Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 06/30 – Amazon Prime Video Launches Watch Party

Episode Date: June 30, 2020

Lululemon wants to buy Mirror. We think Uber is thinking about buying Postmates. Amazon Prime Video launches Watch Party. Android’s AirDrop competitor is rolling out. And why cloud gaming is the impetus for a new data center race. Sponsors: Tovala.com/ride Metalab.co Links: Lululemon set to acquire home fitness startup Mirror for $500M (TechCrunch) Uber in Talks to Buy Postmates for About $2.6 Billion (WSJ) Amazon Prime Video introduces 'Watch Party,' a social co-viewing experience included with Prime (TechCrunch) Nearby Sharing — Android's AirDrop competitor — is rolling out now in beta (Android Police) CodeGuru, AWS's AI code reviewer and performance profiles, is now generally available (TechCrunch) Exclusive: Facebook changes algorithm to boost original reporting (Axios) An Infrastructure Arms Race Is Fueling the Future of Gaming (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 Tuesday, June 30th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Lulu Lemon wants to buy Mirror. We think that Uber is thinking about buying Postmates. Amazon Prime Video launches watch party. Android's AirDrop competitor is rolling out, and why cloud gaming is the impetus for a new data center race.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Lulu Lemon says it is acquiring home fitness startup Mirror for $500 million. $1. Mirror is that, well, it's a mirror that you might have seen, certainly back when you could ride the subway. There were ads for them all over the subways. Basically, you hang a mirror on a wall and you can watch video of fitness routines in the mirror. And of course, you can also match the movements you see on the screen in the mirror because it's a mirror. Think of it as Peloton for, you know, just regular workouts and such. Mirror was last valued at $300 million, quoting text. crunch. The two companies have a relationship dating back to late last year when Lulu Lemon became an investor in Mirror. The $34 million series B1 brought in $34 million for the New York startup's $1,495 reflective guided workout machine valuing the startup at around $300 million. The company has raised a total of $74.8 million from investors, including 0.72 Ventures, Spark Capital, first round capital, and a bunch of others. Mirr has been viewed by many as an

alternative to Peloton's wildly popular connected machines. There's stiff competition in the category of connected fitness slabs, including tonal and tempo, but mirror continues to be the biggest name of the bunch. The company came out of stealth on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018, end quote. And the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Uber is in talks to acquire postmates for around $2.6 billion, quoting the journal. Should a deal come together, it could be announced next week, if not sooner, one of the people said, but there's no guarantee it will. Postmates, which has held discussions with other possible buyers since at least last year, has been simultaneously planning an initial public offering. Just Monday, people familiar with the matter said the closely held delivery

startup was preparing in the coming days to make its IPO filing public, which could presage a trading debut later this summer. A combination would augment Uber's food delivery arm, Uber Eats, which already has an international footprint and the second largest market share in the U.S. after DoorDash, according to research from Edison Trends. Postmates founded in 2011 and based in San Francisco is the smallest among the major U.S. players. The company has raised roughly $906 million and was valued at around $2.4 billion in 2019, according to Pitchbook. It had confidentially filed for an IPO in February of last year, but the plan was delayed when the IPO market became less hospitable to unprofitable startups such as postmates in the wake of WeWorks aborted IPO, end quote.

There was also, of course, that little thing about the global pandemic that spooked the markets, seemingly only briefly. So as we've said before, the food delivery space needs consolidation in the sense that the companies in the space need there to be less players or there's going to be less players in the space because there will be eventually a bunch of bankruptcies. And yet, this is a time where regulators are, looking askance at major platforms consolidating their power through acquisition. And Uber has always been a company whose entire business model has been widely understood to be basically achieving profitability through monopoly consolidation of its markets. So would this sort of thing fly with

regulators? As Alex Sherman tweeted, no surprise that Uber is trying again to consolidate quickly, but can a postmates deal pass regulatory scrutiny? Some I spoke with, predicted Uber would go after Deliveroo instead, but Uber also thought Grubhub should have accepted its offer, end quote. Amazon Prime Video has officially launched what it is calling Watch Party, a desktop feature for U.S. Prime Video members to watch content together and chat with up to 100 viewers simultaneously, quoting Sarah Perez and TechCrunch. The host of the co-watching session will be able to start, stop, and pause the watch party

as needed throughout the session. And those changes will also be synced to all participants' devices instantly. Each session can also support up to 100 participants, as long as those participants also have a prime membership or a prime video subscription and are watching from within the U.S. While the video is playing users can socialize with other participants through a built-in chat feature that supports both text and built-in emojis. At launch, watch party is offered via prime video on the desktop.

and is supported across thousands of titles in the Prime Video Svod catalog. This includes the third-party content that comes with Prime, as well as Amazon originals like Fleabag, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Hannah, and more. Titles available only for rent or purchase are not available within Watch Party at this time, Amazon says. To get started with Watch Party, customers will click on the new Watch Party icon on the movie or shows page on the Prime Video desktop website. They're then given a link they can share with friends and family however they want.

Recipients who click on the link will then join the session and be able to chat with others. Amazon says the new feature was built as a native experience for Prime Video, end quote. So then here's my question. Is this a feature that Netflix needs to rush to copy because it's such an obvious feature, especially for these times? Or is Netflix in the sort of Tiffany position? where it can be like, we're Netflix. We don't need to mess with bells and whistles or mess with the experience you know and love. We're Netflix. I kind of think it is the latter, but then again,

for a brief period of time, you could actually do something exactly like this with Netflix and Xbox Live, but then they removed the feature. And speaking of sharing, nearby sharing, which is what Android calls its AirDrop competitor, allowing you to share files between and, Android devices wirelessly is rolling out now in beta. So again, from the news you can use right now file, maybe. This is from Android police, quote, Nearby sharing may appear slightly differently depending on the type of content you try to share.

In all cases, it shows up as an app in the apps list on the share sheet, but you may also get a smaller prompt just under the content preview, more like it did in the previous Android 11 video leak. We tested it on a Pixel 4xel and Pixel 3A running Android 10, but the appearance may also vary on other versions of Android. Note that Nearby Share works for both files like photos or videos as well as other shareable content like tweets and URLs. Actually, it probably works with a lot of things.

Select Nearby Share in the Share sheet as the target, and you're prompted to turn on the feature if it's the first time you've used it. The quick setup process lets you configure your default device name and device visibility settings, though those can also be changed later. Once you have it enabled, nearby sharing starts looking for other nearby devices. The interface is pretty simple. A big X in the top left corner backs you out. Your avatar on the right takes you to a settings pane that lets you configure things like your device name, visibility, and which mechanism to use to make the transfer, i.e. whether to use

your internet connection for small files or stick to Wi-Fi or to always share offline. There are three visibility settings, all contacts, some contacts, and hidden. In any case, it appears that you can't blast out an obscene photo to a subway car full of unwilling recipients like you can on Apple's AirDrop. That said, it sounds like you can still send content to folks outside your contacts. They'll just need to be ready and waiting for it with nearby share open, end quote. As of this moment, you need to be opted into the Play Services beta in order to test this out, and the rollout right now still appears to be very limited at that. But expect to see this feature go wide, maybe by the end of the start.

summer. And I guess this is just a day of me telling you a bunch of stuff is either available or rolling out, because I got another one. AWS has made Code Guru, its set of tools that use machine learning to automatically review code for bugs and suggest potential optimizations, now generally available. So, devs get on that, quoting TechCrunch. Code Guru consists of two tools, reviewer and profiler, and those names pretty much describe exactly what do. To build reviewer, the AWS team actually trained its algorithm with the help of code for more than 10,000 open source projects on GitHub, as well as reviews from Amazon's own internal codebase. Even for a large organization like Amazon, it's challenging to have enough experience developers

with enough free time to do code reviews, given the amount of code that gets written every day, the company notes in today's announcement. And even the most experienced reviewers miss problems before they impact customer-facing applications, resulting in bugs and performance issues end quote. To use Code Guru, developers continue to commit their code to their repository of choice, no matter whether that's GitHub, Bitbucket Cloud, AWS's own code commit, or another service. Code Guru reviewer then analyzes that code, tries to find bugs, and if it does, it will also offer potential fixes. All of this is done within the context of the code repository, so Code Guru will create a GitHub pool request, for example, and add a comment to that pool request,

with some more info about the bug and potential fixes. To train the machine learning model, users can also provide Code Guru with some basic feedback, though we're mostly talking thumbs up and thumbs down here. The Code Guru application profiler has a somewhat different mission. It is meant to help developers figure out where there might be some inefficiencies in their code and identify the most expensive lines of code.

This includes support for serverless platforms like AWS Lambda and Fargate. One additional feature, the team added since it first announced code guru, is that profiler now attaches an estimated dollar amount to the lines of unoptimized code, end quote. These tools have been in preview since December, and AWS says that during that time, the likes of Atlassian, Eagle Dream, and Dev Factory all adopted the tools to great success. Facebook says it is changing its news feed algorithm to prioritize news stories with original reporting. and also demote stories that are not transparent about their authorship. It is starting to do this today, in fact, quoting Axios. Facebook says that in order to identify which original stories to promote,

it will use artificial intelligence to analyze groups of articles on a particular story topic and identify the ones most often cited as the original source. This won't change the newsfeed experience dramatically for most users because Facebook will still only showcase stories from news outlets that they or their friends follow. But the tech giant will boost the more original story within that subset. The company has been having active conversations with publishing executives on both the business and editorial sides to help define original reporting so that it can build signals into its algorithms to boost original stories along with conducting user research. The algorithm changes only apply to news stories, and for now the tech giant is focusing on stories in English.

It hopes to expand to other languages in the future. In conjunction with those changes, Facebook will also begin to downrank news in its algorithm that doesn't have bylines or present information about the company's editorial staff on the publisher's website, end quote. So on the one hand, using various signals to determine authority is, number one, what tech meme has done to determine the biggest stories in tech each day for 15 years now. And two, basically what page rank did to form the original basis of the Google search engine 22 years ago. So in theory, this is long overdue, but also, it's not easy. Google News tried something similar to rank stories in terms of authority and failed at it somewhat comprehensively.

They gave up. And also, there is such a thing as SEO spam, as we all know, meaning there's basically no ranking system that cannot be gained. I'll leave you today with a segment that's more a trend piece than just a headline. Remember when, Facebook, Google, Apple, everybody was racing about a decade ago to build data centers all around the world to keep up with their exploding usage of cloud data data. Well, now that video game companies are shifting to the cloud, this has sparked a new infrastructure arms race to build even more data centers. But now building them as close to users as possible in order to achieve the low latency and zero packet loss necessary to have cloud gaming work. So imagine a new data center land grab underway that is sort of like how Amazon always needs warehouses and fulfillment centers close to customers, quoting Wired.

While a service's performance depends in part on your home internet situation and will change with the arrival of 5G, at least on your phone, much of its lasting success will hinge on data taking as short and uninterrupted a round trip as possible from your hardware to a data center. It's everything besides bandwidth, second only to bandwidth, says David. Lithicum, Deloitte's chief cloud strategy officer of the importance of data centers to cloud gaming competitors, quote, the company that provides the fastest infrastructure and the largest points of presence in data centers around the world, that's going to go to who's going to be

successful, end quote. If you're playing God of War in Egypt, but your cloud gaming service's closest data center is in Qatar, there might be enough delay between your inputs and Kratos's movements to emotionally disconnect you from the gameplay. In the U.S., sending an axe slash signal from the east coast to the west coast takes 40 to 60 milliseconds, more than enough time for frustration to creep in. To give as many people as possible the best latency possible, you need to own or rent space from a lot of well-located data centers. Quote, the slightest increase in latency, lag, or jitter can send early adopters away from these new platforms and back to their consoles and PCs, says Jennifer Curry, the senior vice president

of product and technology at data center co-location company in app. Just 20, to 30 additional milliseconds can be the difference between a top-tier service and an unviable service, end quote. The point the piece makes is that if cloud gaming is inevitably the future, then the simple question of latency will likely decide who the winner will be. It's just that simple. And so when you look at it from that angle, it's not that the big tech companies, as I speculated before, decided they needed to get into gaming simply because they're hunting around for a new revenue stream or they need to justify their math. of investments in cloud tech, it's maybe that the big tech behemus are possibly the only ones

with big enough pockets and an infrastructure in place to actually make this happen in the first place. So if disruption is coming to gaming, it's going to come from the top down. Nothing pithy for you today, so I'll just talk to you tomorrow.