Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 10/14 – Meta Lied About Legs?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 TechMeme right home for Friday, October 14th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, we now know how much Netflix with ads will cost us. We think we know how many ads they have to show us to make up for the lost revenue. What is unclear is if people will actually watch that many ads. It looks like Zuck lied to us about having legs in the Metaverse. Something, something. Eventually every company becomes a bank. I'm talking about the Apple Savings account. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you make. today in the world of tech. We now know how much the Netflix with ads service will cost.

Starting point is 00:01:13 Netflix says Basic with Ads, which is what they're calling this tier, will cost $6.99 per month in the U.S. and debut on November 3rd in 12 countries, offering most titles available from the traditional service, though not all, at up to 720P resolution. Also, it's going to not let you download anything as we we've discussed. Quoting the Verge. This is all coming November 3rd in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, and the U.K. In exchange for making you watch an average of four to five minutes of ads per hour, basic with ads will give subscribers access to a large swath of Netflix's programming, not the platform's full catalog, though. A small selection of

Starting point is 00:02:01 television shows and movies will not be available to Basic with Ads subscribers due to licensing restrictions that Netflix says it's currently working on. Each of Netflix's ads will run anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds and will be placed before and during programs. Additionally, basic with ads subscribers will not be able to download content onto their devices and video quality is capped at 720P. During a press conference about the new tier, Netflix described it as pro-consumer and detailed how its internal content tagging teams have been tasked with finding natural breakpoints in different shows and films to place commercials in. Netflix also emphasized how basic with ads has come together over the past six months in the buildup to its debut this November, but noted that,

Starting point is 00:02:45 quote, what we do at launch will not be representative of the long-term opportunity of what the product will be, end quote. At launch, Netflix's ad space will be sold with a fixed price model rather than being auctioned off, and Netflix says, quote, hundreds of advertisers worldwide have already purchased most of its initial inventory. In the U.S. Netflix said it will partner with Nielsen to provide advertisers with ratings data that will be published via Nielsen 1. Nielsen's digital ad ratings will play an important role in how Netflix measures its audience. And Netflix said that it will not be using its data to build user profiles that lead to targeted ads outside the platform. All of these new tools will be rolling out to advertisers over the course of 2023, end quote.

Starting point is 00:03:28 So Netflix is going to let you save $3 a month if you're willing to watch ads in between your shows. as Eric Seifert noted on Twitter, in order to yield $3 in ad revenue per user per month to achieve Arpoo neutrality, Netflix must generate 45 ad views per user per month or one and a half per day. Our current users, those comfortable with the $999 plus price point, likely to make that trade-off, end quote. But as someone else said on Twitter, sorry I couldn't find the tweet again. I'm getting bad at that. The fact that Netflix got this up and running in six months tells you two things. One, they probably have been considering this as an eventuality for a while and had been prepping for it just in case and, or, I should say, and or, two, the numbers they were seeing internally must have been so existentially frightening to them that this was a true burn the boats, all hands on deck, make this happen at all costs.

Starting point is 00:04:32 emergency. Like, I'm literally imagining hundreds of low-level Netflix employees spending, what has it been, months, 24-7, just finding places to insert ads? All right, let's talk about legs. I kind of glossed over this when we were talking about the Meta-Connect keynote earlier this week, but Zuck and Company at the keynote made a big deal about how the avatars in their Horizon World's platform will soon be getting legs. They're apparently well aware of all of us snarking that the avatars to this point looked like, you know, Nintendo Wii era avatars, including the fact that they lacked legs. It is apparently true that giving Avatar's legs in a VR setting, which I assume means finding a way to track the movement of legs in the same way that

Starting point is 00:05:26 headsets can now track the movement of your hands, is a difficult and unsolved problem. So they were very excited to announce that they had solved it. Except, I guess, they haven't. Meta has been forced to admit that the segment at Connect 2020 announcing the addition of legs to Horizon World Avatar's in 2023, quote, featured animations created from motion capture. Quoting upload VR. The segment caught the eye of eagle-eyed developers who were confused about the scene which was meant to show features coming to VR headsets in the future. The smoothness of the movements shown in the video clashed with the expectations of what's capable on VR hardware, leaving some to suspect it was motion-captured or carefully smoothed by artists while others strained to understand why

Starting point is 00:06:11 meta would show something in its connect event, even if there's a chance it might not live up to that fidelity in practice with shipping VR hardware. Here's how upload VR's David Heaney broke down the current state of legs on widespread VR hardware in a recent article, quote, many third-party apps and games already give you virtual legs. No shipping VR system has built-in leg tracking, though, so virtual legs don't match the movement of your real legs. Some people don't mind this or even prefer it, but it feels disconcerting to many. Meta is getting around this by only showing an inferred position of the legs of other people, not your own when you look down. There are still major challenges to even showing other people's legs, though, such as how to gracefully handle the

Starting point is 00:06:56 transition between sitting and standing and how to make the legs look natural when moving around, with the thumbstick. In many apps today, avatars look more like they're shuffling and sliding than really walking, end quote. Indeed, the pre-prepared video showed what amounted to a bystander's view of an avatar-based interaction between Meta-C-O Mark Zuckerberg and Advertars and Identity General Manager, Agarim Shorman, featuring full-body next-generation avatars. To enable this preview of what's to come, the segment featured animations created from motion capture, meta-told upload VR, end quote. Quoting Kataku.

Starting point is 00:07:32 Deep down, of course, you all knew this. From vertical slices at E3 to phototrix shown at Apple events, there are always grains of salt we need to chew on every time a company is trying to sell us something that isn't out yet. But there's something especially funny about this in particular, that a project that has spent billions of dollars to look like a connected demo, a piece of hardware first shown off in 2009, has ended up with its own dumb feat-related moment, end quote. Quoting Lori Voss on Twitter. I feel like the only thing more embarrassing than not having feet was saying you added them and then having to admit you lied, end quote. And yes, Apple yesterday announced

Starting point is 00:08:21 plans to offer Apple card users a high-yield Goldman Sachs savings account in the coming months, which will allow them to automatically deposit their daily cash into the savings account with no fees. Quoting Mac rumors. Apple says the savings account, account option will be available in the coming months, but it did not reveal what the interest rate will be for daily cash balances. Goldman Sachs's existing online high-yield savings account, Marcus currently has a 2.15% APR. As with all Apple card features, users will be able to manage the savings account through the wallet app. Once the account is set up, all daily cash received from that point on will be automatically deposited into it unless a user opts to continue having it

Starting point is 00:09:02 added to their Apple Cash card. Users can change where their daily cash is sent at any time. Apple Card offers 2% daily cash on any purchase made with Apple Pay and 3% daily cash on purchases made with Apple Pay at select retailers, including Apple, Uber, Uber Eats, Walgreens, Nike, Panera Bread, T-Mobile, ExxonMobil, and Ace Hardware. Apple card users who take advantage of the savings account option would be able to earn interest on their daily cash automatically, allowing the amount to grow over time. Users will be able to deposit. additional funds into the savings account through a linked bank account or from their Apple Cash balance. Likewise, users will be able to withdraw funds from the savings account at any time with no fees,

Starting point is 00:09:43 end quote. Yes, I see this morning that Allies' online savings account is currently 2.25%. So if Apple can get even close to that, this is something I would use. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. I've got more bad news for Zuck. when the other big plan for meta was to turn WhatsApp into a Chinese-style super app but for India. Their dream was one day most business in India could be done inside of WhatsApp. Well, according to rest of world, quote, on July 18, Ashwarya Rao, a long-time WhatsApp user was at her wits end when she decided to take to Twitter. Quote, first it was email, then it was SMS, now it's WhatsApp, can't escape the spam, Rao tweeted, expressing frustration about her favorite messaging app turning into a spam box.

Starting point is 00:10:42 I don't remember giving explicit permission to most of these businesses to reach out to me through WhatsApp, especially the store ones, Rao told rest of world over Twitter direct messages. Since you typically have to provide a mobile number for billing purposes, they don't ever ask you if they can use it to reach out to you on WhatsApp, end quote. Mehta's WhatsApp is wildly popular in India with around 550 million users in the country. Over the past year, the company has aggressively expanded its WhatsApp business services in the country, allowing brands to reach out to customers, offer support, receive payments, and even verified documents. Direct access to customers over WhatsApp is an exciting proposition for Indian businesses since they reported 80% of messages sent on the app are seen within five minutes, making the platform an incredibly more efficient outreach channel than email or SMS. The unchecked rise of spam has, however, meant that the messaging platform that was once seen as a private and intimate space,

Starting point is 00:11:34 to communicate with friends and family now feels like a busy Main Street crowded with hawkers. At least 10 regular users of the app told rest of world. It's honestly such a frustrating experience now that WhatsApp has its business section. It feels like harassment, to be honest, Rao wrote to rest of world. WhatsApp doesn't really feel personal anymore. I wish there was a legal way to fight this, end quote. Younger listeners, as you age, one of the things that you find will happen to you with increasing frequency is that things you thought were permanent, you realize that they're not. The youngs come for all the

Starting point is 00:12:08 things you love eventually, and apparently they're coming now for the GIFs. According to the Atlantic GIFs, once called the file format of the internet generation are declining in usage, as young users say GIFs are cringe, and MP4 videos make the format seem outdated. Quote, GIFs, particularly reaction GIFs such as Michael Jackson chomping on popcorn and Mariah Carey muttering, I don't know her, were lingua franquah of the internet and significant enough culturally that in 2014, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York even put on an exhibit of reaction gifts titled Moving Image as Gesture. This is the file format of the internet generation. Tumblr's then head of creative strategy, David Hayes, told Mashable in 2016, while more than

Starting point is 00:12:54 23 million gif-based posts were being uploaded to the site he worked for each day. As the GIFS star rose. GIF's searching features were added to Facebook, Twitter, and IMessage, making it even easier to find a gift to express whatever emotion you wanted to convey without words. And that was the turning point. These search features surfaced the same gifs over and over, and the popular reaction gifts got worn into the ground. They started to look dated, corny, and cheap. Gifts are for boomers now, sorry, vices Amelia Tate argued in January. As older adults became familiar with GIFs through the new accessible libraries attached to essentially every app, Gifts became, quote, embarrassing. Tate specifically cites the gif of Leonardo DiCaprio,

Starting point is 00:13:37 raising a toast in 2013's The Great Gatsby, and I agree. It's viscerally humiliating to be reminded of that movie. The future is dark for gifts. Tate suggested, quote, will they soon disappear forever? Like Homer Simpson backing up into a hedge, end quote. Then, from Fast Company, a check-in with a company that we don't get to, to talk about very often. Quote, one of the tech darlings to come out of the great recession of the late 2000s, Kickstarter, popularized crowdfunding. Since its founding in 2009, its platform has helped to raise $5 billion, launched more than

Starting point is 00:14:12 220,000 projects, including businesses like Oculus, Allbirds, and Peloton. The number of funded projects on the site is reaching new heights, and this year, 54% of all projects have hit their funding goals, steadily up from less than 43% in 2018. But the past couple of years haven't been entirely smooth sailing for the company, and now a new CEO is hoping to get it back on course. It started late in 2019 when word got out that the company seemed embroiled in an acrimonious employee effort to unionize, leading to rumors of broader staff discontent and threats of boycotts. Then in 2020, after the pandemic caused a reported 35% plunge in new projects listed on the site, Kickstarter cut and estimated 40% of its staff through layoffs and buyouts.

Starting point is 00:14:53 Last October, the company shuttered its stylish Brooklyn head. headquarters in favor of all remote work. Then in December, the company announced it would rebuild itself in some mysterious way around blockchain and crypto, leading to an uproar from the community and derision of Kickstarter as a company clumsily groping for traction. In March, CEO Aziz Hassan announced he was leaving with no permanent replacement in sight. This week, as Fast Company reported, Kickstarter finally announced that replacement. Everett Taylor, the former chief marketing officer for online art site artsy. Taylor's first order of business will be to redirect the buzz around Kickstarter and dispel the notion that the company is flailing with its best days behind it, end quote.

Starting point is 00:15:33 Then from the BBC, a story about, well, computer errors from space, quote, when computers go wrong, we tend to assume it's just some software hiccup, a bit of bad programming, but ionizing radiation, including rays of protons blasted towards us by the sun can also be the cause. These incidents called single event upsets are rare, and it can be impossible to be sure that cosmic rays were involved in a specific malfunction because they leave no trace behind them. And yet they have been singled out as the possible culprits behind numerous extraordinary cases of computer failure. From a vote-counting machine that added thousands of non-existent votes to a candidate's

Starting point is 00:16:14 tally, to a commercial airliner that suddenly dropped hundreds of feet mid-flight, injuring dozens of passengers. As human society only becomes more dependent on digital technology, it's worth asking how big a risk cosmic rays posed to our way of life. Not least because, with the continuing miniaturization of microchip technology, the charge required to corrupt data is getting smaller all the time, meaning it is actually getting easier for cosmic rays to have this effect. Plus, since giant ejections from the sun can sometimes send huge waves of particles towards Earth, what's called space weather, an unnerving prospect looms. We could see much more disruption to computers than were used to during a massive geomagnetic storm in the future, end quote.

Starting point is 00:16:59 And finally today, since I mentioned the movie Glenn Gary Glenn Ross this week, earlier this month, in honor of the film's 30th anniversary, Vanity Fair had an oral history about how that coffee is for closers scene got made. If you know this movie at all, you know it for from the scene. Again, this is an oral history, so first, this is the director James Foley, quote, In terms of rehearsal with Alec Baldwin, I had one day with him. He had the whole scene memorized. I said, why don't we just read this and see what happens? And he got up in this room with me as the audience and he did the scene. And I'm not exaggerating. I was never more positive in my life. I said, stop. It's over. Rehearsal over. See you on set. Because what he did was exactly what he did

Starting point is 00:17:44 in the movie. There was nothing to say because that came out of him organically. Then this is Alec Baldwin. Being so verbally and psychologically abusive to these guys was not something I was looking forward to. My recollection is that James said to me, this is like Patton. He's referring to the movie Patton. He slaps the soldier in the tent. You call yourself a soldier. In my mind, it was you call yourself a salesman. I'm Patton in the medical tent and I need them to get out there and die on that hill. So I'm here to slap not one, but all of them. When you are doing a scene, you have to say to yourself, why is this person doing this? Does it make sense?

Starting point is 00:18:19 What authorizes this person? End quote. And then finally, this is fully again. Quote, when Alex is far away and Jack is pouring the coffee and Jack, they're referring to Jack Lemon, who is the real star of this movie, in my opinion. And Jack has his back to him, and Alex says, put that coffee down. We didn't plan it out that Jack would have his back to Alec. He was just pouring coffee, and Jack didn't turn around immediately.

Starting point is 00:18:43 his back responds first. You can see that when he turns around. He's already been hit. The fact that they were as far from each other as they can be did not come out of some master plan. I'm not an actor. I don't as a director sit down and decide how the actors act on what line when they turn around. That has to be discovered, end quote. Once again, no bonus episode this week, though Chris and I are planning to do a Twitter space next week, so we'll have something for you soon. I promise. Good weekend, everyone. My weekend project this weekend is, I recently signed up for an Apple One subscription account, like I told you, since my kids love Apple Arcade and Apple TV Plus and then, you know, backing up their iPads. I thought, you know, why not? Let's get a Family ICloud storage

Starting point is 00:19:37 plan. Now, my wife has all this time been paying $9.99 a month for her personal ICloud storage. So the project this weekend is, can we shift her over to the Family ICloud account without losing all of her stuff. It's unclear. And if anyone at Apple is listening, it's just really not that clear. Believe me, I've been Googling around. Like, if you upgrade one ICloud account to an Apple One account, it's easy. If it's yours, it's straightforward. But how do we move hers over? The steps are kind of opaque. So wish us luck. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 10/14 – Meta Lied About Legs?

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