A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
It is a staggering increase - double the views it had in April - which appears to dwarf the billion views YouTube clocks up daily. Facebook's aggressive push into video will surely delight advertisers who can promote their products alongside popular clips. But not everybody is convinced Facebook will eclipse rival YouTube. How did Facebook video grow so quickly?Making clips play automatically, a new video tab in mobile, and suggesting more videos to keep people watching will all have contributed to Facebook's mammoth viewing figures. Facebook also prioritises video in the news feed, or as its founder Mark Zuckerberg puts it: "Helping people discover content that they hadn't really asked for." But the company has been criticised for registering a video as "viewed" if it plays for just three seconds.
"It's counting you seeing the video, essentially no more than you scrolling past the video in your news feed, as a 'view'," said Tom Ridgewell, who posts popular animations on his YouTube channel. "Those aren't true statistics." YouTube has already moved away from views as a way of judging how engaging a video is, instead focusing on how long its viewers spend watching videos - "hundreds of millions of hours" every day, it says. But Facebook has defended its focus on views over watch time. In August, it said three seconds was an acceptable metric because it showed a person's "intent to watch". One of the problems Facebook is trying to tackle is that its video offering is often a fleeting experience, but longer videos typically attract more valuable advertising.
It is a situation the site's founder Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged on Wednesday. "The more natural starting point for us is shorter form content," he said, describing the news feed as "not the place where you're necessarily going to see a TV show and then watch an hour-long clip right there". In September, the average duration of the top ten videos on Facebook was about a minute, according to NewsWhip, a site that tracks the "social velocity" of online content.
"The big question for Facebook is how it can attract the sort of premium, high-quality videos that people want to sell ads against," said Joseph Evans, digital analyst at Enders.
"If it can nail that, it does start looking like a threat to YouTube.
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