

You almost did. But you didn't. It felt too nice in the end.

"Sorry," he laughed, "Didn't mean to scare you. Coffee?" He held out a drink carrier containing two travel cups. "Should be the one on the right." You took it.

"Does it have--" you took a sip before you finished your question.

It was exactly the way you liked it. You regarded Marcus with wide eyes.

"You know my coffee order?" you gaped. He shrugged nonchalantly. You followed him as he made his way back to the front of the museum.

"Yeah. What about it?" he laughed, sipping from his drink.

"How do you know it?"

"From when we were at Copper Coin last week." He looked genuinely confused as to why this was a shocking discovery.

"And you remember what I ordered?"

"Of course." His eyes shone with sincerity and just a hint of something that said, "duh."

You wanted to ask if he knew all of his co-workers' coffee orders by heart, but you were interrupted by the arrival of Adrian, followed closely by Wendy. You blinked a little.

Did they come here together?

You'd heard nothing from her since they had "gotten together" a few days ago. Now, this little scene had you wondering exactly how "together" they had gotten. You shot Wendy a questioning look around Adrian's shoulder, and she mouthed "later" with what was quite possibly the biggest grin you'd ever seen from her. Her whole demeanor had changed in the days since you'd seen her. Even if your plans for getting them together didn't work out as planned, the result was the same. Standing in front of you were two people finding at least the tiniest bit of healing in companionship. And that is all the set-up was about in the end.

Mission: success.

"Hey guys," Marcus greeted them, reaching a hand out to shake Wendy's, "You must be Wendy?"

"That's me," she shook his hand, smiling, "And you're Marcus." He nodded. "Hang on. How do you two know each other?" She studied the two of you carefully.

Oops.

"Oh well, a couple of weeks ago, we were out of coffee, so I snuck over to their break room to get some. We talked for a minute. And now I just see him everywhere, I guess," you laid out as casually as possible.

"I see." You couldn't tell if she actually sounded unconvinced or if your incredible paranoia just made her sound that way. "Well, this is Adrian, who I told you about already," she beamed, you shook his hand.

Be cool, be cool. I definitely haven't been interfering in your love life for the past two weeks.

"Nice to meet you, Adrian. You're on the Art Squad?"

Good playing dumb, me.

"I am."

"Great. Pleased to work with you."

The museum owner arriving saved you from further pleasantries. Adrian, being the one who had talked to her the most, ran ahead to greet her while the rest of you hung back. Wendy looped her arm through yours and started her quiet detailing of her night.

"So last night I went over to Adrian's place just for a little home-cooked meal and a movie," you nodded along, smiling at her excitement, "It was so great, you know? My perfect relaxed evening. Of course, then I accidentally fell asleep there-- thank God I keep an extra set of work clothes in my car. But what do I wake up to? Breakfast from Rick's!"

"Very impressive!"

"Right?" she sighed, "He made sure he was up before me and snuck out for breakfast. Ugh, what a keeper! How did he know?" You shot a quick look over to Marcus but gave a nonchalant shrug to Wendy.

"Everyone likes Rick's, I guess."

"Either way. It was very sexy of him. Find yourself someone like that." With that, she patted your shoulder and stepped over to join Adrian and the museum owner.

Marcus laughed a little as he fell into step with you. You cocked your head as you watched him

"What?"

"I'm the one that told him to do that."

"Really? Been giving him pointers, oh great love master?" He put a hand to his chest, feigning offense.

"Ouch. Of course, I have. He was with his ex for so long he doesn't remember how to date anymore. I had to tell him all of my tricks."

"Oh, is that how you charm all the women? Surprise breakfast?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes other meals. But always breakfast food." You laughed. "Seriously. It's unassuming, comforting. Anyone can go out to dinner and a movie, right? Breakfast food is both more relaxed and more intimate. No one is putting on airs or trying to impress with diner breakfast food. No one is ordering healthy to look good. No one is on their best manners. They're getting their chocolate chip waffles, and they're piling the syrup on it no matter what you say about it, and that tells you way more about someone than how they act at a fancy restaurant."

"That's… Actually, really profound."

There was an indiscernible look in his eye as you gazed at him and him back at you. Like he knew something you didn't, and he was just waiting for you to figure it out.

Remember when I took you to Rick's?

***

The case was a pretty difficult one.

The robbery occurred on one of the busiest days they'd had all year. Guests had been pouring in for one last little family day before school started back, enjoying an educational experience and the beautiful weather the day brought as they walked the grounds. The security cameras were down for the entire business day. The only lead was that the Ney family members-- a distant cousin and niece who had donated the heirloom and the bust-- had come right before closing. They would've undoubtedly noticed that their precious items were missing. Therefore, the items must've been stolen after they left, after the museum had closed.

But that's where things got tricky. The doors to the museum were locked, as were the windows, and there were, as you'd seen this morning, no signs of forced entry. The only suspects, then, were employees and volunteers who could've gotten access to the keys. That left the owner, a bunch of high school and college students keeping a summer job, and a couple of elderly art lover volunteers. Logically, you could pretty much eliminate the students immediately, though everyone would be brought in for questioning for the sake of process anyway. There was little reason for a student to steal those items. This wasn't a Monet and the Hope Diamond. They wouldn't have sold for much, certainly not enough to make it worth the risk of robbing their own workplace. Frankly, the motive was unclear all-around. The family was ready to sue the museum for their negligence, and the museum wouldn't last very long if it came down to a money battle. The owner probably wouldn't have sabotaged themselves like that, unless there was some sort of a deeper issue. And the elderly volunteers… You guessed could've done it if they were art fanatics, but, really: why? It didn't add up.

The owner told you as much as she could as she led you through the property-- she wasn't sure either. You were able to eliminate her as a suspect as she spoke. She was outright begging you to find the thief, nearly in hysterics over the prospect of losing the beloved museum and her livelihood.

"We'll do our best, Mrs. Moa," Marcus calmed her, "Do you know anyone who would want to sabotage you or the museum or the family?" She shook her head weakly.

"Not offhand. You'd have to ask them as well, though."

"We will. Don't worry, Mrs. Moa. You have four of the FBI's best here, we're gonna figure this out," Adrian beamed.

It was a blatant over-promise and gross exaggeration, but as you looked around at your new-found little crew, you almost believed him too.

You all shook Mrs. Moa's hand as you departed, telling her that forensics would be along shortly to do their thing, and you would start questioning suspects the next day. She once again gave her most gracious thanks and went back to anxiously prepping for the museum opening. The news of the theft and the subsequent lawsuit was spreading, and she was going to be getting a lot of hard questions thrown at her today. Poor thing.

"Would you all like to come over to my place later?" Adrian started as you all made your way back to your cars, "I'll order pizza, grab some drinks, and we can maybe talk about this case?" His "maybe" was not particularly convincing. This was strictly going to be a social event, and you all knew it.

You all gave your confirmation that you would be there and headed back to the office to finish out the workday.

***

Despite the in-office workday being a mere half-day by the time you made it back, it felt like it was dragging on forever. You had plenty of other files to work through and close, but you couldn't get your mind off the Ney case. There was a missing piece, and you had to get your mind off of that sinking feeling before you could do anything else. Wendy had been on the phone since she stepped foot in her office, and you frankly didn't know Adrian well enough to be comfortable going to him. So that just left Marcus to go to.

You'd been thinking about him all day. Now that Adrian and Wendy were together, was that going to change your relationship too? Would you still talk like you do now? You certainly hoped so. You'd bared your soul too much at the coffee shop for him to turn into a casual acquaintance now. And honestly? You'd gotten sort of attached to him. He really did make you feel important and wanted and cared about, just as you'd craved back at the beginning of all of this. Some sort of feeling had sprung up. Not necessarily, feeling feelings. You don't fall that fast. But there was something. Enough that you didn't want him gone. You wanted to learn more about him, experience more with him beyond just being a co-worker... Whatever that meant.

You hopped up from your desk and got into the elevator before anyone noticed you'd left, finding him where you now knew his desk to be. You leaned a hand against the front of the mahogany, and he looked up curiously, waiting for your explanation he could see forming in your brain.

"Do you feel like there's something missing in the Ney case?" You asked finally.

"Sure, a perpetrator," he responded in a deadpan.

"Alright, then. Good talk, smartass." You took two steps away from his desk before he grabbed you lightly by the forearm to bring you back.

"No, no. Come back. I'll be serious now, I promise. What are you thinking?"

"Doesn't it just seem like something's missing? I feel like there's no motive in any of the suspects we have."

"Well, that's what the interrogations are for, right?"

"Yeah, but--" you bit your lip for a moment, considering, "Do you think that the family would have anything to do with it?"

"How do you mean?" he folded his arms now. You didn't realize his hand was still on your forearm until he removed it. You felt the warmth leave as the overdone air-conditioning immediately chased the feeling away.

He did, of course. He knew his hand was still on your skin. And for every moment his hand remained there, it grew a little more difficult to not slide it down to where his fingers could fully intertwine with yours. But that would have been too much. His ex-wife-- and admittedly, multiple others-- had chided how he was too overbearing. He had been feeling that something as well, terrifying as it was. And it was taking everything in him to not fall into his usual, "overbearing" ways. Your mind towards him was completely indiscernible so far. Sure, there had been moments that it seemed that you'd be more than happy to have your hand held by him, but, more often than not, the friendly, playful banter you shared moments later completed nixed out those moments to him. He had no idea what you were thinking and was maybe a little hesitant to find out at this point. Right now, he needed to test the waters, play it cool, and maybe one day he'd feel he could do that without scaring you off.

"Well," you started, "I guess I'll have to question the family too to confirm this, but wouldn't they maybe have something to gain from the lawsuit? Money? Power over the museum?" you tapped your fingers lightly on the desk, then your eyes widened with your 'aha' moment, "Maybe I'll research if they've had any past disputes with Mrs. Moa. Thanks, Marcus, you've been a big help."

"I didn't--" you'd already run away, booking it back to your floor, "do anything."

He shook his head fondly.

You weren't at your desk trying to dig into the museum history for very long before Wendy walked up and sat across from you. She did so incredibly coolly, taking a moment to look around the office and give the chair little half-spins before she finally spoke.

"So, how do you actually know Marcus?"

You almost choked as you sucked in a too-quick breath.

"I'm sorry?"

"How do you actually know Marcus?"

"Exactly what we said earlier," you shook your head, "We met by chance in the breakroom a couple of weeks ago, I've seen him around, chatted occasionally, and now we're on this case together."

"Sure."

"You think I'm lying?"

How could she have possibly known about the set up?

"I do. But I don't know if you know you're lying." You gave her a questioning look, inviting her to continue. "I've never actually seen you truly smitten with someone. But I would imagine it'd look something like this."

"Oh come on, you've seen me with him one time." She laughed. Loudly.

"What? Do you think I don't have eyes? I've seen you two talking around the office. I've seen you laughing and looking nothing short of flustered. I've seen your phone go off with a text message when you leave it on your desk. It's from a 'Marcus' pretty damn often. Am I right in assuming you don't know two Marcuses?" It was rhetorical, but you shook your head anyway. "I saw that you were together when I came into Copper Coin the other day. I saw you both with the very same Copper Coin travel cups this morning. And I know for a fact that when you were gone from your desk right now, you were with Marcus."

"I mean, that's all true. But so what? It's not what you're probably thinking it is." She hummed, thinking for a moment.

"Do you want it to be?" That stopped you in your tracks.

What did you want from this?

"I--" you sighed, throwing your head back against the back of your chair, "Undecided."

"That's ok. Hey, it's only been two weeks. I just... I really have never seen you act like that with someone before. I had to ask." You nodded along. You had a strange feeling all of that actually meant: "You've been so ridiculously obvious that I had to make sure you knew how obvious you were being."

"It's not out of the question. I just don't know yet. It takes time. Do you think he… Feels that way about me?"

She sighed. "I can't say for sure. I'll have to keep an eye out tonight."

***

It was by total accident that you arrived to Adrian's at the same time as Marcus, but it happened nonetheless. The autumn air around you was finally cooling down. Marcus had his hands in his pockets, and you were kicking pebbles up the sidewalk as you walked down the parked-up street and up to the little yellow house. Its golden porch lights beamed brightly as the sun was falling behind the horizon so much quicker lately.

"Kind of a funny turn of events," Marcus mused. "We've been casually interfering in their lives, trying to bring them together, making sure they don't know that we know each other. And now they're together in spite of us, and we're walking into Adrian's house together."

"Yeah… Wendy kinda already knew that we knew each other."

"She did?"

"She did. She saw us together too much, I guess. But I don't think she suspects that we were up to anything."

"Oh good… So what did she say?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, she obviously brought something up to you. So what was it?"

"Uh, I-- I guess she thinks there's more to it. I don't know." He laughed.

It was a nervous laugh, but you didn't hear it as such. You moved on before any of the rest of that conversation could be discussed.

"So has Adrian said anything to you about this little relationship of theirs?"

"Just that he has no idea what he's doing and needs help." You laughed. "So, I've been helping him out a bit."

"So… The pancakes are a part of that. What else have you been telling him?"

"You know, some date ideas. I remember you saying that a walk around a museum would be more her speed? I told him to do that. He knows all about the art in any art museum and could talk her ear off about any of it. Do you think she'd like that? Him telling her about the art?"

"She would love that, I think. That's very romantic."

"You think?"

"I do."

Is it something you'd love too?

There was no chance for him to ask. Wendy greeted you at the door with a raised brow. You didn't intend to arrive together, but that wouldn't convince her for a second.

***

The evening went by without a hitch. Adrian and Wendy's budding relationship was genuinely adorable. Watching them dance around the kitchen as they warmed up slices from the already-cold pizza, they looked like they'd already been doing it for months. The conversation shared was breezy and comfortable.

Until.

"Oh, Adrian, don't forget. Floor renovation starts tomorrow. We're on the 5th floor with Special Crimes for a bit," Marcus reminded as you all sat around Adrian's kitchen table-- pizza long gone, finishing the last sips of your drinks.

"Good to know," you interjected. He looked at you quizzically.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, what if I wanted to come bother you after finishing the interrogations? I would've gone to the 6th floor and would've never found you. Now I know." You grinned, taking a smug sip of your drink.

"What a tragedy that would've been." His smile was fond. When you looked over to Wendy, she had a peculiar expression-- her "thinking face"-- as she looked between you and Marcus. Her expression shifted to express exasperation.

"What?" You shifted uncomfortably in your seat.

Of course, you knew what it was. Once Wendy took off your blinders, you saw everything: the way Marcus interacted with you, the way you interacted with him. Every action tonight was tinged with nervous, flirtatious energy: from the way you laughed at every terrible joke of his to the way his arm was seemingly permanently fixated to the back of your chair.

You understood now what Wendy meant earlier, but you still didn't yet understand how you felt about it.

"Will you come with me for a second?" she asked you. You got up with her, moving to the foyer, leaving Marcus and Adrian mumbling amongst themselves to figure out what the hell was happening. She didn't waste time in confronting you.

"I've been watching you two all night, and that does not look like nothing. It's clear that he is very into you. I know you said you need time on it, but if you don't feel the same way about him, you need to stop leading him on."

"I'm not leading him on."

"You are. You may not realize it, but you are. The joking and laughing, the gazing, everything."

You opened your mouth to speak, but closed it, crossing your arms.

"You can't be wishy-washy on this. I'm not letting you run from this this time. So, once and for all: what's going on in your head, and what are you going to do about it?"

"You know what? Nothing. And nothing." The words came out a little sharper than you intended, tired of this conversation and…

Scared. You were scared. You felt the distinct static tingle of lightning about to strike, and you were running from its impact once again.

"Nothing?"

"No. I know what I said earlier about needing time, but I don't. I've made up my mind. Nothing is going on here; there never will be anything going on here, alright?" You turned around to stomp back to the kitchen, but someone was standing there.

Marcus.

He heard you; there was no denying it.

His face was unmistakably downcast. You looked to the floor to avoid those ever emotion-betraying eyes of his.

He was sure the whole neighborhood could hear him swallow his hurt.

"Excuse me. I was just heading out. Have a good night." He brushed past you both coolly and stepped out through the front door behind you. You think Wendy said goodnight in return, but you couldn't hear through the fog. You said nothing.

Lightning struck.

But you ran indoors, and he was a lightning rod.

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petazetafilms · 4 years ago

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▷ Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist; Season 2 Episode 1 - (S2E1) - HD 720p

Watch Online Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist Season 2 Episode 1 in NBC Full Episodes Eng Sub / Sub English TV Series 2020 Premiere HD! ❖ Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist Full Episodes (HD): Full ✓ NBC TV Shows and Movies from Official Partners. ❖ Watch Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist S2E1 Online ►► P.L.A.Y N.O.W

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After an unusual event, Zoey Clarke, a whip-smart computer coder forging her way in San Francisco, suddenly starts to hear the innermost wants, thoughts and desires of the people around her through popular songs. ❖ Genre : Drama, Comedy ❖ Air Date : 2021-01-05 ❖ Network : NBC ❖ Casts : Lauren Graham, Alex Newell, Andrew Leeds, Michael Thomas Grant, Jane Levy, Kapil Talwalkar, Mary Steenburgen, John Clarence Stewart, Skylar Astin, Alice Lee Guest Star : Felix Mallard, Jee Young Han, Harvey Guillén

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A television show (often simply TV show) is any content produced for broadcast via over-the-air, satellite, cable, or internet and typically viewed on a television set, excluding breaking news, advertisements, or trailers that are typically placed between shows. Television shows are most often scheduled well ahead of time and appear on electronic guides or other TV listings.

Livestreaming, what’s in it for us? Technology has advanced significantly since the first internet livestream but we still turn to video for almost everything. Let’s take a brief look at why livestreaming has been held back so far, and what tech innovations will propel livestreaming to the forefront of internet culture. Right now livestreaming is limited to just a few applications for mass public use and the rest are targeted towards businesses. Livestreaming is to today what home computers were in the early 611110s. The world of livestreaming is waiting for a metaphorical VIC-110, a very popular product that will make live streaming as popular as video through iterations and competition. Shared Video Do you remember when YouTube wasn’t the YouTube you know today? In 11005, when Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim activated the domain “www.youtube.com" they had a vision. 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Before too long, algorithms will be better able to prevent sensitive and inappropriate content from being broadcast across the internet on livestreaming platforms. Due to the sheer volume of streams it is much harder to monitor and contain internet broadcasts than it is cable, but we are very near a point where the ability to reliably detect and interrupt inappropriate broadcasts instantaneously. Currently, the majority of content is monitored by humans. And as we’ve learned over the last 50 or so years, computers and machines are much more reliable and consistent than humans could ever be. Everything is moving to an automated space and content moderation is not far behind. We simply don’t have the human resources to monitor every livestream, but with AI we won’t need it. Video Quality In the last decade we have seen video quality move from 7110p to 60110p to 4K and beyond. I can personally remember a time when 4110p was standard and 7110p was considered a luxury reserved for only the most well funded YouTube videos. But times have changed and people expect video quality of at least 7110p. Live streaming has always had issues meeting the demands of video quality. When watching streams on platforms like Twitch, the video can cut out, lag, drop in quality, and stutter all within about 45 seconds. Of course this isn’t as rampant now as it once was, however, sudden drops in quality will likely be a thorn in the side of live streams for years to come. Internet Speeds Perhaps the most common issue one needs to tackle when watching a live stream is their internet speed. Drops in video quality and connection are often due to the quality of the internet connection between the streamer and the viewer. Depending on the location of the parties involved, their distance from the server, and allocated connection speed the stream may experience some errors. And that’s just annoying. Here is a list of the recommended connection speeds for 5 of the most popular streaming applications:

Facebook Live recommends a max bit rate of 4,000 kbps, plus a max audio bit rate of 61111 kbps. YouTube Live recommends a range between 6,500 and 4,000 kbps for video, plus 61111 kbps for audio. Twitch recommends a range between 11,500 and 4,000 kbps for video, plus up to 660 kbps for audio. Live streams are typically available for those of us with good internet. Every day more people are enjoying high quality speeds provided by fibre optic lines, but it will be a while until these lines can truly penetrate rural and less populated areas. Perhaps when that day comes we will see an upsurge of streaming coming from these areas. Language Barrier You can pause and rewind a video if you didn’t understand or hear something, and many video sharing platforms provide the option for subtitles. But you don’t really get that with a live stream. Pausing and rewinding an ongoing stream defeats the purpose of watching a stream. However, the day is soon approaching where we will be able to watch streams, in our own native language with subtitles, even if the streamer speaks something else. Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive Speech Services can give livestreaming platforms an edge in the future as it allows for speech to be automatically translated from language to language. The ability to watch a livestream in real time, with the added benefit of accurate subtitles in one’s own language, will also assist language learners in deciphering spontaneous speech. Monetization One of the most damning features of a live stream is the inherent difficulty in monetizing it. As mentioned before, videos can be paused and ads inserted. In videos, sponsored segments can be bought where the creators of the video read lines provided to them. Ads can run before videos etc. But in the case of a spontaneous live stream sponsored content will stick out. In the case of platforms like YouTube there are ways around ads. Ad blockers, the skip ad button, the deplorable premium account, and fast forwarding through sponsored segments all work together to limit the insane amount of ads we see every day. But in the case of a live stream, ads are a bit more difficult. Live streaming platforms could implement sponsored overlays and borders or a similar graphical method of advertising, but the inclusion of screen shrinking add-ons like that may cause issues on smaller devices where screen size is already limited. Monthly subscriptions are already the norm, but in the case of a live streaming platform (Twitch Prime not withstanding), it may be difficult for consumers to see the benefit in paying for a service that is by nature unscheduled and unpredictable. Live streams are great for quick entertainment, but as they can go on for hours at a time, re-watching streamed content is inherently time consuming. For this reason, many streamers cut their recorded streams down and upload them to platforms like YouTube where they are monetized through a partnership program. It is likely that for other streaming platforms to really take off, they would need to partner with a larger company and offer services similar to Amazon and Twitch. What Might the Future of Livestreaming Look Like?

It is difficult to say, as it is with any speculation about the future. Technologies change and advance beyond the scope of our imaginations virtually every decade. But one thing that is almost a certainty is the continued advancement in our communications infrastructure. Fibre optic lines are being run to smaller towns and cities. Services like Google Fiber, which is now only available at 6 gigabit per second, have shown the current capabilities of our internet infrastructure. As services like this expand we can expect to see a large increase in the number of users seeking streams as the service they expect to interact with will be more stable than it currently is now. Livestreaming, at the moment, is used frequently by gamers and Esports and hasn’t yet seen the mass commercial expansion that is coming. The future of live streaming is on its way. For clues for how it may be in North America we can look to Asia (taobao). Currently, livestreaming is quite popular in the East in terms of a phenomenon that hasn’t quite taken hold on us Westerners, Live Commerce. With retail stores closing left and right, we can’t expect Amazon to pick up all of the slack (as much as I’m sure they would like to). Live streaming affords entrepreneurs and retailers a new opportunity for sales and growth. Live streaming isn’t the way of the future, video will never die, but the two will co-exist and be used for different purposes, as they are now. Live streaming can bring serious benefits to education as well by offering classrooms guest lessons and tutorials by leading professionals. Live streaming is more beneficial for education than video as it allows students to interact with guest teachers in real-time. The live streaming market is waiting to be tapped. Right now there are some prospectors, but in North America, no one has really found the vein leading to the mine. So maybe it’s time to get prospecting. The 2019–20 network television schedule for the five major English-language commercial broadcast networks in the United States covers the prime time hours from September 2019 to August 2020. The schedule is followed by a list per network of returning series, new series, and series canceled after the 2018–19 season.

❏ STREAMING MEDIA ❏

Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a provider. The verb to stream refers to the process of delivering or obtaining media in this manner.[clarification needed] Streaming refers to the delivery method of the medium, rather than the medium itself. Distinguishing delivery method from the media distributed applies specifically to telecommunications networks, as most of the delivery systems are either inherently streaming (e.g. radio, television, streaming apps) or inherently non-streaming (e.g. books, video cassettes, audio CDs). There are challenges with streaming content on the Internet. For example, users whose Internet connection lacks sufficient bandwidth may experience stops, lags, or slow buffering of the content. And users lacking compatible hardware or software systems may be unable to stream certain content. Live streaming is the delivery of Internet content in real-time much as live television broadcasts content over the airwaves via a television signal. Live internet streaming requires a form of source media (e.g. a video camera, an audio interface, screen capture software), an encoder to digitize the content, a media publisher, and a content delivery network to distribute and deliver the content. Live streaming does not need to be recorded at the origination point, although it frequently is. Streaming is an alternative to file downloading, a process in which the end-user obtains the entire file for the content before watching or listening to it. Through streaming, an end-user can use their media player to start playing digital video or digital audio content before the entire file has been transmitted. The term “streaming media” can apply to media other than video and audio, such as live closed captioning, ticker tape, and real-time text, which are all considered “streaming text”.

❏ COPYRIGHT CONTENT ❏

Copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to make copies of a creative work, usually for a limited time.[1][2][3][4][5] The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself.[6][7][8] A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States. Some jurisdictions require “fixing” copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][9][10][11][12] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution.[13] Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered “territorial rights”. This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not extend beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works “cross” national borders or national rights are inconsistent.[14] Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 100 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities[5] to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without a formal registration. It is widely believed that copyrights are a must to foster cultural diversity and creativity. However, Parc argues that contrary to prevailing beliefs, imitation and copying do not restrict cultural creativity or diversity but in fact support them further. This argument has been supported by many examples such as Millet and Van Gogh, Picasso, Manet, and Monet, etc.[15]

❏ GOODS OF SERVICES ❏

Credit (from Latin credit, “(he/she/it) believes”) is the trust which allows one party to provide money or resources to another party wherein the second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt), but promises either to repay or return those resources (or other materials of equal value) at a later date.[1] In other words, credit is a method of making reciprocity formal, legally enforceable, and extensible to a large group of unrelated people. The resources provided may be financial (e.g. granting a loan), or they may consist of goods or services (e.g. consumer credit). Credit encompasses any form of deferred payment.[2] Credit is extended by a creditor, also known as a lender, to a debtor, also known as a borrower.

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noodle-dragon · 7 years ago

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fghfgdh what the fuck? is youtube deleting your account, just because you don't have a certain amount of subs? that?? doesnt' make a single bit of sense? how are people supposed to run channels unless they magically get thousands of subs at once??

They’re not deleting my account but cancelling my Adsense account. Adsense is the service that allows creators to monetize their videos (via advertisements). So basically they’re restricting smaller channels from being able to participate in the Adsense program :(. I don’t fully understand the specifics of why— YouTube stands to gain revenue, even if in smaller amounts, from any channel that participates in their advertisement program. This is just the latest blow of many over the last year.

Edit: I should include, I have the required number of subs. I just don’t have the watch time (4K total hours).

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topicprinter · 5 years ago

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When I go to the youtube creator and click monetization it says You are not eligible for monetization Your channel is not eligible for joining the YouTube Partner Program. For additional information, please review the I thought this was due to not having 4k watch hours and 1k subs. so I did a lot of hard work and spent a lot of time and gained 4k watch hours and with research realized that I should still see the possibility to be reminded when I reached the necessary goals to monetize my channel. The problem I think, when I started this channel, I set it up, and set up a new Adsense account. but I had one from like 8 years ago that I forgot about so it denied me and declined my request. I have no problem setting it up to this account as I have added this youtube email to this account but there is no way it seems to ask youtube to review this specific issue. It was a simple mistake. I tried to set up an Adsense account with the same email as the youtube account when we are only allowed one Adsense account per person. I would like to set my old original AdSense account up to my youtube account if possible. Is there any way to get youtube to look at this? Just F'ed up that I've spent so much time and effort getting 4k watch hours, building a website or at least securing a domain in order to get a personalized youtube link, and a the same name for email and all social media accounts amongst other things to find this out.

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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In March of 2014, Microsoft Studios chief Phil Spencer was tapped to lead Xbox.

Since then, he's been working with the folks at Xbox to shepherd the production of a new, much more powerful model of the Xbox One console: Project Scorpio.

Gamasutra recently visited Microsoft's headquarters in Washington to chat with some of the people who worked on the console, including Spencer himself.

We excerpted some of his comments in our in-depth feature on the Scorpio and its dev kit (which you should read if you want a deeper dive into Scorpio's specs) but since our conversation with Spencer wound up touching on a lot of topics that game developers care about, it made sense to also publish it as a straight Q&A.

Here then is a rundown (edited for clarity) of our conversation with Spencer about everything from Microsoft's VR plans to the future of the game console business, and how Project Scorpio represents an attempt at "learning from some of our PC heritage."

Let's start with an overview of your work on Scorpio. How involved were you in the design and development on this new console?

Fundamentally, my role as I see it is to enable the teams on Xbox to do their best work. So depending on what the teams are working on, the things I have to do are somewhat different. In the case of Scorpio and S, 'cuz we kind of built the plan for them simultaneously...well, it's almost been 3 years I've been in this job. Hardware is one of the longer lead time things. It just takes longer to build hardware than it does...well, games are similar, but in terms of platform or service things, we can do those more quickly. When I came in, I thought we could refresh the original Xbox One and I knew if we wanted to get that done in some timeframe that made sense, we were gonna have to start that quickly.

"I was thinking about console generations being able to take on some of the advantages that PCs have. Without becoming PCs themselves."

So my role in that case is setting context for what we want to do, and letting the smart teams go off and come up with the ideas about what's possible and then we come back and fundamentally, at some point, I have to make a decision about what we're going to do. In the case of Scorpio, the decision really was, we knew we were gonna go do S. There were some specific things we wanted to get done with the S console than were different than the original Xbox One. And then on Scorpio, the decision was, okay do we ship a higher-powered console?

We saw 4K TVs coming, and we made a prediction that 4K TVs were going to be a thing during this generation. As opposed to when you think about original Xbox to 360, the SD to HD transition for TVs kinda happened basically as the generation happened. So it was nice because we could just kind of ride that and say okay, 360 is an HD console. OG Xbox is an SD console. Even though there were actually some progressive mode games on the original Xbox. Still, we could use that as a kind of clean cut.

But we thought 4K TVs would get to scale in the middle of this generation. So we designed a console for 2016, and a console for 2017. We were kind of working on both plans simultaneously. And at some point, we got to -- let's just call it greenlight. For what we would do in 2016, and we sat around a table not too dissimlar from this and said, I think we need to do more than what the silicon is that's available in 2016 at a price point that a console customer would want to pay. So that's when we stopped that effort.

I actually don't remember what the codename was for that effort, but we stopped that effort and said okay, we're going to put all of our weight and execution capability of the hardware team behind delivering a higher-powered console in 2017 that's completely geared towards 4K. And then as we watched how we built it, we realized we could actually build some benefits for the -- I'll call them the 1K customers as well. The 1080p customer. Because the capabilities of the box don't dictate that somebody builds their game in 4K, or that you plug in a 4K TV. So if you're running one of our games in 1K, we wanted to do better there as well.

So my role was to set context, when the teams need decision-making to unlock progress, be the person that takes the tradeoffs and makes the decision, and fundamentally be accountable for what we go do.

Have you been working on this since you started in this role, roughly 3 years ago?

Yeah, it was pretty close after that that we started on what our hardware roadmap was gonna be.

And if you remember in the 360 generation, just to use that as an example, you know the original Xbox 360 did get a refresh to a new console. So it's not out of the ordinary that we would build it, even if it's just what we would call an industrial design -- or ID -- refresh. And sometimes it's a lowering, where we learn where we could save a little bit of money, we would do that also.

So pretty quickly we started on what our hardware roadmap would be. I remember when I came into this job, and I think about the role kind of in this way, there were service things that we wanted to go do with Xbox Live. Things around like, moving Netflix and things outside of Xbox Live Gold requirement, there were just some fundamental platform service decisions we wanted to make with Xbox Live. So we made some of those decisions quickly. On the platform side, back-compat was one of the things I was pretty passionate about. And we had a bunch of other work we wanted to go do on the platform side.

Spencer announcing Project Scorpio at E3 2016

But if I think about service, platform, hardware, first-party, and then I'll call it developer, that's kind of how I look at the job. And in every one of those areas, there was a real desire to go and rethink our plan. Not rethink and redo, sometimes you rethink and you say what we're doing is absolutely what we should be doing. And then in other areas you say okay we're going to wanna rethink the plan that's in place, and do something new. The ideas behind S were in flight slightly, because we knew we would do something in terms of a hardware refresh. But in terms of something more powerful, that kind of came in at that time.

Okay, let's zero in on that developer column. What was the goal there, in terms of strategy?

Yeah, this one helped me. Because my role prior to this job was head of first-party. So I was a developer on our platform. Like, I lived through shipping games like Ryse and Forza and other things. Using the tools and capability that were there on the platform.

And I'll say, we slid into the launch of Xbox One pretty warm. And the development platform itself was not as mature as I would have wanted it. Definitely not as I wanted it, as somebody who is trying to ship games day and date on the launch of the platform. There were just some things that we needed to go back and -- I'll just call them hygiene things. Some things that we could go improve on, and get to state of the art.

"My approach is to try and take a more open and inclusive approach to VR. The problem is the other people who are creating closed ecosystems are probably not going to like that. They're probably not going to want to play."

The other thing that you see, and you guys write well on this topic, you're seeing now, moreso than clearly any other console generation, but probably at a surprising clip, console games feel more like PC and almost mobile games, than they ever have. Not visually, in the case of mobile games, but in terms of games as a service. Which I know is kind of an over-used term. Today, if I look at the top ten games that people are playing on Xbox One (and I do that every day) a lot of those games are games that have been around for years. I can pick something, obviously I can pick something like Minecraft, but that's a little bit cliche at this point. But pick something like GTA V. GTA V is a game that's been out there forever, a massive success, and still incredibly powerful on our platform, in terms of what people are playing as they continue to play it.

So as we were looking at the development platform, we saw games that had a longevity in the market. Not just from people playing, but also frankly developers building new content and continuing to profit off of people playing those games. And we said okay, instead of I launch a game, somebody plays it for 30 days, and then that game kind of goes away out of the consciousness, other than just a memory, we're seeing these games actually continue to live. And people, developers and publishers, want to continue to service those games on our platform.

You know, Call of Duty is a great a example. Right now we've got a lot of people playing Infinite Warfare but we also have a lot of people playing Black Ops 3. And that's good for Activision. They can keep both of those ecosystems strong. And we want to help them do that.

So when we thought about our tools, I said okay, games are going to live longer than we're used to them living on our platform. Which means from the service capability and monetization standpoint, we've got to go build tools so that they can continue to give content and services and other things to the customers. Seeing games like Destiny get born this generation makes a ton of sense.

But also these games are going to probably start to span generations. You know if you think about like, Destiny 2 is coming this year -- I pick Destiny because I think I have 600 hours into the game. But you know, Destiny 2's gonna be one of these games that I expect five, six, seven years from now, people are still going to be playing that game. It's going to be a little bit like WoW. Which you know, whatever its been, 10 years later, 15 years later, millions of people play the game.

So from a development platform, we needed to think about our hardware as multi-generational. Because we said 'Okay, there's gonna be games that are going to live multiple generations. And our software platform really has to service a developer's need to service an ongoing set of users.' As much as it has to serve, you know, how do I get a disc done. And just kind of burned, and go on to go do my next thing. So these two things kind of working on conjunction, which is why you see us doing things like Beam. Because Beam's a great way, if you're a socially led game, to go and share your game to a ton of people who are maybe thinking about buying it, but haven't made a decision yet.

You see us doing things like Game Pass, and Game Pass is this idea of, even games that are more, I buy them, I play them, I finish, you still want to have a way for your customers to engage in those games. So we said okay, we look at obviously what Netflix has done in video, and say that's an interesting way of kind of keeping some of these games in the consciousness, when people do not necessarily go out and buy that full version of the game.

And as a development platform, making sure that the tools are there for developers to keep their game up to date. Make the money that they want to go make, and keep their customers happy.

How has your work as a game developer shaped your approach to leading Xbox? How did it inform your work on Scorpio?

This is about Scorpio, but, it'll ... I'll start with back compat. Because yeah back compat's a nice feature of the box, people can have this library of 360 games to play when they buy an Xbox One. It's a nice marketing feature for the platform.

But as a developer, as somebody who plays a ton of games and has been in this industry for a long time, I kind of have this belief that there are just games people should play. And I grew up as a PC gamer, and the thing I love about the PC ecosystem is I can still go boot up Age of Empires 2 and I can go play that game. It's funny, I was looking at the World Video Game Hall of Fame, there's like Solitaire and Donkey Kong....but...console has this construct that actually makes it hard to go back and play some of those old console games. Because the format is so tied to the hardware itself.

This is Tempest 2000, and it may or may not be running on an actual Atari Jaguar

And there's some clear benefits of doing that. I can tailor my games specifically to the hardware platform that I'm building towards. But it means you end up with this kind of land-locked content that it's hard to go play. Tempest 2000 on Atari Jaguar is a hard game to actually go off and play right now. Because the number of Atari Jaguars that still work, I don't know how many that number is, but once a transistor blows in one of those things, now what do you do?

So, starting with this idea that there are games that I just think are seminal games that people should be able to play, and not getting those locked to a specific generation of the hardware, is a goal of ours. It's a difficult goal, but it's a goal. Ad it's a goal that you see play out on PC, where I can go back and play Doom, I can go back and play Quake. I can go do those things.

So then when we started thinking about our hardware generations, and I talked about this a little bit at one of our showcase events last year, where I talked about hardware -- and I'm thinking as much as I'm saying -- I was thinking about console generations being able to take on some of the advantages that PCs have. Without becoming PCs themselves.

Because there are unique things about being a PC gamer that's different from being a console gamer. But I think there are some things that we can leverage and learn from that happen on PC, when thinking about console.

So one of the things we did in[Xbox One] S, which was actually kind of a pre-warm for Scorpio, is did something like added HDR support in the middle of the console generation. So as a developer now, I have to think about an install base of consoles that don't have HDR, and an install base of consoles that do have HDR. And how are you gonna treat that.

And then start talking to developers about like, what is scalable resolution, and why are you putting that into your game. Why might that be interesting in the future, if new CPU or GPU capability came online and you were able to use that. Those conversations have to start well in advance of us delivering something like Scorpio. Because you want games to take advantage of those things.

Like Halo 5 was a great example, right. It has dynamic scaling of resolution so in more complex scenes, those games, obviously you throttle down a bit on the resolution to keep framerate constant and you think well if you've got more CPU, what's going to happen in that situation. Well, the thing is gonna max itself out, right, and it's gonna run better.

These are the kinds of thoughts, when we think about dev platform hardware evolution, that were coming together, and this idea that I should be able to continue to play the games that were great. That gave us confidence that we could do something like Scorpio. Learning from some of our PC heritage as Microsoft, and also just watching a lot of the movement that was going on in the market. And the fact that games are living longer than they ever have before.

And as I said, you know with games as an art form, I do think people should go back and experience Age of Empires 2. People should go back and play Ico. People should go back and play Donkey Kong Country. People should go back and do those things, just like people go back and listen to old music or read old books.

I think of gaming in a similar fashion. And console generations make that difficult to do. There are advantages to the console generations, but I wanted to try to evolve our capability to kind of have the best of both. Old games that work well, new games that are innovative, and hardware platforms that could scale.

Will you require Xbox devs to support Scorpio? Will you expect them to patch in some level of support?

I want to make sure I understand the word support. The games will run on Scorpio. Any hardware peripheral you have, any game, any app; it is part of the Xbox One family.

Even -- and I tease the hardware team about this, because I'm running takehome now, so I have Scorpio at home --- even when you set it on top of your One, it directly portmaps. Like, you literally plug power in, plug HDMI in, it's all exactly the same.

We want to make it as turnkey as possible, for an Xbox One customer. That person has bet on us. They bet on us this generation, and I want to make sure that we're delivering a product for them, in Scorpio, that kind of meets the expectations and the investment that they've made in us.

So the Xbox One games are going to run on Scorpio. And when you ship an Xbox One game two years from now, even if you don't look at Scorpio as something that you want to take advantage of, fine. That's up to you. We're not mandating that people go and do Scorpio-specific work.

The big triple-A studios, that hasn't been the issue. Most of them, with their PC targets, already have...they've already built the assets. And we've thought about this. This comes from our PC heritage. That we should build the dev tools we deliver, through Direct X and now Pix, and working with our middleware providers, so if you've got a 4K version of your game on PC, we want to make moving that, those assets and that capability over to Scorpio seamless for you. That hasn't been a problem, when we're going and talking with the third-party developers that have done this work.

It's helped us that about a year ago, we started shipping games on PC. So, we did Forza at 4K on PC. We did Gears at 4K on PC. We did some other games, without announcing everything.

We've been in this motion of shipping games at a higher resolution than the current-gen consoles were capable of for a while, and we've used those learnings in our first-party, mixing with our platform and our hardware teams, to say okay, what is it going to mean if big third-party publisher X is already doing the same thing? How will they move over? And frankly, that's what we're finding. That when we go talk to them about it, it hasn't been 'how do we get you to support it?' It's been 'of course we're going to do this, because we want our game to show well.'

And there's even been this dynamic of -- you remember when Red Dead hit 360 back compat, it sold. It really started to sell well. Because a game like that -- well, Red Dead is definitely one of those games everybody should play. And when developers see that they say okay, there can be a new beat for my game, when it comes out and it's running at a native 4K on Scorpio, it's going to bring a new set of interest in my game, that people want to go see it.

And they're not often having to go rebuild the assets, because like I said in most cases they already have the assets. It's just setting the you know, the one guy for two days -- and to be clear, it's not 'one guy for two days' with every project -- that kind of scenario. And we're seeing the games get up and running well on the platform very quickly. And I think it's nice, because even if the game has been out for a while, a higher-res version of the game will cause people to take interest again. Those who maybe passed on it the first time, or were just too busy at the time.

Sounds like a PC game sales tail.

That's right.

What if a developer wants to take advantage of Scorpio hardware, at the expense of performance on original Xbox One?

We are set that Scorpio is part of the Xbox One family of devices. You're probably gonna get tired of our PR like, answers on that. But it's true. Like, we have millions of customers that have made a commitment to the Xbox One generation and I want to make sure if you bought the original Xbox One -- and frankly, developers want to support the largest install base of consoles that are out there, so from a financial standpoint they totally see it.

But I do get the question, more from game players than game developers, on why won't you just let developers target only Scorpio. And aren't you holding them back. Like, that's usually the social question I get: aren't you holding the developer back by requiring they support Xbox One when they support Scorpio?

The Project Scorpio dev kit, in front of earlier Xbox dev kits

Which is what we're going to require: you've got to support Xbox One, S, and Scorpio when you launch your game on Xbox One. But the truth is, the only developers that target one platform are first-party. Any other developer out there is building for the PS4, the PS4 Pro, the Xbox One, Scorpio, PC, probably Switch now, with the great start that they've had. And developers have learned how to craft their tools and their pipeline to support multiple capabilities as they go build those games.

Even if you just focused on PC, any PC game that you pick up has a recommended config, a minimum config...and like, the engines that are out there, the asset library handlers that are out there, understand how to have multiple LODs [levels of detail]. They understand how to deal with multiple asset bases and multiple rendering targets. So we're not holding anybody back.

But for developers, I want them to support the full Xbox One family. I think what they're going to see in Scorpio is the best version of the game that they've seen on console. And that's a little bit of ego speaking, but I'll say, as we designed the console we picked a certain GPU, we picked a certain CPU frequency we wanted to hit, an amount of RAM we wanted, an amount of memory bandwidth we wanted, and I kind of talked about it more as a balanced system.

It's easier to stand on stage with a 6 teraflop t-shirt, and people kind of focus on one thing, but the platform is obviously much more complex than a single number. I think it's fair to say we've been, um, surprised by the performance gains that Scorpio is giving us. Beyond our expectation when we designed the hardware. The engines that we've been bringing through and porting over, one, they've ported over fairly quickly, as third-parties have been coming in. And our own first-parties. The porting has been fast.

And this comes from, so many of these games have PC equivalents that if you say hey, can you set a 4K render target for your engine, you can often just say like sure, I just change this .ini setting right here. Boom! The engine knows how to go do this.

And then when we've looked at our first-party engines, as the third-party engines have been coming up, the balance of the system is playing out. The amount of RAM we're giving to developers, the bandwidth, memory bandwidth, so the GPU is always fed, you don't see stuttering that's happening on the GPU due to lack of assets hitting the GPU. Which is a big issue. You can push as many teraflops onto the GPU as you want, but if you can't feed it with assets, the thing's gonna stall. Because it's run out of stuff to actually go render. CPUs so that we can hit the framerates that people want to see.

And I think that when teams want to show the absolute best version of their game, assuming marketing deals and other things don't keep them from doing that, when they show a console version I think Scorpio is going to be the version that looks better than any other version.

When you say you expect devs to support Xbox One if they ship on Scorpio, what, specifically, do you mean by that?

The requirements themselves don't change, other than there's a new spec and we're saying hey, you've got to support the vertical nature of Xbox One, all the way through Scorpio. When we designed the Scorpio spec, we specifically said games running at 1080p 30 on an Xbox One -- what do we need to put in the box for that thing to run at 4K 30

And that was our design goal, from the beginning. To say: same framerate, increased resolution. Let's make sure that we can go hit that, as a minmum bar.

Now, software's complex and different things can happen, but one of the things that kept us from shipping in 2016 was we didn't think we could make that promise to developers in 2016. That the game that you're running at framerate and resolution on an Xbox One, that you'd be able to take to the same framerate and increased resolution on Scorpio. We didn't think we could get there last year, with the silicon that was in the market.

What changed?

It's a combination of price and capability from our hardware partner, that we worked with as we described a certain spec that we wanted to hit.

Sometimes I get in trouble when I talk about Sony too much, but, the choice they made on PS4 Pro, I totally get that choice, from their perspective and what they wanted to go do. I've said it publicly and I've said it privately, I think they've built a good 2016 PS4 Pro. With the silicon that was available, they picked the parts that made sense to go and put together a console in 2016.

But the point on not wanting framerate to drop when you go to the higher box, right, if the developers want to push resolution, to say to the player 'here you bought this higher-end console, let me show you higher-end resolution,' you don't want the framerate to drop. And that was something we didn't think we could deliver with the silicon that was available in 2016.

So some of it was time, as certain things come down in price -- some of them not as quickly as we would like. And some of it was hardware capability from our silicon partners, that allowed us to go do that in 2017.

And frankly we had to make that bet two, two and a half years ago, right. You're kind of throwing a dart a long way out, because the timelines in hardware are kind of like that. In the case of this, our hardware partner is the same [as Sony] -- we're both AMD partners. So we don't know what each other is doing, but we definitely know the roadmap, because we're working with the same partner. And we chose to pick something that said, if you're runnning -- 1080p 30 on an Xbox One, what does it mean to run that at 4K 30 on Scorpio. And make sure we could do that. And we're seeing results that make us feel really good about the choices we've made.

And some developers will come back and say, maybe I don't want a 4K native frame buffer. And we know some developers that are targeting other platforms are doing checkerboarding and other things. And we said okay, we want to make it easier for the developer to do what's natural for them. So we want to give them the tools to target their rendering techniques, that they want to use.

I believe, regardless of the technique you use, you are going to end up with a better performing game on [Scorpio], just because of the pure specs and hardware capability of the box. And we're starting to get questions like, if I plug my Scorpio into my 1K TV, because that's what I have right now, will I see something that's better than on the Xbox One? And we wanted to go tackle that scenario as well, so if developers wanted to make use of it, they could.

Giving developers tools to do the right thing at different resolutions is part of the dev plat[form] that we want to build.

Do you foresee a future where the Xbox doesn't exist, as a console? Where it instead exists as a PC-based platform?

So...I'm a strong believer in console. And what that appliance means in my family room, under my TV. Like I think...I log in with a controller, it kind of has power options and auto-update options that just feel a lot more like my cable box than it does my laptop.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, but that space of a console, you just turn it on and it's always ready and it's really purpose-built to go do one thing first, which is play games. Yes, people can do other things on it, but it's purpose-built for that. I'm a believer in that.

And I've said, and this is actually true, the planning for what happens after Scorpio in the console space is already underway. You have to think about it that way. Like, what is the next thing? We -- I -- remain committed to the console space. We think it's critically important.

But you're also hitting on something that I think is another change this generation. This will get a little philosophical, but -- gaming, over the decades I've been involved, has been about the device first. And then, almost, gamer second. Like I'm a console gamer, I'm a PC gamer. And still, like, I mainly play on console.

But what you're finding now, if you put the gamer at the center and you say okay, what do I want? I want to be connected to my gaming experience wherever I might go. And like, Twitch is a great example of that. Twitch lets me watch people play Destiny, wherever I go. And if a new raid drops and I happen to be on the road somewhere and I don't have my console with me and I want to see what a new raid looks like, I can get online and watch people go throgh it. That's cool. The experience becomes about me as a gamer, and where do I want to consume the content around the games that I love.

What we started looking at, then, is that we happen to be Microsoft, and we have this foothold on PC. Can we make Xbox an experience that expands, not only from console, but console to PC, and frankly mobile as well. We have millions of customers that come in from iOS and Android today. I think Xbox Live, as a service that connects a customer, a gamer, to their friends and their content and their Achievements and their feeds -- can exist on every platform.

Now some platforms might not allow that, like certain people might look at any encroachment of Xbox Live on their platform as a bad thing. But one of the things that happened when we acquired Minecraft, is we realized, very very quickly, the power of the community around driving the success of the game. Same thing happens with games like GTA V and Ark and Astroneer. You see these games that are almost more about the community than the original creators. When I go to MineCon, the line of kids is not for the team -- it's for the YouTubers! That's awesome.

So put the gamer in the middle, build a service capability around them, and whatever device they sit down with, we've got the capability, let's bring them the experience we can bring them there. If the games can run natively on a PC, and they're on a PC, let's go let 'em play those games.

Obviously on console, same thing. If they're on a mobile device, what can we do? In the case of like Minecraft and Solitaire and some other things, we can give 'em a game. In other cases we're going to bring 'em things like Beam, and their activity feed on Xbox Live, and the ability to chat with their friends on a service and device, wherever they are.

So I definitely think about Xbox Live as something that's more pervasive than just sitting on the console. The console itself, I think, is a foothold for us, a strength for us, and something we definitely have longterm belief in.

What's your general philosophy concerning the future of Xbox, then? Devs wonder about the future of game consoles. Is Scorpio an example of how Xbox evolves from here on out?

Well, let me say that the amount of times we've designed, roughly designed, an Xbox handheld, or a cheap Xbox kind of stick that you could plug in and stream from an Xbox in the home, or play low-powered games....we are always thinking and brainstorming on different scenarios of where the console could go. Or the gaming experience, I guess, more specifically, could go.

In terms of where console will go, I still believe in the power of a television in the home. Now some people don't, right. I happen to have two daughters, they're younger, they don't watch TV -- they watch things on their laptop, right. This big screen on the wall that's a communal viewing service is something of my age demographic, and not theirs.

That said, she'll come down and play games with me. So I believe in that television experience, which I really believe console is docked to, in my mind. Console let's four of us grab controllers and try to go play Overcooked and yell and swear at each other when Jason [glancing meaningfully across the table at Xbox ATG chief Jason Ronald] forgets to slice the tomatoes, or something. I think that experience is magical.

And I think it's something that -- I know it's something that we're committed to, in the long run.

In terms of where the console space goes, there's some things about how the console business runs, in terms of you don't make any money on the hardware, it's making money on the games, making money on the service. So if you're in a situation where you're subsidizing the hardware, a faster refresh of the hardware really hurts you. Because obviously, any subsidy of the hardware is kind of played out over, somebody is going to buy games, they're going to subscribe to Live, they might go subscribe to Game Pass and other things. And that's how you kind of run a business around the console space.

So I don't think you'll see console move. Unless the prices of the consoles themselves change to where they're not a subsidized piece of hardware but rather something that's profitable, like other consumer electronic devices, I don't think you're going to see a constant iteration in the console space.

Going back to Scorpio, we saw 4K. And we said we're going to go make a bet that 4K adoption is going to happen faster than maybe some people thought, or that it's going to happen in the middle of this generation. Let's go do something. So in the console space, in terms of where it's going, I look at those gaming consumer trends and say what are the trends we want to be a part of?

It's possible console generations slow down. Because I don't want to falsely put out a console that doesn't have a real selling proposition relative to the thing that's already in the market. I've said this before, that with the launch of this generation, I thought we struggled a little bit. Because a late-gen 360 game looked pretty good. So when an early-gen game from this generation came out, if you weren't in the industry, and you looked at late-gen 360 game to early-gen Xbox One game -- and I'd say the same thing for the other platforms -- you couldn't make the same statement you made on original Xbox to 360, where the screen went from 4:3 interlaced to all of a sudden you're sitting there at 720p HD. Like, it was just obvious. And TV was moving that direciton, you had sporting events and other things being broadcast in HD, and it was just like okay that's a no-brainer, I'm going to go do that.

This generation, I don't think, had that same call to action. Of here's what's happening around gaming, and you all have to be a part of that. We looked at 4K, we said we wanted this generation to incorporate 4K, and we thought we could do it in a way that wasn't disruptive, and was additive to this generation. And that's what we're trying to do.

"We needed to think about our hardware as multi-generational. Because we said 'Okay, there's gonna be games that are going to live multiple generations.'"

When you think about what's next, and what's going on, just like you guys write about it every day, we play games every day, and we watch what's happening in development and we think okay, well what are the trends? Trends are more socially-driven games. Trends are a more constant set of games that grow with, frankly, a very strong indie scene, such that the hit games don't come from the top three publishers. So we've reached down into the ID@Xbox program and done things like give them dev kits, let them turn their Xbox One into a dev kit so effectively anybody can become a developer. Now letting them submit their stuff directly to the store. This is all part of us saying how do we unlock the greater dev community so that they can actually create the next hits?

Because it's not as likely that you're just going to go bet on a hit that's going to come from one of your traditional names; it might come from somewhere else. And then well, what does the console have to be in order for that to make sense? From a platform standpoint, the platform's still got to be safe. As a parent, I want to know that my daughters can go on the platform and I know what they're able to play and I know who they're able to play with and the ratings of the content they have. We have to continue to do work on the service; we've built Clubs and we'll continue to work on our gaming for everyone accessibility features. And then the hardware capability itself, it's how do you hit a price point that somebody will like with a hardware capability that's easily understood?

The two easy ones to bet on are resolution and framerate. And I don't know if we're ready -- I saw Dell shipping their 8K monitor now, but it's like...five thousand dollars. I don't know if we're quite at a point where everybody is gonna refresh their televisions to 8K framerate. So you see us starting to look at the framerate area and saying okay what innovations can we bring, not only in maximizing the framerate, but even things that tailor the framerate of display to the capability of the engine. So that you get a very smooth feeling. So framerate is one of the things, as we go forward, that we're going to look at.

But I also think there's going to have to be some disruption. Nintendo, I thought, did a cool thing with picking mobile. They kind of said okay, Switch is going to be a console that you can take with you. That's an interesting idea. Nintendo always does cool things, right. They did the second screen with Wii U, they obviously did the Wii and motion gaming in the room. I love that innovation.

Having innovation that really brings third-parties along is critical to us, I think; Nintendo tends to have great success in their first-party on their platforms and then third-parties usually come in a little bit later, usually because Nintendo creates things that are less like other things. Which is, you know, kudos to them. I think it's a fantastic part of the industry. Us being Microsoft, we're going to think about the health of Windows. And of our Xbox console. And try to think about those together, and really continue to grow Xbox Live.

This is the year I think people are predicting that broadcast viewership of games will exceed playing hours of games? I don't know where people come up with those stats. And playing hours are going up. We know this. This industry's massive. It's over a hundred billion dollars, the game industry, globally. It's a massive business, and it's just finding more and more ways of reaching gamers every day, which is I think good for all of us.

I mean, there are many months on YouTube where Minecraft is the number one or two search term on all of YouTube. And obviously we have almost nothing to do with it, other than to continue to try and ship a game that works. Which is awesome.

I've been here a whole day and nobody has wanted to talk about VR. So what's up with VR, at Microsoft?

I've tried to be consistent on this, so I will stay in the swim lane I've been in, not because of any official answer, but because it's what I believe. I have a PSVR, I have an Oculus, I don't have a Gear VR, but I have an HTC Vive and I play a lot of this stuff. I still think we're very very early in the evolution of VR.

Really what I see today is a lot of what I call kind of planar 2D applications being ported to volumetric 3D, or volumetric VR. And I actually don't think that's where we're going to see the breakout hit, something that moved from yes I did this on my monitor and now I'm going to go do this in VR. There's a lot of cool things, there's a lot of learning going on, and I think that's the natural trajectory; I think we need to go learn.

But we don't yet know how to paint on the VR canvas. We're still learning that. And to me, the most innovative space to go, and the most open space to go and learn about what VR is, is Windows. Because anybody can go and take their Windows PC, and we're now coming with our Windows HMDs that are lower-priced and will support a broader spec of PCs, so that any developer if they really want to go learn about VR development, can go plug one of these things and go party on it. Because that's the kind of activation we need, to figure out what's really happening in VR.

And I think we're on like a decade-long journey with VR, and we're still right at the beginning. So I have hesitated to say let's lock on one piece of hardware on our console and say this is it, we've figured out what VR is, this is it. Because from a hardware standpoint I think you can kind of do that, though I stil think we're early, but from an experience standpoint I don't think we've seen the things that we need to really have VR break out.

So we will support VR on Scorpio. We said that onstage. We will support VR on Scorpio, we're going to do that, I think it's important, I think there's some great immersive VR experiences.

But I still feel like the motion of the creative community is more vibrant on PC. And that's the place where we're going to see a lot of those ideas. So our approach is going to be to try and embrace both of those thigns, as opposed to creating a vertical in the VR space to say okay this thing is completely disconnected from the other things. Because I think the Windows space is the place where most of the developer engagement is happening.

Yeah, VR devs are having to choose which platforms they want to be on.

I know! I don't like that.

Do you have any interest in doing your own VR work?

Well, we built Minecraft in VR to learn. It's on Oculus, it's on Gear, we kind of watch and we iterate and we kind of figure out what works and what makes people sick, what doesn't make people sick. Like a lot of creators, as an organization we mess around with VR all the time. And learn.

And the VR community itself is actually really open. The Sony guys have been great, they've had our teams down, we've had them up to look at HoloLens and stuff that's been going on. Obviously Valve's about a stone's throw from here. So the VR community itself is actually very collaborative because I think everybody realizes how early we are in the evolution of what this thing is about.

In terms of hardware, we will talk more about it. There is a plan. I'll say that. This is not a we don't know what we're doing; it's more that we aren't saying yet. I think it's an immersive experience. I do not like that people are having to say, which of these VR verticals do I go pick right now, as a developer? Because I don't think any of them are really big enough yet to support a single experience. So you can see what we've done on console where we've said hey, go unlock your console and become a developer and go build a console game. You don't need to sign any kind of exclusivity deal with us in order to go unlock our console and go party on it. And build games.

So we're going to...my approach is to try and take a more open and inclusive approach to VR. The problem is the other people who are creating closed ecosystems are probably not going to like that. They're probably not going to want to play.

But I'm going to try and be as open as we can, definitely across the platforms that we support. Because I think that right now if you're a developer, you're just looking for oxygen to go sell your game. And having to pick the winner in VR, this early, feels like a path to not having this space really take off, to me.

So we're also out there talking to people that are building VR games today who don't have some kind of exclusivity deal, and saying hey, I want to be able to support you with the Windows work that we're doing. So if you want to ship your stuff here, come over, it's not like if you ship your game somewhere else you can't ship here. We just want people to get users on the VR things that they've built right now. Windows is the easiest space for us to start, which is why you've heard, so far, our VR plan has been more Windows-focused.

So what advice would you give to game developers, in 2017?

We're trying to build the best hardware platform and service that we can.

I guess from my decade-plus in building first-party games, when you ask me to speak to developers, which I do a lot of, I kind of come to the soul of what it is to be a game developer. And I think today's world allows for an unprecedented level of connection between you and your creative capability, and the fans and customers of your game. Whether it's through Early Access or Game Preview, or different ways you can go build a game kind of hand-in-hand with the people who end up being the biggest fans and most devoted players of your games.

And I'd say to developers, go embrace that. Embrace the fact that there are so many people out there that love the craft of building games, as well as playing games. And build games where that community can be part of the experience.

A great little example is, you're seeing more and more developers now building games, understanding that things like Twitch and Beam exist. And the game itself kind of natively exists in this world of players and viewers. And I love that thing. It's what's unique about our art form, is that it's interactive. And I think the process of creating our art form can be as interactive as the end experience is when you're done. And that's something that's unique to being a game developer.

And us at Xbox, we're going to go build the best hardware we can, platform and service, to allow you to go do that. But embrace that interactivity with the community. Because I think it's....we see it in Minecraft: I say you don't own Minecraft; you're the curator of Minecraft. Because it kind of has its own life out there, and that's such a strength for it. So that would be my recommendation.

Continue to give us feedback on how we can do better. That's how we get better. I think it's gonna be a fun 2017.

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