Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 05/17 – Better Quality Streaming Audio (Basically) For Free

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

Apple Music and Amazon Music HD bring better audio quality to everyone. AT&T throws in the towel on Warner Media by doing a shotgun marriage with Discovery. GitHub now lets you add video. Jane Manchun Wong says the subscription service is going to be called Twitter Blue. And what we might be able to expect from Google’s I/O tomorrow. Sponsors: Kiwico.com promocode: ride Cybereason.com Links: Apple announces lossless Apple Music is coming in June at no added cost (The Verge) Amazon Music Drops HD Tier to $9.99, Shaking Up Hi-Fi Streaming Market (Billboard) AT&T to spin off and combine WarnerMedia with Discovery in deal that would create streaming giant (CNN Business) Microsoft Teams launches for friends and family with free all-day video calling (The Verge) GitHub now lets all developers upload videos to demo bugs and features (Venture Beat) ‘Twitter Blue’ subscription service to include undo tweets feature and ‘Collections,’ priced at $2.99 (9to5 Mac) Bill Gates Left Microsoft Board Amid Probe Into Prior Relationship With Staffer (Wall Street Journal) Google's Android 12 redesign leaks with theme support, new animations, more (Phone Arena) 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 Tech Meme Right Home for Monday, May 17th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Apple Music and Amazon Music HD bring better quality audio to everyone. AT&T throws in the towel on WarnerMedia by doing a shotgun marriage with Discovery. GitHub now lets you add video. Jane Mansion Wong says the subscription service is going to be called Twitter Blue and what we might be able to expect from Google's I.O. tomorrow. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Apple says it will bring lossless audio to all Apple Music subscribers for free and will support spatial audio with Dolby Atmos available from June, quoting The Verge.

The company says it will have 75 million lossless audio songs in its catalog by the end of the year and 20 million to begin with. Apple has confirmed to the verge that lossless audio is exclusive to Apple Music and thus subscription only. The company won't offer music, in lossless quality, nor will there be any way to upgrade owned tracks to lossless with the paid iTunes match service. To turn on lossless audio, subscribers must run the latest version of Apple Music and go to settings, music, and then audio quality. There they can opt into different resolutions for different connections like cellular, Wi-Fi, or for download. Apple Music's lossless audio starts at CD quality, which is 16-bit at 44.1 kilohertz.

and goes up to 24-bit at 48 kilohertz natively on Apple devices. It tops out at 24-bit at 192 kilohertz. For the highest quality, high-resolution lossless experience, there's one major catch. Subscribers will need external equipment like a DAC to enjoy it. Spatial audio and Dolby Atmos audio could prove to be an even bigger deal for Apple music listeners. It will provide more immersive mixes for anyone listening through recent AirPods or beats headphones that use the H-1 or W-1 chip.

Spatial audio will also play through the built-in speakers on the latest versions of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac by default. To turn it on for other headphones, users will have to go to Settings, Music, Audio, and set Dolby Atmos to Always On. Spatial audio will be compatible with most Apple devices made in the last few years, including the Apple TV 4K connected to a compatible TV or receiver, end quote. Now, not to be outdone, though it is unclear to me, who actually announced first this morning,

Amazon Music HD is now available to Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers for free, effectively cutting Amazon's high-fi service price from $14.99 a month to $9.99 per month, quoting Bloomberg. Amazon Music HD is now available to Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers for free, effectively cutting the hi-fi services price from $14.99 per month to $9.99 per month. Quoting Billboard. The move is a first in the music industry, where high-fidelity streaming options routinely cost $19.99 a month, before Amazon Music HD arrived in September 2019, forcing competitors like Deezer and Cubas

to lower the price of their high-fidelity plans to $14.99. Title is still selling its high-fidelity streaming tier for $19. $1.99 a month. Now Amazon is leading the way once again, effectively cutting the price of high-fidelity music in half within two years. It's something we've all been wanting to do for a long time, says Amazon Music VP Steve Boom. When we launched, we already broke the mold by taking a service that had been $19.99, and really just for the audio file at that price point, and brought it down to something that was much more mass market at $14.99, end quote. Amazon apparently has 70 million songs available in CD quality and over 7 million available in Ultra HD quality. Ah yes, the streaming wars have drawn

first blood. AT&T announced this morning its plans to spin off Warner Media in its entirety and combine it with Discovery in a $43 billion deal. The new company will be run by Discovery CEO David Zazlav, quoting, well, CNN appropriately. On one level, the tie-up is a logical way to better compete with Netflix and Disney, the two top streaming players. On another level, it is also a complex way for AT&T to unwind its 2016 bid for Time Warner, which took effect in 2018 with the assets named Warner Media. The company said they expect the deal to take effect in mid-2020. A spin-off will help AT&T prioritize its broadband business and pay down its huge debt load. AT&T would receive $43 billion, subject to adjustment.

in a combination of cash, debt securities, and Warner Media's retention of certain debt. Monday's announcement said, Zazlov said Monday the new company will start with $55 billion in debt. AT&T shareholders would get the majority of the shares in the combined company at 71% while Discovery shareholders would get 29%. Shares of AT&T were up more than 3% pre-market, while shares of Discovery were up 16%. Prominent Wall Street analysts had been predicting and in some cases encouraging this type of move. Earlier this year, AT&T struck a deal to carve out its satellite business, direct TV, at a significant loss from the 2015 purchase price. And another telecom giant Verizon threw in the

Tao on its content efforts as well, agreeing to sell Yahoo and AOL for $5 billion, end quote. Yeah, but in Verizon's case, that was a clueless acquisition about trying to compete with Google and Facebook. In the Warner Media case, this was a clueless acquisition by AT&T trying to compete with Netflix. How'd that go? A combined HBO Max and Discovery Plus would have 32.2 million subscribers depending on overlap. That still puts them behind Paramount Plus, of all things, which has 36 million subscribers, Hulu with 37.8 million, then Disney Plus is at 103 million subscribers, and all the way at the top of the mountain are Netflix and Amazon Prime above 200 million subscribers each. I believe those are North America numbers. Friend of the podcast, Julia Alexander,

tweeted this timeline, quote, July 2015, led by John Stanky, AT&T acquires direct TV for $48.5 billion, $67 billion with debt. Later in 2015, Stanky becomes CEO of AT&T Entertainment Group. In 2018, led by Stanky, AT&T acquires Time Warner for $85 billion. Later in 2018, Stanky, Stanky, He becomes Werner Media CEO. In July 2020, Stanky becomes AT&T CEO. In March of 2021, AT&T led by Stanky sells direct TV for NADA. May of 2021, AT&T led by Stanky sells Warner Media for question mark, end quote. So quite a feat.

Champion and ride heard on these major acquisitions till you actually get the top job and then you cut loose all of these acquisitions. In the meantime, you also destroy the Tiffany brand of HBO and screw up the final season of Game of Thrones, or is that just being too harsh? After previewing it a year ago, Microsoft has officially launched a personal version of Teams, quoting the Verge. Microsoft Teams is now available for free personal use amongst friends and families. The service itself is almost identical to the Microsoft Teams that businesses use, and it will allow people to chat, video call, and share calendars, locations, and files, easily. Microsoft is also continuing to offer everyone free 24-hour video calls that it introduced in the preview version in November. You'll be able to meet up with up to 300 people in video calls

that can last for 24 hours. Microsoft will eventually enforce limits of 60 minutes per group call of up to 100 people after the pandemic, but keep 24 hours for one-on-one calls. While the preview initially launched on iOS and Android Microsoft teams for personal use now works across the web, mobile, and desktop apps. Microsoft is also allowing teams personal users to enable its Together mode, a feature that uses AI to segment your face and shoulders and place you together with other people in a virtual space. Skype got this same feature back in December, end quote. Which, by the way, I know we give Google tons of guff all the time for their 32 different chat and video products, but have you thought about Skype recently? Seriously.

with her Skype. GitHub. Now let's all users add video to pool requests, discussions, issues, comments, and more. Quoting Venture Beat. Video uploads are designed to help developers visually demonstrate to project maintainers the steps they took when they encountered a bug, for example, or illustrate what a major new code change achieves in terms of functionality. So rather than having to follow potentially confusing step-by-step textual instructions,

the next person to come along can now see exactly what's happening at the other end. This could also be used in conjunction with a voice track, with a narrator explaining the on-screen actions. Native video uploads support helps bypass the cumbersome alternative of recording and uploading a video to a third-party platform and then sharing a link. On that note, GitHub doesn't yet support video unfurling from shared links, but the company said it's working on this feature alongside enabling video annotations for specific pieces of code, end quote. Friend of the pod, Jane Manchin Wong, thanks the name of Twitter's upcoming subscription product, at least the first or maybe the lowest tier, is going to be Twitter Blue, a $2.99 per month's

subscription offering with collections to organize favorite tweets. And yes, shockingly, wait for it, an undo tweet feature, not an edit button, but undo tweets, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. This feature looks a lot like Gmail's undo sense. button, the app just waits a few seconds before actually sending the message, so this could be what Twitter is planning to launch. As Wong shows, the company is working on the ability to adjust the duration of the undue tweet timer from five seconds up to 30 seconds. Alongside these two features, Twitter could bundle scroll with Twitter Blue. Last week, the company announced it

acquired the subscription platform for users who don't want to read content with ads, but still support publishers to bring in more revenue than with traditional ads on a page. Another paid function from Twitter Blue could come from review another service the company bought in January that helps people to publish newsletters on social media. As for now, Twitter Blue is still in development, and we can't say for sure when the company will launch its paid subscription service, or even if it's going to cost $2.99 per month when it launches. Next week, Twitter is said to relaunch its verification program, as also shown by researcher Jane Manchin-Wong, end quote. Once again, we have a big divorce in the news that impacts a major tech fortune and tech personality.

And once again, I'm not quite sure how or to what degree to cover it, but I do think that this has to be noted. Sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that Microsoft's board decided in 2020 that Bill Gates should leave the board of directors at Microsoft, as Microsoft was probing claims that. that Gates sought to initiate an affair with a Microsoft engineer back in the year 2000. Mr. Gates did, in fact, leave Microsoft's board that year, though, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gates denied that the decision to leave the board was related to this matter. Quote, members of the board tasked with the matter hired a law firm to conduct an investigation in late 2019, after a Microsoft engineer alleged in a letter that she had a sexual relationship over years with Mr. Gates, the people said. During the probe, some board members decided,

it was no longer suitable for Mr. Gates to sit as a director at the software company. He started and led for decades. The people said, Mr. Gates resigned before the board's investigation was completed and before the full board could make a formal decision on the matter, another person familiar with the matter said. Quote, Microsoft received a concern in the latter half of 2019 that Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000, a Microsoft spokesman said. A committee of the board reviewed the concern aided by an outside law firm to conduct a thorough investigation. Throughout the investigation, Microsoft provided extensive support to the employee

who raised the concern, end quote. A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates said, quote, there was an affair almost 20 years ago, which ended amicably. She said his, quote, decision to transition off the board was in no way related to this matter. In fact, he had expressed an interest in spending more time on his philanthropy starting several years earlier, end quote. Mr. Gates resigned from the Microsoft board on March 13th, 2020, three months after he had been re-elected to his seat. In a press release filed with regulators and a post on LinkedIn, the billionaire said then he wanted to focus on his philanthropy and would continue to serve as a technical advisor to chief executive Sachinadella. The same day, he also vacated his board seat at Berkshire Hathaway,

the conglomerate run by Mr. Gates' friend Warren Buffett, end quote. Guess what? Google I.O. is going on tomorrow. So this is, your programming note that the show tomorrow will probably release later than usual since the festivities only begin at 1 p.m. Eastern. And believe me, Google does not tend to be as tight with things as Google has been in terms of runtime for recent events. Anyway, ahead of things tomorrow, Gadget Rumormonger John Prosser has leaked what he claims are Pixel Six and Pixel Six Pro renders as well as a promo video and images of Android 12, quoting Phone Arena. The new software will introduce a heavily redesigned user interface that includes native theming support per the leak.

Things like the new keyboard, app icons, and system app UIs will change their appearance based on the chosen theme. The same can be said for the revamped quick settings menu and updated volume controls. That's all coupled with a range of new widgets that also support theming. There are updated animations across the entire U.I.2, which makes things look a lot smoother and give the impression of a more fluid interface. Google might also be enabling other important UI customization options. Per the promo video, these will include the ability to manually and easily group notifications, as well as the capacity to adjust the size of the calculator pad inside the calculator app. Visually, this might be considered the biggest update to the Android operating system

since Google released Android 5.0 Lollipop with the material design language way back in 2014, end quote. Also, of course, there were images of the phones. click through on the story to see what the phones might end up looking like we assume tomorrow. Another day, another internet outage here at my house. We've been here for almost three years, and service was perfect until about four to six months ago. I don't know, man. I see the spectrum van at the top of the block like once a week, and I see workmen down in the manholes below the street. But apparently they can't seem to get things right.

What happens? If you buy a house and six months into living there, you discover your internet service is basically untenable. That's one of my all-time greatest fears. Seriously, I'd have to move. Like, I need the internet to make a living. And also to play Mario Kart with people across the country. Broadband is not a luxury for me.

It's a necessity. Anyway, talk to you tomorrow, hopefully.