Tech Brew Ride Home - Thursday, Apr. 12, 2018 - ESPN+ Debuts

Episode Date: April 12, 2018

ESPN goes over-the-top, Apple’s Home Pod is reportedly “stumbling,” a final wrap-up of the Zuckerberg testimony, Snap testing commerce, and an AI doctor can diagnose on its own.  Stories:How Android Phones Hide Missed Security Updates From You (Wired)The Facebook Current (Stratechery)The Most Important Exchange of the Zuckerberg Hearing (The Atlantic)I Downloaded the Information That Facebook Has on Me. Yikes. (NYTimes)AI software that helps doctors diagnose like specialists is approved by FDA (The Verge) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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 Thursday, April 12th, 2018. Today, ESPN goes over the top. Apple's HomePod is reportedly stumbling.

A final wrap-up of the Zuckerberg testimony. Snap is testing commerce and an AI doctor that can diagnose on its own. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Today, ESPN officially launched its ESPN Plus direct-to-consumer subscription video service. otherwise known as an over-the-top video service. For $499 a month, you can stream a bunch of content to the device of your choosing. ESPN Plus video streams come in high definition at 60 frames per second, and you can pause or rewind anything you're watching live.

A seven-day free trial is available, and if you sign up by next Wednesday, April 18th, your trial can be extended to a full 30 days. I should probably make it clear that $499 a month does not, get you the full live ESPN channel feeds or the majority of ESPN content. You do get one free Major League Baseball game and one NHL game every day that they're in season, and there are a ton of Major League Soccer games, as well as tennis, rugby cricket, and the lesser-watched college sports.

It's sort of like how ESPN the channel first launched almost 40 years ago with what could generously have been called niche programming. One key driver for a lot of people I think will be the deep back catalog of original ESPN programming that will be available though. For example, going forward, ESPN Plus will be the only place you can access the archives of the 30 for 30 30 documentary series. There will be commercials in live broadcasts, so keep that in mind, but if you sign up for an ESPN Plus account, the display ads on the ESPN app will be reduced. But you don't have to download a separate app on your phone or tablet if you already have the updated ESPN app downloaded. You'll find ESPN Plus inside that app today on Android, iOS, and most smart TV platforms.

This next generation app is ESPN's most sophisticated and elegant digital product experience and a central piece of our next era of innovation. So says James Pitaro, ESPN president and co-chair of Disney's media networks. Quote, no one is in a better position than ESPN to serve sports fans. With this launch, fans will find a reimagined, easy to use, an increasingly personalized experience that puts all of ESPN's incredible content at their fingertips like never before, end quote. At first blush, it might not seem like major news that one app now has a subscription service,

but as we've been talking about for several weeks now, get ready for a lot more of this. One of the biggest stories over the next 18 months or so in tech will be the land rush as companies try to claim subscription TV loyalty from consumers. A rather appalling story in Wired this morning, after testing the firmware on around 1,200 Android phones, German researchers found that some Android OEMs don't install the security patches that they claim to install. What's more disturbing, some manufacturers seem to be editing the device setting, to claim that they had installed software updates when they actually hadn't. Researchers Karsten Noll and Jacob Lell of the firm Security Research Labs

report that after spending two years examining the operating system code of hundreds of Android phones, they found that vendors' phones would often report to users that they were up to date on all security patches when in reality numerous software patches had been skipped. Obviously, if users aren't aware their phones, phones aren't up to date, they're vulnerable to all sorts of security threats. We find that there's a gap between patching claims and the actual patches installed on a device. It's small for some devices and pretty significant for others, Noel told Wired. Quote, sometimes these guys just change the date without installing any patches.

Probably for marketing reasons, they just set the patch level to almost an arbitrary date, whatever looks best, end quote. The researchers tested Android devices ranging from those made by Google itself to top-tier Android makers like Samsung and HTC, all the way down to lesser-known brands like ZTE and TCL. Even Google's own Pixel Line and other top-tier vendors sometimes claimed patches that were not actually installed, and even the highest profile name brands could be hit or miss. Quoting from the story, SRL found that one Samsung phone, the 2016 J-5,

was perfectly honest about telling the user which patches it had installed and which it still lacked, while Samsung's 2016 J3 claimed to have every Android patch issued in 2017, but lacked 12 of them. Two considered as critical for the phone's security, end quote. But lower-tier manufacturers were even worse. The lowest performing companies the researchers named in their report were Chinese firms TCL and ZTE, all of whose phones had, on average, more than four patches that were erroneously reported as installed. It's time for your weekly Mark German Apple Scoop. The title of his Bloomberg piece today kind of says it all.

Apple's stumbling home pod isn't the hot seller it wanted. In Bloomberg, German reports that Apple has lowered sales forecasts for the smart speaker, which went on sale just this past January, and the company is also cutting orders with Inventcom, one of the manufacturers that produces the device for Apple. Quoting from the piece, During the HomePod's first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out about 10% of the smart speaker market

compared with 73% for Amazon's echo devices and 14% for Google Home, according to Slice Intelligence. Three weeks after launch, weekly home pod sales slipped to about 4% of the smart speaker category on average, the market research firm says. Inventory is piling up, according to Apple store workers, who say some locations are selling fewer than 10 home pods a day. Famed Apple analyst, Gene Munster, says he still expects Apple to sell around

7 million home pods this year and close to 11 million in 2019. But compare that to Amazon. Munster says that 29 million echoes will sell. this year, and $39 million in 2019. Another quote from German's piece, veteran Apple analyst Shannon Cross says, consumers assumed the HomePod would be able to do many of the things the Echo and Google Home can do,

answering questions, ordering pizzas, and much more. Instead, the HomePod is mostly limited to playing tunes from Apple Music, controlling a limited number of Apple optimized smart home appliances, and sending messages through an iPhone, end quote. A lot of people also seem to believe that the home pod's comparatively high price of $349 is affecting sales. Of course, this is an Apple product, though, so there's a lot of back and forth about this online. M.G. Siegler tweeted, quote, shocking. Nope, not shocking. Apple bungled this. And while they'll undoubtedly talk up the long game at WWDC, the problems here run deep. Unlike, say, Apple Watch, this is a lethal mixture of bad strategy

and formidable competitors who have the right strategy. But numerous satisfied home pod users jumped to the device's defense, including CNBC's Jay Yarrow, quote, I don't care what the haters say. I like my home pod. Sounds good, and I'm better integrated with the Apple ecosystem, so it works for me. I have both Echo and HomePod, and Echo has gone idle. I'm not going to go over the beat-by-beat of yesterday's second day of Zuckerberg testimony on Capitol Hill,

since we got a good overview of most of it, I think, yesterday, but I thought I'd share some of the commentary that is still trickling in. As expected, the most incisive dissection of this week's events came from Ben Thompson at Strateree. Thompson and others, especially Tim Wu, have long been making the point that tech incumbents often welcome regulation once they reach a certain size because it can create a moat that can keep upstarts and other competitors at bay. And as Ahmed al-Amran said on Twitter,

no wonder Zuckerberg is eager to talk about regulation. It's not simply that it benefits incumbents, it's that it is far more attractive than discussing a potential breakup of the company, end quote. In his piece, Thompson makes the point that there was rare bipartisan agreement over the last several days that something needs to be done about Facebook,

even if there are slightly differing views on what exactly something means. Thompson ends his piece by saying, quote, it's worth keeping in mind, though, that because Facebook is so dominant, the question of its governance is ultimately a political question, and to that end, the shifts in the terms of debate, if not yet its outcome, have been striking. Zuckerberg is in Washington, D.C., everyone says something must be done, and critically both sides have ideas about what that should be.

be. While this certainly may be mostly a Facebook problem, the rest of the industry should take note, end quote. Over at the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal says that the key moment of yesterday's testimony came when Zuckerberg was questioned by Representative Joe Kennedy III about the seemingly slippery notion of data collection and data ownership. Do the advertisers that are using your platform get access to information that the user doesn't actually think is either one being generated or two is public. Kennedy asked Zuckerberg, quote, one of the challenges with trust here is that

there is an awful lot of information that's generated that people don't think they're generating and that advertisers are being able to target because Facebook collects it, end quote. In his piece, Madrigal writes, quote, raw data that Facebook uses to create user interest inferences is not available to users. It's

data about them, but it's not their data. One European Facebook user has been petitioned. to see this data, and Facebook acknowledges that it exists, but so far has been unable to attain it. Later in the piece, Madrigal continues, quote, With Facebook, the concept of owning your data begins to verge on meaningless if it doesn't include that second more holistic concept, not just the data users create and upload explicitly, but all the other information that has become attached to their profiles by other means, end quote. And at the New York Times, Brian X. Chen chimed in with a piece that has become a bit of a genre within itself.

Journalist downloads his or her Facebook data and is shocked to see all the things that Facebook knows about them. From Chen's piece, quote, with a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers, many I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band, had my contact info, which could include my email address, phone number and full name. Facebook also had my entire phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted

from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes. Chen also used a tool called Google Takeout to determine how much Google knew about him. He found that his personal email account alone had generated eight gigabytes of data, including a history of news articles he had written, and the record of apps he had opened on his Android phone,

including time and date of app activity. Interestingly, when Chen downloaded his LinkedIn profile data, he was more sanguine. Quote, the dataset was less than half a megabyte and contained exactly what I had expected, spreadsheets of my LinkedIn contacts, and information I had added to my profile. Sources are telling Digidae that Snap is testing commerce functionality

inside select Snapchat Discover publisher channels. Users who see the commerce tests would be able to swipe up and buy products from a store inside Discover. Apparently, for this test, Snap is not taking a cut of the revenue, but that would clearly be the obvious business model down the road. Snap has recently been trying to diversify the offerings it is making available to content partners, already publishing on Snapchat platforms. The company is reportedly allowing advertisers to, to distribute branded videos as SNAP ads units

and allowing promoted stories separate from the Discover editions of content. Finally today, various outlets are reporting that for the first time, the US Food and Drug Administration has given regulatory approval to an AI medical diagnostic device that diagnoses illness without the need for a medical professional to interpret the results.

The device called IDXDR, is a software program that uses an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze images of the eye taken with a retinal camera. Its purpose is to detect diabetic retinopathy, which is a common vision complication for patients suffering from diabetes. According to the verge, it works like this, quote, A nurse or doctor uploads photos of the patient's retina

taken with a special retinal camera. The IDXDR software algorithm first indicates, whether the image uploaded is high quality enough to get a result. Then it analyzes the images to determine whether the patient does or does not suffer from the eye disease where too much blood sugar damages the blood vessels in the back of the eye, end quote. Malvina Edelman, director of the division of ophthalmic and ear, nose and throat devices at the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said, quote, Early detection of retinopathy is an important part of managing care for the millions of people with diabetes.

Yet many patients with diabetes are not adequately screened for diabetic retinopathy, since about 50% of them do not see their eye doctor on a yearly basis. Today's decision permits the marketing of a novel artificial intelligence technology that can be used in a primary care doctor's office. The FDA evaluated a clinical study of retinal images obtained from 900 patients, with diabetes and determined how often the IDXDR could accurately detect patients with more than mild retinopathy. In the study, the device correctly identified retinopathy 87% of the time and correctly identified those who weren't affected or false positives almost 90% of the time.

There are already several FDA-approved artificial intelligence programs that help doctors examine medical images, but until now those were only advisory technologies, not something that was approved to operate on its own. Michael Abramoff, who founded the company that developed the IDXDR, told science news that what makes this device unique is that in this case there is, quote, not a specialist looking over the shoulder of this algorithm. It makes the clinical decisions on its own. That's all for today, everybody. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. And check out techmeme.com 24-7 to find out the latest news and headlines in the world of tech. Talk to you tomorrow.