HomeTech.fm - Episode 231 - Bye Bye Buzzer

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

On this week’s episode of HomeTech: We say goodbye to the Alexa buzzer. Streaming TV services on pace to grab 25% of the market by 2022. Google Play lowers the price of 4K content and offers free upgrades. Amazon participates in a $50 million funding round for German smart thermostat maker Tado. Netflix to raise a staggering $2 in debt to fund original content and more. Apple’s long-awaited streaming TV subscription service rumored to be launching soon in more than 100 countries. And much more…

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by listeners like you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm slash support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, October 26th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth? Good, man. Good. I'm going to start the show off a little bit different this week. Oh, yeah? As I was editing last week, Jason, I came across something. There's a lot of crosstalk that happens. People don't know how these podcasts work. But if you listen to some podcast, you'll hear people talking over each other.

And we try not to do that. We try and talk like civilized human beings. We certainly try. We give it a go. And last week, there was a little over-talk that happened. Yeah, I've got to edit that out. And that's what I do. But what shocked me was what you said.

And it was kind of under your breath. And it got dropped and didn't make it into the show. But I've got to bring it up now. You haven't cut the cord yet, Jason. You made a joke. You're like, oh, I haven't cut the cord yet, Jason. Like, you made a joke. You're like, oh, I haven't cut the cord yet. I'm like, what? You're not cutting the cord.

That ended up on the cutting room floor? Yeah, you haven't cut the cord. I missed that. I missed that. You haven't. You're just, like, gumming the cord. Well, you know, as fate would have it, as fate would have it, it's done. It's done, Seth. So cue up the round of applause in post-production. And yeah, I'm happy to say that feel a little bit foolish for waiting so long. We were sitting at the kitchen table Saturday morning. I'm doing the house finances, which is something I do every weekend. And my wife is sitting there and I made a comment about the DirecTV bill was due. And I

was just like, ugh, tired of paying this bill. And she looks at me and she's like, well, just cancel it. What, what are you waiting for? You've been talking about it forever. And I'm like, yeah, I was kind of nervous about anyways. So, you know, we did, we did. I, I, um, I called DirecTV to cancel. Um, I'm sure that was fun, huh? Yeah. You know, it was, uh, I was bracing myself going into it for sure. Like I thought it was going to be a really, really painful experience. And, you know, long story short, I go through the process. I talked to the, there was a woman I spoke with first.

And, you know, you do the thing that you always do, like provide your phone number like five times and tell them your name six times. And finally speak to a human and let her know why she transferred me over to the cancellation department i'm using air quotes right now and i spoke with a guy i want to say his name was joe and joe didn't sound like he really enjoyed his job very much joe is in in retention is is what, is what the official name of that department is. I did my best to set my tone in such a way that Joe knew that it wasn't worth wasting his time or mine. Brilliant. Trying to talk me off the ledge, right?

Exactly. I was like, not worth the money, Joe. We're done. But I did think it was interesting because, you know, he asked a few questions like, what other, can I ask what other services you're using and reading between the lines, I 100% speculation here, but you have to wonder if they're sort of having systems to gather information about, okay, we're hemorrhaging customers. Where are they going? What apps are they using? And, um, so I thought that was kind of interesting, but yeah, not, you know, long story short, I'm, I'm, I'm cable free and it feels,

it feels good. It feels good. We'll, we'll see how it goes. I've had a couple incidentally, internet hiccups this week. And so, you know, once you cut the cord and you're reliant on streaming for everything that becomes a let's let's how do i say this nicely a much bigger deal with the household committee yeah i mean you have nothing right there's nothing on there's nothing you can do you can't go uh you can't do anything yeah your your phones are useless your your well your phones aren't useless you could waste your data to get away i guess but um your your your tvs are absolutely useless and yeah it's it's right it's tough right yeah so i think the next step for me we as we talked about a while back is building in a little bit of

redundancy with like a plex server okay have some kids shows on on a server at the very least so you know worst case scenario we can we can still i was about to say bubble guppies but i gotta tell you seth we've kind of moved on from that one. Yeah, I don't know. With her, I can put it on and she'll watch it. But yeah, she's definitely moved to the Puffin Rock stuff. And yeah, Bubble Guppies, it's still a favorite. It's still there. It's a staple. Yeah, yeah, it is.

She's big into the red one, the Dear Leader red one there. Elmo is what she says. Oh. Do you want to watch elmo so oh i know that well yeah lots of that lots of that going around these days but yeah i but again streaming you get that right on hbo so not not a not a big deal but yeah the having the plex server for backup if we ever need to put bubble guppies on or any other cartoon for that matter i think she'll watch anything we put in front of her because we don't we don't like sit her in front of the tv too often

uh so it's kind of like a treat and she'll just absorb every second of it uh yeah you can get it so yeah i think when they get a little older they they start to get a little bit pickier but yeah yep i know what you mean uh what do you say we uh this week we switch things up and jump right into the mailbag yeah i i think that is a good a good idea uh in in sight of what went on in the mailbag this week and seth the results are in the people have spoken they do not like shock therapy as much as you, evidently. It's definitive. We are doing away with the Alexa buzzer.

We had some fun with it, but it's got to go. It's got to go. We had feedback from Chip. Thank you for getting rid of the buzzer. Four exclamation marks. As exclamation marks goes, that's more that were on the Bose trash can on last week's Picture of the Weeker for exclamation marks as, uh, as, uh, exclamation marks goes, that's more that we're on the, uh, the Bose trash can on,

on last week's picture of the week. That's right. Uh, Richard, it's really obnoxious. Mike in, please stop. So those are just some select quotes as,

uh, from people that, that, uh, and listeners of the show that really don't want to listen to the buzzer anymore. Um, so, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll leave it off and we're just going to say Alexa from now on. And if you don't want to listen to the buzzer anymore. Um, so, you know, we'll,

we'll, we'll leave it off and we're just going to say Alexa from now on. And if you don't like it, get a Google home. That's right. Yep. The, uh, the people have spoken there. Um, I thought it was fun. You know, it, it taught me a little bit, Seth. That lesson of shock therapy will be with me forever. But Mike, Richard, Chip, the few others who have commented, rest assured, no more buzzer. Excellent. Well, we're done with that. It's over. It's over. Since we're on the mailbag, I did have one other note that I wanted to touch on. And this was a bit of a typo in my email blast. And Michael responded to the email and called me out and he said, did a bot write this email?

Mark Gurman is the author of the article, not the founder of Essential Products. And so for any of you who read the email i wanted to let you know no a bot does not write those i do and uh andy rubin is the founder of essential products not mark german yeah yeah so thank you michael for pointing that out i do appreciate it well uh that wraps and i'm not a bot yeah all right uh that wraps up the mailbag let's uh jump into some home tech headlines let's do it amazon is rolling out a new alexa feature for echo speakers that intelligently reduces the voice assistance volume when you whisper a command alexa the new whisper mode feature should prevent unexpectedly loud responses in quiet situations and instead use a gentler voice alexa order oreos i really like this one personally this is smart i i i don't know i i've been i've been saying

mine is hard of hearing and i i don't think uh i don't think that it's uh it's hearing us when we scream at it anymore so uh i don't think whispering is going to make it any better. I think I need a new one. We have like the first gen, like the very first one that rolled off the line. Like we were, it's not a beta test, but my wife ordered the thing like within 10 minutes of them announcing it. So it was really early on. I want to say we had ours during the summer and then everybody else got theirs towards the holiday so yeah i remember that yeah it was it

was really early and i think like first i'm always like you won't see me run out and buy a first gen product very often because i know that the boards just aren't like made very well and they figure out like all the stuff that's wrong on those and from qa and say okay fix them in the second rev board and the third red board and just wait like wait a couple months and buy it and it'll be a lot better you got to start moving slower like me yeah exactly well that's just molasses i i don't know what to say about that six months later cut the cord hey man are we watching this anymore pros and and cons. Right, right. Speaking of Amazon, Amazon's made another smart home investment, this time backing a German smart thermostat company called Tado.

In a $50 million round, which also included several other investment companies. This is not Amazon's first smart thermostat investment back in 2016. Amazon Alexa Fund definitely got their site set on the smart home. And like the story says, this is not the first smart thermostat they're contributing to in terms of funding. And so they clearly want to see broad success in the smart home. I don't know too much about Tado, but for Ecobee, after that,

they had the Ecobee, what is it, the 4 or something that has the Alexa built into it where you can yell at your thermostat on the wall. And they also came out with a light switch that has a little microphone and kind of like an Echo Dot built into it that you can yell at your wall light switch for Alexa to do things. So, yeah. So now you can order Oreos and diapers from your thermostat. Right. Exactly. Just yell. Yell your thermostat. Right, exactly. Just yell.

Yell into the air. It's amazing. It's a great time to be alive. CNET reports that Sonos and Roku are in discussions to integrate Roku's new entertainment software with Sonos speakers. It is just a rumor, but it would make a lot of sense. Roku introduced its voice controlled home theater software roku entertainment system earlier this year along with roku connect it's a way for users to operate their home theater systems wirelessly through a voice control i feel like we we hear

one of these roku stories almost every week um and i i don't know there's so much or roku and sonos like they're all trying to like integrate with everybody right now which is which is kind of cool so they're everywhere yeah they're everywhere i i'm planning to pick up one of the premiere plus uh streaming boxes probably for my now that we've cut the cord i've got one more tv we've got to cover yeah so that's what 30 40 dollars for a decent roku player yeah it's amazing. It's a 4K unit. I think it's $49. Yeah.

And Roku, like in all my experience with it, it's a great interface. It tends to get a lot of really good reviews. People seem to love it. I've never owned one personally, but for $49, it's hard to go wrong. Nice. Well, starting today,

Spotify premium subscribers can access a new feature called Endless Artist Radio Exploration, which is similar to the feature that originally made Pandora so popular. Choose a favorite band or song, select the Artist Radio playlist, and you'll get endless stream of music based on what you've chosen. This is pretty much, you may as well just named it Pandora. The playlists are updated regularly and also downloadable to play while you're offline. Isn't that pretty cool? Yeah. I read this one, and I think it sounds great.

I was a little bit confused because I've been using Spotify for a while. And for a long time, they've had the ability. I can right-click in the app on the computer, at least, which is mainly where I use it. And it says, says like launch radio. And so I'm not sure how this is exactly different from what they've been doing before. But either way, I know that Pandora's feature in terms of that music discovery was really popular and I enjoyed it. So I'll certainly be checking that out. Yeah. Google announced in a blog post that Google Play customers in the US and Canada will see

several upgrades to their movie watching experience. First of all, any movies you've previously purchased in standard def or high def that are available in 4k will now be automatically upgraded to stream in 4k, which is great. Additionally, Google Play has lowered the cost of most 4K titles. They used to sit around $30 per title, and now most will sit below the $20 mark. So that's great. Yeah, that is great. I think we saw Apple do that first with their 4K player, but that's awesome. If you automatically get upgraded to stream in 4K, that's going to use a lot of data. I don't know if that's a great thing, but I tried this the other night.

I hooked up my Apple 4K TV to my 4K TV and tried to watch something on it, and I didn't really notice a difference because I have a crappy 4K TV. So, well, what are you going to do? Imagine harder. Right? But it's 4K. It looks so good. Look at all those pixels.

Yeah. All right. Speaking of Google, October 16th will be known as the day YouTube went dark. Google is now apologizing for the outage and offering YouTube TV subscribers a free week of credit. This is the third such outage this year, the most recent occurring back in July. Do you remember where you were? I was watching. I was watching something.

I was watching Add It On, and it just went to fuzzy, staticky YouTube screen. I was like, what the heck is this? So traumatic. Yeah. According to a UBS analyst, John Hodulik. I had to save this for you. Thank you for that. Virtual MVPDs such as Sling TV, Direct TV Now, or AT&T Watch TV.

Creative. That's a terrible name. Will account for about 25% of the video market by the year 2022 ubs is also forecasting 9.2 million streaming tv subscribers by the end of 2018 as a full and a full 24 million by the end of 2022 a lot of people and i i can't remember what this mvpd's things is uh virtual this is basically a fake cable company a virtual cable company right like this is something that you pay for you treat it like a cable company but it comes instead of coming in over the cable or over traditional means like satellite or anything it comes in over your internet right yeah yeah i had to i had to google it to remind myself mvpd is multi-channel video programming distributor so traditionally

used to describe cable companies comcast rec tv etc yeah but yeah then you sometimes you see the vmpvd which isn't a mouthful at all uh to describe the streaming ones anyways just more letters that's what that's what the entire industry tech industry needs more letters the more letters more acronyms yeah just put them all together all right speaking of uh vmvds playstation view has now integrated with apple's tv app allowing users to view on-demand content, live sports right in the TV app on iOS and tvOS. View is the first pay TV provider to be featured in the TV app, which already features content from nearly every major streaming service, except notably Netflix. Yep. Come on, Netflix. Yeah, yeah, we're going to talk about Apple and Netflix here in just a couple of minutes.

And that'll be interesting to see how that plays out between those two. I've said it many times on the show. I think Apple's TV app is a great concept. I've used it a number of times on ours. And, you know, I think it's good. For some reason, I still find myself gravitating occasionally towards the native apps where I know the content lives. But over time, I suspect I'll be using that more. And as more and more providers integrate with it, it'll become more and more useful. So we'll keep an eye out for that. Continuing on the streaming video theme which is a big one last couple of

weeks and really all of this year uh sling tv the the uh vice president of product marketing and management i get another fun one here jim shade jim shot a we'll just put his name in the show yeah jim shot a shot well i'm just gonna go with it because everyone knows i suck at name pronunciation anyways so jim shade shadari shadari yeah all right i'll go with it um he was speaking at the streaming summit at nab new york and accused uh said larger channel bundles available from competitors like DirecTV Now, Hulu Live, YouTube TV are, quote, repeating the sins of pay TV past by packaging up a lot of channels, not all of which consumers want. I think he makes a good point. You see a lot of these

providers sort of trending in that direction. And when you look at Sling TV's offerings, which I haven't examined for a while, they've been around. They're really one of the more original ones. And they've got, I guess, orange and blue, both priced at $25, significantly less, the story says, than the standard $40 to $45 by many other VM-fupadids. Yeah. There you go. The the point being they allow subscribers then to build on with five dollar add-on packages focused on things like sports news kids programming etc so they they definitely do have a little bit of a different pricing model and uh i think it's interesting to consider you you do see a lot of these providers now coming out with $40, $45, $50 bundles.

And I think really where this all needs to go eventually is, if anything, it's more skinny bundles, right? Give consumers more choice. I'm curious, what are you using now for your skinny bundles in your VM? Are you using a VM? Are you just a VM? Are you just strictly OTA? We're not. So we're using OTA with the Tableau for anything broadcast.

And then we've got Amazon Prime and we've got Hulu. And we deactivated Netflix a while back, but now that we've cut the cord, we'll probably activate Netflix again. Yeah, they want you to get back because they need some money. Netflix is needing some money. That's right. We're going to talk about that in a second. All right.

Let's talk about Apple. This is a little bit of a follow-up from last week's show when I was ranting about our dumb Congress for years has not done anything about privacy uh apple's ceo tim cook has joined the chorus of voices warning that the data itself is being weaponized against people and societies arguing that the trade in digital data has exploded into a quote digital or data industrial complex cook said our own information from every day to the deeply personal is being weaponized against us in military efficiency. These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded, and sold. And yeah, that's what I was trying to get across. And he said it so much better because he's probably got really amazing speech writers on staff. But yeah, it's not about like the little small points in data and what you click like on on Facebook.

It's like all that data is saved forever. Yeah. And then put together and then you get this amazing picture about your psyche and things that you do. And like that, we need some kind of privacy laws. Cook went on to like ask for privacy laws to be made here in the States. And I think with companies like Apple and getting on board and Google, I think Google, I saw Google and Microsoft said they would join on board and start putting pressure on lawmakers to actually do something about it. Because we don't have anything here and we certainly need something. Yeah, I agree. And I know I've been guilty probably of sounding a little bit dismissive about this sort of thing in the past,

but I certainly understand that it's an important topic. And with all of the data that's floating around there about each and every one of us nowadays, it is a little bit, not a little bit, it's very frightening and disconcerting to think about the picture that people can paint of you and the accuracy. And, you know, I think that ultimately having common sense laws and regulations surrounding that makes a ton of sense and yeah to see companies like obviously apple you know for them it's a very it's um how should i say this it didn't surprise me to see tim cook out making a statement like this because right they're not always been yeah they they've they've always been able to come at it from a different tack because they don't rely like Google and Facebook. Those two companies are data is their business. That's literally how if you boil everything down and you strip off everything else and look at, you know, the business that they're in and how they make money, it's data and it's information.

And Apple gets to, I shouldn't say get to, but Apple makes money off of hardware. That's their core business. So hats off to them, by the way, for their stance on it. I think Tim Cook is right on the money on this one. And I think that, like I said, common sense laws and regulations make sense here. But I also think we should all be eyes wide open about the fact that like Google and Facebook and all of these great things that many of us love to use, they're free for a reason. Right? Yeah. Yeah. If it's, what is that saying?

If it's free, then it's not the product. You're the product. Yeah. I will ding Apple for one thing. I mean, they're kind of saying this and saying that they're a privacy company in one respect. But then they also do things like sell the default search to Google for like some ungodly amount of money each year. It's like a contract that comes up and you see how much that Google pays Apple. It's crazy. Yeah.

It's like billions of dollars, like $9 billion or something like that, each year to be the default search on iOS. And it's like, well, cake and eat it too there, guy. Which tells you how much that is worth, right? Right, right. The fact that Google is willing to pay all of that money to be the default search. Yep. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah.

They should make their own phone or something. Oh, you should write them a letter you put in the mail yeah the mailbox all right well moving on we've been touching a lot on streaming the last couple of weeks there's been a number of headlines and we wanted to touch on a couple more here that um that came across this week net, we alluded to this here a couple of minutes ago, will raise, story came out this week, $2 billion with a B to fund more original content. It's amazing.

We talked about this last week. Reports were out. I think $13 billion was the number that we talked about that Netflix was planning to spend on original content. Am I recalling that correctly? I want to say that they said they were going to spend like eight, but analysts were like, no, they're going to spend 13. Okay. Got it. It's between eight and 13. And

now we know that there's another 2 billion somewhere being tacked on. Yeah. I mean, what's a billion between friends? That's right. Once you start talking, you know, billions with a B it's, it's crazy to try to wrap your head around that, uh, that amount of money. It says Netflix announced today that it plans to raise $2 billion in debt to fund quote, general corporate purchases, which may include content acquisitions, production and development, capital expenditures, investments, working capital, and potential acquisitions and strategic transactions, blah, according to a release. So it could be spent in short for a whole bunch of different things, but probably a lot of it's going to be spent on original content. We did talk about their Q3 earnings report, which is what we,

I think we were talking about last week and how important it's going to be for Netflix to continue to step up their game in terms of quality original programming as companies like Amazon and Apple and others continue to make moves into the space. Right. And you just kind of said Apple. Apple, the information has a quote from three people familiar with the matter that Apple is planning to launch its upcoming TV subscription service in more than 100 countries. Q1 of next year or they're going to start in the States at the beginning of the year and then roll it out to 100 plus countries. So that's that's the directly competing competing withflix and amazon uh who are both out there uh in the rest of the world i just saw in the chat that greg said greg is in our chat hi greg he said amazon prime is now available on roku in canada so uh yay yay for canada

all right go canada glad to have you on board the roku amazon Amazon Prime train. But yeah, this is a lot of money. And I can't imagine. I'm just like, how much can a production rather than original show be? Like they've got to be going after like major talent, major production expenses, like four sets and that kind of thing to even come in close.

I mean, movies, movies don't cost two billion dollars. They cost a few hundred million and that's it. Like this is this is crazy. Isn't that crazy to say only a few hundred million? Yeah. Yeah. That that puts right there, puts things in perspective. Right. I think i think blockbuster movies are only a few million and we're talking about a million of those right like i forget how to

it's it's these billions it's just incomprehensible yeah a thousand million right a thousand yeah and there's there's zeros that gets attached to it and it's just three zeros zeros yeah it just it doesn't it doesn't matter like yeah that's that's a lot of zeros it our feeble human minds cannot come that's right grasp that so yeah yeah i you know i i think stepping back from the sheer scale of those numbers i i think this really it speaks speaks to, I think it, I really do think it has emerged to me as probably the biggest trend of the year in 2018, which is not surprising. I think it's probably one that I, if we went back and listened to our fireside chat in 2017, which by the way, coming right up again here for 2018, which will be a lot of fun. I'm sure we'll get

together with Richard and Mike and do that again. But I mean, this is not new in 2018 is what I'm saying. This trend goes back to 2017. It goes back before that. We've seen so much movement in terms of streaming content and the way that people consume content and cutting the cord. I'm another one of the statistics, another one of the armies of people who are fleeing from traditional pay TV services. And I think it just, it speaks to a completely different mindset and way of thinking about content than we've ever really seen before, right? This was always the, these sort of budgets were always the domain of either like you said blockbuster movies right or big traditional companies like i guess comcast and i don't even know how all of those ecosystems work but you certainly didn't have hbo may spend

a few hundred million on right new series or something like that. But Netflix is obviously going after a number of new series to cover different types of genres and that kind of thing. Right. I don't know. This is incredible. Just to see this much money going into this space, I'm sure some of that could probably go to upgrading a server or two, right? Oh, sure.

Yeah. You would hope. At $2 billion, you mean, you would hope. Not that much money. Right. Give a couple bucks to the IT guy. That's right. I think the other part

that we don't want to gloss over here is Apple finally coming out with something. So I'll be really curious to see the information. I know it's certainly not known to be an outlet that reports junk, right? So this seems to be a significant story.

And if we're hearing this sort of thing from the information, then I think it's safe to assume that Apple's getting close. And I'm really anxious to see what they come out with. If not from a personal perspective, then at least from an industry perspective of watching this market and seeing how it evolves, I think it'll be fascinating to see what Apple comes to the table with. Yeah, because then you have three or four major players, right? So you have Amazon Prime, you have Netflix Originals, and you'll have Apple doing their own studio stuff. I'm sure there's one more I'm not thinking of. Oh, I know Disney. Hulu. Hulu. And Hulu. Yeah, that's going to be one of I'm not thinking of. Oh, I know Disney. Hulu.

Hulu. And Hulu. Yeah, that's going to be one of my picks of the week. Yeah, so Hulu's doing original stuff too, which is slash Disney right now because I think when all the chips are settled, what is the, I don't know. When everything's said and done,

I think Hulu is going to be like a Disney property at that point. It's super confusing because I know that Disney is somehow associated think Hulu is going to be like a Disney property at that point. It's super confusing because I know that Disney is somehow associated with Hulu. And I'm terrible with. It's Comcast and Disney right now. And I think Comcast is kind of going to hand it off to Disney. It's very confusing. I just kind of want to wait till it's all over. So we just know who

owns what but yeah um but anyway i do know that like disney and i think we talked about the story i just quickly google that while you were talking and this is a story from back in august of this year from variety disney outlines a streaming service that will launch in late 2019. So Disney does have its own service that Variety here is calling, quote, a Netflix challenger. So Disney's certainly going to be a serious contender there. So between Disney, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix, and Hulu, whether Hulu ends up being, I don't know, who knows, somehow folded intoney i i doubt i i'm not sure again but man four or five either way four or five very very big players in this in this market right and then you know don't forget about youtube and google and what they might end up doing with youtube tv

and original content like i don't know it's crazy to think about i don't see disney ever competing with netflix on the sheer fact that i mean the disney brand if you think disney you think of little cartoons with princesses and that kind of thing and i'm sure there's there's more that disney has done but like when i think of disney i think of that particular brand disney world mickey mouse all that good stuff um and when i think of netflix i think of that particular brand, Disney World, Mickey Mouse, all that good stuff. And when I think of Netflix, I think of shows that I just watched called Big Mouth, which is an insane show. If you have kids, don't watch this when they're in the neighborhood.

It's a crazy show about the coming of age of children who are, holy cow. Like I can't imagine writing one. I can't imagine writing the script and then handing it off to like Korean animators with a straight face and saying, draw this for me. Last season was kind of wild and this season was just even crazier. So yes, this it's, and, and what's, what's funny is there's definitely some fans.

Cody is in the chat room tonight talking about the shame lizard, which is a call-out to season three, season two. And then, yeah, Greg is saying it's all true. It definitely is all true. Like, if you watch that, there are definitely things that uh may have gone through uh a pubescent mind uh of mine uh once or twice when i was you know growing up so but it's like that should have stayed in your imagination and not be drawn out on a tv screen in 4k but alas it's 2018 and here we are you don't think

that's going to make it onto uh's service is what you're saying? And that's why I think Hulu is staying around. If Disney owns Hulu, then it can be like Hulu has all those dirty shows and then Disney can be Disney and have Mickey Mouse is kind of what I'm saying. Yeah, I did see while you were talking there, I was scrolling through the variety store and it looks like Disney owns, according to what I'm seeing here, 60% stake in Hulu. And who's the other 40? Is it Comcast? I didn't say specifically in that story, but I know Comcast is a stakeholder. So I would assume if they don't have the rest of that 40, they've got a significant portion of it. I think with all these crazy deals, remember a couple of weeks back or a couple of months back, like Comcast was making a bid for Sky TV.

I think after all that settles out, you'll see that Comcast is selling off their stake to Disney and Disney will own everything. At least that's what I read or saw or heard somewhere. And in my mind, Hulu is going to go exclusively over to Disney. Disney will have Hulu. It'll have the Disney streaming app and they can do two different things with both of those.

Yep. Kind of like, remember they had Miramax Studios which had all like the dirty movies but it was really a Disney studio. Like that's kind of what they'll do again. That's right. No, that's a good point. Big Mouth Season 2.

Go check it. Well, watch Season 1 if you haven't seen it. I have not. I have not. I'll have to check it out. It's pretty good. Anyways, all of the links and topics we've discussed tonight can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter where we will send you weekly show reminders and occasional updates about all of the great things going on here

in the world of home tech. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 231. Yep. And real-time follow-up, it was not Miramax. I guess it was Touchstone. My bad. I knew that Disney had a dirty studio that they had out there floating around, but whatever. Thank you, Greg. Yeah. Thanks, Greg. So don't forget, you can join us in the chat room and let us know when we get things wrong. Every Wednesday or Thursday, 7 to 7.30 p.m. Eastern, the one true time zone. You can find out more at hometech.fm slash live

or on Twitter at hometechpodcast and look for that hashtag, hometechlive, thing that I tweet out. Usually 20 or 30 minutes before the show starts, I'll tweet something out. A couple of pics of the week this week, Seth. One of them was sent to me by a coworker. Not technically a picture.

This one's a video, but it's a gem. I don't know if you've had it. Have you had a chance to look at this one? I did. I did. So this is one of those devices that just was waiting to be. Didn't age well. Didn't age well, yeah. But I remember I could have probably used this.

There was a time when I was always on the phone, either on the phone or on the modem, either way. There was one point in time we had two phone lines, one for the modem and one for uh oh yeah voice and i was on both of them so it didn't matter so this is a little hands-free ad uh hands-free telephone ad for uh from back in 1993 and uh i i guess the idea was you'd stick this thing on your phone and then just it's like a head headband and you can like stick it on your head and it just straps one of these corded phones to your head. It's amazing. It's great. I love the way it opens with the lady.

She's got the phone. She's got her head tilted to the side, kind of trying to hold it, and she's mixing up like, I don't know, some cake batter or something, and the phone falls into the bowl, and it's just classic cheesy infomercial look on her face and then it's like this brilliant hands-free telephone and it's literally like a velcro thing that sticks onto the phone i thought this was great

so i like at the end you can buy uh two there's savings on if you want to buy more than one that's right but wait there But wait, there's more. Yeah, there's more. That's great. I've got a pick of the week this week. It's actually a Hulu pick of the week. I've been kind of watching this show for a while. It's called The First.

I need to go tell you who's in it. There's famous people in it. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, it has Sean Penn in it. There's famous people in it. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, it has Sean Penn in it. So he's famous, right? A little bit. Yeah, yeah. And it's a television series about the first astronauts chosen to visit Mars

and how they get there. It's not so much, it's a straight up drama. So it's not, where I would say, like if you were watching Mad Men to learn about the things that advertisement agencies did, you're probably watching the wrong show. Like it was more of a drama about the people that were working in advertising. And this is kind of the same, that's not how it really worked. Well, actually

it did. Um, but the, uh, the first is kind of like that. Like it's basically, it's about the people and about the families and about, you know, people who are chosen to go on to a long mission to Mars and what that would be like, um, with, with taking all the steps that it takes to get from Earth to Mars. Because this is going to happen. It's going to happen sometime in the future. And this is kind of like in the distant future. And the reason I'm picking it is not because it's a halfway decent show, if you like dramas. If you're expecting technology, don't watch it for the technology. It's actually got some decent rocket technology if you're into space stuff. But it's not like out in front incinerating. That's why I'm picking

this because the home technology in this, in this series is rather quite amazing. They, they have kind of handed that off. Whoever, whoever's doing this, whoever's thinking this through has kind of like said, okay, in the future we'll have voice controlled lamps. Okay. In the future we'll have lights that come on when you come in the room. But the technology that exists in, in, in, in these homes is very built in and, and,

and, and extremely low key. Like you, you don't notice that they walked into a room and the lights came on until like already after it's happened. Like they don't make a big deal about it because these people are doing things and interacting with an environment where this is like everyday life. And I think that's kind of cool to watch that. There's a, there's a, there's a couple of different scenes where you see like light switches on the wall

and they have like little maybe motion sensors in them. Whoever's doing the set design is doing a really good job putting this together. So, um, check that out. I out i i the story's good if you like space stuff and if you like dramas the story's really good uh but also while you're watching it make note of the home technology that they have in in uh one sean penn lives in like this uh uh it's based in new orleans i assume for the tax credits uh not for the launch facilities they have in New Orleans. Okay. But it's based there. And he lives in like a house downtown by the levee. And one of the other actresses, actors?

Yeah, Natasha Taylor. She lives in like a fancy rich person's house because she's a billionaire. She's like the Elon Musk musk of the show right and um she has like a super fancy house with all the whiz bang technology and uh tvs as big as the wall and that kind of thing uh but it's interesting that the technology is in is actually built in and physically built into like the older house as well as the newer house so cool pretty cool to check out. It's only like eight episodes or something like that. Uh, it's, it's kind of a long watch if you're not into dramas, but if you are into dramas, uh, it's, it's good acting stuff. So yeah, no, it's a great, great recommendation. I think this is actually,

by the way, our first pick of the week where we're talking about a motion picture. So there you go. It's a home tech first, but I appreciate the tip. I'm going to go check it out. I think I had seen a passing trailer for this at one time or another and sort of fallen off my radar, but my wife and I are always looking for a good show to watch, the rare free time where we do have a chance to sit down and watch a show together. So we'll check this one out. Yep, it's decent. So if you like dramas,

if you don't like dramas, it's not something you'd be interested in. Yeah, but like Cody's saying, you also watch Patriot. Yeah, please watch Patriot. I haven't seen that one. I need to go check that out. It's so good.

Amazon Prime, it's like the best dark comedy written on tv these days and uh yes it's a that would be my pick every week if i was allowed to do it i i will go i will go check that out great uh great feedback from the chat room as well thanks for that cody we appreciate it if you have any feedback questions comments picks of the week or ideas for show topics, give us a shout. We'd love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Well, let me try that again. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or if you prefer,

visit the website at hometech.fm slash feedback. Once again, that's hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the form. We would love to hear from you. And we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page.

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where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and talk about the inside baseball conversations about home technology. That's right. And if you cannot support our show financially, we totally get that. We would absolutely appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating

in your podcast app of choice five stars that's what we're shooting for here seth there's no more buzzer there's no more excuse yeah we're a show we're show for the people right we take your feedback seriously that's right yeah the buzzer's gone so we need those five stars guys that's right all right seth well thank you i know that next wednesday is halloween so for those of you who enjoy tuning in live i think we're planning to reschedule i don't know if we have it pinned down yet we'll probably either be recording tuesday or thursday and we will try to send a note out in the hub as well as on Twitter. And happy Halloween. We won't talk to each other before then.

Halloween's always a fun holiday. I know my kids really enjoy it. And we always have a good time heading out with them and catching up with some old friends as well. Yeah. Yep. We went to a trunk or treat. I guess this is a new thing. Have you done one of these? Trunk or treats?

Never heard of it. Where people back their trunks up and they decorate their trunks and you basically walk through a parking lot? No. That's the first I've ever heard of that. That's funny. It's efficient. I mean, you're right there.

Bam, bam, bam, bam. There's no streets, no houses, no creepy people. But yeah, she didn't like any of the candy. So I guess I'm getting candy this year. There you go. The struggle is real, right? We always have so much candy in the house after Halloween, and it is difficult not to eat at all, which I typically do. Yeah, exactly.

Not going to lie. No shame, no shame. Yeah. All right, Seth. Well, yeah, have a happy halloween like i said and look forward to reconnecting with you next week all right have a happy halloween and thanks everybody for joining us over there in the chat and uh listening to the show all right we'll talk to you next week take care