Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 12/21 – YouTube Sunday Ticket?

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

A new prediction for 2023, the sports streaming wars. What’s with all the weirdness going on with Anker’s security cameras? Is Apple going to cancel the iPhone SE? Is the Google/Facebook ad duopoly over? And an interesting raise for a deepfake startup. Sponsors: Storyblok.com/ridehome InternetSociety.org/techmeme Links: Google’s YouTube in Talks for Rights to NFL Sunday Ticket (WSJ) Anker’s Eufy breaks its silence on security cam security (The Verge) Kuo: Apple to Cancel or Postpone 2024 iPhone SE 4 (MacRumors) Slow fade for Google and Meta's ad dominance (Axios) OpenAI releases Point-E, an AI that generates 3D models (TechCrunch) ‘South Park’ Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone Land $20 Million in Funding for Their Deepfake VFX Studio (Variety) 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, December 21st, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. A new prediction for 2023, the sports streaming wars. What's with all the weirdness going on with Anchor's security cameras? Is Apple going to cancel the iPhone SE? Is the Google Facebook ad duopoly over? And an interesting

raise for a deep fake startup. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Is it too late to put another marker down for 2023 predictions? Could next year be the year that sports and enter the streaming wars in a big way, or maybe the streaming wars isn't the right framing, really. But the possible transformation of sports viewing, thanks to tech companies, sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that the NFL is in advance talks to give YouTube exclusive Sunday ticket rights. A deal could be reached as early as today after an NFL owner meeting scheduled for today. Quote, terms being discussed for the agreement couldn't immediately be learned. Satellite broadcaster Direct TV, which is owned by AT&T and private equity firm TPG,

currently pays $1.5 billion annually for Sunday ticket rights, the Wall Street Journal has reported. Sunday ticket allows subscribers to view all out-of-market-mnoon games, meaning games that don't involve their local teams. A potential move of Sunday ticket to YouTube is further evidence of major sports migrating from traditional TV, which has been hit by cord-cutting to streaming and tech companies that are willing to spend heavily on content. Amazon has its own NFL deal while Apple streams some Major League Baseball games and has a new deal for Major League Soccer. Amazon and Apple also kick the tires on Sunday Ticket.

The addition of Sunday Ticket would provide a boost to YouTube's streaming efforts as the video platform attempts to broaden beyond advertising sales into subscription revenue. YouTube's advertising business declined on a yearly basis for the first time in the third quarter following a streak of rapid growth during the pandemic. Under the scenario being discussed, NFL games would be available to be streamed on two subscription services, YouTube TV and YouTube primetime channels next season. YouTube has already grown into a popular destination for television watchers, overtaking Netflix as the most viewed streaming service on TV for the first time ever earlier this year, according to Nielsen Data. YouTube TV, a 6499 a month online bundle of cable channels, cross more than 5 million subscriptions and trial accounts in June, according to the company. Primetime channels, which launched in November, allows viewers to individually subscribe to more than 30 streaming services.

Sunday Ticket would be offered as an add-on to both services, the people familiar with the potential agreement said. Direct TV has experienced subscriber declines that made it difficult to justify the costs of holding on to Sunday Ticket. Sunday Ticket has around 1.5 million subscribers. The NFL has been eager to strike media partnerships with tech companies, which expands the pool of potential bidders every time rights deals come up for negotiation. This season, Amazon's Prime Video Streaming Service became the exclusive national home for the NFL's Thursday night football package at an average annual price of $1.2 billion a season, a big increase from what Fox previously paid for the same rights, end quote. Time to catch you up on a weird story that's been percolating for a few weeks now. About a month ago,

a security researcher reported that Anchors Ufi branded security cameras allegedly sent images to the cloud without user consent and could be accessed without authentication. Then last week, Ufi quietly removed 10 commitments from its privacy page, including encryption, after questions about keeping those promises arose. And now, Anchor has been forced to admit that Ufi security camera's live view feature on its web portal, quote, has a security flaw, but fails to address why anyone can view unencrypted streams. Quoting the Verge, On the last episode of Will Anchor ever tell us what's actually going on with its security cameras rather than lying and covering its tracks, we told you how Ufi's customer support team is now quietly providing some of the answers to the questions that the company had publicly ignored about its smart home camera security.

Now Anchor is finally taking a stab at a public explanation in a new blog post titled to our Ufi security customers and partners. Unfortunately, it contains no apology and doesn't begin to address why anyone would be able to view an unencrypted stream in VLC Media, player on the other side of the country from a supposedly always local, always end-to-end encrypted camera. What it does contain is a clear admission, quote, Ufi securities live view feature on its web portal feature has a security flaw. The company admits in bold letters. While stopping short of an apology, the company does acknowledge that, quote, we know the need for more straightforward and timely communications on these issues has frustrated many customers and says it has stayed silent because it's, quote, been using the last few weeks to research these possible threats and gather all the

facts before publicly addressing these claims, end quote. The post also addresses some other concerns that security researchers have raised, like how Ufi was uploading thumbnails from its cameras, including pictures of faces to the cloud without making users aware so that it can deliver push notifications. Anchor says those images are protected with end-to-end encryption and reiterates that it's now making customers aware that they have a choice of local or cloud push notifications in an updated version of the app. Good, end quote. Although it's seems like they still have some splaining to do. Our Apple analyst pal, Ming Chi Kuo, says Apple plans to cancel or postpone at least iPhone

SE4 mass production, which had been set for 2024 due to lower-than-expected shipments of its middle-and-lower-tier iPhones, quoting Mac rumors. Quo also said that the full-screen design that Apple has in mind for the iPhone SE-4 will require higher costs and selling prices, so Apple may need to, quote, reconsider the product positioning and return on investment for the iPhone SE4. Reducing unnecessary product development costs will also help Apple navigate the, quote, challenges of the global economic recession in 2023, according to quo. Multiple rumors have suggested that Apple is working on a new version of the iPhone SE with the device set to launch in 2024. Apple is developing a device that could look similar to the

iPhone 10R with an all-display design that does away with the touch ID home button and instead adopts either face ID or a touch-ID power button. Rumors indicate that the iPhone SE4 could have a 6.1-inch LCD or OLED display, along with a notch at the top, much like the current iPhone 14 models. Apple's plans for the iPhone SE4 have not been finalized, and earlier this year, Apple analysts Ross Young, said Apple had not decided between an OLED or LCD display for the device. Apple discontinued the 5.4-inch iPhone line after poor sales of mini-sized iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 models, and rumors have also indicated that the more affordable iPhone, iPhone 14 plus has seen lower than expected sales. For that reason, Apple could instead focus on its flagship iPhones in 2023 and 2024, pushing development on the iPhone SE line back or going with cheaper components that will allow for a lower price point than the planned design changes,

end quote. Interesting addition to the line also goes down file. According to Insider Intelligence, Google will capture 28.8% of the U.S. digital ad market, at least ad revenue, in 2022 and meta will grab 19.6% for a combined 48.4%, which would be down from the peak of 54.7% in 2017. So for the first time in years, this duopoly is not responsible for half of advertising revenue in the U.S. Is the great advertising duopoly broken? Is it shrinking? Is this Apple ATT stuff or competition from the likes of TikTok? Quoting Axios. Google and Meta, known together in the ad industry as the Duopoly, are expected to bring in less than half of all U.S. digital advertising this year for the first time since 2014.

By far, the biggest threat to their collective ad dominance is Amazon, which has grown its ad business to over $30 billion annually. By 2024, Amazon is expected to capture 12.7% of all U.S. digital ad dollars, while Meta is expected to capture 17.9%. While TikTok's ad business is booming, it's still relatively small in the U.S. compared to its big tech rivals. TikTok is expected to earn $8.6 billion in ad revenue in 2024, which will make it the fifth largest digital ad publisher in the U.S. following Google, meta, Amazon, and Microsoft slash LinkedIn. The ubiquity of screens in the home workplace and on the go has made it so that virtually any company can target customers with digital ads expanding the set of competitors for

Google and meta from other publishers and social media firms to streamers, e-commerce companies, and beyond. Amazon, along with other e-commerce players like Walmart and eBay, has started to build out a significant digital ad network that can be used to boost products within its own marketplace. Streaming companies like Hulu, Roku, Paramount's Pluto, and Fox's Tooby are collectively gaining digital ad market share as more television dollars flow away from traditional television. Google has long dominated digital search advertising, while meta has conquered targeted social media advertising, but new entrants into the ad market are targeting their dominance in unexpected ways. More people are leveraging TikTok and Amazon to search for products and ideas online, pulling

some of the momentum away from Google's dominance. Changes to Apple's app tracking policies have significantly undercut Meta's ability to target ads based on a user's activity across apps. Meta has said it expects Apple's changes to cost it $10 billion this year. Both companies are relying on the growth of digital video, YouTube for Google, and Instagram for meta to stay competitive, end quote. Here comes another one. OpenAI has open-sourced Point E, a machine learning system that generates and displays a 3D object from a text prompt in one to two minutes on an Nvidia V100 GPU, quoting TechCrunch. PointE doesn't create 3D objects in the traditional sense, rather it generates point clouds or discrete sets of data points

in space that represent a 3D shape, hence the cheeky abbreviation. The E and point E is short for efficiency because it's ostensibly faster than previous 3D object generation approaches. Point clouds are easier to synthesize from a computational standpoint, but they don't capture an object's fine-grained shape or texture, a key limitation of Pointee currently. To get around this limitation, the Pointe team trained an additional AI system to convert Pointe's point clouds to meshes. Meshes, the collections of vertices, edges, and faces that define an object are commonly used in 3D modeling and design. But they note in the paper that the model can sometimes miss certain parts of objects resulting in blocky, or distorted shapes. Outside of the mesh-generating model, which stands alone, point E consists of two models, a text-to-image model and an image-to-3-3-D model. The text-to-image model, similar to generative

art systems like OpenAI's own Dolly 2 and stable diffusion, was trained on labeled images to understand the associations between words and visual concepts. The image-to-3-D model, on the other hand, was fed a set of images paired with 3D objects so that it learned to effectively translate between the two. When given a text prompt, for example, a 3D printable gear, a single gear, three inches in diameter, and half inch thick, point E's text to image model generates a synthetic rendered object that's fed to the image to 3D model, which then generates a point cloud. After training the models on a dataset of several million 3D objects and associated metadata, PointE could produce colored point clouds that frequently matched text prompts, the OpenAI researcher said. It's not perfect. Pointe's

image to 3D model sometimes fails to understand the image from the text to image model, resulting in a shape that doesn't match the text prompt. Still, it's orders of magnitude faster than the previous state of the art, at least according to OpenAI's team. What are the applications exactly? Well, the OpenAI researchers point out that point E's point clouds could be used to fabricate real-world objects, for example, through 3D printing. With the additional mesh converting model, the system could, once it's a little more polished,

also find its way into game and animation development workflows. OpenAI might be the latest company to jump into the 3D object generator fray, but as alluded to earlier, it certainly isn't the first. Earlier this year, Google released DreamFusion, an expanded version of DreamFields, a generative 3D system that the company unveiled back in 2021. Unlike DreamFields, DreamFusion requires no prior training, meaning that it can generate 3D representations of objects without 3D data. While all eyes are on 2D art generators at the present model,

synthesizing AI could be the next big industry disruptor. 3D models are widely used in film and TV, interior design, architecture, and various science fields. Architectural firms use them to demo proposed buildings and landscapes, for example, while engineers leverage models as designs of new devices, vehicles, and structures, end quote. Finally today, another AI startup success story. This one's a little different though. South Park creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have landed $20 million in funding for their deep fake video effects studio. Quoting variety. Stone and Parker's Deep Voodoo began building their proprietary deep fake technology in early 2020, and the duo assembled a team of artists for a feature film about Donald Trump they had developed. In October of that year,

they released Sassy Justice, a 14-minute comedy short featuring a deep-faked Trump voiced by Peter Serafenowitz, which went viral. But they suspended the movie project due to the COVID-pandemic and pivoted Deep Voodoo to be a provider of deep fake tools to the industry. Deep Voodoo provided VFX for Kendrick Lamar's The Heart Part 5 music video released in May 2022, in which Lamar's face transforms into the visages of OJ Simpson, Jesse Smollett, Nipsey Hustle, Kobe Bryant, and Kanye West. We stumbled upon this amazing technology and ended up recruiting the best deep fake artists in the world, Stone said in a statement, we are psyched to share their brilliance with the

Hollywood creative community, end quote. It's the first outside capital raised by Deep Voodoo, which previously was funded entirely by Parker and Stone's independent entertainment company Park County. Stone and Parker plan to use the new funding to, quote, accelerate Deep Voodoo's development of its leading deep fake technology, cost-effective visual effects services, and original synthetic media projects, according to the announcement, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.