Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/25 – Will Nintendo Try To Shut Down Palworld?

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

As Palworld surpasses 8 million in sales, The Pokemon Company says it will “investigate and take appropriate measures” with regards to those IP infringement allegations. Layoffs at Activision Blizzard and Xbox. Google’s Lumiere is a text to video AI generator. And how the rising prices of streaming services are fueling a resurgence in piracy. Links: Inquiries Regarding Other Companies’ Games (The Pokemon Company) Microsoft lays off 1,900 Activision Blizzard and Xbox employees (The Verge) Google’s latest AI video generator can render cute animals in implausible situations (ArsTechnica) Pixel facing new storage issue, likely tied to January Google Play system update (9to5Google) Microsoft Teams now supports 3D and VR meetings (The Verge) Microsoft Closes at Record, Ends Just Shy of $3 Trillion Value (Bloomberg) Streaming Pirates Are Hollywood’s New Villains (Bloomberg) 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 Ride home for Thursday, January 25th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. As Powell World surpasses $8 million in sales, the Pokemon company says it will investigate

and take appropriate measures with regards to those IP infringement allegations. Layoffs at Activision Blizzard and Xbox. Google's Lumiere is a text-to-video AI generator and how the rising prices of streaming services are fueling a resurgence in piracy. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So you knew this would happen. The whole gaming world is talking about PAL World. They just passed 8 million in sales this week, by the way. That's probably more than the most recent versions of Pokemon sold combined. So there's basically no way Nintendo wouldn't notice what's been going on.

The Pokemon company, which is partially owned by Nintendo, has issued a statement saying the company hasn't given another company permission to use its IP and plans to, quote, investigate and take appropriate measures. Here is their statement verbatim. received many inquiries regarding another company's game released in January 2024. We have not granted any permission for the use of Pokemon intellectual property or assets in that game. We intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokemon. We will continue to cherish and nurture each and every Pokemon and its world and work to bring the world together through Pokemon in the future, end quote.

So here's the deal. You would think Nintendo and Pokemon would have taken a hard look at how similar Pau World was to Pokemon anyway, just on first principles, but then there's the whole controversy around whether or not the actual Pals themselves seem to be very similar to specific Pokemon characters. Hardcore Pokemon fans have even suggested the CEO of the game designer behind Pal World PocketPair briefly worked at Nintendo, but that's unclear. Pocket Pair chief executive, Takuro Mizobi, has vociferously denied plagiarism accusations online and also complained that employees were seeing tweets that appeared to be death threats. So did this developer cut a few corners to try to bring survival and crafting mechanics to monster collecting gameplay, or has the Pokemon franchise stagnated a bit?

And so fans of the genre have flocked to the first game that showed real innovation. Can both things be true at the same time? Something tells me we're about to find out. More layoffs, though the layoffs in tech and the layoffs in the gaming industry are intersecting on this one. According to an internal memo, Microsoft plans to lay off around 1,900 staff at Activision Blizzard and Xbox, or around 8% of its Microsoft gaming workforce. The job cuts are to come this week. The memo came from Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, quote, it's been a little over three months since the Activision Blizzard and King teams joined Microsoft. As we move forward in 2024, the leadership of Microsoft Gaming and Activision Blizzard is committed

to aligning on a strategy and an execution plan. with a sustainable cost structure that will support the whole of our growing business. Together we've set priorities, identified areas of overlap, and ensured that we're all aligned on the best opportunities for growth. As part of this process, we have made the painful decision to reduce the size of our gaming workforce by approximately 1900 rolls out of the 22,000 people on our team, end quote. Quoting the verge. Blizzards previously announced survival game has also been canceled as part of these changes. The layoffs come the same month, riot games, Google, Discord, Twitch, Unity, eBay, and others announced cuts.

Microsoft completed its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October, following 20 months of battles with regulators in the UK and U.S., former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotik stepped down at the end of December, with Microsoft not appointing a direct replacement. Instead, a suite of Activision Blizzard executives now report up to Matt Booty, end quote. Google Research has announced Lumiere, an AI video tool that, uses unique architecture to create videos in one process instead of by stitching together smaller parts. Quoting Ars Technica, according to Google, Lumiere utilizes unique architecture to generate a video's entire temporal duration in one go. Or, as the company put it, we introduce a spacetime

U-Net architecture that generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once through a single pass in the model. This is in contrast to existing video models which synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super resolution, an approach that inherently makes global temporal consistency difficult to achieve, end quote. In layperson terms, Google's tech is designed to handle both the space where things are in the video and time, how things move and change throughout the video aspects simultaneously. So instead of making a video by putting together many small parts or frames, it can create the entire video from start to finish in one smooth process. Lumiere can also do plenty of party tricks, which are laid out quite well with

examples on Google's demo page. For example, it can perform text to video generation, turning a written prompt into a video, convert still images into videos, generate videos in specific styles using a reference image, apply consistent video editing using text-based prompts, create cinemographs by animating specific regions of an image, and offer video impainting capabilities. For example, it can change the type of dress a person is wearing. In the Lumiere research paper, the Google researchers state that the AI model outputs five-second long 1024 by 1024 pixel videos, which they describe as low-resolution. Despite those limitations, the researchers performed a user study and claimed that Lumiere's outputs were preferred over existing AI video synthesis models,

end quote. And quoting Venture Beat. The video model was trained on a data set of 30 million videos along with their text captions and is capable of generating 80 frames at 16 frames per second. The source of this data, however, remains unclear at this stage. While these capabilities are not new in the industry and have been offered by players like Runway and PICA, the authors claim that most existing models tackle the added temporal data dimensions representing a state and time associated with video generation by using a cascaded approach. First, a base model generates distant keyframes and then subsequent temporal super-resolution models generate the missing data between them in non-overlapping segments.

This works but makes temporal consistency difficult to achieve. often leading to restrictions in terms of video duration, overall visual quality, and the degree of realistic motion they can generate. When comparing the model with offerings from PICA, runway, and stability AI, the researchers noted that while these models produced high per-frame visual quality, their four-second-long outputs had very limited motion, leading to near static clips at times. Imagine video, another player in the category produced reasonable motion, but lagged in terms of quality, end quote. Google Pixel users say they are not able to access data stored in internal storage across all apps after installing the January 2024 Google Play System Update, quoting 9 to 5 Google.

This sounds similar to last year's issue that impacted devices with multiple users enabled. However, the culprit today appears to be having that Google Play System update installed. That said, the January 2024 update is not widely rolled out with most Pixel and other Android users still on the November 2020 release. You can check from the settings app security and privacy systems and updates settings that will hopefully limit the issue from spreading to new users as Google can just halt the rollout. Pixel 8, 7, and 6 series owners are all reporting this problem. It remains to be seen how Google resolves the problem for those that have installed it. Last time, a system update was needed.

If your device wasn't stuck in a pixel is starting boot loop, data could be recovered with the aforementioned OTA, end quote. Google spokespeople said, quote, we're aware of this issue and are looking into it. Microsoft has launched Mesh, its immersive 3D meeting platform in Teams, out of preview, with custom environments, games, and more. Mesh only supports MetaQuest for now, but it's integrated into teams in such a way that you can join these virtual spaces with or without a VR headset, though. Of course, it works best with a headset. Quoting the Verge, you can participate in virtual 3D meetings and the impressive.

massive spatial audio feature mimics the ability to have the type of private conversations you'd have in an office by moving away from other co-workers in a virtual space. The 3D environments are also customizable with games like tossing bean bags or icebreaker questions for remote colleagues you might not have met before. All of the standard mesh features, including immersive spaces in teams, will be available to Microsoft Teams business plans. If you want to deploy a custom immersive space, then a team's premium license is required, end quote. and quoting Windows Central. The immersive 3D meetings are complemented with spatial audio alongside teams' features like live reactions to enhance further engagement among meeting attendees. It's worth noting that your admin must enable immersive spaces in teams via the team's admin center first.

From this point, you can quickly join an immersive space in teams by navigating through the settings, selecting the view menu option while on a team's meeting call, and then selecting immersive space. Microsoft Mesh will allow users to create custom immersive spaces, that align with their needs, including training, guided tours, employee events, and more. What's more, teams users can customize an immersive event or the mesh toolkit to leverage the power of unity for a fully customizable experience using the no-code editor, end quote. Also, it's available in the MetaQuest app store, so maybe I'll have to go test this out this afternoon. Speaking of Microsoft, every time I do one of these horse race segments about big tech market caps,

I caveat them by saying, this is neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things, but look, I got to fess up. I like doing these horse race stories. Microsoft briefly reached a $3 trillion market cap for the first time on January 24th, becoming only the second company to do so after Apple before closing at a record of $2.99 trillion, quoting Bloomberg. While the threshold wasn't held, it cements Microsoft status as one of the largest public stocks. It briefly surpassed Apple, which last year became the first company to hit $3 trillion, but subsequently dropped back below the iPhone maker in value.

Apple closed with a market valuation of $3.01 trillion. There is a huge push toward generative AI, and Microsoft is holding a tremendous number of the cards with its offerings, said Ted Mortensen, Technology Desk sector strategist at Baird. To see a company of this size with this kind of growth is pretty amazing, and I think that so long as we continue to see this kind of growth, the stock will continue to rip, end quote. We understand that companies like Apple and Google and meta are working on ways to monetize generative AI, but you have to admit that Microsoft right now really is the only working model where you can engage with chat GPT for a subscription, said Brian Mulberry, client portfolio

manager at Sachs Investment Management. Demand for AI services, along with cloud computing to support it, is projected to support Microsoft's long-term growth trends. Revenue is expected to rise 15% in its 2024 fiscal year faster than the overall tech sector, according to data from Bloomberg Intelligence, end quote. Finally today, maybe this shouldn't surprise me, but Bloomberg says the rising prices of streaming services are driving a new era in U.S. pirate sites, bringing in around $2 billion per year in ads and subscriptions with a 90% profit margin. That's a pretty good business. Were it to be legal? Quote, initially the rise of legitimate online businesses such as Netflix actually helped curb digital piracy, which had largely been based on file uploads.

But now piracy involving illegal streaming services as well as file sharing costs the U.S. economy about $30 billion in lost revenue a year and some 250,000 jobs estimates the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Global Innovation Policy Center. The global impact is about $71 billion annually. In the U.S., which counts almost 130 subscription piracy sites, the MPA estimates that the top three combined have about 2 million users paying $5 to $10 per month for films, TV shows, and live sports. analysts say the user number could soar as the cost of subscriptions from legitimate companies such as Walt Disney approached $20 per month as they seek to bolster the finances of their streaming platforms. Some of these pirate websites have gotten more daily visits than some of the top 10 legitimate sites,

says Karen Temple, the MPA's General Counsel. That really shows how prolific they are. Last year, Philadelphia and Bill Omar Karaskelo, who broadcast his lavish lifestyle to about 800,000 followers on YouTube and who the FBI said ran one of the most, quote, brazen and successful TV piracy schemes ever prosecuted by federal officials was ordered to forfeit $30 million in assets, including a dozen properties, a Lamborghini, and $6 million in cash. At its peak, his illicit streaming business, Gears TV, had 100,000 subscribers and brought in about $1.5 million in monthly sales. In March 23, Caraschilo was sentenced to five and a half years in prison, end quote. Some of these pirate sites are invitation-only platforms that can gain traction on the dark web,

but most are legitimate-looking streaming websites searchable on Google and advertise on Facebook and TikTok. They're funded by ads as well as subscriptions and offer a buffet of film, TV, and live sports that's wider in variety than legitimate outfits because they usually steal content for multiple services. In some cases, viewers mistake the platforms for legitimate streaming services because of how slick they look. Subscription payments are sometimes made in cryptocurrency, but they're more often processed via credit cards and PayPal, which can help the MPA find the businesses and shut them down.

The MPA says that in recent months, Russian crime rings have paid patrons to sneak into AMC theaters in Los Angeles with camcorders and record films including Book Club, The Next Chapter, Barbarian, Smile, and Lyle Lyle Crockadile. The footage is then uploaded to the internet and watermarked with links to illegal online casinos owned and operated by same criminal organizations to encourage viewers to place bets on those gambling platforms. In 2017, the Association formed the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, or Ace, an

enforcement task force of about 100 detectives circling the globe and sometimes skirting death threats to help local authorities arrest streaming pirates. It's led by Jan von Vorn, a veteran of Interpol and the Marine Corps, where he helped combat drug trafficking. Ace's efforts have led to a substantial reduction in the prevalence of illegal streaming services in North America, decreasing the number from over 1,400 in 2018 to 126. This achievement was bolstered by the MPA's backing of a 2020 federal law that reclassified large-scale illegal streaming from a misdemeanor to a felony. However, the challenge persists on a global scale in 2022. There was a 39% increase in film piracy and a 9% increase in TV show piracy. High demand content such as Top Gun Maverick by Paramount

and HBO's House of the Dragon were particularly affected, as reported by Data Tracker Muso. Mousseau's analysis also reveals an unprecedented $215 billion visits to illegal streaming sites in 2022, indicating a significant surge in the reach of these services. Muso suggests that certain strategies employed by legitimate streaming operators, like enforcing stricter controls on password sharing, might inadvertently push more users towards these illicit platforms. Additionally, consulting firm Parks Associates predicts a staggering cumulative loss of $113 billion due to piracy for legitimate U.S. streaming services in the next two years starting from 2022. Nothing for you today. Talk to tomorrow.