Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 08/25 - ESPN To Amazon?

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Amazon has apparently held talks with Disney about maybe teaming up for a streaming ESPN partnership. Dropbox ends its unlimited storage option. Shein takes over Forever21. A product release so star-crossed, it’s being recalled after just 3 months. And, of course, The Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Links: Amazon in Talks With Disney About ESPN Streaming Partnership (The Information) Dropbox Ends Unlimited Cloud Storage Following Google Change (Bloomberg) Shein Strikes Deal With Forever 21 (WSJ) Citizen Is Suspending Sales of Its New Wear OS Smartwatch (Wired) Threads on the web widely rolling out (9to5Google) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: What Happened to Wirecutter? (The Atlantic) Michael Mann Fulfills a 30-Year Journey Directing the Operatic, Thrilling ‘Ferrari’ — And Teases ‘Heat 2’: ‘I Don’t Think About Mortality. I’m Busy’ (Variety) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMamey and Brian home for Friday, August 25th, 2023. I'm Brian McCalla today. Amazon has apparently held talks with Disney about maybe teaming up for a streaming ESPN partnership. Dropbox ends its unlimited storage option. Sheehan takes over Forever 21, a product release so star-crossed it's being recalled after just three months. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The information is reporting that Amazon has held early talks with Disney about working on a streaming version of ESPN, perhaps helping with distribution or taking a minority stake.

Quote, such an arrangement could shore up ESPN's status as the biggest force in sports media, even as declining TV viewership and advertising combined with rising sports programming costs have squeezed the sports channel and Disney, its majority owner. It could also reposition the tech behemoth, which has been trying to make a dent in sports streaming as more friend than foe to ESPN, and it could weaken the sports league's bargaining power. ESPN is considering charging between $20 and $35 a month for the new streaming service, said people familiar with the matter, a potential price range that could make it the most expensive streaming service in the U.S. and add pressure on already stagnant growth in the streaming sector.

The new service would show the same marquee programming as ESPN's cable channel, unlike the existing ESPN Plus streaming service, which shows niche sports and which would likely be a part of the new offering. Executives at Disney and ESPN are still doing research to determine what sort of price makes the most sense for this new service, the people cautioned. Amazon is one of a number of companies that have shown interest in an ESPN partnership, the people said. Also including Verizon, as the information previously reported. There is much logic in an Amazon partnership, though. The company has gone deeper into sports than other tech firms.

It has the rights for the next decade to the NFL's Thursday night football package, and it streams some New York Yankees games locally. It's a deal for the Yankees involved taking an equity stake in the Yes Television Network, which broadcasts Yankees games. Amazon didn't immediately have a comment. Much is at stake for both Disney and the sports world. The future shape of ESPN could affect the value of sports leagues and teams and determine how fans can watch their favorite teams and athletes, according to conversations with nearly 30 current and former Disney and ESPN employees, sports leagues, representatives, investors, bankers, and tech executives. Disney's CEO Bob Eiger has said a streaming version of ESPN is inevitable, but he hasn't set a date for the services

launch. It would likely operate in parallel with the cable channel indefinitely. ESPN's survival as a profitable behemoth is vital for Disney. The sports network has been a major profit engine for the entertainment giant for many years, helping to fund its key acquisitions over the past two decades, Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm. But there are signs that ESPN's financial contributions have been on the wane. Profits from Disney's U.S. networks, which include ESPN, as well as ABC and other cable channels, fell nearly 20 percent in the first three quarters of Disney's fiscal year, which the company blamed on rising sports costs and declining cable subscribers. The picture is mixed, however, in the most recent quarter, Disney emphasized that ESPN's TV ad revenue rose four

percent as TV ratings improved. Iger has said he is open to selling Disney's traditional entertainment networks such as ABC and FX, but he has made it clear that sports is key to Disney and he wants to retain control of the sports network. It's possible that Disney could strike multiple partnerships for ESPN, including with multiple sports leagues for content and a tech or telecom firm for distribution, the people said. Just under 30% of the sports channel is up for grabs in the partnership discussions. Disney wants to retain control of the network while existing 20% shareholder Hearst Corporation will keep its stake people familiar with the matter said. A 30% stake in ESPN could be worth $9 billion based on a valuation put on ESPN of between $25 and $35 billion by multiple current

and former Disney and ESPN insiders. While Eiger has said Disney doesn't need a cash infusion, he hasn't ruled out the idea of selling a stake for cash, end quote. Dropbox has ended its unlimited option, capping its all-distance. Space You Need Storage Plan at 5 terabytes of storage, after some users apparently were abusing the tier by pooling their storage, reselling, and more. Quoting Bloomberg. The company's highest tier, all the space you need storage plan will be capped at about 5 terabytes per user for new customers, the company said in a blog post shared with Bloomberg to be released Thursday. That's enough space to save about 33 million documents, Dropbox

said. While the plan was designed for businesses, some clients were instead using it for cryptocurrency mining, pulling storage with strangers or reselling the cloud service, Dropbox said. These uses, quote, frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers, the company said. With more than 18 million paying users, Dropbox is one of the best known companies in the cloud storage industry and reported two and a half billion in annual recurring revenue during its fiscal second quarter earnings on August 3rd. The company has worked to expand beyond storage with document management services and video-specific tools. The change follows Alphabet's

Google removing its as much storage as you need product branding for its highest tier workspace plan in May, according to copies of its website hosted on the Wayback Machine. Customers have posted on forums about being told they had exceeded storage limits and needed to pay for additional capacity. Some discussed moving to Dropbox after receiving such warnings. A Google spokesperson said the company began rolling out pooled storage for customers last year, and those you using over 80% of their plan's limit will be notified. While storage policies weren't changed in May, language was updated to, quote, clarify that customers on these plans receive five terabytes of drive secure cloud storage per user with the ability to request more, the spokesperson said.

After this, Dropbox said it saw a surge of unintended uses the past few months, quote, in the wake of other services making similar policy changes. The company's server capacity faced increased pressure in recent weeks, said a person familiar with the issue who asked not to be named discussing internal matters. Under Dropbox's new plan, each additional terabyte will cost $8 per month compared with the previous as much space as needed plan at $24 per month. Current users with less than 35 terabytes, more than 99% of top-tier plan customers, will be able to keep their current storage at the same price for five years, the company said. Those exceeding will be contacted, quote, to discuss a range of options, end quote.

Sheehan has acquired around 33% of Forever 21's parent company Spark. And Spark is taking a Sheehan minority stake, letting Sheehan sell Forever 21 items and operate inside its stores. Quoting the journal, the arrangement marks the next step in Sheehan's evolution beyond selling apparel at rock-bottom prices produced in small batches. Sheehan has become one of the largest U.S. fast-fashioned retailers by market share, but to grow further, it wants to offer its customers' goods beyond what it makes itself. In the deal, Sheehan is acquiring roughly one-third of Forever 21's operator Spark Group. Spark, in turn, is taking a minority stake in Sheehan, which is valued at $66 billion, at least in a funding round earlier this year. Additional financial terms couldn't be learned. Spark is a joint venture between brand management company Authentic Brands Group and mall owner Simon Property Group.

Spark produces and distributes goods for seven of Authentics Brands, which, in addition to Forever 21, include Aeropostel, Notica, Lucky Brand, Brooks Brothers, Eddie Bauer, and Reebok. For Sheehan, the deal gives it access to a brand in its sweet spot. Sheehan's executive vice chairman Donald Tang said, as the company expands, it needs to bring in more third-party brands. We can't make everything we sell, he said. Forever 21 will gain access to Sheehan's 150 million customers, giving it a wider platform to reboot since it was bought out of bankruptcy in 2020. The arrangement could also allow customers to return items ordered from Sheehan at Forever 21 stores. the brand has 560 stores worldwide with 414 in the U.S., end quote. Citizen is suspending sales of its $350 CZ Smart SmartWatch launched on May 1st.

Review units of the CZ Smart had extensive issues apparently, including freezing and inaccurate tracking data, quoting Wired. Although the smartwatch has been on the market for nearly three months, Citizen says it has, quote, recently identified a technical issue that is negatively affecting the user experience. The company's statement in an email comes a few weeks after the watchmaker sent out test units to product reviewers, including myself. I have had a lackluster experience with the Gen 2 CZ Smart and have been cataloging the bugs I've run into. I shared my feedback with Citizen earlier this week. The issues include a laggy interface, poor battery life, inaccurate heart rate data,

inaccurate sleep tracking, the watch freezing on specific screens, and Citizens' proprietary UQ features not working. The smart watch begins at $350. I'm not alone. YouTube tech reviewer Michael Fisher, better known as Mr. Mobile, has experienced many of the same bugs as I have, and even introduced me to new ones,

like the pilot watch face that simply cannot tell the correct time. Squirrel through Citizens' CZ Smart product page and customers aren't happy either. There are many complaints about poor battery life and laggy software, and some of these reviews were posted two or three months ago. Citizen says it's in the process of getting touch with customers who have bought the smartwatch to work out a solution. We are investigating the issue recalling review models and will be temporarily suspending sales on touchscreen models while we

pinpoint the source of the issue and the best path to a solution for our customers and partners. A citizen spokesperson said in an email, the temporary suspension of sales will take a week, if not more, to iron out. The Gen 2 CZ Smart is a successor to the original CZ Smart from 2020, and it runs Google's WareOS3 Smartwatch platform. It's supposed to perform just like any other smartwatch. You can check and respond to notifications, control music playback, and control your smart home devices, but Citizen hyped up a custom app it built for the watch called CZ SmartUQ, end quote.

Meta has finally rolled out its Threads web app to all users, featuring an app bar at the top with the same five tabs as in the mobile app. Tapping home there refreshes the feed. Not much more really to say about that, except that it's here. So, time for the weekend long read suggestions. Only two this week. First up, the Atlantic asks, what happened to wirecutter? Folks, myself included, have felt like the quality of the product review site has gone

downhill in recent years, especially after its acquisition by the New York Times. Quote, by 2015, the Wirecutter brand was popular and lucrative enough in four years. It had generated a reported $150 million in online transactions. potential buyers came calling. In 2016, the site sold to the Times as a servicy complement to the newspaper's own journalism. It didn't take long for Wirecutter staffers to realize that the Times' ambitions for the site far exceeded Wirecutter's own expectations of moderate, steady growth. According to multiple former employees, who I am keeping anonymous because they still work in the industry, the Times leadership wanted the site to double the amount of content it produced in order

to juice revenue. Those employees said Wirecutter's top editors argued that the site's business, would not scale directly because a minority of articles, many of them for big-ticket items such as appliances, generated the bulk of the company's revenues. But the mandate remained. Wirecutter would need to double its staff and double its output. But growth brought with it other adjustments. Times Management also adjusted the freelance pay structure from an hourly rate to a flat fee per article, which two former staffers argue likely contributed to less time spent researching and writing product recommendations. The Times strongly rejected the notion that the flat fee pay structure has contributed to a decline in quality, and argued that the site now relies less on freelance labor,

opting to hire more paid staffers for this very reason. A former staffer alleged that in 2019, an employee on the Times business side changed the copy of a post in the money vertical without telling the editorial team, a major ethical breach in an industry where the separation of church and state, so to speak, is sacrosanct. I asked several former staffers about the nature of the tweak, but no one was able to share specific details, nor did a spokesperson for the Times who told me, the employee was immediately told that he had committed a serious ethics breach, and he subsequently left the company, end quote. To hear former staffers tell it, wirecutter's founding spirit was diluted over time as a result of the Times' effort to chase

scale. Doubling the site's staff and content goals so quickly naturally led to a quality drop, they reasoned. But the people I spoke with were hesitant to pin the blame solely on the acquisition. That's because although Wirecutter changed, everything else did too. The internet of 2023 is not the internet of 2011, nor are the products, nor are the consumers, end quote. And finally, the other long read this week is about something that I almost brought up myself independently. I had never seen the movie Black Hat by Michael Mann because I heard it was a turkey. I sampled it recently, and maybe I'm just in the bag for Michael Man movies, but I was going to come on here at the end of a show one day and be like, are we sure Black Hat

isn't good? Well, as he teases his next movie, Ferrari, Michael Mann, the man himself, makes the case in variety. Might this quietly, might Black Hat be the one good hacker movie? Quote, the film never quite jelled, earning $19.6 million worldwide against a budget of 70 million. It's my responsibility. The script was not ready to shoot, says man. The subject may have been ahead of the curve because there were a number of people who thought this was all fantasy. Wrong. Everything is stone cold accurate. Man says there are films he has made where he couldn't change a frame like heat, collateral, and the insider, but Black Hat isn't one of them. In 2016, he reordered the CyberTax in the film for a Brooklyn Academy of

Music retrospective and liked the results. I've revised Las of the Mohicans three times, and now it's shorter than the original, he says with a laugh. Maybe with the revisions, New Yorker critic Richard Brody would not have proclaimed Black Hat is proof of why, by and large, good riddance to the mid-range drama. It's a good line, but not quite fair. Man's entire career is made up of mid-range dramas, and many of them are among my favorite films. I can remember every theater where I have seen one of his creations, the seats, the architecture, the theaters became a portal into his perfectly curated man versus the monolith world, whether it's Daniel Day Lewis's Hawkeye against the British Empire and Last of the Mohicans,

Russell Crow's Jeffrey Wiegand, taking on the tobacco industry and the insider or Will Smith's Muhammad Ali, battling the white power structure of the 1960s in Ali, end quote. I'm telling you this weekend, these are your marching orders, give Black how to try. Let me know if I'm crazy or if maybe this is the closest Hollywood ever got to capturing hacking on film. All right, I'm going to talk to you on Monday. No bonus episodes again this weekend, but heads up, when I do talk to you on Monday, it will be from Northern Michigan. So it might sound a bit different all next week. In fact, we've already been traveling in case today already sounds a bit different to you.

but vacation. I'll be doing regular shows all next week, but I won't be in my home studio. So keep that in mind. Talk to you then.