Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 07/02 - Are ISP Caps the Achilles Heel of Game Streaming?

Episode Date: July 2, 2019

We know when the Galaxy Note 10 is coming, we don’t know why Microsoft is teasing Windows 1.0, Nvidia refreshes the RTX line, meditation app Calm is finding success in an interesting way, and Loon is about to have its first big test. Sponsors: FiresideConf.com/ride TinyCapital.com Links: Samsung confirms next Unpacked event will be Aug. 7 in New York (CNET) Microsoft is teasing Windows 1.0, and everyone is confused (Engadget) Microsoft finally details its plans for Windows 10 19H2 (WindowsCentral) Nvidia refreshes RTX line: “Super” GPUs add performance at same MSRP (ArsTechnica) Tim Cook disputes 'absurd' reports about Jony Ive's departure from Apple (NBCNews) Calm raises $27M to McConaughey you to sleep (TechCrunch) PlayStation Vue raises prices by $5 per month, following its recent content deals (TechCrunch) Google Stadia's Data Cap Challenge Will Be Addressed By ISPs, Says Phil Harrison (GameSpot) Google internet balloon spinoff Loon still looking for its wings (Reuters) The Ad Free Premium Feed Is HERE 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 right home for Tuesday, July 2nd, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. We know when the Galaxy Note 10 is coming, but we don't know why. Microsoft is suddenly teasing Windows 1.0. InVIDIA refreshes the RTX line. Meditation app Calm is finding success in an interesting way, and Loon is about to face its first big test. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Book your calendars because Samsung has announced its next unpacked event. It will be held on August 7th at 4 p.m. at the Barclay Center in New York City, actually in Brooklyn, specifically, and most likely that's when we'll see the new Galaxy Note 10, quoting CNET.

The invitation sent to reporters featured a black stylus and what appears to be a camera lens on a white background. Samsung's Galaxy Note was one of the first major smartphones to feature a stylus called the S-Pen. A recent rumor about Note 10 said the S-Pen could have a camera of its own. while another rumor said the Note 10 could have four rear cameras. The Note 10 may even feature a swivel selfie camera like the Galaxy A80. The Note lineup doesn't sell as well as Samsung's Galaxy S devices, but the big screen fablet has a fervent fan base. It also has long been home for Samsung's ultra-premium phone technology,

at least until the debut of the Galaxy Fold, end quote. Also mark your calendars-ish because Microsoft says its next Windows 10 feature update, which is expected to arrive in September, is going to be focusing on performance improvements and quality enhancements. According from a Microsoft blog post, the next feature update for Windows 10, known in the Windows Insider program as 19H2, will be a scoped set of features for select performance improvements, enterprise features, and quality enhancements. To deliver these updates in a less disruptive fashion, we will deliver this feature update in a new way using servicing technology, like the monthly update process for customers running the May 2019 update who choose to update to the new release. In other words, anyone running the May 2019 update and updating to the new release will have a far faster update experience because the update will install like a monthly update, end quote. But one other thing real quick. yesterday the official Windows Instagram account wiped all of the posts

from its page and in their place posted a single video where the logos of all the versions of Windows from Windows 10 scroll all the way backwards in reverse chronological order to Windows 1.0

Microsoft posted a similar video on Twitter announcing the quote all new Windows 1.0. What's going on here? No one really knows and Microsoft is being coy in the replies, merely telling people to stay tuned. Is Microsoft going to do some sort of surprise naming convention reset with Windows? Or something even wackier?

Maybe a tie-in with the new season of Stranger Things since Windows 1.0 came out in November of 1985. Maybe Microsoft is jumping on the retro gaming console bandwagon, and we might get some classic DOS titles in some nice new package, some classic Doom and Commander Keene, maybe. Don't know, as they said. Stay tuned, I guess. Nvidia has refreshed the RTX lineup by unveiling the new RTX super series of graphics cards with reportedly more power for the same price as the old RTX lineup. There is now an RTX 2060 super and an RTX 2070 super both at the same price points as their predecessors, $39 and $499 respectively.

They're both available starting July 9th. Then on July 23rd comes the $699 RtX 2080 super, quoting from Ars Technica. For this new super line, Nvidia went back to the original RTX cards and packed them with more computing cores, more texture units, more streaming multiprocessors, and higher base and boost clock speeds. In the case of the 260 super, its V-RAM count has jumped to 8 gigabytes, which has caught up to its siblings' 256-bit memory interface while jumping to 440. gigahertz memory bandwidth. The super version of the 2080 gets a slight memory bandwidth uptick. The 2070 super receives no memory-related boosts. The biggest catch about the super lineup is that this is in no way indicative of a new or more efficient process. While Nvidia is proud of the Turing lines, quote, performance per watt measure, you'll still need more wattage for each

supercard than its non-super version. It's not a ridiculous amount, but if you're already on the edge with your PSU of choice, be warned, end quote. Small addendum to that Johnny Ive departure story, Tim Cook himself sent an email to NBC news reporter Dylan Byers, wherein Cook took issue with that Wall Street Journal report we talked about on yesterday's show, the one about Ives reported frustration with Cook's alleged a lack of interest in design. Well, quote, the story is absurd, Cook said in the email. A lot of the reporting and certainly the conclusions just don't match with reality.

At a base level, it shows a lack of understanding about how the design team works and how Apple works. It distorts relationships, decisions, and events to the point that we just don't recognize the company it claims to describe. The design team is phenomenally talented. As Johnny has said, they're stronger than ever, and I have complete confidence that they will thrive under Jeff, Evans, and Allen's leadership. We know the truth, and we know the incredible things they're capable of doing. the projects they're working on will blow you away, end quote. Now, lots of people on Twitter pointed out that nowhere in the email does cook specifically refute or dispute any facts or details in the journal piece.

Quoting Owen Williams, but that wasn't the point of this email at all, which simply exists to distract from the story in the first place, end quote. So, mission accomplished. Meditation app Calm has raised a $27 million series B extension adding to the original $88 million series B raised just this February. The total valuation for Calm is $1 billion. You may know Calm as one of the more prominent of the meditation apps out there, but I did not know that they might have hit upon something that differentiates them.

Their Sleep Stories product, quoting from TechCrunch. Meditation app Unicorn Calm wants you to doze off to the dulcet tones of actor Matthew McConaughey's Southern Draw or writer Stephen Fry's English accent. Calm's sleep stories feature that launched last year is a hit with more than 150 million listens from its 2 million paid subscribers and 50 million downloads. While lots of people want to meditate, they still need to sleep. The 7-year-old app has finally found its must-have feature that makes it a habit rather than an aspiration, end quote. Yes, soothing bedtime stories to help you fall to sleep read by celebrities.

A subscription to this feature costs $70 a year. Calm has apparently quadrupled revenue in 2018 on the back of this new feature to hit a $150 million annual run rate and apparently profitability. It isn't just the sleep stories, though, because Calm still does the guided meditation thing, but the success of the lolling me to sleep as a service product might be a gateway toward a whole bunch of other personal health upsells. Quoting again from TechCrunch, Calm is poised to keep up. its rapid revenue growth. After the launch of Sleep Stories, quote, it was incredible to see the engagement spike up, but also the retention, says Lightspeed partner Nicole Quinn, who invested in the round.

Users can choose from having McConaughey describe the wonders of the cosmos. John McEnroe talked them through the rules of tennis. Fairy tales like the Little Mermaid and more. Quinn tells me, quote, sleep stories is now a huge percentage of the business and also the length of time people spend on the app has gone up dramatically. She tells me that so many startups are, quote, trying to be. to invent a problem where there isn't one, end quote. But difficulty snoozing is so widespread and detrimental that users are eager to pay for an app instead of a sleeping pill. Having the interstellar

actor talk about the universe until I pass out sounds, all right, all right, all right, end quote. Quick note that Sony's PlayStation View Live TV streaming service is joining the Let's Raise Prices party. Quoting TechCrunch, the company announced today it will be upping the price for all its plans by $5 a month each. The change is live as of today for new subscribers and will kick in for current customers with the beginning of the first billing cycle on or after July 31st. The company says the decision was made due to the rising cost of content, the same reason it raised prices by $5 just around a year ago. That made views cheapest plans, $45 a month, now its cheapest plan is $50 a month, end quote. You might recall that YouTube TV, Sling TV, and Hulu have all

raised prices recently for their various live streaming service offerings. So Sony is in good company. On the gaming streaming front, the executive in charge of Google's upcoming stadia offering says that ISP data caps will not be a major issue for the game streaming service, but some people are skeptical about this. Google executive Phil Harrison was asked by GameSpot if he believed ISP data caps were a threat to the eventual success or failure of the streaming service, and Harrison and responded, quote, the ISPs have a strong history of staying ahead of consumer trends. And if you look at the history of data caps in those small number of markets, and it's actually a relatively small number of markets that have data caps, the trend over time when music streaming

and download became popular, especially in the early days when it was not necessarily legitimate, data caps moved up. Then, with the evolution of TV and film streaming, data caps moved up. And we expect that will continue to be the case, end quote. to which GameSpot was like, really? Quote, placing faith in ISPs to respond to the demands of a streaming service like Stadia, which sends 1080P or 4K video feeds to players depending on the package they're subscribed to, presents further questions. The first being, would the adoption of Stadia be widespread enough to signal a trend that ISPs need to respond to

in the same way that music, TV, and movie streaming did? Harrison, though, stuck to his guns when presented with this concern, saying he believes, quote, ISPs are smart and they understand that they're in the business of keeping customers happy and keeping customers with them for a long time, end quote. On the suggestion that ISPs may instead see this as an opportunity to attach further costs to having more data, which in turn would become a greater expense on the user, Harrison noted that 5G technology would be one part of the solution, quote, there's a very interesting additional dynamic happening in the internet market, which is the evolution of 5G, particularly in what's

called fixed wireless, which is not necessarily running 5G on your phone, but as a way of bringing 5G into your home. All of the 5G fixed wireless businesses that are up now that I'm aware of have no data caps and are very, very high performance. So that's introducing a competitive dynamic. $50 a month. That's what Verizon fixed wireless costs for minimum 300 megabits per second and up to a gigabit. It's pretty good value to me, end quote. Okay. so for gaming streaming to work, we need to imagine a completely rosy scenario where five years from now say 5G is ubiquitous and incumbent ISPs resists the temptation to gouge gamers. Gotcha. And finally today, Alphabet's Loon, the Moonshot Company, looking to deliver networking capabilities via balloons,

is facing its first big test, its first commercial trial in Kenya. the coming weeks, quoting from Reuters. The test with Telecom Kenya, the nation's number three carrier, will let mountain villagers buy 4G service at market rate prices for an undefined period. Kenya's aviation authority said its final approval would be signed this month. Hatched in 2011, Lune aims to bring connectivity to remote parts of the world by floating solar-powered networking gear over areas where cell towers would be too expensive to build. Its tennis court-sized helium balloons have demonstrated utility.

Over the last three years, Loon has successfully let wireless carriers in Peru and Puerto Rico use balloons for free to supplant cell phone towers down by natural disasters, end quote. Some things that I did not know about these Loon balloons. A grouping of six of them can supply 4G to an area as large as Puerto Rico, but each balloon costs tens of thousands of dollars and need to be replaced every few months. If winds are too heavy, users can lose connection and using balloons too close to cities can jam other forms of communication. And also, the balloons operate using solar-powered gears so they need super-abundant sunshine, thus making Loon decidedly not useful and a whole ton of, shall we say, cloudier climbs. Still, quoting Reuters again, Alistair Westgarth, chief executive of the Alphabet subsidiary, officially formed last July, expressed confidence in its strategy,

quote, multiple additional entities are close to signing contracts with Loon, he said. The company's workforce has tripled to over 200 employees in the last year, end quote. That is all for today. Got to get into the booth as soon as I can to record this so that I can be editing and have the USA England game on in the background. Talk to you tomorrow.