Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 08/07 – Is The New Google TV Streamer An Apple TV 4K Killer?

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Google’s new TV streaming appliance, plus lots of lot of Gemini stuff is coming to Google Home and Nest and such. Elon tries to get advertisers to come back to X by… suing them. That time Intel had a chance to invest in OpenAI. And what new products can Airbnb dream up to make more money? Links: The Google TV Streamer might be the Apple TV 4K rival we’ve been waiting for (The Verge) Gemini intelligence is coming to Google Home (The Verge) Scoop: X sues major brands, ad industry group for antitrust (Axios) ‘There’s no price’ Microsoft could pay Apple to use Bing: all the spiciest parts of the Google antitrust ruling (The Verge) How chip giant Intel spurned OpenAI and fell behind the times (Reuters) The limited edition OnePlus Open is the most striking foldable phone yet (The Verge) Airbnb details plans to expand beyond short-term rentals, including co-hosting and relaunching ‘experiences’ (TechCrunch) 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 Wednesday, August 7th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google's new TV streaming appliance, plus lots of Gemini stuff, is coming to Google Home and Nest and such. Elon tries to get advertisers to come back to X by suing them. That time Intel had a chance to invest in OpenAI and what new products can Airbnb dream up to make more money. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google yesterday unveiled the rumored $100 Google TV streamer with better performance than Chrome. Chromecast with Google TV, thread and matter support, and more. It's all shipping September 24th, quoting The Verge. Google isn't waiting for its upcoming hardware event to announce the Chromecast's

successor. By the way, I didn't mention, but the Chromecast is definitely being sunsetted now. Quoting again, alongside the new Sleaker Nest Thermostat today, the company is introducing the Google TV streamer, a $99 set-top box that improves upon the Chromecast with Google TV with substantially better performance, also thread and matter integration and useful new features like a remote finder. Yes, there are some Gemini AI tricks thrown in and with other hardware upgrades like a built-in Ethernet Jack. The Google TV streamer seems poised to be a much better entertainment hub than its predecessor. The only downside, since it's not a dongle anymore, you'll have to provide your own HDMI cable when it ships on September 24th. The sloped low-profile device comes in two colors,

porcelain, white, and hazel, dark gray, with the latter being exclusive to the Google store. Unlike the Chromecast, which could be hidden away behind your TV, the Google TV streamer is designed to sit underneath it and be seen without standing out from your other home decor. Part of why Google designed it to be placed out in the open is because the device includes a thread, border, router, and connectivity support for matter. And that brings us to a key new feature with one button press on the remote. you can pull up a Google Home panel on the right side of the TV screen, giving you easy control over your smart home devices and cameras from your living room couch.

That's handy, and the thread hardware is a nice bit of future-proofing. But at its core, the Google TV streamer is still mostly an entertainment gadget. Google seems to recognize that customers have long been hoping for a more powerful device that doesn't suffer from the lag and navigation hitches of the underpowered Chromecast with Google TV. The new hardware has a processor that's 22% faster, double the RAM, and 32 gigabytes of integrated storage. That CPU bump probably means that this thing still falls short of the Nvidia Shield TV and Apple TV 4K, but it's something. I'm looking forward to reviewing the Google TV streamer to see whether the company has finally produced a respectable foe to the Apple TV

4K. Google has always prioritized value over price and performance, but the new hardware upgrades and smart home features have me thinking that it just might have landed on the right formula this time, end quote. And then, as mentioned there briefly, Google also unveiled Gemini-based features for Google Home, coming later in 2024, including descriptive captions for NEST camera videos, a smarter assistant for NEST, and more. Quoting the verge. Most of these features, aside from the new voice, will be paywalled behind Google's Nest Aware subscription, its video recording subscription for NEST cameras. That starts at $8 a month or $80 a year. The features will launch first in Google's public preview beta program to a limited number of Nest Aware subscribers, and will, roll out to more users next year. Google is using Gemini Intelligence on Ness cameras to allow them to

understand what they see and hear and tell you what's most important. This means that instead of just getting an alert for a person or package and then having to watch the video to see what happened, Google Home will add a detailed description of what the cameras saw. The models will learn and train on your data in the cloud, but for your home, getting smarter over time to better understand what's happening around your home. One example Google shared was a clip of a person unloading groceries from a car with the caption, A young person in casual clothing standing next to a parked black SUV. They are carrying grocery bags.

The car is partially in the garage and the area appears peaceful. Interpretive details aside, the caption provides a lot of context, which alongside being helpful could translate to smarter home automation. For example, if a camera detects an animal and understands that the dog is digging in the garden, the next step could be to create an automation to turn on the sprinklers. There will also be an option to use text to search through footage in the Google Home Activity tab. This could be handy when, say, my cat sneaks out after dark. I could ask it to show me the last time it spotted the cat,

rather than having to scroll through every video tagged with an animal to find him. And a new Help Me Create feature in the Google Home app lets you describe what you want to happen, such as lock the doors and turn off the lights at bedtime and have it create a routine to do it automatically, end quote. X has sued the World Federation of Advertisers, also GARM and GARM members, CVS Health, Mars, Orsted, and Unilever over what CEO Linda Yaccarino calls an illegal boycott, quoting Axios. Garm was created by members of the World Federation of Advertisers in 2019 to set standards around brand safety for digital advertisers. Members include major tech companies, advertisers, agencies, ad tech firms, and advertising co-oel. Last month, conservatives on Capitol Hill held a hearing to address complaints from conservative media firms, mainly the Daily Wire, that Garm was colluding with ad-buying giant Group M to

discourage clients from buying ads on their sites because of conservative politics. The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, argues Garm, quote, conspired along with dozens of non-defendant co-conspirators to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue from Twitter, now X-Corp. copy of the lawsuit obtained by Axios alleges Garm triggered a, quote, massive advertiser boycott when it conveyed to its members concerns about compliance from Twitter, now X, with its standards after Elon Musk acquired the platform in 2022. Quote, these actions were all against the unilateral self-interest of the advertisers. They made economic sense only in furtherance of a conspiracy

performed in the confidence that competing advertisers were doing the same, the complaint reads. Garm is considered a helpful tool by many players in the ad industry, letting them hand off to a third-party potentially controversial calls about the acceptability of particular advertising environments. It's unlikely that Congress would intervene in an intra-industry dispute between Garmin X or any other publisher. A court could choose to litigate the case further, or it may choose to toss the lawsuit, end quote. Now look, I'm not taking a side here, and I'm not even snarking, but are we sure one way to get people to start advertising on your platform again is to sue them? I would imagine that not only would the brands you take to court not be eager to spend money with you ever again,

but it might also make all the other advertisers think twice. Like, if we lower our spend, will Elon sue us? A couple of interesting leaks. This first one is from the USV Google case. Apple's eddiqueu apparently said, there was no price Microsoft could offer to make Bing Safari's default search engine. Quoting the verge. During the trial, he said that there,

is no price that Microsoft could ever offer to Apple to get the company to preload Bing in Safari. Quote, I don't believe there's a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us, Kew said at another point. They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company, end quote. For Google, this is a sign that they've earned their default status, which, incidentally, they pay Apple gobs of money to maintain. Judge Metis says that this is an indication that the, quote, market reality is that Google is the only real choice in the default GSC or general search engine market. In addition to Apple, Google also has contracts with cell carriers and device manufacturers to be the default search engine on Android devices.

These contracts operate a little differently since they hinge on Google's control of the Google Play Store. It's not just Eddie Q refusing to give Bing the time of day. All of these companies recognize Google as the only game in town. None of these, quote, Fortune 500 companies have a real choice in the matter. Google understands there is no genuine competition for the defaults because it knows that its partners cannot afford to go elsewhere, the judge wrote. Time and again, Google's partners have concluded that it is financially infeasible to switch default GSEs or seek greater flexibility in search offerings because it would mean sacrificing the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, that Google pays them as revenue share,

end quote. According to the judge, it's not just that Google pays Apple not to challenge its search supremacy. It would be unbelievably difficult for Apple to get in on the action at all. Unsurprisingly, both Google and Apple have looked into this, and their own internal estimates came out at trial. Apparently, Apple has calculated that, quote, it would cost $6 billion annually on top of what it already spends developing search capabilities to run a GSE. Meanwhile, in quote, late 2020, Google estimated how much it would cost Apple to create and maintain a GSE that could compete with Google. Apple would have to spend something in the rough order of $20 billion in order to reproduce Google's technical infrastructure, to search, end quote. And Reuters' sources have revealed that in 2017 and 2018, Intel and Open AI executives discussed Intel buying a 15% stake in Open AI for $1 billion in cash,

but then Intel CEO Bob Swan did not go forward with the deal. Quote, over several months in 2017 and 2018, executives at the two companies discussed various options, including Intel buying a 15% stake for $1 billion in cash, three of the people said. They also discussed Intel taking an additional 15% stake in OpenAI if it made hardware for the startup at cost price, two people said. Intel decided against a deal, partly because then-CEO Bob Swan, did not think generative AI models would make it to market in the near future and thus repay the chipmaker's investment, according to three of the sources who all requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters. Open AI was interested in an investment from Intel because

it would have reduced their reliance on Nvidia's chips and allowed the startup to build its own infrastructure, two of the people said. The deal also fell through because Intel's data center unit did not want to make products at cost, the people said. An Intel spokesperson did not address questions about the potential deal. Swan did not respond to a request for comment, and OpenAI declined to comment. Intel's decision not to invest in OpenAI, which went on to launch the groundbreaking chat GPT in 2022 and is now reportedly valued at about $80 billion, has not previously been made public, end quote. Well, whatever you think of the value of generative AI, even in the long term, chalk this up as another poor management decision at Intel. Again, even if Open AI were to crash and burn, just strategically at this

juncture at this point in time, having a wedge against Nvidia in the AI realm would have been worth something. I did not know this, but for the first time in 30 years, Intel's market cap is now less than $100 billion. Invidias is $2.6 trillion. new hardware alert. One Plus has debuted the $1,900 One Plus Open Apex Edition, with a crimson red color, 1 terabytes of storage, 16 gigabytes of RAM, and a new VIP mode software feature shipping August 8th, quoting the verge. Based on all the leaks and Google's own marketing, we already know that the upcoming Pixel

9 Pro Fold has a design quite similar to last year's One Plus Open. One Plus doesn't yet have a new foldable ready to take on the latest from Google and Samsung. So for the time being, it's instead releasing a limited edition of the Open in a crimson red color. That's one way to squeeze some more juice out of the thing, right? Priced at $1,89.99. The One Plus Open Apex Edition is completely specked out with one terabyte of storage and 16 gigabytes of RAM. Aside from the color, the company has made some other very minor hardware tweaks with this version. The Alert Slider Switch is thinner with a carved out. out splash of orange in the middle, for example. I've been carrying the Apex Edition around New York City

for a few days now, and I've gotten plenty of questions about it. It's a looker, and this is also the first time I've gotten familiar with the Open's design after many months of using a pixel fold. Spoiler, this is the way, and I'm now very glad Google is making the switch to a similar approach. And damn, this company sure did come up with a great system for multitasking. Allison covered a lot of it in her review, so check that out. The long and short of it is that One Plus's gestures and multi-app Experiences feel surprisingly intuitive in very little time. But back to the hardware, there's just a lot I've come to enjoy about the One Plus Open in a matter of days. The inner displays screen protector has an anti-reflective quality that makes it easy to see

in a variety of lighting conditions. The speakers sound noticeably better than those on the pixel fold, and I'm again impressed by One Plus's proprietary wired charging speeds, end quote. Finally today, Airbnb reported earnings yesterday, and they were above estimates, but their Q3 guidance was below estimates, and so at the time of this writing, the stock is down more than 14%. But I'm mentioning this because I'm low-key fascinated by Airbnb's continuing efforts to try to innovate new products beyond, you know, renting places out. I mean, Uber has been able to add in-car and in-app advertisements to the tune of a $1 billion run rate, apparently. But what can Airbnb do that is new? Well, quoting TechCrunch.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky suggested on Tuesday's Q2 earnings call with investors that the company will soon expand into new products and services, including co-hosting, a relaunch of Airbnb's experiences, guest services, and more. The company positioned the upcoming offerings as a way for Airbnb to grow its revenue by becoming known for doing more than just one thing, short-term vacation rentals. We're going to have to do multiple new things, Chesky told investors. With co-hosting, launching later this fall, Airbnb aims to connect homeowners who don't have time to manage their listings with those who have the time, but who don't have a home to offer on the platform? What if we could match those two people together? That would unlock a lot

more inventory, the execs said. The company additionally teased the relaunch of experiences, a feature that had originally allowed Airbnb guests to book things like outings, tours, and other things to do near their stay. The option had been put on pause last year as part of Airbnb's plan to refocus on its core offerings, however. Next year, Airbnb says it will bring back experiences, having learned what worked and what didn't from its earlier attempts. Experiences, explained Chesky, will need to be, quote, more affordable and unique to Airbnb, he said. Earlier this month, the company told Bloomberg it was weighing ideas like personal chefs, massages, and mid-state cleanings as part of its in-home experiences plans that could potentially woo customers away

from hotels. Airbnb is going to be about long-term stays. It's going to be about guest services, host services, and many new offerings, Chesky told investors, and you'll begin to see that next year, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.