Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, June 15, 2018 - Oprah Signs With Apple

Episode Date: June 15, 2018

Oprah signs with Apple, but OLEDs aren’t working out for Apple, Netflix has a hidden source for teen comedy hits, the weekend longreads suggestions, and, if you can believe it, William Shatner’s new gig. Stories from: @mochi_wsj, @McLauchlin Links:APPLE’S ORIGINAL CONTENT IS FURTHER ALONG THAN YOU THINK (LoupVentures)Netflix’s latest hit ‘The Kissing Booth’ is a Wattpad success story (TechCrunch)How Batteries Went From Primitive Power to Global Domination (Bloomberg)William Shatner's new enterprise: A solar-powered bitcoin mining farm in southern Illinois (Chicago Tribune) Weekend Longreads Suggestions:The Time Canada Wanted Its Own Internet Because It Thought the US Would Mess It Up (Motherboard)Instagram’s Wannabe-Stars Are Driving Luxury Hotels Crazy (The Atlantic)HOW THE TRENDIEST GRILLED-CHEESE VENTURE GOT BURNT (Wired)THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE RACY MODULE THAT ALMOST RUINED D&D (Wired) 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, June 15th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Oprah signs with Apple, but OLEDs aren't working out for Apple.

Netflix has a hidden source for teen romantic comedy hits, the weekend long read suggestions, and, if you can believe it, William Shatner's new gig. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So, as I've been saying, all the excitement is, is going to be in the media space for a while. Oprah Winfrey has signed a multi-year deal for new original programming to be produced for Apple. Oprah is expected to have an on-screen role as host and interviewer, not just produce shows,

though that's part of it as well. Apple is calling this content deal a, quote, unique multi-year content partnership that will allow Oprah to create original programs that embrace her incomparable ability to connect with audiences around the world, end quote. Sources tell the Hollywood Reporter that this was a, quote, competitive situation with other tech giants, likely including Netflix and Amazon, all pursuing similar deals, end quote. The deal won't be exclusive. Oprah still has the own network, after all. But the Hollywood Reporter also points out, interestingly, that the deal won't just be for shows, but also for film, apps, books, and other content. which makes sense because Apple can distribute all that stuff.

Netflix, not so much. I've been trying to keep you up to date on all this, but Apple has been signing similar content deals recently with the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steven Spielberg, among many others. But as recode notes, quote, Apple still hasn't told the world, or most people in Hollywood,

including some of the ones it is making deals with, what it plans to do with all the stuff it is making. except that it won't be ready to roll that stuff out until the spring of 2019 at the earliest, end quote. At the same time today, good old Gene Munster was out with a piece suggesting that Apple's original content project is actually further along than you might think. Gene is always very excitable when it comes to Apple, of course, but I'll link to his research report in the show notes so you can check it out for yourself, quoting from it, content could ultimately account for $10 to $15 billion in annual revenue and 3 to 5% of overall Apple revenue in coming years. As a comparison, Netflix will do $16 billion in revenue this year 2018.

So Gene is basically suggesting that Apple wants to grow an entire Netflix inside Cupertino. And that would be great, but it would still only account for at most 5% of Apple's yearly revenue. What was I saying yesterday about the entire entertainment industry, possibly becoming tiny divisions of the giant tech companies in about five or six years or so? There was also a fairly big Apple rumor floated by the Wall Street Journal today. When the iPhone 10 launched last year, it was the first iPhone to feature an OLED screen, as Apple has a habit of launching major new features at the high end and then moving those features down its product lineup over time.

many expected that the same thing would happen with OLED screens. But sources are telling the journal this might not be the case. According to the piece, Apple has been underwhelmed by the demand for the iPhone 10, and perhaps that weaker demand was caused by the iPhone 10's price tag, which starts at $999. What was the main reason the iPhone 10 was more expensive? OLED screens are more expensive than LCD screens. The iPhone 8 starts at only $699, and the 8 plus at $799 because they have LCD screens.

Perhaps it turns out that OLED screens aren't really a big enough wow factor to encourage people to pay up for them. Thus, today's journal piece suggests that Apple now believes that for the foreseeable future, most of the phones that it sells will have LCD displays in them, even when the new iPhones come out later this year. This is not suggesting that Apple is abandoning OLED, just that it is tweaking its production expectations and making the bet that the cheaper LED models will continue to be the more popular ones. Quoting from the Wall Street Journal piece, Apple's new iPhone lineup coming this fall

includes two OLED models and one LCD model, people familiar with the plan have said. Jucey Hong, an analyst at IHS, said he expected all three new models, including the LCD one, which share the iPhone 10's look to give consumers who upgrade from one LCD phone to another a new feel. But industry executives with direct knowledge of production plans said Apple initially wanted roughly equal production of the two screen types.

Now they say Apple plans to make more of the LCD model anticipating that consumers would lean towards the cheaper. It's been a bad day for popular apps. All day long there were scattered reports on social. media that Apple Maps was experiencing outages. The app would display direction not available when some users were attempting to navigate using Apple Maps. Later in the day, Apple acknowledged the issue and said it was investigating ongoing issues and said that, quote, all users are affected. So if you're using maps to navigate your way home while you're listening to the

tech meme ride home, possibly stick to Ways or Google Maps for the time being. Also, an Update to Facebook Messenger that was pushed out yesterday for Messenger on iOS is apparently causing people no end of problems as well. Crashing frequently. Tapping on notifications can cause Messenger to crash. Tapping to another app and then coming back can cause it to crash. No doubt this will be fixed sooner rather than later, as Facebook, of course, has a habit of updating its apps seemingly every other day. In that story from earlier this week that went deep into Netflix and how it operates, Ted Serendos specifically mentioned a Netflix original movie by the name of The Kissing Booth,

calling it, quote, one of the most watched movies in the country and maybe in the world. In IMDB's popularity rankings right now, it's the number four movie behind Deadpool, Avengers Infinity War, and Solo. Jacob Allorty is the male lead. Three weeks ago on the IMDB Starometer, which is how they ranked their popularity, he was number 25,000. Today he's the number one star in the world. King, the female lead, went from like number 17,000 to number six. This is a movie that I bet you'd never heard of

until I just mentioned it to you, end quote. So yeah, Ted, I had never heard of that, and I found that little exchange interesting. A niche teen rom-com that is quietly this huge, gigantic hit. And we'll never know it's a hit because, well, we're not the demographic, of course. But also, since Netflix doesn't release any audience numbers,

There's no headlines in variety about Bafo box office. So when I saw this piece in TechCrunch, I was super curious to follow up about this phenomenon. And it turns out that there's even more to the story of The Kissing Booth. Have you ever heard of Wattpad? I actually vaguely remember hearing about it. It's a website and a mobile app where writers can just upload their original stories and readers can read and then comment on them.

imagine a band camp or SoundCloud, but instead of for music, it's for fan fiction, slash fiction, literary fiction, fiction, fiction, apparently Wattpad gets 65 million visitors every month, and readers spend 15 billion minutes per month reading the stories there. And also, Wattpad is super popular among teens. So it turns out that the original story for the kissing booth was posted on WattPath. had back in 2011, and it became very popular. It won one of that Cites Wadi Awards that year in the most popular teen fiction category. It was read 19 million times. The author, Beth Riekels, who was then only 17 years old, landed a three-book deal with

Random House in the UK in 2013 on the strength of the kissing booth. Then Hollywood producers reached out. The movie was produced by Netflix, and the rest is not. now history. Quote, the kissing booth is a great example of what is possible on Wattpad. So says Aaron Levitt's head of Wattpad Studios, which helps make media deals for Wattpad authors. Quoting again, Beth was a fresh new voice whose story connected with millions of readers all over the world on Wattpad before becoming a published book. We were able to work with Netflix to market the film on Wattpad and make sure the stories fans around the world hit play when it started

streaming, and now it's one of the most popular movies on the planet, end quote. And there might be more where that came from. TechCrunch reports that, quote, Sony Pictures, television acquired the rights to Watpad's story, Death is My BFF, which was read more than 92 million times, and Hulu gave a straight to series order to Light as a Feather, which saw more than 2.9 million wattpad reads. Cupid's Match, which had over 36 million reads, got a pilot. on CWC. So lithium ion battery technology

has been around for about 30 years now. You probably encountered these type of batteries in camcorders in the 1990s or maybe early digital cameras or if you were lucky enough to own an early cell phone, you had a lithium ion battery inside of that. It's actually sort of cliche to point this out

but our modern gadget culture would never be where it is if lithium ion had never come along. Can you imagine all of us lugging around a AAA batteries to pop in and power our phones every day. I actually imagine us walking around with Chewbacca-style bandoliers filled with batteries to make sure we were never out of juice. But interestingly enough, gadgets are no longer the biggest consumers of lithium-ion batteries. Sometime in 2015, electric vehicles, past gadgets and computers and electronic razors,

etc., as the biggest demand source for lithium ion technology. If you look at a chart showing the demand curves, as in the Bloomberg piece that I'm sourcing this segment from, the EV line is like a hockey stick, going ever upward and blowing past and leaving behind the electronics line, which while it's still growing, is growing rather gently. Quote, we are at an inflection point. Each year we will beat the previous year,

said Ravi Mangani, a ball. Boston-based storage analyst at GTM research, quote, it's definitely an oh wow moment. It turns out that one million electric vehicles like Tesla's consume the same amount of lithium ion batteries as literally every other device in the world. Between 2014 and 2017, electric vehicles use of lithium ion quadrupled to 71,000 megawatt hours.

By 2025, that number is projected to approach 400, megawatt hours. Battery-powered electric vehicles still only account for about 1.2% of auto sales worldwide right now, but of course that number is expected only to go up. And what else is on the horizon? I don't know, things like electric scooters, electric ferries, and even airplanes. Quoting from the Bloomberg piece, quote, greater use will create a feedback loop, making batteries more competitive in other markets.

More batteries for electric vehicles will make for cheaper batteries, said Logan Goody Scott, a San Francisco-based analyst at BNEF. That means more batteries and more things. I usually like to tee up the long reeds with a sort of quasi-long read like that last segment, so that means it's time for the long reads proper. We'll start out with a piece in motherboard, with a title that sums the whole subject up. The time Canada wanted its own internet because it thought the U.S. would mess it up. This was back in the 1970s when the Internet was almost intense.

entirely the domain of academia and the U.S. Defense Department. And commerce was actually illegal at that point on the net, and you and I were never even supposed to be on there. Canada decided it wanted to build its own nationwide system of networked computers to be called the Trans-Canada Computer Communications Network, or TCCN, and the piece of motherboard outlines what the network was supposed to look like and also what its goals were. In short, the Canadians wanted to make sure American consumerism didn't take over the net.

Internal Canadian politics eventually doomed the project, quoting from the piece, the Council's report recommended a five-year study, but the network itself never materialized. A follow-up report released by the Science Council in 1973 suggests that it had all but abandoned the concept of a Canadian-owned network utility, moving towards incentive structures for Canada's computer industry, such as preferential treatment for federal contracts, and import tariffs on foreign technology, end quote. It is a glimpse of a different kind of internet, though, when that sort of thing was still conceptually possible. This one is pretty self-explanatory as well.

The title in the Atlantic is Instagram's wannabe stars are driving luxury hotels crazy. If you want to be Insta-fabulous, you have to look like you're leading your best life as a jet-setting luxury vacation-taking poolside posing superstar, of course. That calls for just the right shot, just the right setting. Oh, and your fabulous Poolside Villa should also be comped as well.

Quoting from the piece, Kate Jones, marketing and communications manager at Ducet Thani, a five-star resort in the Maldives, said that her hotel receives at least six requests from self-described influencers per day, typically through Instagram direct message. Everyone with a Facebook these days

is an influencer, she said. People say, I want to come to the Maldives for 10 days and will do two posts on Instagram to like 2,000 followers. It's people with 600 Facebook friends saying, Hi, I'm an influencer. I want to stay in your hotel for seven days, she said. Others send vague one-line emails like,

I want to collaborate with you, with no further explanation. These people are expecting five to seven nights on average all-inclusive. Maldives is not a cheap destination. She said that only about 10% of the requests she receives are worth investigating, end quote. Some hotels, like, like the ACE actually have resorted to a formalized application process to separate the influencer wheat from the influencer chaff.

Wired has the story of Jonathan Kaplan, who founded pure digital technologies, which made those flip video cameras that were so popular in like the half a second before smartphones became ubiquitous. Kaplan successfully sold that company to Cisco for $590 million. But as often happens with founders, he wanted to change the world a second time. So he opened the melt,

a chain of fast, casual, grilled cheese and soup shops that he hoped to have in 500 locations by this point. It hasn't exactly turned out that way, but Kaplan actually cooperated with this article, so this isn't a hit piece about Silicon Valley Hubris so much as it's a reminder that not knowing anything about an industry that you're trying to enter can help you disrupt it sometimes, read Airbnb,

be. Sometimes not knowing what's impossible can actually lead you to accomplish the impossible, but sometimes you should maybe know a little bit about what you're trying to do, and also maybe focus on making grilled cheese sandwiches that actually taste good. Finally, a story for you fuddy-duddies like me out there, also from Wired, an oral history of the Palace of the Silver Princess, still the hardest to find Dungeons and Dragons module in existence. Because D&D was socially controversial at the time and because this module in particular was more racy and more overtly sexual than anything D&D had done before,

it was yanked from shelves shortly after release and has subsequently passed into nerd legend. All of the links to all of the long read suggestions are in the show notes, as always. Speaking of nerd stuff, I really can't resist many. mentioning that William Shatner has a new gig. He's the spokesperson for Solar Alliance, a Vancouver-based developer of alternative energy projects that announced plans to build a solar-powered Bitcoin mining operation

in an abandoned factory in Southern Illinois. Oh, 2018, I love you. Captain Kirk apparently got involved with Solar Alliance after they installed solar panels on his California home. And I'll just leave you with this quote from Shepard. Statener attempting to explain not just his interest in Solar Alliance, but also his interest in Bitcoin, and I guess Bitcoin in general. Quote, the concept is so, I guess the word is bizarre.

You have to blank your mind and say, what is blockchain again? How does mining operate again? The concepts are really strange, and yet when you begin to grasp it, it makes sense, end quote. I was really tempted to try a Shatner impression there, but in the end, I decided to spare you. And that's all for today. Happy Father's Day to all of you fathers out there. Happy birthday to my boy Max, who turns two tomorrow.

And happy World Cup, everyone. How about that Spain-Portugal match? Really won for the ages. I remember in the late 90s there was a Champions League game between, I want to say Manchester United and maybe Barcelona, that was sort of like that, where it was back and forth, probably ended 4-4 or 4-3 or something like that. Patrick Clybert was involved. That's all I can really remember. Anyway, since the U.S. didn't qualify this year, that means I'm free to root unashamedly for England.

The whole reason I got into soccer originally was because I was in London during Euro96. I fell in love with the English team. I fell in love with the Premier League. And ever since, the one thing that I yearn for more than anything else in sport is for England to someday win a major tournament. Don't get me wrong, I'd love for Arsenal to win the Premier League. I'd love for the Florida Gators to win a national championship in American football. But really, I won't be complete as a sporting fan until England wins a major trophy like, hey, the World Cup. Good luck to your team, whoever you're rooting for, whatever nation that might be.

B, the download stats say that 27% of you are overseas. So I hope you're enjoying and that your team does well. And especially good look to Iceland, who is my dark horse favorite to do better than most people think in this tournament. Have a good weekend, everyone. Enjoy the games. I'll leave you with the dulcet tones of William Shatner from a vintage price line ad from the year 2000. You want it. You want it?

Baby, just bust a move. I wanted to chill, but making all of my travel arrangements was freaking me out. So I went to Priceline.com, we could name your own price for some dope airfare, a hip hotel, a fly rental car. You want some of this? Then you know what to do, dog. Bustamoo!