Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/11 - Disney+ Is About to Get a Bit More Expensive

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

Disney+ is about to get a bit more expensive, but you’re also gonna get a lot more stuff to watch. Are we in a tech IPO bubble? X64 emulation comes to Windows. Apple whispers that it will likely be dropping Qualcomm like it dropped Intel. And of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Amazon.com/ridehome Tinycapital.com Links: Disney Plus is increasing its price to $8 a month starting in March 2021 (The Verge) ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Pinocchio’ and More as Disney Leans Sharply Into Streaming (NYTimes) Airbnb skyrockets 112% in public market debut, giving it a market cap of $86.5 billion (CNBC) x64 emulation has come to Windows on ARM (The Verge) Apple Starts Work on Its Own Cellular Modem, Chip Chief Says (Bloomberg) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Social Strikes Back (A16Z) “A damn stupid thing to do”—the origins of C (Ars Technica) 7 Rejections (Brian Chesky) Facebook Sees WhatsApp As Its Future, Antitrust Suit or Not (Bloomberg Businessweek) Who’s Behind the Fight Between Warner Bros. and Hollywood? It’s AT&T (NYTimes) Inside the Human Science of Spotify’s New Music Friday Playlist (Variety) How eBird Changed Birding Forever (Outside) 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 TechMeme ride home for Friday, December 11th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Disney Plus is about to get a bit more expensive, but you're also going to get a lot more stuff to watch. Are we in a tech IPO bubble at this point? X-64 emulation comes to Windows. Apple whispers that it will likely be dropping Qualcomm like it dropped Intel, and of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. How many times have I said this this year? I can't believe that covering Disney is now part of the scope of covering tech news. But here we are. Disney yesterday held a multi-hour event for investors where they outlined their streaming strategy going forward.

They unveiled, for example, Star, the answer to Hulu for international Disney Plus customers rolling out in some EU countries, Canada and New Zealand on February 28. They also introduced a new bundle in the U.S. where you can now get Disney Plus, ESPN Plus. and ad-free Hulu for only $18.99 a month. But the bigger news was Disney is also raising the cost of standalone Disney Plus by a dollar. It will now be $7.99 a month in the U.S. starting in March. The better, the company says, to invest in new content offerings. Quoting Julia Alexander and the Verge.

This is the first time that Disney Plus has received a price hike. It arrives just a couple months after Netflix announced it was increasing prices for subscribers in the United States, including raising its most popular plan from $13 to $14 a month. Although it seems early for a Disney Plus hike, the announcement comes amidst a flurry of other announcements over TV shows and movies heading to Disney Plus. The more that Disney spends on content for its service, the more revenue Disney needs to invest. When Netflix's Greg Peters, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, was asked about price hikes, he said Netflix, quote, will occasionally go back and ask customers to pay a little bit more to keep that virtuous cycle of investment and value creation going,

end quote. Disney is now doing the same thing, end quote. Did someone say a flurry of new content announcements? Yes, here you go. This was all from yesterday, quoting the New York Times. Disney unveiled a blitz of new Star Wars projects, including 10 television shows, two of which will be Mandalorian spin-offs, another that will follow C-3PO and R2D2, and a new theatrical film, Rogue Squadron, by Patty Jenkins of Wonder Woman fame. Ms. Jenkins will be the first female filmmaker in the 43-year history of the Star Wars movie franchise. At least 15 Disney-branded movies are in the works for Disney Plus, with new installments in the Ice Age, Night at the Museum, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, sister act, and cheaper by the dozen franchises on the way. Amy Adams will star in a sequel to

the 2007 musical Enchanted, while Tom Hanks will appear as Geppetto in a live-action Pinocchio. and multiple sports dramas fill out the slate. Pixar, it has a cluster of shows en route to Disney Plus, including one that seeks to revive the Cars movie and toy franchise. Marvel, it is chipping in at least 10 series with Ms. Marvel, about a Pakistani-American superhero as won. National Geographic, another Disney Division, also announced a flurry of Disney Plus shows,

including an endurance-focused series starring Chris Hemsworth of Thor fame, and directed by the Oscar winner Darren Aronofsky. We obviously didn't have time to show you everything, Mr. Eiger said at the presentation's three and a half hour mark. In all, Disney announced 100 projects. Disney Plus programming costs ran about $2 billion this year. The service's annual content budget will be roughly $8.5 billion in 2024, the company said, end quote. But all investors really cared about yesterday was news on the subscription numbers, right? And there's good news on that front as well. Remember when Disney Plus launched 13 months ago, they said that they hoped to have 60 to 90 million subscribers by 2024.

They announced yesterday 86.8 million Disney Plus subscribers. The company now forecasts 230 to 260 million subscribers they hope to have on Disney Plus by 2024. Overall, Disney currently has 137.1 million direct-to-consumer subscribers. 86.8 million at Disney Plus, 38.8 million on Hulu, and 11.5 million for ESPN Plus. The other big news yesterday was the Airbnb Pop. Airbnb finally opened trading at $146 a share and closed the day at $144 a share up from its $68 IPO price, more than doubling its IPO valuation

and achieving an $86.5 billion market cap. Remember when Uber hoped to go. go public at a $100 billion valuation, it looks like Airbnb is more likely to hit that mark sooner than Uber. Remember, in the depths of the pandemic when Airbnb's revenues all but evaporated, some investors gave them a lifeline at an $18 billion valuation. That was mere months ago. Airbnb had only been valued at $31 billion before the pandemic. So, yeah, investors seem to really like to scoop up tech startup IPOs at the moment. Quoting CEO Brian Chesky on CNBC yesterday, quote, Chesky says he isn't too concerned about

valuation. Quote, I don't think I'm going to worry much more than in April and May when we saw our business drop 80% in eight weeks in the middle of a pandemic, he said, end quote. Can I tell you this, though, if you put your ear to the ground right now anywhere in Silicon Valley, you'll hear literally every single startup that is even remotely close to even considering, maybe even thinking about filing to go public, all rushing to make that happen yesterday. Yes, there probably is a bubble in startup IPOs at the moment, but here's the thing about bubbles. They're sort of like a game of musical chairs. You can make a ton of money and be sitting pretty as long as there are greater fools around to give you a seat before the music stops.

Microsoft has released a preview of X-64 emulation on Windows for Arm for Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel, quoting the Verge. Microsoft is finally releasing X-64 emulation on Windows for Arm to testers today after announcing that the feature was coming back in September. The feature will allow users to run 64-bit apps that haven't yet been compiled for their arm-powered devices. This means that if you just got one of the new Surface Pro X's, and, are willing to jump through some hoops and install a Windows update long before it's ready for public release. Microsoft says you should be able to play games like Rocket League or run productivity apps like Autodesk's sketchbook. Whether they'll run well is a different question. Windows on Arms emulation has been pretty rough in the past, but even running an app poorly is better

than not being able to run it at all. Just don't expect to see the same emulation performance that your Arm Mac brethren have been seeing. Microsoft hasn't yet said when the emulation will be coming to the main builds of Windows, but says that it, quote, looks forward to the feedback from our Windows insider community, end quote. And Mark German's sources are telling him that Apple's senior vice president of hardware tech, Johnny Sruji, told staff that Apple has begun working on its own cellular modems for future devices to replace the Qualcomm chips Apple currently uses. Qualcomm shares dropped 4.4% on the news this morning, quote, This year we kicked off the development of our first internal cellular modem which will enable another key strategic transition,

Sruji said in a town hall meeting. Long-term strategic investments like these are a critical part of enabling our products and making sure we have a rich pipeline of innovative technologies for our future, end quote. Seruji said the $1 billion acquisition of Intel's modem business in 2019 helped Apple build a team of hardware and software engineers to develop its own cellular modem. He said the modem is one of a few wireless chips the company designs, including the W-series in the Apple Watch, and the U-1 ultra-wideband chip in the iPhone for precise location information. The latest iPhones with 5G use parts from Qualcomm. Before that, Apple use Intel parts for a few years and then purchase that business unit from the chipmaker. Serugi did not say when the cellular modem would be ready to ship in products,

but a 2019 patent agreement between Apple and Qualcomm includes a six-year licensing pact. Qualcomm charges license fees to phone makers based on wireless patents it owns, regardless of whether they use its chips or not, end quote. Of course, what did you think Apple was going to do when it bought Intel's modem unit? But talk about being the only company that can do the harmony between hardware and software like no one else because they do both? At this point, what is the major hardware component of especially iPhones that is left that Apple still depends on a third party for? Maybe they should buy corning for the glass and then maybe get into battery tech and then basically, bang, the whole stack is complete. Time for the weekend long read suggestions.

First up, our friends at Andreessen Horowitz cooked up a package of nine huge essays making the argument that, well, let me quote their argument directly, quote, until recently it was commonly accepted that social was done. The market had been fully saturated. The thinking went dominated by the Holy Trinity of Facebook. Twitter and Instagram. Turns out, rumors of social's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Not only are we seeing the rise of innovative new social networks from the ear share of clubhouse to the seamless interactivity of cloud gaming, but having a social component has become a powerful acquisition and retention tool for every consumer product across education, shopping, fitness, food, entertainment, and more. In this series, we reveal what the new social looks like, the forces that are driving it, and how to build it, end quote.

We will, by the way, be talking this weekend to A16Z's Connie Chan for the bonus episodes, so maybe check out these essays ahead of time to get ahead of the curve. This week's bit of tech history is Ars Technica's piece on the Origins of the Sea programming language, quote. There was little thought given to expanding the language that had been developed for Edsack 2. In the early 1960s, it was common to think, we are building a new computer so we need a new programming language, David Hartley recalled in a 2017 podcast, along with David Wheeler and David Barron, Hartley would be involved in the early development of this new computer's programming language.

Quote, the new operating system was inevitable, according to Hartley, but a new programming language was not. We thought this was an opportunity to have fun with a new language, which, in hindsight, was a damn stupid thing to do, end quote. Next, a couple of items that are newsy from just the news of the week. Back in 2015, Brian Chesky posted seven rejection email. to medium emails that he got back when Airbnb was attempting to raise $150,000 at a one and a half million dollar valuation. For $150,000, you could have bought 10% of Airbnb. Don't know how much that would be diluted down at this point, but you'd be looking at what? How many billions of

dollars today? So I thought it would be fun to share Brian's share of those rejection letters this week. Next, given the Facebook antitrust news, I thought this Bloomberg business week piece about how Facebook sees WhatsApp as its future was quite interesting. For Facebook, a company that makes 99% of its revenue from advertising, WhatsApp presents a chance to diversify its business and protect itself from erosion and enthusiasm for its core social networking apps. Eventually, Facebook believes, it can control the entire exchange between a brand and its customer, starting with an ad on Facebook or Instagram and leading to an interaction or product sale on WhatsApp or Messenger. Instagram and Facebook and Facebook,

Facebook are the storefront, says WhatsApp chief operating officer Matt Edema. WhatsApp is the cash register, end quote. And the fallout from HBO Max, Warner Brothers, movie slate, all that stuff continues. A piece from the New York Times makes the point that AT&T was sanguine about pissing off half of Hollywood because AT&T doesn't really care about Hollywood. They're in an entirely different ballgame, quote. A strategy that strikes autores and cinema diehards as dysfunction. functional, makes perfect sense to Mezzar's Killar and Stanky.

AT&T's primary focus is its wireless service, a $71 billion a year business. WarnerMedia generates half of that. More important, the wireless industry brings in significantly more money than the entertainment business, and it does so in a much more efficient manner. AT&T's wireless division makes three times the pre-tax profit brought in by Warner Media. Mr. Killar did not endear himself to the entertainment establishment during his time at Hulu, and now he seems to have aggravated the content creators who make Hollywood run. But the company he works for has very little in common with other entertainment outfits.

For AT&T, HBO Max isn't just a way to make money, but serves as an incentive to keep phone customers from defecting to its rivals. Every 0.01% of customers who stay glued to AT&T are worth about $100 million to the company, end quote. Variety takes a look at the secret sauce behind Spotify's New Music Friday playlist. It's become a majorly powerful launching pad for new songs and artists. And surprise, it's actively curated the old-fashioned way by human tastemakers. How very quaint, quote, Any weekly collection of 100 relatively high-profile new songs is going to land on a hit pretty often.

But as one of Spotify's playlist that is entirely curated by human beings, the platform's vaunted recommendation algorithm plays no direct role. High placement is a collective co-sign from the streaming giants team of editors, the professional tastemakers who curate its hundreds of playlists. It's fully editorial, as we describe it, based on a mix of cultural significance and exposing people to new music, says Ned Monaghan, Spotify's head of global hits. Yes, that's an actual title. Who joined the company last December from Interscope Records and oversees New Music Friday,

today's top hits and other playlists with global hits lead Becky Bass. It's also one of a kind for Spotify in that it has music from so many different genres and subgenres, and it's a very collaborative effort that includes genre editors and international markets. We highlight the songs that will probably get the most streams at the top and work in a handful of songs into the top 30 that people might not have heard of, which are often independent. It's important for us to serve both of those purposes, end quote. And finally, talk about old-fashioned or new-fashioned giving life to the old-fashioned. Outside magazine takes a look at E-bird, the online platform that has become the go-to place for bird watching, and by doing so,

has changed the process and etiquette of birding itself. Quote, at its most basic level, e-bird documents bird sightings. A team at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology created the platform in 2002, and it became widely used by birders within a few years. As of 2020, it has collected more than 860 million global bird observations from over 597,000 registered e-birders. By sheer numbers alone, e-bird is one of the world's largest citizen science projects. It's now used to understand species distributions, population trends, migration pathways, and even habitat use. At least 120 million observations are submitted per year, many through the handy e-bird app, a kind of Strava, Yelp, Pokemon Go hybrid for birders. The app doesn't ID birds for you,

Cornell offers another app called Merlin for that, but instead provides an easy way to record and upload the birds you spot. To log sightings, you start a checklist, similar to the way you'd start a run on a smartwatch, and the app automatically pulls in your location via GPS. Although eBird is primarily an observation tool and a scientific database, the site still allows users to size each other up. Anyone can view rankings of the top E-Birders in different hotspots, counties, states, and entire countries. You can even peruse a list of the top 100 e-Birders, birders in the world. These types of competitive lists have birthed trends like the endless big years in which birders constantly compete to see who can spot the most species in a year. In turn,

such fads have spurred counter initiatives like the five-mile radius challenge, which encourages birders to enjoy birds in local areas rather than seeking them out in far-flung places. Local birding has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic as many work from home and explore their own backyards, end quote. Yeah, maybe I'm imagining it, or maybe it's just who I follow on Twitter, but has anyone else noticed that birding has seemed to have gotten pretty popular lately among tech folks? Well, you know, I do live a block away from Prospect Park. Maybe I should do a non-video game activity with the kids this weekend. If you do go out birding this weekend, I've got a great podcast for you to listen to while you're trekking, a weekend bonus episode chat with A16Z's

Connie Chan about the future of social in video. Hint, it's a lot about education and shopping and a lot of other things. Ties in, actually a lot of the threads we've been pulling on lately. Shopify, TikTok, Solopreneur influencer businesses, very, very interesting stuff. Look for that tomorrow afternoon, although of course, I guess half of birding is listening for the birds in order to locate them, so maybe save the podcast for your trek back home. Anyway, talk to you on Monday.