Building a Cross Platform 360-degree Video Experience at The New York Times (opens in new tab)

They are off investing time/money in bleeding edge tech, yet they won't innovate or improve the community/commenting system.

Discussion can be huge for engagement, and they have the reach and audience to set a new high watermark in this area.

Instead, you still can't even comment on most articles.

If anyone from NYT reads here I'd love to share some ideas.

Those guys came from Globo, the biggest media conglomerate in Brazil.

Global has slowly and consistently built an open source software culture and a lead in web tech for media in Brazil.

Congrats!

I don't understand the NY Times' focus on future technologies which have little immediate application, over fundamentals they should (IMHO) have mastered ten years ago, such as making video and graphics first-class mediums alongside text.

And this "open. ..." blog is behind the paywall.

Oh, well.

FWIW, the 360 videos aren't working on Debian using Firefox-ESR (which is 45.4.0). :( I'm getting the error "Your browser doesn't support 360 videos."

Great to see 360 web video for once. I hate YouTube's "you need Chrome for this". My answer to that is "no Google, you need cross-browser 360 video".

I tried the NYT video on iOS Safari and while it worked, it was a bad experience. When swiping up to look up and down, the whole page scrolled instead of the video pitching up/down. The video was choppy too. I'm impressed they got it working on iOS Safari though. Apple would prefer you repeat the phrase "there's an app for that", and it's no surprise their browser well short of its potential for handling such things.

I love this! There is no reason why the NYTimes can't be a media-tech powerhouse 10x what it is now.