If you want there to be competition, the next question would be competition for who? Android & iOS are pretty competitive with one another in terms of features and support. The handset makers aren't going to be doing any more competing than they currently are. Samsung is half-heartedly working on their own mobile OS to make it look like they're not completely indebted to Google for their part of the market. Carriers in the US couldn't care less as long as they can continue to dictate bands & crapware services that the OS does for free.
Now if you want something else, like being free from advertisements or removal of tracking, then we have a different set of questions to address. First off, why are you getting a smartphone in the first place? Part of what makes one useful is the fact that it can get your current location and provide a map of the area around you. Or get you directions on where you're going. If you don't want third parties accessing that then we need to talk about how we secure the phone more than needing a new OS.
Have you noticed that Apple has stopped trying to remove all of the Google related things from them? Apple made their version of a map app, started poorly but got better and ultimately didn't matter. Google was and remains so far ahead that catching up isn't feasible w/o expending a supreme amount of resources. It didn't matter what Apple tried. Unverifying the app only alienated their customer base. Dropping it from the store only saw articles on how to sideload it proliferate. And making it run poorly in the native web browser saw Chrome for iOS get downloaded more. Apple lost that battle.
This resulted in a shift of strategy for Android. No longer did Google need it to run everywhere in order for people to get a taste, it now needed to run well. At first, Google tried to get manufacturers on board with this plan. High-end, premium experience phones were pushed. However, Google ran face first into the carrier profit centers, something the handset makers were already well aligned with. Google could care less how often you switch and I would guess they'd rather you'd keep the same phone for several years since it makes it all the easier to track and data-mine you. But the carriers and handset makers are not Google. Not yet, anyways.
So instead of backing off, Google went whole hog. As a company they only want the best experience for much the same reason as Apple does. It makes them look good. It makes people want to stick around.
Having a mid-price phone is the choice of people without the same sort of brand loyalty they're looking to groom. Yes, groom is the correct term here. Right now, Google is all about creating a digital monopoly. To get there, they need people to stick with them and keep sticking with them well past the point it makes sense to.
If you're looking for options, look elsewhere. The smartphones are heading for stagnation.
Have you been to a casino recently? All the spinner games have updated to video interfaces and touch displays with frankly dizzying array of oversaturated color and graphics so busy it's hard to keep track of everything going on. But that's all on purpose. To part you from your money.
There's a reason why all the big game publishers have switched to crapifying their games with lootboxes and other gambling-lite features. They're all trying to get the same payday that casinos have had for years but are instead targeting the one group that casinos can't, legally, for now. Just wait a couple more months and that might change. Then everyone will be on equal footing.
It's sickening that nothing is being done about it.
Google, now Alphabet, is going for the digital monopoly. Complete and total vertical and horizontal integration.
That's it. That's the sum total of why Google is doing this. It has nothing to do with Samsung, Apple, or anyone else. It never did and never will. Google wants to run everything digital through itself. It could care less about the rest of the internet for so long as you start at their gate and they can record when you left and re-entered. It knows it can't stop you from going to Netflix, Slingbox, Hulu, or anywhere else but it can damn sure make it have a nice spot on any number of devices you own. A nice little gateway that can record what you do and when you do it.
It's not about "not being evil" or any such nonsense. It was always about being the first, last, and only place you go to get stuff done on the internet.
but I doubt it's going to happen for two reasons. First is that the FCC isn't one of those headlining institutions that the GOP cares about. In fact, they'd rather it all just go away right now because they can't be bothered to govern let alone care about governing. So as long as Pai isn't causing it to rain on their parade, they couldn't care less. And second, I'm pretty certain if it came down to a close vote there would be more than enough lobbying action on his behalf to see him through. There's a lot of moneyed interests that want to keep him that post.
Not to mention that if does deliver on this agenda there's probably a pretty cushy job waiting for him with whichever telecom or cable operator he chooses when it's all over.
What is happening in SV and elsewhere is the same thing that happened last decade on Wall Street and the other stock markets. Electronic & algorithmic trading showed that you could cheat your way to millions, if not billions, and little would be done to reign it in. Those who owned the markets (which why do we allow for stock markets to be privately owned? that makes no sense!) still got their slice and those you were doing the trading for got theirs. Regulators are still behind that curve. Even more complex computer controlled trading evolves as the profits for doing this have been cut down now that everyone is doing it.
The same thing happened when currency trading started. It's a constant cycle of finding a gap and exploiting it until everyone tries to exploit it. Tragedy of the commons writ with the sweat and dollars of the workforce.
So that's what startups do now. They try to find where the gaps exist and exploit them without thinking of what that does to everyone involved. This isn't about "disruption". It never was. It was always about idealistic computer people being exploited by the avarice of Vulture Capital into gains at the expense of the many. Google has ruined online advertising with its relentless march towards monopoly, taking many wonderful things down along the way. Amazon has done the same. Etsy, eBay, all of them strip mined a good thing and made it worse.
Not everything needs to be accessed through a web browser. Seriously. I have trouble imagining why that was the solution in the first place. Let them make their own apps and when they fail to move eyeballs away from the web, let them come back and play nicely with the rest of us.
And if these apps don't fail and provide unique, worthwhile experiences that people are willing to pay for DRM or whatever scheme included, then that's the way it will be. We computer people are the minority here. Just because it may ruffle a few ideological and dogmatic feathers doesn't make the situation any worse than it already is.
You have to want to solve problems in order to innovate. You have to have competitive pressure in order to force innovation to happen. Right now, I don't see an environment in the US where the powers that be want problems to be resolved or are willing to break companies apart to force innovation to happen. Now, individuals feel otherwise. Income distribution seems to be a popular place to start. Or for there to be unlimited internet everywhere is another good one. Or better, cheaper healthcare.
But none of these are addressable through technology. Apple, Google, or Amazon aren't who we should be looking to for that. The problems those companies are good at solving have been solved by them.
The problem here is that this is a state actor being caught out. The effective kinds of penalties in this situation would be tantamount to self harm. That is, the only thing that would stop China from doing this would be to cut economic ties with them. Of any kind. And that is literally cutting our nose off to spite our face. We and by this I mean the global community are tied too deeply to one another economically to try and isolate a nation as large and as prosperous as China currently is. It's also of dubious use as a way to change regimes. Look at N. Korea or Iran for examples. While Iran has seen some positive democratic reforms in the past decade, it was only after a certain amount of trade was normalized that it happened.
The only level one has left then is an individual one. To make it too costly for an individual to be caught to make it worthwhile. In order to make this effective, one would have to up regulations so that your own country's infrastructure and business practices are able to catch them. Which isn't going to happen while the current political regime reigns in DC. If anything, President Stupid is going to make it easier for this to happen for his Russian buddies who are busy doing the same thing China is doing, just in different industries.
which state the obvious. 1) That HTC is a competitor in the same phone space and that 2) Google has money to burn.
There's a third reason.
Google doesn't know how to innovate anymore. They've gone as far as they can with computers as they are and don't want to sink time and money into finding the next new thing. Instead they're going through a retrenching so that profitability remains relatively high while seeking as many monopoly positions as they can. They already have search and internet advertisement sewn up. The US doesn't have the will to establish a new regulatory regime and the EU doesn't currently have the reach to force the US into following their course. That may change by the time President Stupid is done but that's for the future to decide.
In the meantime, the smart move is for Google to gobble up as much as it can under their Alphabet umbrella and see which keeps bringing in the money.
The article only spoke to how Google wanted to reserve the first two results for their own and when that was rightly criticized it wanted to set a floor price so it could be "outbid" by competitors. Which, once again, was right criticized for entirely missing the point.
This is really sad to see Google, which was a bastion of good search results come to this. The avarice which has infected the company is no longer overcome by the innovation of product and delivery it once had. I'd be fine with paying a couple bucks a month to have the calendar, email, and a few other things. I'm already paying for their steaming music. Maybe it's beyond time for YouTube to become 100% paid since advertisements are screwing over the reason it became popular in the first place.
Advertisement is distorting everything Google has done. I'm no longer comfortable with paying for use with my time and eyeballs. I want to pay with money.
Maybe we need to come up with a new word to describe when computers are used to generate meaningless connections between events. Or maybe we can add to Pareidolia's definition the idea that it can also find meaning in random information as well as sights and sounds. Oooo! That's it. Meta-Pareidolia. Finding meaning in random stimuli or information.
It's not the cycle the manufacturers got addicted to. It was the first time in a while that the margins were sufficient. And margins were only sufficient because we're down to a few companies making them. The Chinese are going to be entering the market shortly so we'll see those margins dwindle. Which leaves them only one direction to go in if they want to keep making good money. Resolution.
Let them fight. The outcome is going to be the same for us no matter who wins. The landscape will be in ruins and we will be left to pick up the pieces.
they brought back the headphone jack, right? Because they were able to jam so much other new things why not also find the room for something that caused much consternation last time around? It's only right to confirm their commitment to the consumer and are willing to admit they made an error in removing it, right?
None of those are companies I've ever heard of. So maybe they're well known in certain, small circles but I wouldn't call them "household" names. Or brands. Or whatever they're doing since it seems their products are nothing more than sinkholes for good cash following bad.
Last I checked, it's still a Schedule-I narcotic which makes it unobtainable even with a prescription. What more does our anti-drug leaders need? It's a confession made free and clear in a news article. That should be more than sufficient grounds for a search warrant for house, car, and office.
Serious question. If what you're getting is their AdWords, why should they care what or how you're set up wrt landing pages, etc? It doesn't impact their ad business. Which is to serve up your advertisements to people they've identified as potential buyers and/or interested parties. Those extra requirements are well outside any immediate considerations when it comes to serving up advertisements to the correct audience. And while Google can have requirements they want to be part of their ad program, none of those seem either germane or necessary to the basics of advertisement. You know, the service they're supposedly offering with AdWords.
The only place I've found fifty and over IT workers are in family run companies or the like. Places that value consistency over being on the bleeding edge. I'm such a place now because I'm closer to my 50s than I am to my 20s and went looking for it on purpose. Long term planning, folks. Don't leave home without it.
In any case, places like/. have the problem of users enjoying the bleeding edge of tech and pie-in-the-sky thinking of how the world could be transformed with it. Rarely does the audience here give the time to think about how the tech will be supported or implemented in detail. Or even if that same tech is a good long term investment that'll remain usable a year from now, let alone 5 or 10 years down the road. Which is the backside edge of using the latest and greatest. Most companies don't have a need to change their overall tech packages more all that often. That it often costs more to keep up with it than it does pay back in benefits. Hell, in many cases it can take a good decade for the non-tech people to get up to speed and used to the tech the last time a new package/paradigm/whatever got deployed.
Which the third side of this particular issue. It's not us, the IT worker, that has to deal with the implications of what is put together. It's the rest of the company. And as much as we enjoy telling everyone "The world is all IT now" that doesn't make it easier for everyone else to live in it.
Which is what kik mostly delivers. Personal, one-on-one porn experiences. What the article seems to miss is that by creating their own coin platform, they now have a way for people to purchase and then pay others with that stays wholly inside their walled garden. No need for any pesky Apple or Google to process the payment. This is what their investors want as it gives them a nice rental situation which puts the onus on the user and not them to provide a method of cashing out.
Trailers already hinted that replicants were still around. This reveals nothing which enhances that understanding.
What it addes is another mystery box in the guise of what the short calls "The Blackout" which has been explained as being a world-wide EMP (can't wait to see how that one is explained) that wiped out all/nearly all electronic data and throwing the world into a temporary dark age. Seeing how books were still around and people reading signs and stuff I'm not sure the world supports that particular idea well. Hopefully what happens is that the audience is somewhere along the line clued in as to why this six minute short is useful for understanding the film. Otherwise this was just something that ended up on the cutting room floor that the director put out as a stunt to keep people interested.
That's a new one. Also, how does a dealership get involved with a third party deal like that? The article even said it was one of their techs who notified the new owner. Something ain't right here.
Advertisers want stats. They want to know every little thing they can about an audience even if it doesn't help them. They can sell the data on to someone else who thinks they can extract the value.
Why is this relevant to the article? Because videos help gather that info for them. You'll notice, that alongside this rise in video content, is a there's a rise in the amount of hosted content. It can get the demo info by being linked to a Facebook profile or to a YouTube profile or whatever platform is hosting the video. Few sites will self-host the content not because they can't afford it, but because it won't have the same demographic information. What FB has been able to do is to put together a standard format of data to be used by advertisers. That's hugely useful for their datamining efforts.
Just how useful all this demographic info is an entirely different discussion to have. I don't think it's very useful, at least not nearly as useful as the advertisers think or want it will be.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want there to be competition, the next question would be competition for who? Android & iOS are pretty competitive with one another in terms of features and support. The handset makers aren't going to be doing any more competing than they currently are. Samsung is half-heartedly working on their own mobile OS to make it look like they're not completely indebted to Google for their part of the market. Carriers in the US couldn't care less as long as they can continue to dictate bands & crapware services that the OS does for free.
Now if you want something else, like being free from advertisements or removal of tracking, then we have a different set of questions to address. First off, why are you getting a smartphone in the first place? Part of what makes one useful is the fact that it can get your current location and provide a map of the area around you. Or get you directions on where you're going. If you don't want third parties accessing that then we need to talk about how we secure the phone more than needing a new OS.
So there's a bit of background first.
Have you noticed that Apple has stopped trying to remove all of the Google related things from them? Apple made their version of a map app, started poorly but got better and ultimately didn't matter. Google was and remains so far ahead that catching up isn't feasible w/o expending a supreme amount of resources. It didn't matter what Apple tried. Unverifying the app only alienated their customer base. Dropping it from the store only saw articles on how to sideload it proliferate. And making it run poorly in the native web browser saw Chrome for iOS get downloaded more. Apple lost that battle.
This resulted in a shift of strategy for Android. No longer did Google need it to run everywhere in order for people to get a taste, it now needed to run well. At first, Google tried to get manufacturers on board with this plan. High-end, premium experience phones were pushed. However, Google ran face first into the carrier profit centers, something the handset makers were already well aligned with. Google could care less how often you switch and I would guess they'd rather you'd keep the same phone for several years since it makes it all the easier to track and data-mine you. But the carriers and handset makers are not Google. Not yet, anyways.
So instead of backing off, Google went whole hog. As a company they only want the best experience for much the same reason as Apple does. It makes them look good. It makes people want to stick around.
Having a mid-price phone is the choice of people without the same sort of brand loyalty they're looking to groom. Yes, groom is the correct term here. Right now, Google is all about creating a digital monopoly. To get there, they need people to stick with them and keep sticking with them well past the point it makes sense to.
If you're looking for options, look elsewhere. The smartphones are heading for stagnation.
Have you been to a casino recently? All the spinner games have updated to video interfaces and touch displays with frankly dizzying array of oversaturated color and graphics so busy it's hard to keep track of everything going on. But that's all on purpose. To part you from your money.
There's a reason why all the big game publishers have switched to crapifying their games with lootboxes and other gambling-lite features. They're all trying to get the same payday that casinos have had for years but are instead targeting the one group that casinos can't, legally, for now. Just wait a couple more months and that might change. Then everyone will be on equal footing.
It's sickening that nothing is being done about it.
Google, now Alphabet, is going for the digital monopoly. Complete and total vertical and horizontal integration.
That's it. That's the sum total of why Google is doing this. It has nothing to do with Samsung, Apple, or anyone else. It never did and never will. Google wants to run everything digital through itself. It could care less about the rest of the internet for so long as you start at their gate and they can record when you left and re-entered. It knows it can't stop you from going to Netflix, Slingbox, Hulu, or anywhere else but it can damn sure make it have a nice spot on any number of devices you own. A nice little gateway that can record what you do and when you do it.
It's not about "not being evil" or any such nonsense. It was always about being the first, last, and only place you go to get stuff done on the internet.
but I doubt it's going to happen for two reasons. First is that the FCC isn't one of those headlining institutions that the GOP cares about. In fact, they'd rather it all just go away right now because they can't be bothered to govern let alone care about governing. So as long as Pai isn't causing it to rain on their parade, they couldn't care less. And second, I'm pretty certain if it came down to a close vote there would be more than enough lobbying action on his behalf to see him through. There's a lot of moneyed interests that want to keep him that post.
Not to mention that if does deliver on this agenda there's probably a pretty cushy job waiting for him with whichever telecom or cable operator he chooses when it's all over.
and easily blinded by their greed.
What is happening in SV and elsewhere is the same thing that happened last decade on Wall Street and the other stock markets. Electronic & algorithmic trading showed that you could cheat your way to millions, if not billions, and little would be done to reign it in. Those who owned the markets (which why do we allow for stock markets to be privately owned? that makes no sense!) still got their slice and those you were doing the trading for got theirs. Regulators are still behind that curve. Even more complex computer controlled trading evolves as the profits for doing this have been cut down now that everyone is doing it.
The same thing happened when currency trading started. It's a constant cycle of finding a gap and exploiting it until everyone tries to exploit it. Tragedy of the commons writ with the sweat and dollars of the workforce.
So that's what startups do now. They try to find where the gaps exist and exploit them without thinking of what that does to everyone involved. This isn't about "disruption". It never was. It was always about idealistic computer people being exploited by the avarice of Vulture Capital into gains at the expense of the many. Google has ruined online advertising with its relentless march towards monopoly, taking many wonderful things down along the way. Amazon has done the same. Etsy, eBay, all of them strip mined a good thing and made it worse.
Not everything needs to be accessed through a web browser. Seriously. I have trouble imagining why that was the solution in the first place. Let them make their own apps and when they fail to move eyeballs away from the web, let them come back and play nicely with the rest of us.
And if these apps don't fail and provide unique, worthwhile experiences that people are willing to pay for DRM or whatever scheme included, then that's the way it will be. We computer people are the minority here. Just because it may ruffle a few ideological and dogmatic feathers doesn't make the situation any worse than it already is.
Because it's incredible how stupid this whole thing has been.
How can anyone be this bad at their core business?
You have to want to solve problems in order to innovate. You have to have competitive pressure in order to force innovation to happen. Right now, I don't see an environment in the US where the powers that be want problems to be resolved or are willing to break companies apart to force innovation to happen. Now, individuals feel otherwise. Income distribution seems to be a popular place to start. Or for there to be unlimited internet everywhere is another good one. Or better, cheaper healthcare.
But none of these are addressable through technology. Apple, Google, or Amazon aren't who we should be looking to for that. The problems those companies are good at solving have been solved by them.
The problem here is that this is a state actor being caught out. The effective kinds of penalties in this situation would be tantamount to self harm. That is, the only thing that would stop China from doing this would be to cut economic ties with them. Of any kind. And that is literally cutting our nose off to spite our face. We and by this I mean the global community are tied too deeply to one another economically to try and isolate a nation as large and as prosperous as China currently is. It's also of dubious use as a way to change regimes. Look at N. Korea or Iran for examples. While Iran has seen some positive democratic reforms in the past decade, it was only after a certain amount of trade was normalized that it happened.
The only level one has left then is an individual one. To make it too costly for an individual to be caught to make it worthwhile. In order to make this effective, one would have to up regulations so that your own country's infrastructure and business practices are able to catch them. Which isn't going to happen while the current political regime reigns in DC. If anything, President Stupid is going to make it easier for this to happen for his Russian buddies who are busy doing the same thing China is doing, just in different industries.
which state the obvious. 1) That HTC is a competitor in the same phone space and that 2) Google has money to burn.
There's a third reason.
Google doesn't know how to innovate anymore. They've gone as far as they can with computers as they are and don't want to sink time and money into finding the next new thing. Instead they're going through a retrenching so that profitability remains relatively high while seeking as many monopoly positions as they can. They already have search and internet advertisement sewn up. The US doesn't have the will to establish a new regulatory regime and the EU doesn't currently have the reach to force the US into following their course. That may change by the time President Stupid is done but that's for the future to decide.
In the meantime, the smart move is for Google to gobble up as much as it can under their Alphabet umbrella and see which keeps bringing in the money.
The article only spoke to how Google wanted to reserve the first two results for their own and when that was rightly criticized it wanted to set a floor price so it could be "outbid" by competitors. Which, once again, was right criticized for entirely missing the point.
This is really sad to see Google, which was a bastion of good search results come to this. The avarice which has infected the company is no longer overcome by the innovation of product and delivery it once had. I'd be fine with paying a couple bucks a month to have the calendar, email, and a few other things. I'm already paying for their steaming music. Maybe it's beyond time for YouTube to become 100% paid since advertisements are screwing over the reason it became popular in the first place.
Advertisement is distorting everything Google has done. I'm no longer comfortable with paying for use with my time and eyeballs. I want to pay with money.
Or at least headlines are trying to achieve it.
Maybe we need to come up with a new word to describe when computers are used to generate meaningless connections between events. Or maybe we can add to Pareidolia's definition the idea that it can also find meaning in random information as well as sights and sounds. Oooo! That's it. Meta-Pareidolia. Finding meaning in random stimuli or information.
It's not the cycle the manufacturers got addicted to. It was the first time in a while that the margins were sufficient. And margins were only sufficient because we're down to a few companies making them. The Chinese are going to be entering the market shortly so we'll see those margins dwindle. Which leaves them only one direction to go in if they want to keep making good money. Resolution.
Let them fight. The outcome is going to be the same for us no matter who wins. The landscape will be in ruins and we will be left to pick up the pieces.
they brought back the headphone jack, right? Because they were able to jam so much other new things why not also find the room for something that caused much consternation last time around? It's only right to confirm their commitment to the consumer and are willing to admit they made an error in removing it, right?
Right?
I don't think that means what you think it does.
None of those are companies I've ever heard of. So maybe they're well known in certain, small circles but I wouldn't call them "household" names. Or brands. Or whatever they're doing since it seems their products are nothing more than sinkholes for good cash following bad.
Last I checked, it's still a Schedule-I narcotic which makes it unobtainable even with a prescription. What more does our anti-drug leaders need? It's a confession made free and clear in a news article. That should be more than sufficient grounds for a search warrant for house, car, and office.
Serious question. If what you're getting is their AdWords, why should they care what or how you're set up wrt landing pages, etc? It doesn't impact their ad business. Which is to serve up your advertisements to people they've identified as potential buyers and/or interested parties. Those extra requirements are well outside any immediate considerations when it comes to serving up advertisements to the correct audience. And while Google can have requirements they want to be part of their ad program, none of those seem either germane or necessary to the basics of advertisement. You know, the service they're supposedly offering with AdWords.
those policies that are causing them to not hire people are largely based on federal and state regulations?
Things like non-discrimination or minimum wages?
The only place I've found fifty and over IT workers are in family run companies or the like. Places that value consistency over being on the bleeding edge. I'm such a place now because I'm closer to my 50s than I am to my 20s and went looking for it on purpose. Long term planning, folks. Don't leave home without it.
In any case, places like /. have the problem of users enjoying the bleeding edge of tech and pie-in-the-sky thinking of how the world could be transformed with it. Rarely does the audience here give the time to think about how the tech will be supported or implemented in detail. Or even if that same tech is a good long term investment that'll remain usable a year from now, let alone 5 or 10 years down the road. Which is the backside edge of using the latest and greatest. Most companies don't have a need to change their overall tech packages more all that often. That it often costs more to keep up with it than it does pay back in benefits. Hell, in many cases it can take a good decade for the non-tech people to get up to speed and used to the tech the last time a new package/paradigm/whatever got deployed.
Which the third side of this particular issue. It's not us, the IT worker, that has to deal with the implications of what is put together. It's the rest of the company. And as much as we enjoy telling everyone "The world is all IT now" that doesn't make it easier for everyone else to live in it.
Which is what kik mostly delivers. Personal, one-on-one porn experiences. What the article seems to miss is that by creating their own coin platform, they now have a way for people to purchase and then pay others with that stays wholly inside their walled garden. No need for any pesky Apple or Google to process the payment. This is what their investors want as it gives them a nice rental situation which puts the onus on the user and not them to provide a method of cashing out.
So far as I can tell, it's not about anything.
Trailers already hinted that replicants were still around. This reveals nothing which enhances that understanding.
What it addes is another mystery box in the guise of what the short calls "The Blackout" which has been explained as being a world-wide EMP (can't wait to see how that one is explained) that wiped out all/nearly all electronic data and throwing the world into a temporary dark age. Seeing how books were still around and people reading signs and stuff I'm not sure the world supports that particular idea well. Hopefully what happens is that the audience is somewhere along the line clued in as to why this six minute short is useful for understanding the film. Otherwise this was just something that ended up on the cutting room floor that the director put out as a stunt to keep people interested.
We share the address but it's not our fault.
That's a new one. Also, how does a dealership get involved with a third party deal like that? The article even said it was one of their techs who notified the new owner. Something ain't right here.
But many publishers have little choice.
Advertisers want stats. They want to know every little thing they can about an audience even if it doesn't help them. They can sell the data on to someone else who thinks they can extract the value.
Why is this relevant to the article? Because videos help gather that info for them. You'll notice, that alongside this rise in video content, is a there's a rise in the amount of hosted content. It can get the demo info by being linked to a Facebook profile or to a YouTube profile or whatever platform is hosting the video. Few sites will self-host the content not because they can't afford it, but because it won't have the same demographic information. What FB has been able to do is to put together a standard format of data to be used by advertisers. That's hugely useful for their datamining efforts.
Just how useful all this demographic info is an entirely different discussion to have. I don't think it's very useful, at least not nearly as useful as the advertisers think or want it will be.