Apple's $3K Headset, BlackMagic for Twitter, and DJI's New Stabilizer [Jan 17, 2023]

How Apple is tacking both AR and VR, the cool Twitter extension that turbo-charges your feed, and why you should be testing everything.

🔗 Click here for this episode's links, tools, and tactics

📺 Watch the video version of this episode

Transcript

0:00

Let's talk about Apple's AR headset; BlackMagic, a pretty cool Twitter extension; and why you should always be testing your content. This is Video Signals. What's up, everyone? I'm Joey Daoud. Welcome to Video Signals. Twice a week, we send out a newsletter with 5 interesting links, 3 tools, and 1 tactic to keep you up to date in the world of video marketing and level up your video marketing skills. All right, so let's jump into it with our 5 links. First link, we've got an article from Bloomberg about Apple's long-awaited AR VR mixed-reality headset. So obviously, Meta, being that they rebranded to Meta from Facebook, Meta has been trying to make the metaverse a thing. It hasn't been going so well for them. But with Apple jumping in, this could be the next push to making the metaverse an even more realistic thing, or something that we use more often. Though, it'll probably take a while for it to adapt. So this headset that's going to come out is reported to cost about$3,000. So it's only going to be for like the mega diehard Apple fans or developers or high-end users. But the idea is developers will get the headset, they'll start making things, year or two of developing this new app ecosystem for this new operating system, this xrOS operating system, so that when the new future versions of the headset come out and they are less expensive and more accessible, there is a place and things for people to do in the metaverse or Apple's version of the metaverse. It's still very fuzzy of how many metaverses we are going to have and if they're ever going to get along as far as Facebook's metaverse or Apple's metaverse and whatever other metaverses there are. So a few interesting things about this design, and this was in the Hard Fork podcast, it will not only have an internal screen for what you see, but it'll also have an outward-facing screen. So the idea here is, I believe, it will have cameras that will show your eyes because it is a virtual reality or augmented reality. If you are in augmented reality mode, where you see the real world around you, it would show other people your eyes. So you could wear the glasses but still have face-to-face, somehow face-to-face interactions with other people. And they can see your eyes or at least see some sort of indicator that you are in augmented reality versus virtual reality, where that screen would turn off and people would understand that you are in a virtual world and you cannot see them. That's what's reported. This all could totally change when the device is actually launched. The other interesting thing is it will have a cable coming down from the headset to a battery pack that you have to clip onto your pants or your waist or whatever, a belt, which is a bit un-Apple-like, but apparently, one of the things that they've been challenged with is fitting all of the processors and graphics and screens and enough battery power to power it all for a reasonable amount of time. And the only way to do that without making the headset extremely heavy and uncomfortable to wear is to put the battery in a separate device that you have to clip into. So interesting to see if this actually- I mean, it's been reported for years. And every year, it is like this is one of the devices that's going to come out. But it seems like 2023 is going to be the year that it comes out. All right, next up, we've got DJI. They got a new gimbal. So device that you put your camera on it, turns your camera into a steady cam, super smooth shots and get really cool cinematic shots. So they've had these for a while, but they have a new version, the RS 3 Mini. So it's designed for lighter-weight cameras, so like your smaller mirrorless cameras. But it is a lighter stabilizer device than the RS 3, which has been out. It is up to 40% lighter than the original RS 3. And when you're doing handheld shots and you're holding this one-arm thing around, especially if you're filming a lot during the day, weight does matter. So having 40% lighter will make your arm a lot less sore, and you able to film a lot longer. I didn't use this specific device, but I used one of the older DJI gimbals on the Mucho Mucho Amor shoot, especially during the final scene where Walter is getting his grand presentation, and I tracked him with a dolly or gimbal just like this for a long time. It was a two-handed rig because it was so heavy. So this is a lot more friendlier and easier to use one-handed. All right, so next link, we've got some stats about advertising rates. TikTok has undercut its rivals' cost per 1,000 impressions. It's 50% less on TikTok than it is on Instagram, and 62% less on TikTok than it is on Snapchat. But not only that, TikTok has an engagement rate of up to 6%, whereas it is 0.6% on Instagram. So if you got some ad dollars to spend, or you're looking for a platform for spending and getting the best bang for your buck, it seems like TikTok is by far the best choice. All right, fourth link, we've got another update from Apple. So they launched Apple Business Connect. And so this is basically kind of like, Google has Google My Business or renamed to Google Business. This is a way where you can go claim your Apple Maps location if you have a physical brick-and-mortar store and update the info, add photos, add more info about your business. So I'm kind of surprised they haven't had this before. But apparently, they didn't. And now you can. So if you've got a physical brick-and-mortar space, just go over there and be able to claim your location and update it just as you can add photos or update photos. So it would be nice to see if they have some video support soon where you can add videos to your business location. But as of right now, I don't think that's a possibility. And then last link, if you do any creator or UGC, user-generated content campaigns on TikTok, TikTok is launching a Talent Manager Portal, where you can manage and establish relationships between brands and creators. So this is on top of their Creator Marketplace, which has existed, and you can kind of do this. But now, you can manage everything on the campaign from start to finish. You can manage feedback, deal flow, contracts, reviewing metrics. So they're really doubling down, building out this portal and a whole network to make it easier for brands. Going on top of that, hey, it's pretty cheap to like advertise on TikTok. It's pretty effective to advertise on TikTok. Now, they're even making it easier where you can find cool people on TikTok to help make videos for your brand and promote it all within the same platform. Not a lot of video tech stuff this week that I saw. All right, 3 tools. First tool, BlackMagic. So this is a really cool Chrome extension that will add a new sidebar to your Twitter feed and it'll give you a whole bunch of other metrics and tools to make your Twitter experience a little bit more useful. Definitely good if you're on Twitter, with the goal of being like a creator, or someone who is like putting out content and you're interested in seeing how your stuff performs or like when the best time is to post. So it'll give you metrics. You'll be able to like load up someone's profile, look at their best tweets, look at what works on them, save their tweets in different folders. You could also use it as a scheduling platform so you can write out tweets and schedule them. And it does have a cool integration with Hypefury, where you can pull tweets that you already have scheduled in Hypefury into BlackMagic. So it's a cool sidebar, adds a lot of extra features to Twitter, makes it a lot more useful. Second tool, we've got Pro Backup. So when it comes to backing up your data, you probably think about backing up your hard drive a lot. But what about all of the SaaS tools that you use, especially project management apps like ClickUp, Asana, Todoist, Basecamp? You probably don't think about backing those platforms up. But stuff can happen. You know, if they have the only copy of your data, they mess up somehow and your data gets lost, or if you need a timeline backup version of your data, there's really no way to get it. So we've been using Pro Backup as a tool with our ClickUp workspace where it'll save a copy of everything on ClickUp, which is where not only do we have our tasks, but we just have like comments, notes, documents, feedback, a ton of info where like if it got deleted, it'd be pretty terrible. So we have that all backed up and gets saved a copy of it to our Google Drive. Really useful tool. They cover a bunch of other apps that you can get a subscription backup to. It's really useful. All right, and third tool we've got is Talkwalker. So if you remember like Google Alerts has been around forever. You can type in a keyword and have it alert you if like a blog or an article mentions that keyword. Usually, main things you would use a keyword for would be like tracking your brand name or tracking your own personal name. So Google Alert is all right, but sometimes, it either doesn't find stuff I found, or it finds it like a lot later and you get alerted a lot later. So I've been using Talkwalker. So they got a free alert service. It runs pretty much the same way as Google Alerts, and you can kind of choose how you want to get notified like right away or once a day or once a week, and what things you want it to scan, like forums or social media or blog posts or articles. But I found that it does a better job of like surfacing things that Google Alerts misses. And it also tends to work and alert you a lot quicker and in more real-time. So that's Talkwalker. Check it out for alerts. All right. And lastly, our tactic: Always be testing. So you know, the whole thing, you should always be learning. But the kind of precursor to always be learning is you need to test things to learn from them, and review them and experiment and figure it out. So bunch of things you can test. Test ideas, test video formats, test thumbnails, test tweets, test offers, test ads, whole bunch of things. Anything you put online, you can kind of usually test it. So this email alone, we had 4 different headlines sent out before the winner was picked. Headlines are tested. We test our thumbnails as well on the channel. So even little things in your profile can be tested. So I just discovered a tool called Birdy, and that's actually a fourth bonus tool, that will A/B test things on Twitter profile. So it'll A/B test like literally anything, the bio, your name, your location, your website, your banner. Anything on the profile can be tested. So even little things like that, it'll like see which one converts more people who visit your profile to a subscriber. By the way, if anyone wants to develop that for YouTube, that would be extremely handy. We'd pay money for that. So that's it. Start testing and start learning. And that is it for this edition of Video Signals. If you enjoyed this, please hit the like and subscribe button. If you know someone who would like it, please share it with them. Let me know your thoughts, either@C47 on Twitter or in the comments below if you're watching this on YouTube. Thanks for watching. I will see you in the next Signal.