Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - A Sports Super Bundle, The Next Challenge for Digital Advertising, Zuckerberg Reviews the Apple Vision Pro

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

A look at the questions surrounding the sports streaming bundle that’s coming from Fox, Disney, and Warner Brothers Discovery, including the challenge of targeting video ads on the internet, why Disney’s bet on sports is a bet on ads, and why Andrew is bearish on the joint venture. At the end: Mark Zuckerberg on the Vision Pro, and Ben takes to Twitter to talk Vision Pro on an airplane.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? I'm doing okay, Andrew. I'm doing okay. How are you? I'm doing pretty well. It's good to be back. We've been away for a little while and we're going to do something dramatic on this episode. We're going to talk about something other than the Vision Pro. Are you prepared for that? A deviation from the last two weeks. I am prepared, although the rundown seems to have some Vision Pro question.

So we'll see if this is false advertising. That's true. There is a little bit of Zuck toward the end. And we've gotten like 500 emails on the Vision Pro. So I'm sure we'll be sprinkling those in as the weeks pass here. But we promised on the last show we were going to talk about the giant sports bundle that is coming to market sometime in the next year. So maybe coming to market. Who can say I'll kick us off with the Wall Street Journal from over the weekend.

They write, executives at the National Football League were in, Las Vegas on Tuesday preparing for this weekend Super Bowl when they got word from news reports that their business and the sports media industry writ large was about to change in a fundamental way. Disney's ESPN and Fox, two of the league's biggest media partners, announced that alongside Warner Brothers Discovery, they would create a new streaming service to offer all their live sports programming. The NFL, a titan that's used to having a seat at the table in any discussion affecting its future and content was out of the loop, that the media behemots were willing to risk the ire of the NFL shows the sense of urgency, even desperation they feel about

solving what is arguably the biggest riddle in their industry, finding a business model that can work in the streaming economy. So there you go, Ben. And part of the fun with all this was neither the NFL nor the NBA knew this was happening, none of the cable operator. had been told NBC Comcast and Paramount Plus weren't even asked whether they wanted to participate in this super bundle. And I read the journal excerpt mainly because it's a nice snapshot of the way all of this news was reported. It was very cloak and dagger, high stakes corporate drama. But it has now been a week. So let's start with the first sentence of that journal report. Gut feeling, do you buy the idea that this bundle is going to change the sports?

sports media business in a fundamental way. Like how are you thinking about all this a week later? I think any of this stuff is like I feel like the dramatic change has already happened, right? Like we're now sort of dealing with repercussions and that dramatic change was basically like paid TV penetration going from 90 plus percentage of households to somewhere around 50%. I mean, give or take, whatever it is. It's still going down.

So who's to say where it is. So there is an aspect of you, this some sort of change. Like, that's just a fundamental change. The entire structure is broken. And the whole question is, how long do you hold on to the broken structure, which still does throw off a lot of cash? It just speaks to how absurdly profitable the old structure was that it could go through this massive amount of sort of degradation as far as penetration goes and still be a concern about like, are we going to, are we hurting ourselves by sort of doing this? So there's an aspect of this is acknowledging a reality that is. happened and sort of moving forward. And it's been pretty clear to me in the long run that you're

going to have sort of general entertainment and you're going to have sports. And sports is going to be separate. And this is basically, it's not how I thought it would turn out. I thought it would be that basically just we would keep the linear TV bundle. That would be sports. And if it was streaming, it would be like a Hulu live or YouTube TV. That maybe I was, I don't know, maybe I wasn't ambitious enough or or or thinking through but the broader idea that you're going to have sports only subscriptions i think is true but it's that's going to be tough because the reality is for a long time the way the money actually flowed is yes all those other channels made money by going along with sports but then the implication was people that did want those other channels were subsidizing sports

because they were paying for ESPN they were paying for ESPN they were paying. for FS1, they were paying for TNT, whether or not they actually watch sports on those channels. And so you have the situation where that 90% penetration, 90% of households were paying for sports. Once sports is separate, it's only sports fans paying for sports. And I think the other sort of thing that happened in the last few years, I think we talked about on this podcast. I wrote about it on Shetectory was the Warner Brothers launching the sort of Bleacher Report sports thing, where you can get basically Warner Brothers sports content, which includes the, you know,

and it's an add-on to the Max app, correct? That's right. It's an add-on to the Max app. And what that means is you have to subscribe to the Max app and then also subscribe to the Bleacher Report layer. I think this was an underappreciated shift that happened, where basically if you have to pay for Max first and then pay for sports, the sports fans are being.

asked to subsidize general entertainment. Even if you don't want Max, you're paying for Max and then you're also paying for sports, whereas non-sports viewers only have to pay for Max. They don't have to pay for the sports layer. And this is a inversion of the way things worked previously. And I think we still don't know the long-term sort of effects on that. But it is a fairly bearish structural change for sports as a whole where only sports fans are paying as opposed to everyone paying.

Right, but justice for generations of non-sports fans who have been subsidizing all the ESPN carriage fees and everything else that we've been enjoying over the last 30 or 40 years. Yeah, I mean, you talk about that Max app, for instance, I don't know what the audience is for that, the max add-on with Bleacher Report and like random NCAA games and hockey or whatever. And it sort of dovetails with my general thought on what's happening here, which is, it's all very interesting as a reflection of the desperation and confusion among some of the existing legacy media companies. But I actually don't think that this offering is going to change very much and everything that we've talked about for the last year or so and everything that was true two weeks ago before any of this was announced about the future of the sports media industry, seems like it's going to be more or less unchanged after the announcement of this super bundle. You know, it doesn't have a name yet, but all the trends and questions are still the same. And to the extent we're waiting for a new product or a new model to sort of inject some clarity into what the future of the business is going to look like. I'm not actually sure this super bundle is it.

And so I look forward to getting into why here. But let's walk through some specifics as we go. So a few more details. You're doing the mouse in your pocket thing. You're speaking for yourself and not for me. Absolutely. I speak for myself here and I'm curious for your thoughts as we go. You and I haven't talked about this offline either.

So it's going to be a journey of discovery on this podcast. A couple more details. Well, let me jump in on a couple things that you said. The key thing that everyone is focused on, and this is absolutely a concern, not just for these services, but also for the sports leagues, is you have to think about the long run. How do you get new fans? How do you get sort of new viewers? And demographically speaking, the bundle is, you know, the traditional cable bundle is a bit like print newspapers, which is another industry that was so profitable that they still kept it going for years and years past when they were sort of relevant because people were still subscribed to the newspaper and people are still subscribed to cable.

And the question, though, is where do you get sort of new, new viewers? Where do you get young people? Young people are the most likely to have cut the cord or to be using passwords for their parents streaming services, which are now sort of cracking down on as well. So I think that the big focus for this and for all these ideas and certainly for the standalone ESPN app, which Disney did it also announces coming in the fall of 2025, is this issue of how do we make it more accessible to get into our stuff? at the end of the day, the thing to remember is it's the cable bundle. It's not just that it costs a lot of money, but also you have to like sign up for cable, right? You have to get a technician over and get a cable box and all the, it's a little easier now. Actually, this is a great thing with COVID.

They actually had to make a lot of this stuff sort of self-serve. But there is a sort of barrier to entry that for more, how do you put it, it itinerant sort of people as young people tend to be moving house every year or moving around, things like that. it's kind of a pain and it's easier to just like that barrier to entry is is a meaningful one we're really lower in the bar for young people of the world they can't even sign up for cable it's not that hard just for the record but i hear i hear what you're saying but but i think that it's easy for you and i to bring the viewpoint of we are both hardcore sports fans first thing we're going to do is make sure we get our cable hooked up so we can watch the game and i continue to maintain people that watch sports on streaming are nuts uh you have issues like the paramount you know service I really felt bad during the Super Bowl. Everybody was complaining. I was like, well, how could you ever willingly watch the Super Bowl on streaming? But for a lot of people. You have a wire going into your house that is dedicated to delivering video.

Use the wire. That's my philosophy. But that's a person that, you know, wires up every single computer that I have. Like, I believe in wires. This is a pro-wire podcast. I feel safer with wires. I'm right there with you. Yes.

I mean, so the, you know, so I think, but I do think that that's a real thing. Like we talk all the time about convenience matters, barrier to entry sort of matters. Now, the flip side that we've also talked a lot about is easy to get into means easy to get out of. And churn is such a big challenge for all these sort of services. And I think something they didn't fully appreciate when they were getting into this. And this is where the bundle aspect is compelling. You sign up for just this bundle for $30 or $40 or $50 even, whatever it might be. You're going to have a good portion of all the sports content you want sort of all the time.

If you pair this, by the way, if you want to actually just save money, now this is maybe harder than playing cable, but you set up an antenna to get actual like broadcast, you'll basically have everything. Right. That is that is sort of an interesting angle on this too. And by the way, justice for young people. I would not know how to set up an antenna at this point in my life. And so I am just as helpless as any Gen Z member out there who's unable to call Comcast. So I guess that's a show of solidarity there. I mean, it is very funny.

I was helping a friend actually set up cable because, you know, they're through, you know, my favorite channel sort of app, you can watch your sports sort of abroad or wherever you are through sort of any application. And he was like, the technician was stunned. he's like, I haven't done a new install of cable in a long time. It's always uninstalling. But, but yeah, I mean, there's just some aspect of this deal that is just accepting reality, right? And so that's meaningful.

And I think it's meaningful. They're doing it together. Again, it's not exclusive. Like, Max is still going to sell just their sports bundle. Disney is going to have their standalone ESPN service. So it's not like, it's not, they're not all their eggs are in this basket for sort of better or worse. but I do think they're better off together. And to me, just that acknowledgement and recognition that, look, we got to work together.

That's meaningful. And I think that that's, that's, you know, there's an aspect of that with the Disney Charter thing, too. Not going to change the world overnight. But the idea that Charter now is, you know, including the ad supported Disney Plus tier. And by the way, they're paying for it. So Disney had a big jump in subscribers last quarter, which is basically people who now get Disney Plus, whether they knew it or not, because they're in the charter bundle, like that is, that was another idea of these entities that were used to being, that were sort of, they work together by default because everyone went over the same wire.

But because of that, they spent a lot of time fighting with each other because they're all fighting over the sort of the share of the pie. Now the options are sort of infinite and they have to choose to work together because it's in their mutual best interest. And so I think just the fact that that's happening, I think, is meaningful as well. Right. Well, as far as infinite options are concerned, credit to Disney, because right now they're moving forward with this mega bundle. And then they've got the Hulu with live sports plan.

There's ESPN on cable. There's ESPN Plus. And then ESPN's OTT product in 2025. I didn't think that we would ever see a company put together a more confusing offering than HBO. and HBO Max and HBO now. But here's ESPN, giving them a run for their money. I can't wait to see how it all shakes out. But yes, that's one of the details.

It is a good observation, though. I mean, on one hand, there is definitely going to be a lot of confusion over the ESPN offering. You know, we've already had it sort of bad enough with ESPN versus ESPN Plus. But wow, I get ESPN for so cheap. Yeah, that's because it's not actually ESPN. It's terrible. It's like lacrosse, right? Or something like that.

no offense to all across viewers or players. So, yeah, for sure, that's going to be a challenge. But there's also an aspect of you need to meet customers where they are. And they are going to meet customers wherever they are, however they want to be met, with a standalone app, with this bundled app, or it'll still be in the bundle, you know, the cable bundle, sort of if you want that. And that's correct. That's what they should do.

Remember, just to go back to the economics of this, they are selling a product for which they spend huge amounts of upfront costs, whether that be creating original content, or whether that be in this case sort of renting rights from the sports leagues. That's a lot of money. When you spent that money up front, you need to maximize the areas over which you can sort of monetize that. So, you know, we talk about this in the context of like, say, Apple being a product company versus Google being a services company. Sort of a classic example. A big mistake Google made years and years ago was prioritizing Android at the expense of their iOS sort of experience.

That hurt the company. it was the tail weighing the dog where they were trying to like differentiate Android, but that wasn't their business. Their business was this massive amount of fixed costs in building up the Google services and making those services available everywhere. In this case, it would be a mistake absolutely for Disney to only focus on one channel. They've already paid for the rights. So get those rights out there in as many places as possible, meet people where they are and where they want to be. and by the way, you're kind of poo-pooing this service. I think it's probably going to be the best way to get sports in a few years, right?

Like assuming like the kale bundle sort of whether maybe you and I, because we're old, we are going to be the subscribe to the newspaper till we die sort of demographic. But I think for most people, look, if you like sports, this is probably going to be the best deal out there. Right. Well, okay. So I have a question for you before we dig into the. details. So we don't know who's going to operate the technical side. We don't know how profits will be shared on the back end. We don't know what it will be called. We don't really have any idea

how ESPN plans to differentiate its streaming product. It's standalone ESPN streaming product from this bundled streaming product where you can get all these different sports. But is there any unknown that's most interesting to you as we sit here now in February? January, 24. I mean, the Super Bundle is expected to launch in the fall, whereas the ESPN streaming service is coming fall 2025, so about 18 months from now. But is there anything that's most interesting to you now? I mean, I think that you, you kind of got to the core ones. Like, who's running this? Who's getting the data? Right. My thesis around why Disney is staying in sports instead of spinning off ESPN, which a lot, you know, a lot of their shareholders would

like them to do. And there's a lot of shareholders or like, you know, Nelson Pence, whatever's leading this sort of, I think putting up an alternative slate at the next Disney board meeting. There's a lot of sort of drama around that. But my view is you want to have some scalable aspect of the business where you get more money over time without having to increase sort of the cost of the inputs. The challenge with a subscription model directly is if you're trying to run a subscription service that is based on rights that you acquire, what's going to happen is the entity giving you those rights, which is the actual differentiator of your service, they're just going to take all the money, right?

Like, which the NFL is very famous in particular for doing. And the NBA over the last 10, 15 years has gotten much more aggressive about doing. And so the question is, how do you actually make money outside of that? What's the benefit that you gain? my view for Disney is Disney's goal in how they're going to achieve scalable profitability with streaming is through advertising. And the idea with advertising with digital is you is targeting, right? You can actually deliver ads that are pertinent to people. This is obviously a big thing online.

And it's funny, like, I think there's an aspect of this that still doesn't quite click for people. I saw this tweet about like criticizing advertisers on the Super Bowl for paying all this money. And they're like, and they talked about some YouTube video like MKBHD's reviewer. And I can't remember which one they were talking about. I saw that too. I think it might have been referring to Mr. Beast and Mr. Beast audience. Why don't you just buy an advertisement for all the Mr. Beast viewers? That would be astronomically expensive.

That's not how it works. You don't buy, like if you wanted to buy an ad that ran in front of 100 million people on YouTube, it's going to cost you much, much, much, much, much more than it would cost to run and ad front of 100 million people at the Super Bowl. Why? Because with YouTube,

you don't buy against content. You buy targeting particular demographics that you want. If your desired demographics are every single person in the United States, you're going to pay

a lot of money to do that on YouTube or Facebook or any other digital platform. The idea is you can reach fewer people precisely because you're not reaching the people

you don't want to reach. You're not paying for stuff that you don't need. What's your people? for is to reach the people that are particularly pertinent to your product and whatever it might be. TV, on the other hand, is different. There are some products like consumer package good products or beer companies or whatever might be.

They actually want to reach that many people. And when it comes on like a per person basis, TV is still cheaper. It is a cheaper way to reach a mass market. Now, this has lots of knock on effects into the market. It was TV and TV advertising and the relative efficiency of technology. TV advertising that drove the development of consumer packaged goods in the U.S. Where you had these sort of brands that were designed to reach a relatively large niche. Now, they would still differentiate, right?

We've talked about it before. You know, you have this particular deodorant for young men, this one for old men, this one for, you know, you're the old man one, right? Old Spice. I think we've talked about this before. But even there, the idea is, well, you're going to have a brand that matches a particular channel, say, like, this deodorant lines up with ESPN. and it's going to be put in this section of the grocery store and like sort of wherever it might be.

It was all sort of a fully integrated chain where every aspect of that marketing funnel was tuned to reach a mass audience. Now, maybe a sector of that mass audience, but still relatively speaking, it's sort of mass market sort of advertising. The internet gave you the idea that you could target specific niches. I am going for the sort of, you know, the classy man who wants to think of himself as an individual. vigilist and a artisan. So he's going to buy like my razors that are like, you know, actually the same as every other razor. But it's going to be even more specialized in sort of whatever it might be, right? Yeah.

Facebook and internet advertising is amazing for this because you're paying a lot per person you reach. But because they're targeting is so good, the likelihood of that person converting is drastically higher than a random viewer of a Super Bowl ad. Right. And so that's the trade up. Let me stop you there because I'm curious about how this actually looks in a video context, because we got this question from Harold, and this is a digression and a diversion from the sports bundle conversation. We'll return to that in a second.

But Harold said, I like to watch sports highlights on YouTube while eating lunch. And the ads drive me crazy. I've had to watch the same Tom Brady Hertz ad about a million times. Why are video ads on the internet so uniformly terrible? and why can't the geniuses at Google figure out what I'm not interested in or at the very least realize that they've already shown me something. On the odd occasion when I watched linear TV at a hotel or something, the ads feel a lot more natural and don't leave me with an abiding hatred of whatever brand I'm being sold.

And so we got that question a few weeks ago and after reading it, I immediately thought back to our conversations about the progression we've talked about with ads going from newspapers to the clunky sort of placement we saw on old school websites, and then to this new native format that works tremendously well on social media with targeting and everything we were just discussing. And when you explain that to me, it made sense. But I don't know that we've ever taken that final step for like pre-roll or mid-roll ads in video contexts where basically all of them suck, whether we're talking about

brand advertising or targeted ads. I never feel converted. And this is purely subjective. But I mean, I never buy anything based on a YouTube ad, for instance, where I do that all the time based off of Instagram ads. And so I wonder whether it's sort of two separate tracks when we're talking about advertising on the internet. It has been. That's a great observation. That's exactly right. It has been these sort of two different tracks. And this is sort of like the great white whale of advertising of advertising is basically targeted video ads. How do you do it and sort of do it effectively? One of the big challenges that you have is beyond the fact that, I mean, I appreciate that Harold pays to subscribe to Sharp Tech. It doesn't pay for YouTube premium. I'm not sure of the,

but it's the right choice as far as your quality of life goes. But there's this bit where it's hard to create. YouTube premium evangelist, the world's foremost YouTube premium salesman. it's it's it's it's it's it's I just can't imagine living without it um the the the the the it's hard to make video ads that's actually a huge challenge and one of the aspects of like the easier is to create ads you get more volume you get a more liquid market what you can serve people sure and you get more specificity you can do much better targeting and so the targeting bit also it's easier to understand text like to understand what people are

interested if they're reading text websites or they're viewing text updates and you have a text ad, it's just easier to understand context and what they sort of might be interested in. So there was text. Then we've gotten to pictures, obviously, which is probably the sweet spot still for internet advertising is all your ads that you see on Instagram. They're all images. And there's, by the way, more stuff that's going to be happening here with Generative AI in particular, where you're going to be able to specify what your brand sort of type is, image, and you're, your message, and it's going to like iterate and figure out the perfect image and the perfect text and like A, B tested like crazy in a way that no human ever could and basically deliver you

customize ads that are just like even more. It's not just the ad that's custom to you. It's the whole creative that's sort of custom to you. And there is a real aspect of the cost of the input is a real limiter here. To make effective sort of video ads is tough. And the other problem is the companies that had the wherewithal and the money to spend on those sort of ads were fundamentally better suited TV because their entire company is structured around TV advertising. I can't overemphasize this enough. Like the car companies, the cell phone

companies, the big box retailer companies, the big CPG companies, the ones that dominate TV advertising still to this day, everything about their company is built around mass market. Also, if you've got the resources to produce like high-end advertising, chances are you're marketing to the entire country. And it's not like a targeted niche or something. Exactly. And that's a function of having a mass market product, not having a niche type product. If you're a niche product where your goal is to reach, say, say your addressable market is a million people.

Okay. Sounds pretty big, but relative to like the TV marketing size, not really that big. Maybe back in the day, a million people you could target like the history channel or if your product sort of associated with that, right? and you would find sort of channels that made sense. But a million is probably really like you're just going to be sort of better off on the internet. With that, you, in a key thing to internet companies in general, it's a key thing to Structry's business model. You have to keep your costs under control. Your costs have to be internet sort of native costs.

This is the big problem. This is the core problem that newspapers say have going to the internet. Their cost structures were totally out of whack with the internet. You could be fabulously profitable in the internet, putting text on the internet like Stratory has been. But that was a function of for a long time, I was literally the only expense for Stryker. That like credit card fees and sending emails, right? Now we have a, we have a few more costs, but by and large, our cost relative, yeah, well, our costs relative to the audience we reach is very small. But that works on the internet where you can reach a lot of, you can reach a lot of people, but you can do it sort of very efficiently.

And so video has always been, it's like a square peg and a round hole for this. It costs a lot to produce. It costs a lot to do it well. And that doesn't necessarily align with a business model that's focused on finding niches, which internet advertising has been about. Now, obviously, so this is where the streaming bit and why Disney is very interested, because this is an unsolved problem, this question of targeted video advertising around general entertainment or targeted video advertising around sports.

is an unsolved question. Like Google is probably the best with YouTube. And as Harold says, it's still crap, right? And so there's actual, so from the Disney perspective, number one, there is a problem to be solved. Maybe it will never be solved. Maybe it's too hard. Maybe generative AI will solve the problem because it will bring down the cost of producing

a lot of this stuff so dramatically that you can actually serve customized content in a meaningful way, not just get the same commercial again and again and again. I don't know. There's going to be a lot of work to figure this out. But it is an opportunity to be figured out. And the advantage of sports is you have sort of this core capability that remains the best advertising opportunity to get you scale and advertising so that you can pay it off with targeted ads on Disney Plus, targeted ads on Google, target ads on all their other ones, where they have more cost control. And so they can they can have a scalable profit advantage. Now, the problem is maybe sports is just always going to be different, because.

it is mass markets. Maybe the advertising you do there won't really translate to sort of more niche sort of areas. That's TBD. But I think it's a valid thesis and a reason for ESPN if they want to become a video advertising behemith to keep sports makes sense. I love behemoth. Behemoth. Behemoth. Behemoth. Whatever. Well, and just before we shift back to streaming, the reason a Super Bowl ad is more valuable than a Mr. Beast ad is because it's just a more valuable advertising medium. You're capturing a captive audience of 100 million or 150 million people. I forget exactly what the number was. The most watched Super Bowl, most watched televised event since the moon landing. Shout out to Taylor Swift making that possible. But it's more valuable than what you're getting if you're

inserting a branded advertisement in a Mr. Beast video would be my thesis. Maybe. I don't know about that, but I know that the costs are not going to be remotely similar. Like, that's really the key thing. It's just the cost structure of. See, I think you're also reaching an audience that's wealthier than the people who are watching Mr. Beast videos or like a army of 13-year-olds. So judgmental and stereotypical. I don't know. It's my gut feeling.

If I were a brand, I'd feel much better buying a Super Bowl ad. In any event. Mr. Beast makes a lot of money from brands. I can tell you that much. That's fair. Who knows? Who knows? But the whole point is, and I think you and.

Harold are both kind of driving at this, there really has maintained two kind of distinct advertising ecosystems. The TV advertising ecosystem has been kind of fundamental different. And this is, by the way, this is one thing that I learned over time with trajectory. I think I've mentioned this before, but I got a lot of traction early in strategicry by writing about advertising in that it's a huge part of the consumer internet and no one was writing about it. The funny thing is looking back is I had no idea what I was talking about particularly at the

beginning. But I was always fixated on this idea of the brand advertisers on TV and that opportunity on the internet. And one of my posits was that Facebook's structure was better suited to win brand advertising versus just sort of direct response. That was actually totally wrong. What Facebook built up was this entirely new ecosystem of products. Like those products don't exist without Facebook. Facebook made them possible. They were, they created a new market, which was basically, it was not brand advertise per se, but it's this very niche focus direct to consumer or sort of, you know, products that were direct response, you would buy them immediately. It wasn't necessarily like buy a mattress per se. It could be t-shirts or it could be whatever the sort of things that we've

talked about, but they created new advertisers. What they did not do is really capture brand advertising from TV. That question of what happens to all those millions and millions of dollars that go to brand advertising on TV, how does that move to digital, remains an open one. And I think that that is the core of Disney strategies, trying to capture that. This was all a digression from what are the big questions? And why won't it work? Let me start with why it won't work. I'll read two notes from the Wall Street Journal.

So first, by packaging together all the content, the companies are hoping they can bring in enough sports first customers to make the economics work. Wells Fargo analyst Stephen Cahill projected based on various assumptions that the service could break even if around 6 million subscribers paid at least $40 a month. The companies are discussing a price that could approach $50 a month, people familiar with the situation set. So that's note number one. Note number two, the as yet unnamed service expected to launch this fall will carry 14 networks, including Disney's ESPN channels and its ABC network, Warner's TNT and T. TBS and Fox's broadcast network and sports cable channel. The service will feature sports including the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball,

college football, and basketball, golf, and NASCAR. And to put the subscriber target in perspective, 6 million subscribers, enough to make this work, YouTube TV launched in 2017 and announced it had 8 million users as of last week, or they crossed the 8 million user threshold. But the second note is interesting to me because they're not going to have key football games. If you want to watch the football on CBS, you're going to need to have CBS access. If you want to watch Sunday night football, you need to have NBC and maybe Peacock down the line. If you want to watch Thursday night football, you need to have Amazon.

They're not going to have all the sports. And that's going to be a problem. Right now, they're trying to charge $45 a month. for a product that only a diehard sports fan would want. But a diehard sports fan will still need to subscribe to several other services to watch every football game or watch every Premier League game or watch every game of a local NBA team, whatever it may be, you're not getting one service that's going to serve all your needs if you really care about sports.

And that's before you factor in Netflix or Hulu or any traditional streaming service. It's like the target audience. for this product is the person who loves sports. And the person who loves sports and has enough disposable income to subscribe to this bundle is definitely already subscribed to cable or YouTube TV, which are going to end up netting out at about the same price when you factor in all the value they're getting. And so that's why I just don't know how big the target audience will end up being here.

Right. But what's wrong with that? I mean, nothing. It's just not actually going to make much of a dent in the current landscape is my takeaway after thinking about it for a couple days. Right. But the point here, and this goes back to the issue of sort of costs and being, you know, wanting to leverage your spend is that at least as it's being mooted right now, it's not going to make a difference to ESPN or Fox or Warner Brothers if people subscribe via the cable bundle or via this service or via each one sort of. of individually. The whole point is to meet people where they're at. If the answer is that they launched this service and a whole bunch of people who had cut the cord because they're waiting for

this big bundle, they're like, you know what? I could spend $35 more a month to get YouTube TV and get all the sports and also get all the other crap that's on cable. I'm going to do that. Then from Disney or Foxx service, like, great. That's actually better for us. We will make more money on cable. And so in that context, I think looking at this in isolation is saying this is dumb because cable's a better deal. If that is the message that is internalized by their audiences. Is this an elaborate guerrilla marketing tactic for the traditional cable bundle? Maybe it is. Not the worst idea of the world.

Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, just to clear, you know, for the sports thing, one of the issues and why everyone's mad at CBS and NBC is they're cheating on the cable bundle. You can get the NFL games on Paraninot Plus or CBS now, whatever it's called, and Peacock, right? The Peacock one, the reason we talked about the Peacock playoff game is that was only on Peacock. It wasn't on TV at all. But you've been able, all the NBC games have been also streamed on Peacock.

So you could, you know, probably if you want to be super diligent about managing your costs and you're a hardcore sports fan, you subscribe to this year round. And then just during football season, you add sort of the other two and then cancel them. And sorry for them. They're not part of the bundle. they get churned out every six months of people sort of coming and going. That's certainly a very viable thing to do. You could put up an antenna, right? Not saying that's going to be a huge market, but that would solve sort of your broadcast network problem.

I mean, one of the issues with the cable bundle bill in general is that a huge part of the cost, like $2530 or something is the broadcast networks. Basically, they're charging what are called, there's not affiliate fees, the retransmission fees. If you leave your cable bill, they usually separate this out because the cable companies are very irritated about these fees. Right. And they want to make clear where the piece are coming from. Yes, exactly. And so that's, you know, a big chunk of this cost. We don't know ESPN.

But if ABC is on there and Fox is on there, that's a big, that's sort of, you know, that's a big chunk of cost that is pushing it up to that $50 mark or sort of whatever it might be. You can get around that cost with an antenna, right? And sort of get like, honestly, that's probably going to be the most cost efficient way going forward. Get an antenna. By the way, you get a better broadcast signal.

Like 4K is more likely to be over the antenna than it is going to be over cable. I know that. One of the limitations of wires is they have to be upgraded over time. They aren't always. And then sort of get this for basically ESPN and FS1, or a T&T, like the sort of the cable sports options. But backing up big picture, my whole pushback to you is that's fine. Right. Though the making stuff more available is a, I think, I think a net win.

Yeah. No, I hear you. And I just am making the point that in the wake of all the hubbub a week ago, the customer that some of these guys are imagining, whether it's Lockland Murdoch talking about, there's a tremendous opportunity, not of people who are cutting the cord, but who have never had cable in the past or whatever. I just don't buy that that person exists. Like the person who's not willing to pay for cable. But here's the thing. If your view of the world is, and you might be right, to be very, very clear, you might be right. But to the extent

you are right, sports in America are screwed. Because what you're articulating is that there's a huge crowd of people that are never going to watch sports. And the bet these folks are making is that there's a lot of people that might be sports fans or would be sports fan. They're just cable nevers. They're not sports nevers. They're cable nevers.

And you're saying that category does not exist. And you might be right. Again, from my perspective, as an old person, I think cable is better. Then again, a lot of old people thought newspapers were better. Like, why would I even bother? Like, and so to the extent there is a population that would like to get sports, but is never going to sign up for cable, this will meet that need. And if that market does not materialize at all, then everyone is sort of screwed.

And by the way, that might be true. It might be the case that the new generation just wants to watch highlights, and maybe catch the big game, and they're never going to be like you and me watching every sports game because we grew up in a world where we didn't have five gazillion options of different things to do. That might be the case. And everyone that's kind of in the back of everyone's mind, a little bit nervous about it.

They probably should be a lot nervous about it. But that's the market that's being targeted. Right. And I just respond to the value proposition that's being proposed here. And I'm just like, yeah, I'm not sure I see it. You know, the people who are not willing to pay for cable, but are willing to pay double what Netflix charges. to get like 75% of sports and still have to subscribe to other services to go get the rest of sports.

Like, I just don't know how many people that will appeal to. And in thinking about it. But you might be right. We'll see what happens. Well, and what I would say is it's interesting to think about it alongside the other rebuttling conversations we've had because rebuttling in entertainment makes so much sense because you can give me 70% of the shows and movies that are out there. and charge me one premium price and have it all in one place.

And the convenience, all of it actually makes a lot of sense and makes me less likely to churn from anyone's service. And it sounds like a great deal and I'll be a happy customer. But this again circles back to sports potentially just being different where 75% of national live sports broadcast isn't good enough for most sports fans. Like you probably wouldn't subscribe to this service, right? Yeah. And you might be right.

Like we'll find out. We will find out. Does this bring us closer to a sports aggregator or are we further away now? Yeah, I mean, you know, one thing that I hear was saying a lot about ESPN is the ESPN platform, ESPN platform. But I think they're viewing that as more of a standalone sort of like it's going to have fantasy football. It's going to have gambling. It's going to have all the sorts of things in one app. That's, that's, I think that's why it's going to take a while to launch.

And that, you know, but the problem there, this has always been the problem for ESPN. is if you don't have all the sports, that's not enough for the hardcore sports fan. Is that enough for the casual sort of sports fan? Okay, I'll just take what's on ESPN. There's a question of, you know, I think the challenge was what makes sports so valuable is it is rivalrous. Is rivalrous or not rivals? Are you going to mix up? It's rival.

Like, if you're, if I want to, I'm not going to replace a Bucks game with a random NBA game. Like I care about my team. That's the, those are the sports that I want to watch. right if I want to watch sort of an NFL game I'm not going to replace it with like a lacrosse match like sorry my ESPN plus subscribers that watch lacrosse really taking it on the chin yeah yeah sorry I don't know why it's like it's like top of mind here it's a fun lives for it just for the record but yeah yeah it was barely brutal to play too but anyhow the that's the challenge right that and that's why they can extract so much for their fees because they are so valuable and people feel like they have to sort of get get get all of it to the you know but that's a challenge in this new world of you're not going to, you know, do you, if you want to pay for everything, you can pay for it, just get the cable bundle sort of to your point. So maybe that is not going to work. But, you know, to the question of an aggregator, the question remains who can, who's place to build this. And I do think it's a, you know, it's an angle where owning the

underlying platform, not from an app perspective, but from like a hardware perspective is probably still the more important place to be because you can monetize directly. you can charge them, you can do purchases. This is something that I think the cable companies could have done. Maybe the opportunity has passed. You know, I was pushing for this to happen years and years ago when penetration was closer to 70% than a 50%. But this idea that, you know, you can sort of pay in one place and you can have one grid

that directs you do the game. And if you don't have that service, you can sign up with it. I continue to think the opportunity is compelling. Amazon's probably the one best place to do it. Maybe YouTube, YouTube TV absolutely helps in this regard because that's the catch-all for basically any sport you don't have a service for it, just sign up for YouTube TV. The challenge is YouTube TV is like $85 or whatever, the price keeps going up. So all these are going to need to be worked out.

This is by no means to be clear. None of this, this is not going to solve the issue, as you said at the beginning. I completely agree with you. But it is a representation of a change in mindset and that they're partnering and sort of a recognition that, look, the old world is gone. We have to figure out something in the future. And the more bets in this case, the better. Okay.

Well, to now shift back to our North Star here, something completely different toward the end. Mark Zuckerberg in a three-minute review this week said, I don't just think that the quest is the better value. I think the quest is the better product, period. And then he talked about Apple fanboys. He said, I know that some fan boys get upset whenever anyone dare. to question if Apple's going to be the leader in a new category. But the reality is that every generation of computing has an open and a closed model. And yeah, in mobile, Apple's closed model one,

but it's not always that way. So Zuck Guys Unite. Mark Zuckerberg has officially commented on the Apple Vision Pro. And I want to know what you thought of the comments, but I'll read you a sampling of some Twitter feedback here. So Joe Wisenthal of Bloomberg says the Zuckerberg video is really good. As a shareholder of both Apple and meta, I wish they would collude instead of compete. But still, it's cool to see a CEO so overtly combative toward arrival. And then this is just randomly selected at FOT3G. Alternate angle, BlackBerry could have made a similar video about the iPhone when it dropped. And I should note a bunch of people were comparing Zuck's comments to Steve Balmer's comments about the iPhone. So there's a lot of fun had at Mark Zuckerberg's expense over the

last few days. Documenting meta says, why would Mark even put out this video? Let's say that it is indeed the best headset, but the product should speak for itself, not the CEO. You don't see Tim going out there putting out videos about how iPhone is better than Android. And then at Neil Seibar says Mark Zuckerberg just posted this video to Instagram where he reviews in air quotes Apple Vision Pro. He says, Quest 3 is better for the vast majority of things that people use mixed reality for. He later calls out Apple fanboys and says a lot, it says a lot that he felt the need to record this video. My favorite aspect of the past few days was Zuckerberg calling out Apple fanboys and then Apple fanboys immediately getting all pissy about it.

So that was a lot of fun, great work all around. What did you think of what he had to say about the Vision Pro? Well, first off, I actually kind of want to push back on this comment from Joe Wisenthal. As a shareholder of both Apple and Meta, I wish they would collude instead of compete. I don't wish that at all. Like, would the Apple Vision Pro exist in the world today in 2024 if the quest did not? Maybe, maybe not. or would meta be investing billions and billions of dollars in the Quest

if they weren't frustrated and sick of dealing with Apple controlling the platforms that they exist on and wanting to control their own platform? Probably not. This category would not be moving forward if they were colluding. Well, I mean, the alternative, so the alternative take to VR is that there's a complete lack of sort of like startup energy in this space. There was in the, in terms of Quest, or Oculus, I should say. and then Facebook bought them, right?

And so that was kind of a bummer. But the other question about this category and the concern that I have, I put this sort of in my review, is maybe it's just the case that the cost that's required to sort of get this out the ground is something only big companies can do. And I do worry Zuckerberg puts them, you know, we're going to be the open alternative. You know, there's talk in the long run quest will be available on hardware

other than metas, but they have a lot of control of the app store. They're taking huge fees, like even bigger than the phone app stores. So it's not like this is like the willy-nilly Windows PC sort of era. Is it going to be relatively somewhat more open than Apple? Probably is it what we think of when we think about open? Kind of not really. And that is an aspect where I actually wish we had more competition and sort of pushing in these directions. So in that context, I think the way to think about this video, if I were to sort of put on my, you picked up a bunch of critics here.

So if I'm going to be the devil's advocate sort of to this point of view, it's this was a rallying cry for meta first and foremost, which is like, no, I wanted to come up here and say, sure, it's a lot better because it costs seven times as much. Not only is it cheaper, it's actually better, sort of X, Y, Z. And you know what? I think if you're a meta employee or someone working on this, that is something that's compelling. If you're in that ecosystem, it's like compelling.

Like, yeah, you're going to sort of have the questions. Well, of course he says that. He sort of motivated to say it. But there's an aspect of your leader going out there in risking looking like Steve Balmer is kind of cool, right? That sort of going for it. And if you have sort of your executives are guided by fear of looking stupid, that's an excellent way to end up like, say, Google these days, right? So risk averse. Don't want to do anything.

Don't want to mess up your monetization engines. So from my sort of perspective, if I were Joe Wisenthal is like a shareholder of these companies. He does say it's through an S&P index fund. I have index funds. Like that's how I invest in these companies as well. I don't buy stocks sort of individually. But, you know, from my perspective in that context as a shareholder, yeah, great. He's out there fighting for it.

And maybe it's going to fail and he's going to look stupid. But I would rather executives out there risking looking stupid because they believe in their product and they're inspiring the troops and they're going for it in competition than the alternative. Yeah. No, I'm 100% there. Okay. Secondly, I would say, in my opinion, now again, not as a heavy BlackBerry user, you know, to be clear, I was, you know, I didn't have BlackBerry at all. I had a Nokia smartphone back in the days. I think the iPhone from day one was just drastically better than the, like the BlackBerry, yes, they had the keyboard and everyone loved the keyboard.

They had the messaging service that, you know, you go back and forth. But the iPhone from day one was just, it was such a leap forward. You know, the main response of BlackBerry was that's fake. There's no way they actually shipped something this capable in that size with the battery technology available, the processor technology available. They didn't believe it was real. Just to put in context, like in this case, the Vision Pro is very clearly real. It's sort of in your hands. And I will say from my perspective, my dream computer, my dream VR headset right now would be Quest with sort of the high resolution of the Apple.

Vision Pro. Just because I think Apple's whole eye tracking, the ham thing, all that sort of stuff is super great for entertainment and it's very frustrating in long-term uses. But again, I'm the weirdo who has four screens and cares about productivity, right? The controllers are kind of annoying,

but they're actually nice. They talk about oh, the question is hand tracking. I think the iPhones is, I think the Vision Pros is better. But like there's, you know, it doesn't have the sort of eye tracking. I think the pro had a version of this, but it wasn't like the UI was sort of based on it. Yeah, he said that in his video. Yep. Yeah, and so, you know, I think, you know, he was certainly sandbating a bit.

Oh, yeah, it's just like this. We have that sort of thing. It's like, well, yeah, not quite. But this was part of what I was trying to get at my review of the Vision Pro. One of the things that was a little bit of a bummer for me, it's not that I think Apple screwed up. I think they made good tradeoffs for what they were going towards. But I do feel like the tradeoffs they made point to a long run future where I'm not sure the Vision Pro is ever going to fully be what I'm. I want it to be. If to the extent it gets close, it's going to be basically more Mac screens

in the vision. I'm just using the Mac, right? And maybe that, you know, we talked with them dithering last week. When we say productivity, what we mean were applications that were designed around a mouse and a keyboard. That's basically what we mean. And maybe it's always going to be a fool's errand to think that you're ever going to get a better experience with productivity applications, if that's how you're actually defining them on any device that does not have a mouse and keyboard. It's kind of tautological, right, that that's going to be the case. And, you know, what we call productivity in 30 years, like, you know, where you're wearing a vision pro and you're fixing a car, you're fixing an appliance, you're putting up an intent on your house, right?

Maybe even Andrew Sharp can climb up his house. He has his vision pro on. And he's looking at says put a screw here, do X, Y, Z, connect this wire. That's productivity for sure. It's not something you can do with a mouse and keyboard. That is something that will be unique. Now, the other big question about this is what access to the actual hardware capabilities do you have? And if Oculus wants to be open, I think giving more access to more aspects of the hardware to an extent Apple won't.

That could be sort of a differentiator. And if that happens, that's great. And I think it will happen because of competition. Yeah. Well, I think the competition is exciting to see, frankly. And I don't know that any of these headsets are actually going to succeed as a product category just because of the issues we've talked about in the past where they're coming at a time when everyone's sort of connecting the dots on the social costs of remote work and isolating technologies and immersion and all that. So I have no idea what will or won't be adopted by a meaningful segment of the population. But as a CEO, it's really cool that Zuckerberg is willing to just jump on camera and explain why he's.

stands behind his product and why he believes they're delivering more value to people and why he's excited for the future. Like strategically speaking, I think positioning meta as the plucky upstart is number one, hilarious. And number two, they are. They're only worth a trillion dollars. Exactly. Relative to Apple, they are plucky as ever. But I also think, you know, he's giving the quest the best chance possible to succeed. So if I were a meta shareholder, holder, I would feel good about that. And I also, I just don't really understand the people framing this as like an act of weakness or desperation on Sucks Park. It would be much weaker and easier to just slink off and unwind the investments they've made in VR and hand the category

to Apple. But I think, yeah, what does it buy? I mean, why do I care if he ends up looking stupid, right? It's not my problem. That's his problem. And I'm glad he's willing to incur the cost. Well, and looking stupid is part of the job. You know, it comes with a territory, taking risks, trying stuff, and occasionally you're going to look like a complete moron. But I enjoyed him mixing it up with Apple. And we'll close with Peter who says, Andrew, can you please make fun of Ben being back on Twitter?

He'll 100% regret it if he doesn't already. And I'll read at Ben Thompson, Apple Vision Pro in an economy seat is life-changing. movie experience is a total escape and here the max screen sharing makes a massive difference anyone flying long haul regularly it's worth it absolutely worth it that went semi-viral so what do you say ben uh was peter right do you already regret getting back on twitter already i regret it within like five minutes i was going to add on to the streaming cabinets yes i'm not talking about if you can afford busy level i was like oh i'd just rather find business class well not everyone can fly in business class.

Anyway, well, actually, but I do think this was an important point that I, I made that point in my review, which is like, look, anyone that could Word of Vision Pro, maybe there's, are they really flying in the back of the plane? And then I forgot,

I have been in this state, right? When I, you know, when I work for Microsoft, I was working for the Windows 8 app store, we're sort of getting started, we're trying to sign up folks. I was in one of my categories was like publishing or I can't remember what it was.

So, whatever, long short of it, I was flying in New York a lot, right? And, you know, Seattle, New York, not a short flight, and I was also very busy because we were watching a new platform with a new app store. We'll leave aside what happened after that, but it was a very fun time. And I was working on all those flights. And let me tell you, Microsoft, it's very annoying. I think that the policy is you have to be flying five or more time zones to even ask if you have permission to fly business class, which of course is perfectly calibrated that even flying cross country does not get business class, right?

So I was flying in the back of the plane a lot, often with tickets that were bought the last minute so I'd be stuck in the back in the middle or something like that, trying to do work scrunched up on a keyboard. And let me tell you, I would have paid on my own pocket $3,500 without question for, no, but you think about it. It actually doesn't take that many flights where just it's such a better experience. And, you know, again, I'm not representative, but I've flown over the Pacific tens and tens of times, probably over 100 times.

Most of those times for a long portion of my life was in the back of the plane. And everyone's like, oh, but you're still going to feel crappy because you're sitting in a bad seat. This is why Twitter is infuriating. Of course you're going to still crap because you're in a bad seat. I'm not saying your butt magically feels better because you're wearing a Vision Pro. So look, I will tell you, go back. I watched the first season of Sopranos. I can actually still vividly have this memory.

In the back of a plane on the video iPod, like the first one with like a one and a half inch screen, like just plowed through the whole thing. Just as David Chase intended. And let me tell you what, I was not comfortable, my butt hurt. I was, you know, all the miserableness you expect in the back of the plane, I would have taken all that miserableness and been watching it on a massive screen like there. And, you know, the, the bit that I was trying to articulate is we talked a lot of, we talked in this episode about the fixed cost sort of idea, right? The whole thing with tech businesses in general and entertainment businesses, this is why

they're adjacent and why I cover both. these are entities where you spend a lot up front and then sort of zero marginal cost to spread around, right? Once you made a movie or once you made sports rights, you want to spread it everywhere as possible. That's how you sort of maximize your sort of cost. Oh, by the way, just to go back to the Disney thing, this is the other bit.

Because distribution is free, having a million streaming services doesn't actually cost them more. There's a complexity cost and setting up the infrastructure is going to be difficult for sure, and that shouldn't be dismissed. But actually sending it out over the wires, it's not really any extra cost. right? So why not sort of do more? Wouldn't it be a cost though if you're trying to funnel

everybody to the platform of the future if you're trying to be the aggregator? Like you don't want dispersed audience. You you I mean you should go take over these entertainment companies because you seem to have such a clear view of what it's going to be. That's my sort of my point. We don't know what it's going to be. So more experiments, more sort of iterations, right? And why not experimented with this? First of all, I could not do any worse than the people who have been running these entertainment companies the last three years. Fair point, better point. But anyhow, to go back to the point, in this case, it's like a personal tech economic story.

I can spend $3,500 once and every flight I take from then until the thing breaks down is going to be dramatically better. That's pretty good, right? Now, is that a big enough market for the Applevision Pro in the very long run? Of course not. The reality is, you know, I mentioned this on a podcast previously. it's a long-running joke that every tech demo is about improving the flying experience. And the answer is most people don't fly, right?

Most people, if they do, they fly like once a year or not that often. That's why you have all the people in the non-TSA pre line. It's like, how can you be so crazy not to apply for TSA pre? Well, if you fly once a year, just take your shoes off once a year instead of going through, you know, applying for the process sort of X, Y, Z. That applies by and large to all these flight demos. in this particular case for this particular product, the improvement is so astronomical in this specific use case

that if you happen to fall in that niche, I think you're nuts to not get one, actually to be totally honest. That's how much better it is. And to take my productivity example, this is the one that was the most meaningful to me. I am still on the road. I am not using the Vision Pro for work.

I am working on my computer because the screen sharper, it just works the way I expected to. the more I use the Vision Pro, the lack of sharpness in the Mac projection is very annoying to me. So number one, I hope that gets better. But number two, guess what? If it's being in an economy seat

with a 16-inch screen that I can't even look at versus having a huge screen in front of me that I can see clearly and the people next to me cannot see what I'm working on, turns out the sharpness doesn't matter that much, right? Context matters in the sort of like pros and cons. In this particular context, it's awesome. Now, if I were a person of unlimited means, just buy a business class seat and use a computer how you want.

For sure. That's what you should do. Guess what? Flying over the Pacific and business class is about $4,000. Flying over the Atlantic is like $8,000. And once you've flown it once, it's gone. You don't get a fly business class every time by paying $4,000 once. So basically, long and short of it is, number one, it was even better than I expected.

Number two, I think I was a little dismissive in my review because. I think there is a vast middle area between can afford to always fly business and is flying economy all the time. For a one-time fee, you can make every economy flight you have a million times better. Now, that's a high fee. Not everyone should pay it. Most people don't fly that much. But for those that do, it's pretty awesome. Yep. Well, we also got an email. I can't find the email now, but somebody was asking if they could just come up with, they being Apple, if Apple could just come up with a way where you could connect a lightning cord to your Vision Pro and your Mac and just have the screen shared that way. Well, no, you can.

So they have the actually the developer strap thing, which is $300. That basically connects your Vision Pro directly to your Mac. And from what I understand, that does give you a better connection. Theoretically, and so a few technical things. All about cords, man. We all feel safer with cords. That's exactly right. So the peer-to-peer connection, I think Apple has this new protocol that I think it's like 150 megabits per second.

And I think sharing the screen is like 70 or something like that. So theoretically, it should be fine. But wireless always has interference issues. It is peer-to-peer. So even if you're on a plane with no Wi-Fi, you can still do the Mac projection, for example. Because it's just the Vision Pro is connecting directly to the Mac and projecting it in your screen. And if you have Internet access, for example, you could just get Internet on just your Mac and then your Mac's on the Internet. And then your Mac's on the Internet.

Got it. I still sort of use it. I recommend the Travel Router. you can bridge the connection and everything can be online, but that's very geeky and technical. Also, by the way, just to address another annoying Twitter thing, I was like, you're battery wife, did they know? I swear, these people, have you been on a plane in the last 10 years?

Like, it is very rare you get on a plane with no power. And any plane you get on with no power is definitely not flying longer than two hours. Your battery is going to last you for the flight. So, like, yeah, the little CRJs maybe no power. Basically, every mainline airplane has power, has for a long time. So that's also not a concern. But yeah, I actually, I think I'm going to get that developer strap to sort of try it out. When and if Apple ships dual screen support, I'm sure that's going to work better because then you're approaching the theoretical sort of limit of their screen sharing capabilities.

It is in hilarious Apple fashion, $300. It's only USB 2 speeds, which is enough for this sort of connection. but it's like basically almost as much as a quest. Mark Zuckerberg should have brought that up. Just hold them up. Here's a quest. Here's a USB 2 developer strap. About the same price.

We're not shaking down the American public here or the global public. Yeah. Well, rest assured, Peter, the tweet did in fact drive Ben insane, as you can tell by him continuing to reply to various people who annoyed him. This is the problem on Twitter. People like, people respond with non-second. That is like nothing to do with my... People have these facile observations and then you're worried like if I don't rebut this, it's going to look ridiculous to anybody who's just glancing at this.

It's like, it's like, well, the vision pro is not going to fix the fact time six foot four. Yeah. And I'm like, no, it's not. What do you want me to say? I admire the people who can tweet and just not worry about their mentions, not think about it and just keep it moving. I've never been one of those people. So the big takeaway of vision pro on an airplane is never tweet.

Never tweet, absolutely. But hey, Twitter has not been been any less influential over the last 12 months or so. I'm just not a part of it anymore. But never tweet is a good rule for life. Also a lie. You dropped a few bombs the last couple months that I can remember. Yeah. Here in there.

On that note, though, we are coming back next week. continue to send notes to email at sharp tech.fm. Maybe next week will deviate from the Vision Pro for another episode. Who can say what the future holds? But until then, Ben, I have a huge risk going on that we can address next week. There's this rumor of this or reports of this big Xbox announcement of being non-exclusive anymore. That's going to be a Thursday afternoon. I'm like, do I wait until next week or do I write about it now?

because I believe the report and it fits with what I've always said. I want to be on top of it. I wrote about it. So it's possible next week either I have to walk back everything that I wrote or that could be an interesting topic. But we'll see. We'll see what we'll see at the email or send. We'll be back early next week. Time will tell.

Have a great weekend and I will talk to you soon. Talk to you later.