Live streaming apps steal traffic from the pay-per-view Mayweather/Pacquiao fight
Over the weekend dozens of live streams of the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight were available through Periscope, a fairly new app owned by Twitter. Because apps like Periscope and Meerkat record and broadcast live, it is more challenging to shut down live streams of TV footage before users see them. HBO and Showtime, who co-produced the pay-per-view boxing match were required to alert Twitter of illegal streams of the so called fight of the century, while many media firms say it should be the app’s responsibility to police the live streaming of pay-per-view events. Periscope shut down over 30 illegal streams, but internet users still boasted about their ability to watch for free. It was estimated that thousands of illegal streams were available to watch from users who had recorded and simultaneously broadcasted the TV footage on their smartphones.
Google Cloud Deployment Manager is now in beta
The Google Cloud Deployment Manager was introduced into beta this week, allowing you to generate a description of what you want to deploy and hand off all the dirty work to Google. The tool boasts intent driven management using a declarative syntax, meaning you simply have to state the desired outcome of your deployment rather than running scripts to configure your environment, or even using a separate server to run a configuration tool. The main difference between the Deployment Manager and existing open source configuration tools like Puppet, Chef or SaltStack is that the Google Cloud Deployment Manager is natively integrated into the Cloud Platform, meaning you don’t pay anything extra for it or deploy and manage a separate configuration management software.
Here are the key features:
- Define your infrastructure deployment in a template and deploy via command line or RESTful API
- Templates support Jinja or Python, so you can take advantage of programming constructs, such as loops, conditionals, and parameterized inputs for deployments requiring logic
- UI support for viewing and deleting deployments in Google Developers Console
- Tight integration with Google Cloud Platform resources, from compute to storage to networking, which provides faster provisioning and visualization of the deployments
Facebook extends deep linking capabilities
Facebook announced the extension of their deep linking tool beyond engagement ads to also include mobile app install ads. The goal of the tool is to help developers and advertisers send people directly to information they care about, such as a product page, when their app is opened for the first time. Developers can access the feature through App Links, Facebook’s cross platform standard for deep linking on mobile, or through the Facebook SDK if they’ve enabled App Links. In addition, developers can also define the location they want their ads to link to.
To complement this new feature, Facebook also introduced a new deep link verifier within the app ads helper to verify if deep links are set up properly before running app ads that use the functionality.
PageSpeed Service has been deprecated
This week Google announced that PageSpeed, a service that optimizes websites by rewriting web pages and serving the optimized content via Google servers, has been deprecated and will be discontinued on August 3rd, 2015. All sites using PageSpeed service will become completely unavailable on that date if users do not change their DNS before then. Although Google will be notifying users believed to be affected, they urged users not to rely solely on a notification and to login to the console to check for any domains that show up as “Enabled” to determine if they are at risk. Many hosting providers integrate PageSpeed, and users are instructed to check provider documentation.