The Vergecast - Australia's bargain with Google and Facebook / Apple TV on Chromecast / Nintendo Direct's biggest announcements

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Nilay Patel talks with Adi Robertson and Casey Newton about what Australia's News Media Bargaining Code means for Google, Facebook, and the open web in Australia. Chris Welch and Julia Alexander join the show to discuss the new Amazon Fire TV stick, Apple TV on Chromecast, and the state of streaming services in 2021. Andru Marino and Taylor Lyles discuss the announcements from this week's Nintendo Direct. Further reading: Maps show ZIP codes hit hardest by COVID-19 have low vaccination rates Finicky COVID-19 vaccines raise the stakes of power outages Vaccine rollout won’t be equitable unless health care reckons with racism If you’re vaccinated against COVID-19, you won’t have to quarantine if you’re exposed How to score a COVID-19 vaccine appointment Texas freeze risks slowing COVID-19 progress Facebook will block Australian users and publishers from sharing news links in response to new bill Why Google caved to Australia, and Facebook didn’t Facebook employee warned it used ‘deeply wrong’ ad metrics to boost revenue Facebook’s Australian media ban is taking down official government pages Apple won’t have to allow App Store alternatives on iOS after North Dakota bill fails Amazon Fire TV Stick (2020) review: just get a 4K model Apple TV app now available on the latest Google Chromecast YouTube TV offering HBO Max, Showtime, and Starz for $5 less in new entertainment bundle Donald Glover’s reported Amazon deal could lead to a more curated Prime Video HBO Max is ordering way more kids’ content to compete with Netflix and Disney Plus The 20 biggest announcements from today’s Nintendo Direct Android 12 developer preview is available now with many under-the-hood updates How to easily install the Android 12 developer preview Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody. Before the show starts, I want to talk about something I think is really exciting. On March 1st, we're holding our first live event. We're calling it the Verge Live. Senator Amy Klobuchar is going to talk about big tech regulation in a keynote, followed by a panel with Addie Robertson on Section 230 and the future of speech on the internet. Again, that's on March 1st. Senator Klobuchar will be taking live questions from the audience. We're going to have a really in-depth, weedsy conversation. If you're a Vergecast fan, I think you're really going to like it. If you're interested or you have questions for Senator Globetchar, you can register at Voxmediaevents.com slash the verge live. That's Voxmediaevents.com slash the verge live. All right. I'm on the show. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud

with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom.

And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. This week on the Vergecast, Casey Newton and Addie Robertson joined to talk about what is going on with Facebook in Australia. Chris Welch and Julia Alexander come on for a streaming service update. And Taylor Lyles and Andrew Marino talk about Nintendo Direct. that's coming up on the Vergecast now.

Hello, welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Australian media industry. Would it be great if we just made it hard, every time I do that, I'm like, we should just do it. We should just say we're the flagship podcast of whatever I said, bomb into that zone. I mean, if it turned out not to be true, you wouldn't be able to talk about it on Facebook,

so it would sort of become true by default. See? And that's how you get a market. You just back into it until no one else has a choice. I'm Eli. I'm your friend. Peter is off today, but that voice just heard is Casey Newton. Hey, Casey. Hey, Casey. Addy Robertson is here. Hey, Addy. Addy and Casey are going to join me at the top of the show to talk about what is going on with Facebook in Australia. Then a little bit later, Julia Alexander and Chris Welch are going to come on. There's a much streaming news to go through. And then at the end of the show, a new segment idea. Our producer, Andrew Marino, and our reporter Taylor Liles are going to go through what happened at Nintendo Direct. I have no. There are a off recording it right now without without us. So I don't I don't even know what they're doing,

but I think it's going to be great. The show needs a little bit of chaos. It's just, yeah, it's like, it's been the same for a long time. You got to, who knows what's good. Who knows what the last 30 minutes of the virtual yesterday will be like, you will in about one hour is my guess. Okay, let me start where we always start, which is an update on COVID. I also want to do a little update on what's happening in Texas because both of those are kind of the biggest stories going right now and they have gigantic second order effects. to touch on a bunch of verge coverage areas. So we have been covering vaccine rollout.

That's been the heart of our COVID coverage lately. Lots of news there. So right now we have, if you go on the site, we have a little bit of a service post to help you get a COVID-19 vaccine appointment wherever you are. Go check that out. Obviously, if you're eligible,

please get vaccinated as soon as possible. How vaccines are being distributed is a big deal. They're not being distributed particularly equitably. So there are maps now that shows that areas hit hardest by COVID-19 have some of the lowest vaccination rates, which is not great. And then also just generally, there is a systemic racism in the healthcare system that is now expressing itself through vaccine rollout in general. So we have stories on that. And then lastly, there's some new guidance saying that once you do get vaccinated, you won't have to quarantine if you're exposed, which is a glimmer of good news. what is happening next to vaccine rollout is very much related to what's happening in Texas.

There's obviously huge weather events happening in Texas. It's very cold there. Things are freezing. Power is going out. That means the freezer store in the vaccines are going out. So there's a rush to get some of those vaccines distributed. Some of them are not going to make it. That is slowing vaccine rollout. There's also the power grid in Texas, which is the subject of much debate. I will tell you right now, it is not because the wind turbines froze. It is because natural gas pipelines and coal plants were not winterized. We have a lot of coverage on that from Justine Kalma and how to make that grid better. And then I will just public service announcement, there are a lot of scammers targeting people in Texas with disaster scams. This is something we see all of the time with these things. So we have a story on that.

Please go find that, look at it. Share it widely. If you're in Texas or any of the other areas being affected by the weather, please stay safe. hopefully the Vergecast can entertain you a little bit as we go on. But those are the two biggest stories. We have a lot of coverage from our science team of those stories on the site. I always want to start with them. Keep our focus on those things.

Okay. Then there's Facebook and Australia. Like, it is a crazy story what is happening with Facebook and Google in Australia. The basics are that there was going to be a law in Australia that I want Casey to explain. And Facebook and Google reacted in wildly different ways. Google basically paid some money instead of. I hope this makes it better, and Facebook basically said, screw you were going home.

But Casey, can you just start at the beginning and explain what is going on in Australia? Yeah, so for about three years, they've been talking about the news media bargaining code, which is an effort to level the playing field between Australian publishers and the big tech platforms when it comes to the subject of getting paid for journalism content. ever since the platform's sort of perfected digital advertising. Other publications have been bleeding revenue, and publishers have been agitating for some kind of payments.

And so along comes the news media bargaining code. What makes it so much different than the payments we've seen other places is a couple of things. The first is that it says if you are Facebook or Google and you want to do, display a link, even one that has been voluntarily been posted by a publisher, then you have to pay up. So it sort of breaks the open web. And then if you can't reach an agreement with a publisher on how much you should pay them for the right to let them post their own links or other Facebook users post their own links, then you get sent to binding arbitration in a style that is sometimes called baseball arbitration. Because instead of negotiating for the fair

risk price, the platform and the publisher throw out a price, and then the Australian Arbiter decides which of those two they think is the most fair. So the platforms hate this. There is another stipulation in this code that says that if Facebook or Google are going to make any change that would affect the ranking of their stories on those platforms, then those platforms would have to provide publishers with a 30-day notice every time they change the law. They have since amended it so that if Facebook or Google wants to make a change that is in, quote, the urgent public interest, they do not have to do that. But it should go without saying that nowhere on earth is any industry privy to advance updates on ranking changes. So, you know, this is, as the discussion of this has ricocheted around the internet today, it often gets collapsed down to, oh, well, you know, Facebook doesn't want to pay news, Google doesn't want to pay for news.

when in truth, they're paying for news a lot of places. We can argue about how effective that has been. But the truth is, they just hate this law because it is insane. Right. That's really the heart of it. I want to break it into the two parts. The first one is if you get crawled by Google, which you can opt out of doing very easily with your robots.

dot text file on your website. But if you don't have your Google exclusion line in your robots text file, and Google crawls your website and then displays your article in search results, they have to pay you. Yes. Anywhere in search results are just in their newsbox.

It doesn't get down to that granular level of detail. What it says is if we designate you as being a platform under this new platform code that we're developing, then you have to pay for certain privileges, including displaying, links. And of course, you know, Google and Facebook display links in various different ways across all their products. Okay. So that's the first one is just pay for displaying links. It sounds

importantly like there's no price laid out in the code. No. And what Facebook and Google will tell you is that they feel like they can derive a pretty good sense of how much value those links are creating on their platforms. And they also have a pretty good sense of the value that they are driving to publishers, right? They know how many clicks they're sending to publishers. They know roughly what the price is of an ad. And there are many cases in which a lot of publications includes ones that I love and read every day are being largely kept afloat on the back of clicks driven from Facebook and Google, right? But this is not taken into account in the negotiations for the most part. I will push back on that and say that I understand exactly what Facebook

and in particular Google would make that argument. But that argument is based on, well, we have the best data because we run the search monopoly and the advertising monopoly on the web. So we should just set the prices. Like, no one's ever, no one has ever been allowed to audit that data. Right. Sure. Like that is closed a loop of we're going to tell you exactly how much you're worth and you

will never be able to push back on it, especially for Google as can possibly exist. Yes. I agree. And I want to say, while I'm. very skeptical of this law. I have also been arguing four years, including on the verge, that these platforms should pay for journalism and that these platforms benefit when there's a lot of high quality journalism on them. I want to see basically direct payments that do reflect some sort of fair market value, but maybe even go beyond that into the realm of philanthropy.

I just don't want to break the open web as we do that. I'm with you on that. I also think the law is a little silly. I'm just trying to understand it. So the first one is basically this link payment scheme. I don't really know why it's called baseball arbitration, because what you described there's no relation to baseball as I understand it. Well, not the game of baseball, but apparently this is how like contract disputes are mediated in baseball. And if you know this, I encourage you to tweet at Nil all of next week after listening to this episode. Mostly what I know about baseball is like every now and again, I read an espion article about it that shows up on like the dashboard. And I watched Moneyball like a month ago. That's it. That's what I got. Yeah.

One of the interesting things about your article, Casey, was that you'd mentioned small publishers in Australia. Yeah. That really when I'm reading this law, that seems like the group that gets absolutely screwed over by this is places that are not News Corp and that are not like able to lobby out and get a cut of this revenue, but are still going to get punished by any decisions that, like, lock out sites. I'm curious how much you've looked into, like, I want to know more about that. So this is the matter of some dispute. Like, people who support the code will say that small publishers can come together and bargain collectively under this agreement for better terms.

That's actually probably a good thing. American publishers have wanted to do that and have been unable to do it because of antitress rules, funnily enough. Which is hilarious, yes. Yeah. And I've also been told that apparently when they say, like, small, like, you have to make at least $150,000 as a site to, negotiate. It's actually not clear to me whether that's Australian dollars or US dollars, but most publications of any size are probably hopefully going to be generating at least that

much revenue. So there is some evidence that it will be more inclusive in that sense. But, you know, to be crystal clear, this is not being driven by an interest in small publishers. It's not being driven by an interest in bringing new competitors into the market. And the reason I say that is that nowhere in this code does it say that any of the revenue, generated by these arrangements has to be spent on journalism. They don't have to spend one dollar on a journalist salary. They don't have to spend one dollar on news gathering. It is just a multi-million dollar giveaway to Rupert Murdoch and his cronies. The New York Times had a great story on all the cronyism that is involved in this law. Australia's media market is very small. It's concentrated.

The conservative government is very closely linked to Rupert Murdoch's properties. And so the whole thing is just corporate welfare, but it's done in the guise of saving journalism. And, uh, and, and, And these companies are trying to ride this kind of cheap anti-tech sentiment into a million-dollar giveaway. So I want to get to that. I just want to unpack the other part of the law after the link text first. The other part of the law is anytime the ranking algorithm on Google or Facebook changes, they need to give notice to the publishers. I am not even remotely sure how that would work. Well, I mean, we have seen, like in 2016, I think it was, Facebook came out and they said, we are not going to emphasize. size news posts in the news feed anymore. And they put out a big blog post about it,

and it was a big story. You can imagine that they would have had to take that blog post to these companies 30 days early. And then I guess just hilariously hope that none of the media publishers leaked that in a month-long period. But yeah, that's the basic idea. My charitable reading of it is also around 2016 was the infamous pivot to video, where Facebook said, video is the thing. A bunch of publishers fired a bunch of a bunch of journalists, hired a bunch of video people, tried to make Facebook video, a big business. Facebook said, whoops, this is horrible, actually. Turned it off. Everybody fell apart. Like, if that had been messaged more clearly, that might have been a good thing. Yes. But I don't,

I don't see that this law is written actually targets that scenario. No. So something I believe very much is that as bad as this law is, I do think the platforms have brought this on themselves in a number of ways. I mean, one is it's actually just very hard for Australia to tell. tax Google and Facebook. People have been telling me this all day, and I believe them now, that when Australia has sought to enable taxes, the U.S. government has actually fought it. So it's been hard.

So they've been looking for other ways to get compensated for this revenue. And Facebook and Google have made these very sort of tentative, half-hearted measures over the years to essentially buy off the publishers for as cheaply as possible. The pivot to video was one of those things, right? The idea behind the pivot to video is actually that it would benefit Facebook more than everyone else, but they would share some of that revenue with publishers, so it would be worth everyone's time. Instant articles, which Facebook did, was another similar effort in that regard,

right? Google has something called the Google News Initiative, and they email me about it once a week telling me what they're doing. And I, if it has ever published a single consequential story, it would be news to me. Like, it's an accelerator and an incubator, and they're launching 94 programs in 400 countries, and you've never heard of any of them, right? So, you know, in every other dimension of these companies, they're hyper-focused on outcomes, right, and key objectives and actually, like, driving value. And none of that has been the case with their efforts around journalism. And so I do think that they've left themselves totally vulnerable for insane proposals like this. Okay. So the code has not yet passed, from what I understand. It's in like a close

to final stage. And so Google and Facebook, I think a week or so ago, they both said, look, if this passes, we're out of Australia, which I thought was great. Like, Just from a, when do things like this ever happen? Like, when does Google threaten to just, like, leave a country? Like, okay, from a narrative perspective, this is great. You assume this is brinksmanship. There will be some amount of development, some further negotiation, and it will come to nothing because that is the way of the world, especially when it comes to these amounts of money.

That is not what happened here. And this is a part where I kind of, I think we need to unpack Google and Facebook differently. Yes. Google just decided to pay News Corp and then a handful of other public. in Australia. To what end, I'm not entirely sure, because the code is still going to pass. Facebook said, no more news in Australia. So let's start with Google. What exactly is going on with Google? So Google has been operating under the assumption that it can avoid being designated under the code if it reaches agreements with all of Australia's big publishers. So there are three really

big publishers in Australia, I am told. In addition to News Corp, one is called seven and one is called nine. I would love to hear more about that from people in Australia. Just why is that, why is that true? I don't know. So Google goes ahead and makes these deals. These deals are to license the content for something called the Google News Showcase, which today exists only on Android as a tab in Google News. but this is actually the model of platforms helping journalism that I like, right? This is sort of like carriage fees with telecoms, right? This is sort of like Comcast paying to host ESPN. I like this model.

It's like a fair exchange of value like negotiated between two businesses. Great. So what's weird about it is that as you point out, Neal, it has nothing to do with the code. There is nothing in Australia law that says if you make a deal with Google for showcase, we will hold you not liable for the terms of this code, which has given, I think, further credence to the idea that this was just a shakedown, right? NewsCorp puts out a statement yesterday

where they're so excited about, you know, this deal that they've signed with Google and nowhere do they say, you know, but it's still really important that we see all of your algorithm changes 30 days in advance. They don't care about that. They just wanted the money. I want to read the NewsCorp statement.

It's just like, it's so over the, the top. Yeah. The deal simply would not have been possible without the fervent, unstinting support of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and the News Corp Board. For many years, we were accused of tilting at tech windmills, but what was a solitary campaign, a quixotic quest has become of movement, and both journalism and society will be enhanced. Just a remarkable statement from one of the world's largest media company. I don't understand. This is the thing that I,

do they just buy their way out of this law? Yes. Yes. Then like sometimes, you know, people, there are people, a lot of people in my mentions over the past couple days, you know,

and some of them will object to me calling this shakedown. But, you know, if you walk up to a company and you say, be a real shame if something happened to your business and they give you a bunch of money

and then you walk away and don't harm them. I don't know what else to call that. Okay, but there are also people who call the entire concept of taxation a shakedown. Well, that's true. Yeah, but this,

it's news, and the Murdox. Like, they are the people who call the concept of taxation a shakeout. Very odd, like, especially with everything that happened in this country, with the capital riots, with the big lie. A very odd moment for Google to be making a giant payment to News Corp with what it has put out into the world with, like, the Wall Street Journal opinion pages and Fox News. like a really weird circumstance for Google to find itself in. Totally. But they paid the money and maybe they'll be fine.

We'll see what happens. Facebook did not do that. That's really the heart of this. And I think the heart of the conversation. The reason I took this long to build to Facebook is because all of that is important to understand Facebook just walked away from news in Australia. Right. And so maybe the first thing to point out is how different their businesses are, right?

on Google, links to news is a really huge part of Google. You go to Google to learn about current events, right? News, sports, weather. You expect those links to show up in search. Search is what Google actually cares about. It doesn't have any obvious way of just extracting all news out of Google, right? It would be an enormous technical challenge. And so even though I think it would have been great if they told Australia to take a hike,

I understand why they did it. Facebook is different. 96% of the posts on Facebook, says Facebook, are not news. News causes Facebook nothing but trouble from time immemorial. And so the idea that you could just get rid of 4% of your posts and not have to pay Rupert Murdoch whatever he wants you to pay him was, I think, actually sort of appealing to the company. And so they have just said now that if you try to share news from an Australian outlet, you can't. And that is true, regardless of whether you're,

in Australia or not if I want to share an article here in the United States from the Sydney Morning Herald, I can't do it. So, you know, there were a lot of problems with like the execution of this plan that we should talk about. But that was the basic idea. And that's why Facebook thought it could get away with it, because it, you know, what they feel really aggrieved by is the sense that the publishers are creating this huge amount of value for them and not vice versa. And so this is their moment to say like, oh, you think your links are so valuable to us. We're going to show you exactly how not valuable they are. Addie, we talk a lot about de-platforming in general and how valuable it is and how effective

it can be. There is the outcry that Facebook was deplatforming an entire country, like, reached members of Congress yesterday. Is this in the same category for you? There are like a bunch of different issues and I'm going to keep trying. I want to say like three, but I think that's not correct and I'm just going to start like mining, out numbers. But the first thing is, I've heard a lot of concerns about just the utility of this,

that it doesn't matter whether Facebook has a good reason for deplatforming or whether this counts as deplatforming. The point is that Facebook is an incredibly powerful site and it's going to lose a bunch of things that are objectively valuable in this telling for its users, that users are going to get pushed to lower quality stuff, that they're going to get pushed away from things that help them learn about the world. And as Casey's, mentioned there have been all kinds of weird, like, blowback from this that means that, like, meteor, like, weather reports get banned and things like that. So that, like, you're just, you're depriving people of a bunch of information on a platform that they spend a bunch of time

looking for information on. And that regardless of any of the extenuating circumstances, that that's just objectively a bad thing is one argument that I've heard. I'm not totally sure how convinced I am of this. I feel like I have to disclose here, the verge is not an Australian publication, but the shotgun approach that Facebook took to news in Australia means the versus page can't post news in Australia. I don't know what kind of disclosure that is. I'm just telling you it's true.

So now you know, in case you cared. But it is like Facebook did take a wide, chaotic approach to this, including like Australian government services being banned from the platform. Right. And that appears to have been inadvertent. I think this, to me, this is the, the best. criticism of this is just Facebook botched the rollout. If this was something that they really thought was a strong possibility that they might do, they should have been preparing it for it for months. They should have been disclosing it to users every time they visited Facebook.

You know, they should have pointed them to the law. They could have encouraged people to call their representatives if they wanted to. And then when they actually rolled it out, they should have been really careful about are we banning government pages? Are we banning emergency services? are we banning nonprofits? Now, and while I haven't talked to Facebook about this, I suspect they would say the way that the law is written doesn't give them that much flexibility in making these decisions.

Like, it encourages them to take a very wide approach to banning news rather than a very narrow one. But I also know that the company was using machine learning to figure out which pages to ban and which not to ban. And, like, of course, you know, 2021 machine learning was not going to perfectly distinguish between news and non-news content on Facebook. I feel like I don't understand.

understand this. There's a really, there's a finite amount of news. This isn't like people posting facts. I know. It feels like they could have just taken a bunch of domains and said, you can't post things from these domains. Is there like a reason they couldn't do that? I asked the same question and I was told, we're using machine learning. Yeah. Facebook set up like recently set up like an entire Supreme court to figure out if it's machine learning algorithms or doing a good job of taking things up or taking this down and keeping them up. Like it's I that's the one, especially for a consolidating. media market. There really is only a finite number of domains you need to punish. So it goes. Okay, Adi, what are your other arguments? The other argument is that Casey mentioned that arguably, arguably, arguably, one of the big problems with the way we deal with Facebook and Twitter and Google is that we grant them this power of treating them like they are governments or like they are spaces that are inherently always going to be incredibly powerful, that they're, like, the land itself, there is no way that you can just get, like, leave them. And this all kind of

just puts the light of that. Like, there is a world where, wait, okay, no, we're not going to put news on Facebook anymore. Facebook is no longer the place you go to for news. You go to news websites. And I feel like I've made this argument in a bunch of other contexts. And so which obviously means I really like seeing other people, right? But it does actually just make me wonder if maybe I'm completely wrong about it. That, like, actually, maybe it turns out that, these sites are too big to fail and nothing takes their place, that like people don't visit news websites, that it turns out people just watch less news or they, I don't know, go to One American News or something from Australia for some reason and get stuff. I don't know.

I guess this is an interesting test case that like this is one of the rare moments where somebody goes in and make some giant change and we get to see how it plays out. So there's one study that is relevant here, which is Google stock. showing links in Spain several years back within the Google News over similar issues. Like publishers wanted to be paid for linking and Google said no and so it stopped showing Google News in Spain. And news consumption in Spain dropped about 20% according to one study. That is significant.

I, you know, I feel sad for the 20% of people that stopped reading the news. I'd like to believe and I in fact do believe that they probably got information about their country from somewhere. And hopefully it wasn't all just, you know, misinformation and lies. But to your point, you know, I, all day long, I just retweets and articles from people who hate Facebook with every fiber of their being who say nothing but how they want to remove it from the world. And then here's something comes along that actually de-centers Facebook from the narrative. It removes them as the middleman between the news and the people. And people lose their minds. and they say, how dare you, good sir?

And I just feel like these people are human pretzels. Like, you have to have a more coherent view of the world than that if you're going to be in my timeline. Casey, I have bad news for you about people and coherent views of the world. It's a longer conversation, but I think we should go through it. That's the thing that gets me, right? Is either way, I would reframe what you just said

about how we view Facebook and Twitter and Google. Facebook is the internet. for a substantial number of people around the world, right? Like, they ran free basics where they handed out internet service and the only sites you could access for free or faith. Like, they aspired to be the beginning and the end of the internet for a lot of people in a lot of ways. I don't know if that aspiration has come true. I think as they have come closer to even inched closer to that aspiration, they have run up against all kinds of chaos in ways that maybe they don't want to, be the whole internet for people.

That said, they will just copy every new social service that exists. So maybe they still do want to be the entire internet for people. But this is one of those places where they're actively saying, we're not going to be the whole internet. And like, maybe they're doing it for bad reasons. One of the best arguments, you know, I, I joked yesterday that saying Facebook is acting anti-competitively by making it service worse is crazy. This doesn't make any sense.

But the best argument I heard in response was they will take a short-term hit if they know it will harm others more long term, and then they will return to a dominant position. And I do believe Facebook is a company that can think that far ahead that will absorb a short-term amount of pain if it thinks it can win two years down the line in a big, significant way. They are that smart. They are that clever. Great companies have that kind of time horizon in their thinking.

And that, I can't quite reconcile that. Right. If I was a startup entrepreneur Australia, my pitch decks for Facebook but with news would be just like flowing out of my computer. Like literally I'd be running up and down the street, mask on, of course, screaming, I have an idea for Facebook but with news.

And like hoping that money dropped on me. And Rupert Murdoch was like, we're going to build a real competitor of Facebook because we think news is the thing that drives social networking. Will any of those get launched? Will any of them succeed? I don't know.

But this is the one, opportunity to like take the shot in the open lane that Facebook would never give you in any other country. I mean, the weird twist to this is that Microsoft is really into this idea. And I'm curious how that ends up playing out. I mean, they're just trolling. Like it was the trolleest troll post that has ever trolled. They don't care about any of what they said they care about. And it's just like, oh, Google might suffer and we'll remain totally unharmed. Yeah, we'll do a blog post. Sure. Why not? The Bing Australia team was like, we can take the

But, well, to your point, we have a really good evidence of what happens when companies get nationalistic like this. And the lesson comes from last June when India banned TikTok. There are now two TikTok clones in India. One is called Moj MOJ. And they are thriving. Tens of millions of users. So one aspect of this kind of, you know, I don't call it nationalism, protectionism, whatever, is, it sparks domestic economic growth, right?

Which is like one of the many reasons why I think you're just going to see the internet continuing to Splinter because it turns out it sort of is in the interest of these countries to have these homegrown networks for a lot of reasons. It's good for the economy. It's easier to control them, right? It's easier to tax them. So yeah, like, hey, I mean, well, one, I think that the Australia Facebook thing will probably be resolved within a couple of weeks. But if it's not, you bet they'll be Australian Facebook with news. Why not? I mean, do people want Facebook with news?

People might just actually not want Facebook with news. I mean, they might not. I read the news all day, and I sometimes wonder if I want to see any news. I mean, this is the open lane, and I think this is Facebook's argument. There's more going on in Facebook than news, right? And links to your news website are one of the least important things we do. We have this news division that says things, but doesn't actually pay anybody a lot of money. Is that not enough for you?

They're probably Americans who would pay good money to have their relatives not be able to post news on Facebook. I would pay that money in one heartbeat. It would still wouldn't stop them, right? Like that's like the real issue with Facebook is the disinformation spreads by the users, not by Facebook itself. You know, not to put too fine to point on it, but some of the misinformation spreads after people read articles in the mainstream media, some of which is published by News Corp. I'm excited for the Zuckerberg Murdoch Showdown. I hope like the Australian government makes them go head to head. head on TV or something. Live streamed, of course, on Instagram. Addy, do you worry about just the

basic speech implications of this for Facebook? Not to export the First Amendment to Australia, but there are some core principles of who should be allowed to speak in large spaces that even if you want to grant that Facebook is a fully private company, they operate a large network, and they have just said, no news will be published here. It's really hard to separate this from just my like basic sad disillusionment from a 2008 open internet fan. Like it just, it feels insane to me that you think, but like it's 2021 and we take for granted that there's this basic service that is like the equivalent of what I don't know, Jabber would have been for me at that point or like chat and that you can't share certain links on

that like there are just entire categories of communication that you can't have anymore over this major platform. Obviously, there are nuances to this. Like, you can still post links through WhatsApp or something. But it's just, this kind of feels like the death of the open internet. Like, it just feels like a really huge moment where, A, companies can no longer really even try to make an idealistic pitch for, like, we want freedom of, like, the ability to have people post links.

Like, it's notable that I feel like I haven't even seen the sort of idealistic, internet information should be free take from any of these companies. Like, it's just purely a business decision, which is fair. Like, a lot of this was just people sort of wrapping themselves in these idealistic arguments about the internet. But it's really weird and sad. Like, if you grew up thinking that the point of the internet was that you could post what you want, where you wanted it, and that, like, you could just spread stuff and that that was a good thing, now it turned out that's bad because everything I liked was bad in the end.

That has been the story of, I think, the past few years of the internet. I think, Casey, the kind of the big question here is, okay, it's happening in Australia. There is some sort of mish-mash of a push to regulate in the United States. There are all kinds of laws around the world. You have called it the splinternet before. Is this just the first big moment of this fight? Are we just going to see it repeat around the world and eventually land in the United States? For me, the first big moment.

was when India banned TikTok, right? There you have this democratically elected government which bans this very popular app. And yes, there are some really important national security concerns around TikTok. But I just sort of thought, if this can happen to TikTok, it's going to happen to a lot of other apps. And it's why, by the way, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg in particular were so taken aback by that. I think it really sort of put fear into them that. that, look, you know, many countries have reasons to ban Facebook, and I assume that eventually many will. But, you know, to your point, so I write a newsletter, I tag everything that goes into the newsletter. And like, splinternet is just becoming a tag that I add to more and more things.

You can just sort of look all around the world and find ways in which boundaries are beginning to appear around the internet. You know, one of my favorite stories that a CEO who runs a global internet company told me one time was, you know, you used to be able to travel around the world without a passport. You could actually do it until like the 1920s. You could just, you know, cross borders. Nobody cared. And then all of a sudden, oh, border control, passports, checkpoints, right? And you can just see that now starting to pop up all over the internet. One thing I wonder, and I think this will tie into the next piece, which is how states are kind of coming after Apple right now. But one thing I wonder is how much of the global internet, sort of

the average American experiences. This was the grand promise of the internet that you would log on to your computer and you would see pictures from around the world and you would get all these perspectives. But actually, the internet has made us more nationalistic in aggregate. Right. And the average, I, I just rarely see things from around the world that are positive. It's like literally, it's like, either I'm looking at pictures of unrest around the world or K-pop stands are like doing it.

And those are the only, like, those are the two big vectors of international internet for me. And I'm somebody who's, like, out looking for it. I, like, I wonder if that big idealistic goal, like Adi has been talking about was actually ever realized where the international internet was actually providing value to the average internet user, especially the United States. I mean, sure. Like, we could probably think of lots of ways that a global internet was good. You know, like Wikipedia is a global project, right?

You know, I wish we had 100 more Wikipedias that we could point to. It does seem like it's easier to find examples of the Internet causing harm, or at least it sort of leaps more readily to mind. But look, I mean, I know this from working at the verge for so long. You know, the replies I would get in my Twitter mentions, they were from people in India and Australia and Korea and the UK and France and Germany, right? And I love that so much, right? That sense of I'm connected talking about this thing that I love to other people. Luke care about it too. And by the way, they also made me smarter because they would point out how I was wrong and they would link me to other stuff that, you know, pointed out something that I

missed. So there is something really precious there that is worth fighting for. And by the way, it starts with the ability to post a link somewhere and not have to pay to show that link somewhere, right? And so to the extent that there is something worth fighting for here, I really do think it starts there. I mean, the internet is basically links. Links are what the internet is. And there have been other link taxing proposals that I'm going to say there is one in the EU and I know that is not exactly right and before like EU commissioner PR people come up I know it's not exactly right but there was something that looked like a link tax proposal of the EU that died on the vine for this reason that it is almost impossible to parse out who should get paid for what when you share link

I think what I'm coming to is to your point that the international it's a very small and very personal good thing. It's like you individually see another, like we have an international staff, right? Like Sam Biford lives in Japan, he logs into the version, he's in our Slack and he's telling us what happens in Japan. Is that a value that can be expressed politically to lots of people that overcomes like nationalism? No, although Sam is very funny, and I wish all of you could see his Slack's more. But I think that's like a big thing to puzzle out here.

The reason I brought out the Apple thing is we talked about the North Dakota bill that would have taxed the app store differently in North Dakota. It failed this week. There was some reporting, I think, from the Times and others. That bill is basically being pushed by Spotify and a handful of other companies. There are versions of that bill, I think, in Arizona now. There are versions in other states. It's funny to have this whole conversation about Australia and then come back to, well, maybe state by state in the United States. the internet will be different because that is it's a real it's a real thing that is happening addie

have you heard any any rumbles of the other bills and how they're doing i have not i feel like the just like speed at which this failed kind of makes me think that this is not necessarily going to get a lot of traction elsewhere yeah one thing that is true about politicians is that they love their iPhones and apple always has a built-in good argument of i'll make your iPhone worse like we have many hearings we've been to where like some member of congress will be like Do you know why these bubbles are green? And Tim Cook is like, I'll have my staff look into that for you. But we'll see.

I think we're seeing it on both levels. I think we're seeing it internationally, and I think we're seeing a lot of states. There's a digital services tax bill in Maryland that's going to get challenged in court now. Because it might be unconstitutional for Maryland to levy different taxes on advertising than else we're in the country. So Splinternet continues.

Thank you both. That was great. Casey, what do you think your time on in Australia? It's a couple weeks before it. I think so. You know, both the Australian government and Facebook on Wednesday, the day that, you know, the split was announced put out statements saying that they were having productive conversation. So, you know, the suggestion to me is like we're going to get to an agreement that we can all live with. But I really do think that Facebook will have put itself in a better bargaining position here, right? Like Australians, woke up today, Australian publishers woke up, and 20% of their traffic was gone. So if you don't think that's going to factor into these negotiations, I think you're wrong. Or they're going to come back with an even higher number. And then from what I understand, a game of baseball will be played. That'd be incredible.

All right. Okay, Casey, you write Platform. Tell people where they can find it. Platformer is a newsletter four days a week about big tech and democracy. One issue every week is free, and you can get it at platformer. news and on theverse.com. We'll be back after this with Julia Alexander and Chris Welch talk a little bit about streaming. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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Hey, Julia. Chris Welch is here. Hey, Chris. Hey, Chris. Now, if you're a Vergecast fan, you know this means we're going to talk about television. I have an ulterior motive here, which is I would just like to spend a significant amount of time like, what's up with that Apple TV? But we're going to try to do it through the lens of news. So let's start with the company that has put out some new hardware. Chris, you just reviewed the new Fire Stick, which seems like a very confusing product for its price point and specs.

So it's their new base level Fire TV Stick came out late last year, but then Amazon brought their new software experience to this first. So it's a bit more streamlined. That's a bit easier to use. But the stick itself is 1080P for max resolution, and yet it still does HDR and Dolby Atmos audio. So I've never even seen a TV that does 1080P and HDR at the same time. It's kind of a rare fit. So it's kind of a strange device. I mean, we were talking in Slack today, and it seems like one of those things that Amazon

should really at this point just like give away as like a freebie for your prime, just to like, you know, make you watch and keep you watching their stuff. But like as like a core streaming product, it's nice. It's got all the apps you want. Besides Peacock, there's always one on all these platforms now that's just not there. So if you're a big peacock stand, then you might have to wait a bit longer. But everything else is there. That's got the Apple TV app.

That's got April Max, Disney Plus, yada, yada. I'm just looking at this screenshot of the interface. So you said they clean it up. I'm dying for Julia's thoughts on this because the last time you were on the Vergecast, Julia, you just ranted about how bad the prime interface is, especially in apps and other devices. But I am just looking at this screenshot. This is an Amazon press screenshot, right? This is their screenshot.

Yeah, I know. This is mine. This is yours. Okay. Taken off the actual device last night. And there's a gigantic banner ad for the Accura MDX. Just like in the middle. Like, it is above the apps, right?

There's like the top hero module that's showing like watch billions. Right. So there's the top hero. Then you got those four tabs, library home, fine. And then you've got your favorite apps right to the right of that. So you can see there it says Disney Plus, HBO Max. Like those are your favorite apps go there. Then below that, it's like your last watch and stuff like that.

But yeah, the full-width Accura ad. And then there's just a gigantic Accura ad. Like, I wanted to start with WhatsApp with the Apple TV, but I'm like, oh, it's the one that doesn't have ads in the interface. Yeah. Like, it's the one that doesn't openly disrespect me by ads for crossover SUVs. Anyway, Julie, I'm dying. You have been very negative on the primary. interface based on what you're seeing here.

Have they gotten any better? No, it's a slight improvement and it's functional and I think that's all you can ask for at this point. But also, I'm just so in love with, I think last time I was on this podcast, I was talking about it, with the Google TV Chromecast that everything I compare it to is just absolute garbo. But this seems better for sure. Okay, so the reason I'm bringing up is it is cheap.

It's $40. It's not the cheapest thing you can get. but it has the capabilities it's new, it's $40. I would just point out again that the Apple TV exists. It's still a very expensive device. And then the next thing, like the Apple TV app, which has Apple TV Plus, is now on that Google Chromecast. Chromecast, yeah. It's on this fire stick.

It's everywhere. I cannot think of a reason to buy the Apple TV hardware right now. I mean, I saw some Twitter thought the other day about like customer privacy and like all these companies getting out your viewing habits. But, like, I think people are, like, less skittish about that kind of data being shared, clearly. I mean, because people buy Roku's and Amazon Firesticks. Like, clearly, they're not that hesitant about that kind of data being shared among companies. So I think, like, that point for the Apple TV is good. But it's, I mean, it's not going to be enough in the long term, obviously.

And that price several years after it shipped unchanged is a lot to deal with. Well, so I always thought Apple TV plus, right? So the long history of the TV, I mean, we could start as far back as, like, Steve Jobs tells his biographer that he's finally cracked how to make a cable box. But even if you don't start that far back, the long history was they were making a TV product. They thought they could basically launch a cable service, an MVP, like a virtual cable service. They could not get the deals on the terms they wanted. Then they pivoted and said the future of TV is apps.

So they basically made an iPad for your TV. That's the Apple TV. That's functionally what it is. based on what's the chips inside of it. To me, that remote, God bless that remote. The future TV turned out kind of like not to be apps. Like in one important way, the future TV is streaming apps, but another much bigger way,

it's like discovery and curation on the home screen that drops you into those apps. The Apple TV home screen is not that thing. Right, it's very Roku in that way. They built another home screen. And then I always thought that the reason that were going into Apple TV Plus was to make great content so you'd want to use that home screen. And then all the companies, most particularly Netflix, would be forced to aggregate content

into that home screen. Then that would become the default home screen. And then you'd buy an Apple TV and Apple would have once again won. Instead, they're like, now our content is an app on everyone else's devices. Yes, and it goes on their home screens. It's on their home screens. Like on the Google TV, you see Apple TV originals now, which is kind of. I just don't know what their TV strategy is, except that there's like a second season for all mankind, which Ted Lassau is great.

Like, they've made some great TV shows, but like, Julia, is that like a big overarching TV strategy? What do you have to examine that there are two different things. I don't think Apple TV Plus is necessarily meant to supplement Apple TVs. And I don't think Apple TVs are supposed to supplement Apple TV Plus. I do think that there is a, you know, stark difference between like a Disney Plus and a, you know, a primed video in Apple TV Plus. And I think, you know, one is built on this idea of content strength alone, bringing in subscribers and keeping them and retaining them.

And the other is more reliant on an ecosystem that is being supplementary enough within a bunch of different products to just kind of keep people there against their will in a lot of ways because it's just easier. So like Apple TV Plus just has to be good enough alongside Apple Music and Apple News Plus and Apple Fitness Plus and ICloud storage to keep you there and then you whenever you're going to switch to your next phone or whatever it's going to be you're just going to upgrade to another Apple device because you're already locked in on everything. I think the idea with Apple TV is they want to an extent to have secure whatever it may be, you know, for Roku it's ad inventory. It's why they partner with everyone. They want to have 30% of that ad inventory that comes in. Apple wants to be able to make those deals and have

those partnerships, but it's not like we're creating this to create one ecosystem. It's two different strategies that would hopefully work for Apple. I don't get what their hardware design or hardware plans for Apple TV are going forward at all. But you're going to buy an iPhone anyway. Like, that's the funniest thing about this. Like, ICloud storage is like pretty cheap to make, you know, like they just put some new hard drives in a data center. Like, more ICloud storage. Like Apple music is an ongoing running business where the labels are making music. Apple is not trying to make music. Like, we don't get emails from Apple being like, like Tim Cook's new single is dropping.

Although that would be incredible. If anyone's listening, keep it in mind. IMessage is like the ultimate lock-in product. Like everything else you're talking about in their bundle, Apple either makes in a very direct way that is connected to their business or other people make it and they distribute it and they get a cut, right? And then there's TV shows where it's like Apple made Ted Lasso. So I think the most interesting thing that's happened with Apple

in terms of its strategy for content is in many ways. So Apple just signed a deal with Skydance animation, which is a very big studio that is headed up by former Pixar dude John Lasseter. And the idea is that they're going to take a bunch of TV shows and movies aimed at kids. And they've not been shy about showing their kind of plans to be dominant in the animation space, which makes sense because kids watch a lot of stuff. And Apple wants to have a lot of that attention on them. but also I think like the more interesting thing from that deal was that Apple took all these movies from Paramount. In a way, like, you can read that as Apple is a bigger studio deal and distribution deal than Paramount is. And I think that's true.

I think one, on the one hand, you have a studio that wants to offload a bunch of stuff because they don't know when people are going to go back to theaters and they don't know what's next to them. And the other idea you have something like Apple where it's like if they can control that space where kids are watching their shows and so parents are paying $5 and then, kids are listening to Baby Shark or whatever that song's called on Apple Music. And you kind of go on and on and on. Eventually you have a whole family that's looped in and paying monthly fees every single month. So I think it's just like they have to have stuff to get people in. They don't want to have library content. And so this gives them a chance to be the go-to place for kids.

And I also think Apple in terms of its overall plans is like they, since Steve Jobs, right, they've been like, where are the place for creators? All their commercials are like musicians. and filmmakers and everyone uses us. I think they have the opportunity to be the next home for really impressive filmmakers as they're doing with Martin Scorsese and just be like, we're just going to be a place that you come to to watch movies and be a place to celebrate film, but also we're going to have this bundle that you will inevitably, I think, buy into.

Yeah, all of Apple's businesses turn into big businesses on their own. This is the one where it's like what you've just described as a reason to buy a new iPhone, not a reason to run a gigantic business. And I'm just guessing that, like, managing Martin Scorsese is someone's full-time job. Right? Like, that's just, like, making TV shows and dealing with contracts and getting people paid and, like, marketing. Like, all that stuff is, like, really hard. There's a reason studios traditionally do it.

Like, Amazon has not even been great at it historically, and they run prime video. Netflix had to get good at it in a way that they weren't good at it from the beginning. And I just like, I continue to wonder. But I think Apple's following in the Amazon track. I think Amazon's whole thing was realizing we're not going to, we're not going to have the type of IP or franchises. You know, they're going to try, but we're not going to have what the big players have. So what are we going to do? We know that our whole goal is to supplement Prime as a retail service.

I mean, the head of studios have said that where their number one goal is Prime. And I think for Apple, you know, what I can't remember is last thing. I mean, you guys, you and Chris will definitely know. Luca, I forget his last name at Apple. The CFO. Yes, the CFO of Apple. The CFO of Apple. I worked for The Verge.

The CFO of Apple has, like, being said on almost every earnings, how important services is to them. And they know that software is where they kind of want to be. And I don't think the goal is necessarily to sell more iPhones. I think the goal is to have you in a place where you're not even thinking about anything, but having an iPhone in the way that your core services are all in one place.

I think that's what their whole plan is to be. Like Amazon has done, I think, very. well. But they also know that there's competition. I don't think they're ever going to want to be Warner Brothers. I don't think they're ever going to want to be Netflix. I think they're kind of happy to figure out what their role is and how that fits into an overarching plan to build this ecosystem. So let me put that in the context with some of the deals you've written about this week. HBO Max is ordering up a ton more kids content. I'm curious for your overall read on HBO Max, but they're definitely getting deeper into kids content to compete with Netflix and Disney Plus,

which are obviously full of it. And then Amazon made a deal with Donald Glover to give him a channel of sorts inside a prime video, which is like we want to start a curated bunch of stuff, which is like, I don't know, Ava DuVernay has the Netflix deal that's already produced a bunch of really cool stuff.

Those are like big moves, right? Like we need a bunch more kids content in HBO Max. I mean, HBO Max is just like everything to everyone now. I definitely accidentally watched too fast, too furious, and it's just because it was there on HBO Max the other day. the worst of them all, like easily the worst of them all. But it was there.

And I was like, all right. I just gave an hour and a half of my life to HBO Max to watch Tyrese and what is his greatest role in the worst of the fast movies. But like, that's a huge library. There's a reason you get sucked into that. Or you have big stars. And you're like, I want to see what Donald Glover is doing. I'm going to open the Amazon ad.

Yeah. I mean, I also want to take the online class that led to Ludacris going first. from running street races in Miami to being the world's best hacker, like in the span of six movies. I truly want that course. But, no, I mean, so the thing is kids' content is the hottest thing right now everywhere. And there was three things I tweeted about this. There are three things that happened one day, and I kind of spoke to it.

One was the Apple deal with Skydance animation to produce more stuff for families. YouTube announced that YouTube kits has 35 million weekly views. like viewers, they have like users that are coming to YouTube kids specifically, and they want to find ways to expand that kind of attention kids are spending on the app. And three was HBO Max. It was like, we're going to make Cartoon Network the central kids and family brand of Warner Media, which owns a bunch of stuff. And we're going to invest heavily in content for HBO Max that makes it more kid and family friendly.

And I think part of that goes back into what the whole joke about TV has always been is that it's a babysitter. And it is. But you put it on and you can just let it go and let kids watch stuff. One of the top shows on Netflix week after week after week in the United States is something called Cocoa Mellon, which is a popular YouTube preschool thing. I know about Cocoa Mellon. Yeah. And it's every single week.

It is like a top trending title on Netflix. Because there's four episodes. You put them on. Kids are good. And so I think we're in this really interesting moment where WarnerMedia is realizing that they can. control part of that kid space and really be a giant player in it and increase time spent on the streaming service, which is going to be a bigger deal when they launch their advertising supported version later this year.

And they want to show to advertisers, hey, we've got a ton of kids watching this. I think it's important for them to brand out that way because when you think of HBO max, you think of HBO because it's in the name and you don't associate HBO with kids. Although HBO wants to be a teen thing now, like they're leaning hard into a teen content because they want more of a teen audience. I think all it speaks to is that kids and teens watch a lot of stuff. They're engaged with a lot of stuff. They're going to post about stuff on TikTok and Twitter and Instagram and Facebook or wherever teens are these days. WhatsApp. WhatsApp. It's just it's just a place to be. And if you are someone, if you're one of the,

you know, like 55% of households in the United States are going to have at least two streaming services that are subscription-supported. And if you, right now, they're Netflix and Disney Plus. Like, without question, it is the two that I have friends who are like, there's no way I'm getting rid of Disney Plus. It keeps my kid busy while I work. No one's getting rid of Netflix because Netflix has something for everyone and is everyone, is everything for someone?

And now we're in a moment where HBO Max and Paramount Plus want to be two of those services. And so the only way that they can do that is by appealing to a family and not appealing to a very much smaller demographic of people, including a demographic of people who know how to pirate. So being that, finding a way to do that is, is crucial to keeping subscribers. You know, we talk about the streaming wars as if it's a game of subscriber acquisition and it's not. It's a game of churn. It is a game of how many are you going to keep month after month? Because if you're losing month after month, then your whole bet on recurring revenue is not going to end well. So, I mean, again, this is like,

the Apple thing. Like, they just keep extending the free trial for people. Like, when are they going to charge someone a dollar? But they're fronting a ton of money towards some of the most expensive names in the, like, that's the argument for this is just to make you feel better about your iPhone. It is not the argument for we're going to make you feel better about this horrible Apple TV remote. Like, I just can't, like, put that whole strategy together. Because now you can go by the new Chromecast or this new cheap fire TV stick and this free Apple TV.com. And this free Apple TV subscription that just keeps rolling towards you is now valuable on other people's devices, which is historically not the Apple way. Chris, I mean, you've looked at most of these devices.

Which one would you buy? Like, what's the best one right now? So in the process of doing that update to our guide right now, actually, it should be up by the time people hear this. And Chromecast right now is still the best one. Just because, like, Google figured out, like, how to show recommendations and you see, like, where things are coming from, like, which service they're coming on. As you scroll, like, it'll show you with the Rotten Tomato score, what service that thing is coming from. So there's no confusion. There's no, like, ambiguity, whereas Amazon still pushes, like, prime video content and stuff from IMDB TV and, like, that stuff all gets top billing over, like, Netflix and whatever else. Because Google doesn't

really make stuff to push on you. So that's, like, another good thing about that whole Google TV software is that, I mean, there's a YouTube row. Sure, but that's about as far as it goes, as far as, like, self-promotion. And so I think, like, just the recommendations are great. The whole software experience just makes sense to a lot of people. And so we're just kind of ashamed because Amazon is really a first of that whole concept of like content forward, no more just like app grid. And so Google just kind of came along and just did it better. And so Amazon, they're catching up now. But I think like in 2021, I think the Chromecast is still the streaming one to beat. And we'll see if there's new Apple TV come the summer, I guess. Well, so this is like my other, I'm interested

than Chromecast, I subscribe to YouTube TV. It's like super interesting to me that I basically subscribe to a cable bundle to watch CNN. And like now football is over and it came to a heartbreaking conclusion and the NFL should be disbanded and it should be legal. If anybody has a bill to make Tom Brady illegal, that would be great for me.

But none of these devices like surface live TV in a way that like makes it the first class citizen. It's all like we're going to drop you into an app. And it's weird that the Chromecast doesn't really do that either. Well, it'll show listings, right? Like, it'll show like a grid guide of like channels and what's on what. But once you click in, it'll like open up YouTube TV. But it'll show you like a grid, like a TV guide. And the new fire TV stick actually does the same thing. So I feel like, but that will still drop you into another app. Yeah, of course. It's not like a first. And that like,

like that seems in a weird way, like we're just going to come full circle to bundles of services or Paramount Plus falling apart and like just wholesaling everything to Netflix. Yeah. There's like even money on that happens. And then the interface is just becoming more like traditional cable boxes. And I'm wondering like what will we have learned across this journey? Like if what you really want is a bunch of live news and sports to be playing when you turn on your TV and then you have a bunch of on demand shows that are maybe released at once or maybe coming out one at time like Wanda Vision and you want that event moment, doesn't that just look like the best version of Comcast X1? Right? Like isn't like what what have we unbundled really and like what have we gained?

That's like the best part of streaming and only a few are getting it right. And one of them is my favorite streaming service, which is Discovery Plus, which I use daily, is the ambient channel experience where you, I put on the House Hunters channel every day and I get mad at people buying houses. But it's, it works. It feels like you're searching through. I mean, Peacock does this, is getting better at it where they really wanted to lean into the idea of live TV aspect within a streaming service and you just go and you put something on and you're like browsing through

and it's curated for you and it feels like TV without the commercials. And I think what Paramount Plus and Peacock and potentially HBO Macs have the ability to do if they really want to lean into it is find a way to integrate their live cable stuff into those streaming services. And we know that they're kind of thinking about it because we can look at Disney's plans for ESPN or like lack of plans for ESPN and kind of like they're very slowly pushing into a what if we integrated ESPN more of a live thing into Disney plus elsewhere around the world and Hulu here and figure out what to do with ESPN Plus and how do we bring stuff over and how do we talk to

the leagues about them being better with us putting stuff behind this wall? Because they know their cable subscribers are literally dying out. And so they have to figure out a way to bring that experience that people do want in. So the two options are find a way to bring it into this cool channel experience that like Peacock and Discovery Plus have and you go through and you just put something on. It does feel like the traditional cable experience that I really like. Or you spin off CNN into a streaming service,

which is not so a rumor, right? It's like people will pay for CNN out of all the cable news networks, they have the youngest audience. Like, it's a good place to be. And it's just figuring out what makes sense for them and what doesn't. Yeah. And there's a pretty significant amount of rumors that after

Jeff Zucker leaves CNN, he's head of CNN right now. He's going to leave at the end of the year. That AT&T will just sell or spin off CNN because it does not look like the teeny bopper streaming service they want HBO Max to be. By the way, I would just say this no matter what. It is flatly crazy that AT&T owns CNN. Like it's just like a fact that like every now and again pops into my head that like AT&T owns Batman and CNN. That's just a real thing that's true in America. I think this also means we have to do the Julia Disclosure block now. Disclosure.

The Verger's owned by Vox Media, which NBC is a significant minority investor in box media. I am the EP of a Netflix show that The Verge is producing. And that's it. Yeah, Quibi went under. Quibi went under. Also, we hexed Quibi into oblivion. Roku's bringing Quibi back.

It's beautiful. What's dead can never truly die. You know, we have talked about making some apps. So maybe we'll merge our app with the Roku quip. And we're not going to do that. All right, Julia, what's next? What's the state of play right now? It feels like there were all the big launches, all of that settled down.

Netflix was already a winner. Disney Plus is a winner. What's going on with HBO Max and Peacock? Where's, give me the Go 90 scale. Can't believe you would say that on the eve of Paramount Plus the launch. If you would just forget Paramount Plus, which I think will do great. amount of friends that I have who like Paramount Plus. They should have launched Paramount Plus with an Utop Gun movie.

If they had just connected those dots. I don't think that's out of the question. I think we're going to get a bunch of news next week. I don't say I would be surprised if we did not get something like that. They have to figure out how to get a significant amount of people to sign up and stay signed up. And in the United States especially, the issue that HBO Max and Peacock have is that it's an incredibly fractured space. and so they have to figure out how to make themselves non-negotiable. And right now they are negotiable.

I think HBO Max will ultimately be fine. I think it's got a huge marketing problem. I don't think anyone still knows what it offers. There were people who responded to the article we wrote about HBO leading into kids' content with, didn't even know they had kids' content. And they're like the home of Cartoon Network. It's one of the three major cable brands for kids. But like they don't know what to do with it.

And it's a great app in terms of, content, not in terms of actual usability. I will tell you on the Apple TV, it's very hard to fast forward on the HBO Max app, which is something that I desperately wanted to do while watching Too Fast to Furious. There are large portions that movie. You can just move right past. And Wonder Woman in 1984, just fast forward right to the end. Now she's a kitty.

And I think Peacock is an interesting player because people keep thinking of it as a streaming component service comparable to Netflix in the sense that it's an S-Fod which we mean like it's 100% based on subscription sign-ups but Peacock's like an advertisement thing like that their whole goal is to like get ads on it and I don't think we can make

a judgment on what Peacock has the capability to do until the Olympics because that was their whole thing and I'm interested to see how they bring in live sports and how they kind of curate content around something like that and how that plays out with other leagues that they want to have and I think if they

lean super hard into being a place that has like NBC library content on top of live sports and live news and we'll figure out what that looks like. I think it's fine, especially if it's free for a lot of people or $5 a month. But I'm most excited about Paramount Plus because I think Paramount Plus could be good. It's just they need to figure out what they want to do with it and no one there does, including their CEO. So that's a problem. Well, it turns out I will soon have Peacock myself. I don't have it right now. But this is pretty recent news as well. They're buying WWE network

like from WWE and like integrating all of that content like 30 or 40 years of like paper view events and documentaries and people are a bit worried that like this very like

niche service that has markers for like where each match begins and ends and like is really like clear cut made custom built like for wrestling fans like me and Casey who was on the show before is going to like how do you bring that into an app like peacock

are you going to ruin a lot of what was good about it so we'll see how that works wait they're just going to bring the library and they're not going to keep the WWE app alive. Nope, but shutting down. So it's all moving to Peacock and I mean, I assume they're going to have some kind of portal for WWE, I

would assume, like have some kind of like banner, but that's going to be in March. Is Peacock the one where the skip intro button exists but doesn't work? That might be HBO Max. That's HBO Max. If it's a product related question and it's like, why isn't this do work the way it should work? It's usually HBO Max

for Amazon. Amazing. Well, I look forward to seeing Paramount Plus enter. I mean, they've got to do it. They've got to put the Top Gun movie out. Right. Like that makes the most sense. I'm just dying to see the Top Gun movie. As always, Julia, a pleasure to hear you rant about software interfaces in streaming. Chris, I'm excited to see the updated guide. We're going to take a break. And then this is true. I didn't make this segment. Andrew Marino, our producer and Taylor Liles just recorded a segment about Nintendo Direct. I'm going to hear it the same time as everybody else.

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mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. Hello, this is Andrew Marino, producer of the Vergecast, and I'm here with Taylor Tyler Liles, writer at the verge. We're here to talk about Nintendo Direct. Hello, Taylor. Hi, how's it going? I'm good. How are you?

I'm doing all right, all things considered. I'm actually really excited about talking about this Nintendo Direct because I thought it was actually pretty good. Yes, I was pretty excited to watch this Nintendo Direct because, like everybody, I've been stuck inside playing video games, a lot of Nintendo Switch games. And this was the first Nintendo Direct since 2019. We had like a bunch of little mini directs, but this was the first full 50 minute video of announcements of all the games coming to the Nintendo Switch. So we're going to walk you through the biggest announcements or maybe our favorite announcements.

We're also going to talk about the stuff announced for 2022 and all the other little games that they have coming up on Nintendo Switch. So I think a lot of people tuned into this to see a new Super Smash Brothers Ultimate Character. There were a lot of guesses. What ended up being the character announced? Yeah, so Pira and Mithra from Xenoblade Chronicles, they're actually joining the Smash Brothers Ultimate roster. I thought it was interesting. I'm not going to lie.

I like how both of these characters are going to be considered one single character and not two characters. But they're also the fourth DLC character that is coming to the second Smash Ultimate Fighters Pass. We didn't get a whole lot of, like, details about these characters in particular. but, you know, I assume that we'll probably get more information before they come to the actual game next month. So they'll probably do maybe a, I don't know, I could see Nintendo probably doing like a mini direct just focusing on just like the new smash characters because they tend to do that before a new character releases and things like that. Oh, I thought I was going to be in Smush.

Just sit back and leave it to me, Rex. One of the other big announcements people were really looking forward to was an update on the sequel to Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild. Did we get any of that? We did not. Nintendo said that news is coming this year, but they did announce a little bit of Zelda-themed announcements with this direct, and with one of those in particular being The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword HD. So just a re-release of that We exclusive that came out in 2011.

But alongside that game, it's coming out July 16th. They also are going to release a pair of Zelda-themed joycons, which have this really, really interesting blue shades. And honestly, I have four pairs of joycons. I'm probably going to just buy this pair as well because I just, I needed an excuse to buy these two icons. Yes, you love your hardware. Another big announcement for a game this year, one of my favorites of this direct was Mario Golf Rush. The fairway is open once again. Yes. You know, I like all of the Mario sports games. I really wanted Mario Strikers. But, you know, Mario, golf super rush looks really interesting. Not as interesting as maybe a switch version for Super Mario

Strikers, but I'll take what I could get. I like how they're going to use Joy Conns as like how to swing the golf ball and things like that. I love that they are also going to add new modes. The story campaign looked interesting. I'm really curious to see what kind of drip that Wario's going to have because I already know he's going to have a really interesting outfit. I saw his hat. He has a great hat. I was looking forward to a Mario baseball, but I guess I'll wait until next year maybe. Crossing my fingers. Speed goal. The bigger announcements, I think, from this direct were stuff that's not even coming out this year.

Yeah. So they announced for 2022, Splatoon 3. Yes. The fact that we're getting a third game, I think is great. I wish it was Mother 3 instead. But you know what? Splatoon 2 was really great. I was a little sad that they kind of stopped doing Splat Fest as often as they did in the second game.

So I was like, oh, okay, maybe we'll get another game soon. I am curious to know a little bit more about how they're going to change the gameplay and stuff, because I felt Splatoon 2 was already a really good sequel and like a good follow-up to the first game. Yeah, I agree. I've been playing a lot of Splatoon 2 this past year, but I've been pretty content with just playing turf war over and over again. But it looks like they're adding a lot more to the story, but adding new weapons and areas is always fun. We'll see more of this in the upcoming year, I'm sure. The other game that they announced for 2022, this game, Project Triangle Strategy, which I believe still has a working title.

I promise to do all in my power to see us through this safely, every last one of us. While I was watching this, I was wondering why they spent so much time talking about this game. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, when I first saw the, like, before they announced, like, what the working title was, I'm not going to lie. I thought it was a sequel to Octopath Traveler, which I think. think was a really good game and I kind of want a sequel but you know I think the way it ended gave me that closure but you know the art style immediately reminded me of Octopath Traveler then I looked at the

gameplay I was like oh it kind of reminds me of a little bit of fire emblem and then they're like oh yeah it's being worked on by Square Edix I was like no surprise no shocker at all so I like the idea that they're doing like that art style similar to Octopath I like the fact that they're bringing back like kind of gameplay like tactical RPG you know I think with square e Nix in particular they just they're working on a lot of really interesting stuff a lot of really good RPGs are just coming through their pipeline I'm really just curious to see more about just like this game I also just kind of want to know why they did just make an octopat sequel because again it looks like it looked a lot it reminds me a lot of octop there was also a bunch of games that were announced that are

either ports or remakes or HD versions. We already talked about Skyward Sword, but what are the other ones that were announced? Yeah, so we're also going to get a port for Fall Guys, which I was very shocked about, to be quite honest. But, you know, I think just like talking a little bit more about just like Fall Guys for a second here, I'm really interested to see how this game's going to perform because I know it was pretty popular for like a couple months, like when it launched last year. and then I don't want to say it died out, but I know its popularity kind of decreased a little bit,

especially with the resurgence in games like Among Us. But, you know, again, it was like on PC and it was on PS4. It was free for PS4 for like a month. So I feel like with the port coming to Switch and it's also coming to Xbox One, I feel that now that's a little bit more widely accessible to gamers, I wonder and I'm hoping if it will have like just like an increase in popularity just because there's going to be more people playing. There's going to be more ways to play that game. I already have it on PS4, but I'm probably going to buy it on Switch because I want to play as those humanoid jelly

beans on the go who wouldn't want to. There was also a game that came out on Apple Arcade, sort of. It was kind of like a part of it came out on Apple Arcade, but it was called World's End Club. I don't know much about this game, but the trailer had me interested. I liked the art style a lot, but not a whole lot that I know about this game. I do have Apple Arcades, so I might actually give this a world. Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of mobile games on the Switch, which makes sense. There's a lot of people buying the Switchlight this past year. And I also was surprised to see Famicom Detective Club.

I know that they're going to be like remakes of sorts. And these games were originally released on the Famicom as the game, like the name implies. But, you know, visual novels, I think, are very underrated. I like the fact that we're going to get visual novels where you get to solve crimes as a detective. So I think that that'll be interesting to see. I think the Switch is actually a good console to play visual novels out, you know, because of its portability. Right. And then we have Stubbs of Zombie. Yes. I was so excited to hear about this. I actually played the original Stubbs of Zombie when it came out on the original Xbox.

I really liked the game a lot. It's goofy. I like the fact that it's a zombie game where you're not just killing zombies. You are the zombie and you're making more zombies. It's been a little hard to play in recent years up until this announcement. basically pretty much you had to play the original Xbox version. And it's kind of expensive. And to its credit, it is a good game, but it's also a pretty short game. So I'm glad that it is breathing new life, so to speak, on modern consoles. I am curious to see how it runs on Switch, especially in handheld mode. So I'm curious to see how this will pan out.

But I'm glad. And also the people that are working on it also did like a remaster for Star Wars episode one racer, so I feel a lot better knowing that this port, or I guess, remaster, we should say, is in good hands. Cool. Rames! All right, Taylor, we're running out of time. What other announcements do we have?

Yeah, so, I mean, we also had a couple of just, like, release dates and some pretty surprising announcements. We got that release date for No More Heroes 3. It's coming on the 27th. Monster Hunter Rise is coming earlier. It's going to launch on March 26, but I'm really interested about Monster Hunter Rise in particular, more so because the Monster Hunter theme switch and the pro controller that's coming out. I think those are really pretty.

I don't know if I'll pick up the game, but I kind of want to pick up that pro controller because it's visually appealing to my eyes. Also, a big head turn for me in particular was that Ninja Guidean Master Collection. Just like a remaster compilation of Team Ninja's most notable titles, Ninja Guyden Sigma 2, and Ninja Guide and Three Razors Edge. It's coming June 10th on the Switch. I believe it's also coming on other platforms, but there's also going to have all the post-launch content

that was released for those games that will be available at no cost. And we love to see that. We love when compilations come out. We love when they get, we just have all these, this little neat package of just everything, just all in one place.

All right, give me a few more. There's also a new IP called Knockout City. It's just basically like an online-based dodgeball game. But interestingly, It's actually from the creators of Mario Kart Live Home Circuit. And I'm pretty interested to see how this game looks like. The gameplay was striking. It was appealing.

It was very colorful, vibrant. I like the idea of playing dodgeball in a game because there's a pandemic going on. So this might fill my voice. And let's not forget, Hades. Hades is getting a physical release. Right. So Hades has already been on the Nintendo Switch, but now there's a physical copy. What is the reason to buy a physical copy?

me now. Well, okay, so my bias aside, Andrew, you know I am a staunch supporter of physical media, but aside from the fact that you can get that beautiful box art, the cartridge of the game, aside from that, you also will get a book containing game art, and there's also a download code for the game soundtrack. So it's like over two hours of just, like, beautiful music from that game. So if you haven't played Hades, or maybe you did, you just want to double dip again on this physical copy, I don't blame you. I'm probably going to buy this. I think it was, on upper pre-order at Best Buy the last time I checked out. It was like $35.

So I was like, okay, I'm going to bite the bullet. I'm going to pre-order this. Speaking of indie games, neon white was also announced. And I liked the art style. I like the fact that you're fighting demons in heaven. I was like, demons in heaven. That's interesting. But even more interesting was the fact that Ben Esposito,

the creator of Donut County, is actually working on this game. And anybody who's played Donut County, if you watch the trailer for Neon White, you're just going to be like, wait, he's working on this game? It just seems like such a stark contrast from what he previously worked on. But you know what, Esposito is really good at his job. I'm very interested to see how this game will turn out. I like the whole concept.

I love the art style. It was a really good trailer. It shows a lot of potential for me. Cool. And then a couple last things. There is a new Star Wars game called Star Wars Hunters. How hype should I be about this? I feel hesitant here.

You know, I was a little confused when I saw that too. I'm not going to lie. I was like, Star Wars hunters. Huh, it's a competitive free-to-play shooter. Okay, so it's probably going to try to compete with games like Fortnite. Okay. And then I was like, Zinga's working on this? The guys that made words with friends is working on this.

The guys that worked on Farmville is working on this. I'm just curious. I need to get more information before I can be like, hmm, how do I really feel about this game. Okay, and then we'll end on a little news in Animal Crossing New Horizons. Super Mario Brothers' 35th anniversary themed items are coming to the Animal Crossing New Horizons game. Yeah, I mean, basically, they gave us a little teaser of just kind of like a first look at all this stuff. We had a couple of villagers dressed up like iconic Super Mario characters. Wario.

I like the idea that they're bringing in all these, like, items. So I kind of want to just make a maze on my island and just put fill it with just a whole bunch of Super Mario themed items. Yeah, what was interesting is a lot of, it was actually pretty interactive where you can put in warp pipes on your island. Yeah. I mean, I, for one, I'm very curious to see how many people are going to use these to run away from tarantulas and scorpions. That's a great idea.

Like, I was like thinking about that too. I was like, oh, I can teleport from one area of my island to another. The free update is coming February 25th. Hopefully they'll share more information before then, but I'm pretty excited. Okay, Taylor, thank you so much for walking through the Nintendo Direct with me. Hopefully we'll see another one, second half of the year. In the meantime, what is the game you'll be playing? Aside from Animal Crossing.

I don't know. I don't know. I'll probably just be playing Animal Crossing this whole time, but part of me also is probably going to make time to play my PS5. But definitely Animal Crossing because I love my villagers. I love that I have an island named Taitopia. I mean, you can't beat that. All right, well, I'll have to visit Taitopia soon. Yeah, of course.

Thank you, Taylor. Thanks for having me. All right, I'm recording this outro before I've heard that segment. I'm assuming it was great. I'm excited for more surprise segments about video games on the Vergecast. Thank you to Andrew and Taylor for doing that. One thing I want to mention that we didn't get a chance to talk about. Android 12 developer preview is available now.

We have some coverage of it on the site, including how to install it. Go check that out. Dieter wrote all that stuff. I want to say thank you to everybody on the show. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Casey is at Casey Newton. Addy is at the dexterkyarchy. Julia is loudmouthed Julia. Chris Welch is at Chris Welch and Taylor is at Tay Nixter. On Decoder this week, we had John Fort from CNBC. Go check out that interview. We talked about all about GameStop. There was the GameStop hearing. We have coverage of that from McKenna and Liz on the site. So go check that out. Lots going on TheBurge.com. Go read the site. Listen to all the podcasts. We'll be back next week.

Rock and roll.