The Vergecast - Galaxy Z Flip review, CBS streaming service revamp plans, and Android 11 features so far

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

Stories discussed this week: Folding glass: how, why, and the truth of Samsung’s Z Flip A Motorola Razr’s screen is reportedly peeling right on the fold Galaxy Z Flip teardown reveals that its hinge brushes may not block much dust Galaxy Z Flip durability test calls Samsung’s Ultra Thin ‘Glass’ into question Leaked images show TCL prototype phone with expandable, slide-out display Dish Network floats merger with DirecTV over pace of cord-cutting CBS is planning an improved streaming service after squandering its head start with All Access HBO and HBO Max are headed to YouTube TV HBO Max’s first ad wants to remind you how many of your favorite shows and movies it owns Disney+ has surpassed 28 million subscribers since launch … Tiger’s retro LCD handheld games are making a comeback The most interesting new Android 11 features so far Android 11 will fix dozens of small annoyances, but what about the apps? Google releases Android 11 developer preview earlier than expected Apple considers allowing apps like Chrome and Gmail to be set as iOS defaults Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Deere review the Galaxy Z Flip. We talk about the state of folding phones. Julia Alexander joins us to talk about the streaming wars. We go deep on Android 11, which is out earlier than ever, and we talk a little bit about Apple maybe letting you set default apps on the iPhone. That's Vergecast coming up now. 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 in 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. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast. I would say questionably sourced phones.

We'll get into it. We're going to get into it. I'm your friend, Nelai. Dieter Bohn is here. Hello, hello. Howdy hi. Paul Miller's here. Hello.

And I have exciting news. Julia Alexander is going to join us for the second segment to talk about my favorite, The Streaming Wars. Love them. Love them or hate them. Got to love them. Love them or hate them. Your prices are going up.

That's what I know about the streaming wars. But Julia knows more about that stuff than anybody. There's a lot going on. I'm excited to have her on. Let's do it, Dieter. Do you want to tell the story of our weekend? So, you may or may not have heard that the Samsung Galaxy Z-Flip folding phone is available.

I put available in quotes because so far as I could tell when it went on sale on Friday, there were like three per Best Buy and there's four Samsung Experience stores in America and the one that I called, that's local to me in Palo Alto,

said that they were getting fewer than 10. So it sold out immediately. Who knows how many they actually produce, but it sold out immediately. Sprint stores were sold out. AT&T stores were sold out. By the next day, everything was gone. It was a real struggle. I got a 24-hour loaner from Samsung, which is an

interesting period of time to give a review unit out for. And I also bought one from Best Buy. And then Best Buy said, yep, we'll ship it to you. You'll get it by Saturday. And then they said, just kidding, we're Best Buy. Yeah. Yeah. So I spent all day Saturday literally calling around the entire country to various random best buys AT&T stores and sprint stores trying to find one. And we were reaching out to friends, family, and ex-co-workers. Shout out to Micah. Yeah, Micah Sigleton.

Make sure there was somebody in the city that could go buy it for us. I eventually did manage to acquire one. In fact, I-Dena robbed an influencer. Yeah. No, I have one. It unfortunately was like the Korean version of one. But it's basically the same. However, the one that I have actually reviewed, Best Buy did come through.

And so I actually have two now. I have one from Korea and one for that was designed for America. You know, even if it's not a lot of demand or not a lot of absolute units, you know people want them when the Sprint stores are selling it. When people are like, yep, I'm going to take the Sprint one. It folds, but Sprint, I'm going with it. My version of the story is that I was home. It was a weekend.

And Dieter just a flurry of text messages. I can't get this phone. What's going on this phone? I hate the phone. I'm going to buy a phone. How much money can we spend on the phone? I'm flying to L.A. Like, Deeter don't fly to L.A.

I call Micah. Dieter's like, what if I go to L.A. anyway? I kind of want to go to L.A. I think there's one in Irvine. For a little bit of context, 24 hours is not the typical amount of time that you spend with a phone when you are reviewing it. So I had that, and I had to give it back after 24 hours.

So I needed to purchase one so I could, do a review because I'm not going to review a phone based on 24 hours with it. So I want to talk about that in particular. I will say it's becoming a recurring theme in our lives. The idea that we'll just release it, right? We'll do, and I don't mean to like throw any shade at influencers because we obviously cover them. I think it is a vibrant new economy.

It's a whole new kind of business. It's all happening over there is very interesting. But you see this happen a lot. they buy influencer marketing campaigns. So Motorola with a razor. We can just pick on the razor. Motorola holds a razor launch event. A lot of influencers.

Some tech people, not a lot of tech journalists. They don't want the scrutiny. Right. And then they say you're not getting your review in it or getting this very short review period. And then things are on sale. And to me, it is an absolute. And Dieter, I'm very curious for your take on this too because you're reviewing more stuff than me. But to me, that is just an absolute signal the product is broken.

If you do not trust a reviewer to hold the thing for a week, use it, ask questions about it, answer the questions about it, and then write a thorough review of the product, it means your product cannot withstand the scrutiny. And it is just borne out every single time. It's not every single time. It's every single time when you think that might be what's going on. But there are cases where companies like, we just want to get this thing out really quickly, or they're like, they're very confident in it.

And so they will just, you know, Apple will. have reviews go up on the same day as say like pre-order day in some cases or like before or after pre-orders happen. Samsung does similar things. They will put it out with like no embargo or they'll put it out basically the day it's

released and sometimes that means like what it means with movies where if the critics don't get to look at the thing before it shows up in theaters, that's a sign. And sometimes it's like actually a genuine sign of confidence and you kind of just have to have a gut feel for like what game is being played with

this particular phone released from time to time. Yeah, you're right. You're being more charitable than me. And to play devil's advocate a little bit, because I typically agree with this, this is typically a sign that it could very well suck. But this flip phone thing is almost as much a fashion accessory as it is a piece of technology. You know what I mean? It's like, it's a...

I mean, that is the dream of the tech industry. Yeah. So they're living in their dreams. But, like, you know, we, they still have to work. Sure. Sure. Hopefully. They still have to not break.

Theoretically, yes. And I would argue in, you know, this is like debatable across a number of metrics. But like, most people gaze at the fashion industry and they're like, oh, that looks weird. I want my clothes to be functional as well. Like, right? Like, there's an element of this where even that industry has to, like, you can't sell a $10,000 purse that doesn't hold anything. Like, it's like, it's not going to. It's just like, do it.

It's like do its job, right? So Paul's talking about fashion, like, brings to mind my number one complaint with the way that these foldable phones are getting released. And that's that these companies aren't setting the context correctly. And this might get into the fact that over the weekend there was a bunch of drama about the Galaxy Z flips fold specifically. Zach over at Jerry Rig Everything did what he does with every single phone. He scratched it, which is what he does. Like, it is a thousand percent predictable. If you make a phone that's notable at all, cherry rig everything is going to take it,

and it's going to use his little hardness mose picks on it and see where it scratches. So he did that because that's what he does. And guess what? The screen scratches really, really easily, like just indenting it with your fingernail. It can do it. I tried that at the launch event. Didn't really see it. But on the review units in that video, like, once you actually get on it, yes, you can do it.

It feels firmer than other plastic screens, but you can scratch it. your fingernail. And so there's like, well, what the hell? And the thing that gets me is that outcome was completely predictable. Instead of waiting until it happens and then reacting and be like, oh yeah, by the way, we have a premier program with screen replacements and, you know, you can go get a screen protector installed for you professionally by you break, I fix. All that happened after the fact, they could have just led with it. And if they just release these phones in the context of, I think the way I put it is it should be somewhere in between like a sneakie. sneaker drop and Google Glass.

Treat them as like high fashion experiments that are limited edition, limited run so that nobody runs into this thing or looks at this thing or talks about this thing with the expectation that, you know, anybody's going to buy it, really. That's how I look at it. But these phones get released as though they're just regular old phones. And so instead of saying, look at this weird special edition thing, let's see what it's like. Maybe someday it'll become real. We have to say, look at this phone that you shouldn't buy that they claim is normal, but it's not.

And so now don't buy it, but we're going to look at it anyway because if it were a special edition phone that you wouldn't buy, it tells us something about the future of the phone industry. You have to go through this whole convoluted mess, and nobody does that because why would you? Because it's a huge pain. Yeah. Again, I just think you're, as is traditional, being far more charitable than me. I would say that's our dynamic here. They didn't do it because they don't want to. These are choices they're made.

They're not mistakes. Samsung employees most of Korea in the service of marketing their phones. Like tens of thousands of people work at Samsung on marketing the phones in every country that they're going to put out. They have agencies upon agencies working on this stuff. There are millions of dollars and lots of hours and lots of smart people working on how to launch every single phone they put out. And then on top of that, there are the carrier partners. who have the same marketing, sales, distribution strategies to manage as well. It is not a small project.

It is not one person. It is this massive machine. And when the machine works, they launch the S-20, right? Which we'll talk about next week. And that will be a perfect clockwork launch. They'll put out the phone, there'll be reviews. The camera will be great or not. It'll just happen.

It'll just be the thing that you expect. They will distribute millions of units over the course the next year. They'll market those units. They'll just do it. And you know exactly how the machine works when it works. The idea that it's a mistake or they overlooked something or they didn't consider what you have described, right, and they just missed it. I just don't buy it. Like, you have to believe that they're dumb or they didn't spend all the money or all the brains aren't working on it.

I mean, all the ads, I don't see a lot of ads because I aggressively block ads. But most of the ads, all of the ads I've seen for the Z-flip show it as a sort of a fashion thing. Like, it looks like I might be seeing an ad for makeup or clothes, but it turns out it's for the Z flip. Yeah, I mean, look, they've got a new hardware form factor. That's just like when Apple did, I mean, I always come back to the iPod. And I probably talked about the iPod and how Steve Jobs and Tony Fidel like handled the iPod design over years. Like, one year it was big, one year it was small, one year it was fat, one year was skinny, one year no button. So they changed the way it looked and they got to market an appearance over the functionality of the phone.

And I think so much of phones right now, we take the functionality almost for granted. Like, we review a modern flagship smartphone. We are mostly talking about whether it can resolve a strand of hair at 50 feet or 5 feet, right? Or whether the color temperature is accurate or not. We're not like, does it run the apps? Does the screen disintegrate into a thousand pieces if you touch it? Like, we take a bunch of phone stuff for granted. Deider, to your point, where note we cannot take any of that stuff.

stuff for granted with foldables because we just don't know what they're like. And so, yeah, they're marketing. I think they're marketing it as though it's a regular phone and new form factor. Right? They're not emphasizing the fact that like the form factor shift has caused a reset of everything else that you would expect. And I think that's actually the evidence of the mistake. They're like, if you just had some more money, you would get this cooler form factor

that's an S-20 but fold. But like, really you're not getting that. You're really not. So like Z-Flip review should be up around the time that. this podcast gets posted, so I'll just say. I actually think that the Z flip is, it's the best foldable phone with the best hinge and the best feeling screen, and so what. Yeah. Because we don't know what counts as the right, the best.

Well, we don't know what counts as good yet. We're like still figuring that out. But I do think it, after using it for about five days, it started to just feel normal. Like, it's not a normal phone, but it starts to feel normal and a little bit boring, which is where these phones should go. So in that sense, it's like closer to what a folding phone should be than any other phone because I was able to start taking it for granted just a little bit. However, it's not an S-10 or an S-20 that folds in half because in order to get it to fit, in order for space, in order for price savings, just to make me sad, I don't know. They chose to put camera sensors in it that are just like not quite as good as they could have been. It's like not quite up to like S-10 standards.

It's better than, you know, the razor, which is the lowest bar possible. But it's not quite where I hoped it would be. Yeah. And, you know, like the packaging of the phone, like the entire, if you think about a candy bar phone, the middle is, like, available for use. You can, like, put stuff there. If you think about a folding phone, like, the middle of the candy bar is the hinge. Which middle are you talking about? The sides of the middle?

The middle of the phone. Like this part of the phone. You're pointing out it's a podcast. And you're like. Oh, no. Pull over in your call. Pull out your phone. Hold your phone in your hand.

Right, right, right. See the middle of it? The dead middle of the display. Where the five is on the dialer. Right, okay. Behind that is usually like a battery and some chips. Right? Maybe some antennas.

A sensor that's probably tracking everywhere you go. So you're really talking about the core of the phone. The core, the heart of the phone. It's a chunk of space. A folding phone is like a bunch of moving parts. Yes. And so they just have physically less space to package all this stuff in. And I think that is, again, right, that's a huge tradeoff.

Is anyone talking about this tradeoff? Absolutely not. How does, if you're holding, this is a little bit of a tangent, but if you're holding a Z-flip and you're holding like an iPhone 11 or Max or whatever, like where is it like weight and thickness chunk-wise? It's about the same thickness when it's open. It's about the same weight, maybe a little less than a max. I haven't actually checked the grams.

But it's about the same height. It's like the Z-Flipp is a tall boy when it's opened up. So it's very, very tall, but it's narrow at that height. So it's like a 22 by 9 or 21.9. It's some very narrow aspect ratio, which makes video sort of hilarious on it, but it does make it feel like a pretty big screen because if you're holding it in portrait and scrolling, you get just a ton of stuff on your screen.

So that's great. And I don't even that unhappy about the thickness when it's closed. It's slightly thicker than like two smartphones like sandwich together because it has a little bit of a gap on the hinge. But that's a tradeoff that like I fully understand because if I had a pocket that couldn't fit a big tall phone, then maybe a little thickness is worth the tradeoff so it's not sticking out of the back of my pocket or, you know, fitting in a bag or whatever. But when it's open, that balance and that size and that weight feels very normal phone? Yeah, so that's why I say that the Z-Philip approach is normal. Like, I was able to take, once you, like, stop, like, saying, all right, is a hinge any good? Does it make, like, grinding noises?

How do I feel about the crease? Is the screen sharp enough? Am I, like, protecting it from the elements? All of that stuff. Once you get rid of all that stuff, then you're like, oh, the camera's not quite as good. It's, like, literally the review I'd write of, like, you know, a one-plus phone a year ago or two years ago. It's like, oh, like, everything here is great, but the camera is just not quite up to snuff, right? And that's a nice thing to be able to do to just be like, I'm going to just view this almost like a normal phone.

But of course, that was only like the back quarter of my review because I still had to talk about the hinge. And then the glass. And maybe we should briefly mention Sean Halster wrote a really excellent story detailing how the glass works on the Z-Flip. Sean has been working on the story since like the first time we saw the galaxy fold. Yeah. Like he's been cranking away trying to find the suppliers, talking to the materials, talking to materials. science engineers. He worked with the verge science.

Like, he's an, so you go read it. And there's just this one, one like line. It's a classic Sean line that's like the punchline of the story. Which is like, anything folds if it's thin enough. Which is like, it's just kind of a threat. You know? So basically it is, they call it ultra thin glass. And it is very, very thin glass.

Yes. Samsung display claims that they make it. Samsung display separate from Samsung, but in fact it is a group of companies that make this, starting with a German company called Shot, and then they make the glass, and then stuff happens to it, and then Samsung display puts a layer of plastic on top of it to protect it, and that's what you can scratch and indent with your thumb. You know, it's all there, but it's just like, it is, in fact, glass. All the conspiracy theories that it wasn't glass were not true, but just because it's glass doesn't mean that it's good. Okay, if it's glass that bends, that it's not rigid, I guess for some reason, would Samsung announce this phone say we have a flexible glass?

Like, I was like, well, that's impossible. But also, that would be nice because that would mean you'd have a hard surface that you're interacting with. But if it's flexible, it's not hard. So, well, no, if it's flexible, it's so hard. It's just, it's very thin. So if you get one crack in it, the crack instantly goes all the way through in the glass. Yeah. Or the crack ruins the structural integrity of it. So, like, he has this really great photo that's really obvious. Like, imagine a piece of foam and you bend the piece of foam, right? And the top of the bend is just a bend. Now, imagine you, like, put a scratch in the top of the foam and then bend it. Like, eventually that scratch grows. It ruins the structural integrity of the glass. So the reason Samsung had to put a plastic layer on top of the glass is a tiny neck, some tiny whatever, could ruin the structural integrity of the glass so then when you bent it, it would just shatter.

Yeah. So there's this line from last week we were talking about T-Mobile and Sprint. There's this line in the case. It's like, DISH is going to build a network that the lawyers can use and no one else can use. And that is exactly how I feel about this glass. It is such a technicality. Yes, it is a folding glass display, but the thing you touch is plastic. And it's like, yeah.

It does feel firmer than the Galaxy Fold and the razor. Like, it feels better. It just doesn't feel that much better. Yeah. I mean, you have spent more time. I feel like the razor just doesn't count. Oh. Like, yes, it's better than the razor is, as you have said, like the lowest spot.

Like, it doesn't, does it creak? Like, it's dying every time. No, it doesn't creak. But so they have tiny little bristles in the hinge mechanism to try and keep dust and dirt out. And you can't hear it. But if you, like, put it literally next to your ear, you can hear the bristles a little bit. Oh, my God. It's the maximum extension.

It's great. Sorry. Did you see what the tagline is for? Samsung Ultra Thin Glass. They have a whole, like, thing that they're going to sell to other companies, and they're very excited, and there's, like, PR for it, and they have a marketing tagline. Would you like to hear it? I would. Nothing more.

Samsung Ultra Thin Glass. Tough, yet tender. Oh, no. That's bad. That's not what you want. I don't want Tinder Glass. That's like, that's just like a crying cowboy. Like, what?

What is that all about? Okay. I mean, I get it. They did it. And, you know, again, read Sean's piece. Corning is at it. Shot is at. Like, everyone understands the problem. The thing that is great about big competitive markets, lots of players, lots of money, everyone understands the problem. One can assume we are, you know, there are lots of smart people spending lots of money to solve this problem. Right now, what you have is tough but tender. The tough is presumably the plastic, and the tender is the glass. And I think that is maybe backwards.

So, yeah, that's the, right, that's the bar. Like, Dieter, last week we were talking about the razor. And I don't know how to measure this stuff. I feel like I'm not touching plastic is the thing to measure. Maybe. Probably. I don't know. Real solution, like, like, nanomachines that, like, reconfigure themselves as you're folding.

You just like, like, pull on a vape over there? Like, again, like, our first. Our phones, like, our phones that are good with hard screens that are scratch resistant are like, they're like, they're like pressurized. They're like bulletproofer. They're like helicopter windshield material. You know, it's crazy stuff. I don't see how you could possibly get anywhere close to that with something that's

flexible. I mean, I think that is, one, the problem to solve. Two, I think that's why you have not seen the cornings of the world. old, like, talking about it. Corning is, like, nonstop, like, in the enclosed doors being like, that's great, but you should, you should just wait a little bit. Yeah. They've been doing that for a long time, but corning is sort of like around. They're like floating around. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the other thing is glass is just got dishes, like corn and where dishes, just floating around. When you're making glass, it's flexible. So if you just keep it real hot. That's the answer. Yeah. The Apple folding

iPhone has a button where it just gets real hot in the middle. And that's like Phil Schiller's going to be on stage. I mean, like with our proprietary eye heat mechanism. No, I mean, I think that's, you've reviewed three of them now. We're figuring out just like what makes them good. I think that's like this is one of them, right? This is just one of the marks to hit. Like, does the screen scratch with your fingernail?

You probably shouldn't. That's probably the mistake. Like we're validating the form factor, but the technology. isn't there. Would you say that's fair? I think that's fair. Yeah. Also, all three of them have broken. Yep. Within the launch weekend they have. In ways that are... Every phone probably breaks in that way somewhere in the world when you launch a phone.

But with foldables, it seems like it's a higher percentage because few of them are sold. And it's also like we're paying attention. So a Z-flip cracked somewhere in the world. It also easily scratched. inputs, Motorola razor, had like a complete screen separation at the hinge. Just ridiculous. Yeah, they all keep breaking. Yeah.

And it sounds like neither the flip or the razor have had the sort of the same impression on you as the fold did as like, oh, this could be, this could transform my relationship with my phone. That's exactly right. Yeah. The fact that it's smaller and can fit in a pocket is nice. The fact that you can have a big phone that fits in a small phone form factor when it's folded, small-ish, is nice. But none of it fundamentally changes your relationship with your phone. I love being able to close the phone and have it closed on the table. There's something psychological about that, but it's nowhere near as big an impact as having a candy bar that turns into a tablet.

Yeah. Secret tablet. like this bonkers TCL prototype. Oh my gosh. I don't understand how that works. I don't either. You try to describe it to me and then I'll try to try to you. Here's my theory.

Okay, there's two images, right? That's all we've got. This is a leaked TCL prototype. So MWC is canceled, so this is how it's all happens. This is all we've got. Yeah. One image shows the phone like a normal phone. The other one shows it pulled out somehow.

And so my thinking is that the phone, wraps around to the back of the screen wraps around to the back of the phone, and then when you pull it out, it extends and now it's all on the front. Does that make any sense? Like a garage door coming around. I'm not describing this very well. Not at all. I think it's just three different screens. I think there's the outer screen, and then there's a little itty-bitty baby screen, and then you slide the outer screen and the baby screen apart like a dining room table, and that reveals a third screen underneath them.

No. Or maybe it's two screens, and so, like, they sort of, one folds in underneath the other, like slides it. Yeah, but I don't think it's an S-curve. That's what I thought, too. But if you think about it, again, this is great radio. Okay, pull over in your car

and hold your hands side by side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And imagine a screen going over the top of both of your hands. Yeah. And then slide one hand under the other. Right. Yep. Right.

It's an S curve. Oh. I'm not seeing that on this photo. No, I don't think it occurs. I think it's literally just two screens. I'm saying take. And there's just a, it just slides in. Take your phone, put a piece of paper on top of your phone.

It's horrible. Wrap it around the phone. And then if you slide that piece of paper across the surface, more of the paper will be revealed. What I worry about is it the scale of our show. There are like tens of people right now in their car. with like phones and paper, try to, just look at the website and look at the picture. Tweeted us how you think this works. Yeah.

Because none of us have any idea. What's the prize of someone mails it? Do they become the CEO of TCL? Dieter will send them in a legal phone. I'm not saying which one it is. I'm not saying it'll be cool. I'm saying Dieter's going to find an illegal flip phone on Verizon and send a T. Like a fake S.E.

Yeah. All right, Deeter, last Z-Flip review observation. What's your big takeaway? The little screen on the outside is just not good. It's too small. Like, it's fine for showing the time, and that's it. It's a clock. Yeah.

Yeah. Here's what I'm telling you, again, I'm being less charitable than Deuter. If you see a product of this scale and it just arrives and it's fancy and there's a new technology in it, and they have not given it to reviewers. It's probably broken. I'm just going to keep hammering at that. I want to hear the testimony of a person who is all about looking cool and they got this phone and they feel like it up their game. That's what I want to hear.

I'm not saying that's for sure going to happen, but I'm hopeful. It's definitely going to happen. Like I was already a pretty cool person. Got this phone. I'm even cooler now. Yeah. And then that person's like it's on sprint. Yeah.

No, they also carry an iPhone. I can only get this front one. All right, we're taking a break. When we come back, Julia Alexander's and talk about the streaming wars. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this.

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Julie Alexander. Hello. Our embedded streaming wars correspondent. Back from the front lines. Well, I ask you, come on, you're like, nothing to happen. And then I'm looking at our list of headlines. And a lot of things have happened. Yeah.

So I just want to start with this one, because last week we just yelled about T-Mobile and Sprint for like a long time. Yeah. The Sprint T-Mobile deal is like predicated on one, you believe in that John Ledger is the shit. I do. Great. It's also predicated on two. It's just true. That's like what our nation's judiciary has said.

Two, that DISH network will build a 5G network from scratch using a bunch of spectrum they have. Okay, sure. Maybe you believe it, maybe not. This week, I'm looking at Dish Network's earnings, and Dish Chairman Charlie Ehrgan is like, we're going to have to merge with DirecTV, which I just want to remind everybody, it's currently owned by AT&T. It's like they're just like personally, like he knows I'm looking at it, and he's like, we're going to ruin that guy's day. Just explain to me what is going on, because it seems like the pace of cord cutting is like

faster than ever. It's happening. We're watching the sort of like, the classic TV. streaming providers, like the Sling TVs, they're not succeeding. It just seems like that's falling apart faster than anybody expected. But what's going on specifically with DirecTV? What is not going on with DirecTV? I mean, the funny thing just to add to how insane this whole deal is, is that DirecTV and AT&T's linear networks lost like 3.1 or 3.2 million pay TV subscribers.

And out of all paid TV, there was only like 5 million lost. I mean, so there was a lot of people in the last, and AT&T was most of it. Wow. So Dish is like, we're going to merge with them. We're going to be fine. I mean, there's a lot of things that are happening. I think Dish is kind of realizing that they satellite is, people are cutting satellite faster than most other things.

They are a dying kind of technology, if you want to use that word, and they have to team up with someone. The question is like, why AT&T would want it. They're trying to get rid of their expenses. is they have investors breathing down their backs going, these are dumb purchases. Why do you keep doing these things? And Randall Steemanson.

Yeah. Eli, who's not their investor, also yelling at them. I have no poll with AT&T, as history suggests. So I'm also not. So DISH's thought is that they're going to get bought by ATT. Or the AT&T would slough it off. Yeah. I thought he was saying that DISH would be buying direct TV.

Yeah, sorry, sorry, all the way around. It's just, it's ridiculous. And I don't understand what they're doing. And the other part of it is Sling TV. Yeah. Sling TV is like in my own. Owned by dish. And they just recorded their first subscriber losses in a quarter, which has not happened

before. And they basically said it's increased competition in the space. And the space is a really interesting one to be in right now because there is increased competition from like YouTube TV and Hulu TV, which saw increases. But like PlayStation View shut down. Yeah, AT&T TV now, which was DirecTV now, lost a bunch of subscribers. So there is competition, but there's also a decline in competition in a lot of ways. So I think they're just getting a quote point where people are choosing ecosystems.

They want to be a part of. So you're in the Hulu ecosystem with Disney. You're in the Google YouTube ecosystem with YouTube TV. And people are just going there, plus they're a bit cheaper. Yeah. The thing that, I'm sorry, have Fios, and they have unbundled their TV from their internet. So now you can just like, you don't have to buy a triple play or whatever from Fios. You just like buy them all the same.

And they're like, what if you just buy YouTube TV? They're just like openly on the same screen. They're just like promoting YouTube TV instead of their own TV offering, which I think is utterly bizarre for a cable company to do. Yeah. But they're definitely pushing people towards by this kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, YouTube TV just, well, Google just secured a new deal with Warner Media. So like HBO and Cinemax are now going to be on YouTube TV. You can buy YouTube TV also just became the first official distributor of HBO Max, which is like a cool thing for Warner because that's what they really want to sell.

And we know, like, there's been reports that YouTube and specifically Google is interested in expanding the idea of like selling additional TV subscriptions via YouTube TV. It's basically taking on Amazon, which Amazon does with channels and Apple, which has probably the kind of best looking ecosystem. And so it makes sense that YouTube's going to come in and go, listen, we can offer a cheaper price for subscribers. People are signing up. There's reports that in 2019 they had one million paid subs, now by Google's CEO. Osinda Pachai said now they have more than $2 million. So, like, they're growing at a pace, which is impressive. And so I think what we're seeing a lot of with the Sling TV stuff with the AT&T TV now stuff is people going,

I don't want to pay $65 to be on this scurvis, or I don't think Slink TV gives me enough. And I can go to YouTube TV, pay, you know, decent price and get a lot for my money. Yeah. I have not actually even used YouTube TV. Have any used it? Yeah, I use it all the time. I'm in the place where I'm like subscribing and unsubscribing to it depending on like if I want to watch you know the Super Bowl or like award shows or like the Democratic debates or whatever.

So I'm like hopping on and off. I was just on it until they raised the price and now I'm like I'm constantly subscribing and unsubscribing. I perceive a YouTube TV as the thing for live television. Yeah. But HBO and Xbox aren't. No, you have to add them on. They're add-ons. Like what Amazon does with channels.

And then those are just. Per show. You're just watching shows. Well, you get both linear and on demand. So you'll have access to all the, whatever, Game of Thrones, if you want to go back and watch it. But also, if you're a Succession fan, come Sunday night, you can watch Succession Live. Yeah, and YouTube TV has, like, traditional DVR stuff. Right.

So it doesn't have really on demand, though. So it doesn't really, I don't know, for some reason, maybe, because I didn't grow up with TiVo, the idea of trying to fuss with, like, here are my shows. I'm going to tell you what shows to record, and then you'll record them. and then I'll watch them before they run out, run out, blah, blah, blah. I just, I have no patience for it. Maybe this is a little premature, but how am I going to watch the Olympics? Peacock, baby. It's NBC Universal's whole big push.

Is that going to be good for Olympics? I just want to right here disclose that NBC Universal is an investor in Vox Media, a parent company. It's fine. They don't love me. My best ever, my best ever Olympics experience, I just built my own PC and I got like a TV tuner capture card for my PC. And I just DVRed 24-7 Olympics. And I could watch them in like Windows Media Center.

And it was just a wonderful, wonderful time. And I've never really reached those heights because it's so difficult. So I currently have a TiVo Edge review unit. It's a $1,000 TiVo. with six tuners. I don't love truck and feel that much. It can do anything. And I have not yet recorded.

It's automatically just recording stuff. Because like all things, it's an algorithm. Just like, I'm doing stuff for you. And I've never watched one thing off. It's TVR. We were using it for live TV. I recorded a lot of Young and the Restless back in college. There you go.

Yeah, it was my. But the thing that Dieter's saying, which is also what I do, or in the case of like any awards to like the grand was on CBS All Access, so you sign up for CBS All Access for seven days, then you unsubscribe. The other thing that, like, Hulu, companies are realizing this. Hulu had a really great blog post for Hulu TV that was like, we know you're not going to be here all your round. You should just leave and come back when you really want to be here.

And I think it's like a brilliant marketing move, which is just they understand how people are using it. It's so easy to just cancel and then go back, cancel and go back. That leaning into that, and then Disney figuring out bundling options going down the line with the Hulu TV aspect is like where they really succeed. Because they're like, we get it. Yeah. You have other places to go.

You know, it's funny. If you pay for something and then you don't pay for it anymore and you pay for it again, you actually have not subscribed to anything. You're just buying a thing. It's bizarre that the mechanic is like, I will now just like buy this virtual DVD of the award show. Well, our like my poor editor, Jake, who's one of the best editors of The Verge, he has to listen to me every award show complain about subscribing a sum network when I can

just be like, it's wild that it's not on YouTube and they're not charging like $5 a night. Yeah, here's what I can just pay for the thing I want. Like a boxing match. Yeah, TVV. Like a pay-per-view. So all this comes back around to the thing I'm constantly thinking about

which is eventually it gets even more unbundled. So the thing that has already happened is instead of subscribing to Fios TV, I'm going to subscribe to Disney Plus and maybe YouTube TV to pick up all this live stuff and Apple TV and suddenly I'm just paying as much as I was paying for cable. Right. And you keep on bundling and now it's like,

per show I will spend $5. And I'm definitely going to spend more than cable. Right. Where does the sort of like the value come back around? There's only a few that are going to be kind of your staples, right? Netflix will remain a staple for at least a few more years because Netflix has a lot and they produce a lot. I think it took for Disney Plus to come out for people to realize how much Netflix

puts out because they were like oh so the Mandalorian's done and now I have nothing to watch unless you have kids and you're like your kids watching Finding Nemo every night this is very true it's also clear to me that I'm paying way more for Finding Nemo over the course of the year than

if I just purchase Finding Nemo Finding Nemo is $20 on like any streaming on any traditional movie platform I'm just $12 a month for like two minutes of the movie Here's the thing that I run into with my friends, though.

When this came up a lot, we had, screener season happens. Studio sent out screeners for consideration. And everyone I talked to is like, I don't own a DVD or a Blu-ray player. How am I going to play this? Don't they have, like, Xboxes and PlayStation? I bought my PlayStation. Well, I didn't buy it. My brother bought me a PlayStation, and that's why I used that for it.

But I only use it for Netflix and Disney and HBO. Like, I don't use it for anything else. Yeah. And I haven't bought a DVD, and I used to work at, like, at record store, we sold DVDs. I haven't bought a DVD in years. I think what it comes down to is like the more that people in bundle, they're just going to go back and forth. Every analyst I talk to is like, you're just going to go back and forth and you'll have one or two that you keep. Most people right now will keep Netflix and Disney Plus because the Disney Plus offerings are pretty good.

And if you have kids especially, and Netflix is just a staple. The more expensive ones, HBO Max is going to be $15 a month and you're going to get a lot out of it. But really like, are you spending $15 a month for friends? Like, and The Matrix? I don't know. You don't really need it, especially when you can open up a Google Doc or Google. drive and watch a bunch of this stuff online. Wow.

Oh, dude. Wow. I've conditioned... Deep window into Julia's content consumption habits. I've conditioned my TikTok algorithm to tell me about how to cheat at school and how to steal movies. Me too. Like, there's like 20 different websites where you just, like, it's always presented as a cool secret tip. And you go to this website.

It's just like a regular domain name. Go to that website and you can watch all anime that's ever been made for free. Yeah, it's like country roll.com. You're supposed to pay them for it. It's like, it's like, no, not that one. It's not the legit one. It's like popcorn time or like Netflix, but it's just in the web browser. I think we did the first 40 minutes of the show on Dieter stealing a phone and now we're like, here's on a steal movie.

I do not steal anything. I paid a lot of money for it. Has anybody talked to Google about this Google drive? I think because that is another, it's a very hot tip on TikTok. Yeah, I know Russell wanted us to blog about it, and I was like, I'm not going to narc. That's how I feel about all of our Plex coverage. Whatever I'm like, we should do a story about the reality of Flax, everyone's like, shh, shh, shh, shh. Well, like, the best app I ever got pitched on, and I never wrote about it because I think I forgot about it.

But the best that I got pitched on was this idea that you, it's basically like Nintendo's family sharing plan, and you all, you, you've picked like seven friends, and each of your friends chooses something to subscribe to, and then they, like, share that account. And it's like who shares what, who owns what, how many passwords you get onto this? Who's streaming it right now? I was like, it's a great idea for that. I feel like that would also like just improve the bonds of your friendship. That sort of collaboration. That's like a team-building exercise. Why did you push that episode?

Why did you push that button episode about this? What password sharing and like people break up? Oh, that's true. It's very good. This is the question that the executives get asked probably the most, aside from like, how fast are you scaling? It's do you worry about password sharing? And for the most part, they've been like. It's going to be an issue in about two years, but we're not worried about it right now.

If you're Disney and Netflix, you're like, I don't give a crap, really. So I think that's related to, like, this moment in the market that we're seeing the thing that we start talking about, which is the, what do you call the YouTube TVs of the world? Virtual. They're VMPDs. Yeah. Oh, my God. It's not a great name. What does it even stand for?

Virtual multi-video platform distributor. Yeah. So here's a, like, a problem you had in the old days. when DISH and DirecTV were vibrant companies in the future was you couldn't just call them cable companies because you had the two satellite. So they made up a new acronym MVPDs, multiple video platform distributed.

Just to be clear, what you're talking about are things that have like channels and not just on-demand episodes. Right, but there's a difference between the MPBDs and then the VMPVDs, which is like the virtual. So that's the YouTube TV, the Hulu TV, the AT&T TV now. If you can come up with a better word for this, please just let us know. What about like a hyper virtual?

Yeah. Where you run YouTube TV inside of YouTube TV. Yeah. I see what you're saying. I got it. Anyway, so we're seeing a lot of those entered the market. Now they're consolidating. That's a pretty normal course of, right?

A bunch of new services enter. They see an opportunity. Some of them succeed. Some they don't. They consolidate. You're seeing that churn. But you're not worried about password sharing yet because you're trying to get shared. You're just trying to get people to get your app.

Yeah, it's trying to scale. Right. So you just need whatever, share it. Yeah. Like, give everybody the password to your YouTube TV account because then they'll get the app. And then the day that we're like, we've destroyed all of our competition. And we're the one of the two or three big players will start enforcing the password sharing rules. And then we'll make the money.

That's exactly. I mean, I talked to this lawyer who represents a lot of the big companies and the word he kept using. He was like a very excited lawyer. Like, you just kept going, consolidation. Consolidation. And I was like, you represent very big corporations. But this is the thing where he's just like, they're just waiting it out. Like, Disney's waiting it out.

Like, they're like, we know that we're fine. They've also, I mean, the big thing I wrote about this today, the big thing that it's funny, you know, CBS had an investors call today. And there have been a few other investors calls in recent weeks. And when it comes to international, NBC Universal, Warner Media, and CBS are like, yeah, we're thinking about it. Like, we're definitely in that game and we're considering it. But then on the other end of it, you have Amazon, Netflix, and Disney. And they're like, no, no, we don't care about the U.S. Like, we want India and Brazil and Mexico and Germany and Japan.

Like, those are the ones we want, which is why Netflix is investing billions and, you know, in different regions. And I was talking to someone today and he went, if you're not already there, you're not going to compete with Amazon in two years. Because Amazon's going to control everything and you're not going to compete with local streaming services. Like Netflix is trying to break into India and they're spending half a billion dollars this year to do so. And they're still like the fourth most watch service. And the number one most watch streaming service is called Hot Star and Disney bought them. They were just like, yeah, we'll just take it. Like we can't compete with it.

We'll just buy you, which is like the Google move, right? It's like the very, I'm just going to buy what I can't have or what I can't make. Like I have a successful product in the United States and now I'm going to take over the world with it. It has not always worked. Like that didn't work out for the rideshare companies necessarily, right? It didn't work out for Groupon. Yeah, I mean, I think those are all companies that move atoms, not bits. Right?

We're a big successful software company, and we're just going to find any market that we can address with, like, not necessarily zero marginal cost, but pretty low marginal cost. Well, actors are Adams. I mean, I'm guessing in India, they do have to produce new things, right? Actors are Adams? You're made of stuff, right? Correct way to describe Hollywood. You're just a collection of molecules, I think. Yeah, yeah, right.

But like the movies that you distribute and the software distribute those movies, like, you just spin it up in a new place. Whereas, like, Uber was like, now we have to find another million Toyota cameras and people to drive them. Right. But Netflix has to find a million new shows in India to produce, right? Which they're going to. I mean, they're going to. The biggest issue that Netflix faces is, like, Netflix is a general entertainment company, which is fine, except that what they're competing against are people who carry sports. And this is more of an issue international than it is here because the internationally bundle more often entertainment in sports for a cheaper price versus here if you want to get entertainment in sports, you're paying like, yeah, $50 for YouTube TV or whatever.

And even then, you're like still blocked out by like regional sports issues. So it's a whole complicated mess. But internationally, if they're spending and they're working with local talent and they can penetrate a market that is like mobile focused by offering really cheap mobile plans, which is. they're doing that'll probably grow. They're not growing as fast as they want and like read Hastings, who's the CEO of Netflix, has addressed this, but they are growing. They just kind of released, they released their 10K and they were and they kind of looked over a bunch of the stuff. And they're like, no, we're fine. Like, we're spending a lot, but we do have proof that we're doing well. Investors were fine. A bunch of analysts just raised, they just hit a 52 week high and

like their stock surge. So like they're fine. The advantage Disney has, which they know and they kind walk around like they know is that they're Disney and they're like no one has Star Wars like no one has Marvel it doesn't matter where we launch people are going to come to us because Disney is worldwide but your point about Disney plus not having quite enough stuff after that initial rush is very true are they going to start flooding the app with new content the way the Netflix does yeah I mean they've addressed so I I the one I the one thing I keep yelling about to like my mom could she'll be like Disney Plus is kind of boring. And I'm like, listen.

That's why you're here. You understand Bob's brilliant. An audience of dozens to talk to it. No, I mean, so they know they have to put out more stuff. That's why they spent a lot of time on their investors' call saying, like, yes, we have two Marvel shows, The Mandalorian and something else. I can't remember another big show coming out at the end of the year. But Disney Plus is not Netflix and they're not going to be Netflix.

They're not trying to be Netflix. Disney, the best way to think of their output is HBO. Not that in terms of content by any means. But HBO usually has one to two big shows a quarter. Like they have one or two and they just kind of overlap eventually. That's what Disney's going to end up doing. Disney is like undergoing changes right now on the plus side where they're just basically, from my understanding,

going to give slots to the studio heads and basically be like Kevin Feigy, who's at Marvel, you get three slots. Kathleen Kennedy at Star Wars, you get two slots. And throughout the year they'll have new shows that come in and it'll just kind of overlap each other beautifully if it works out for them. And the way that HBO does,

like HBO went from being like they had a good year. It was like Game of Thrones Euphoria Successions. So you just didn't cancel for nine months. We're like, yeah. Like, there's enough here that I will keep subscribing.

I like the idea that they've literally shipped their org chart in this app. Yeah. And that like each one of those boxes is like a powerful sub-CEO inside of Disney. I have this. And then the Nat Geo person

who's like, Helen documentary. What's up? That we sold for Apple. Here's my time. I have this org chart like hand drawn in a notebook It's yeah

So I mean like they figured it out in the way that like Their heads of stu Their studio heads tend to be visionaries Lucasfilm is going through changes Lucasfilm hasn't had a good time But you know like Bob's big son Kevin Feigy Like is

Wow That's what he is Is like producing enough that they're pretty confident By the way Bob is Bob Eager This is the third time you've referred to Bob without saying his last name or who he is. Rob Eiger, the CEO of Disney and the most powerful man in entertainment, or as we know him, Bob. Too many Bob's in show business these days.

But so you're saying Fagie is like he's winning in that zone, right? Yeah, he's figured out. And I mean, they're going to loop in their shows into their movies pretty heavily. So they're going to go like, okay, there's a scene that happens in Dr. Strange. And to really understand it, you have to watch Wanda Vision, right? Like that's their whole play, which, by the way, is the same thing that Marvel comics tried to do in the 90s and nearly bankrupted. What's so different about this and then the Marvel TV shows on Netflix not so long ago? Well, so this is, I mean, this gets into like petty drama that I could write a book about, but Jeff Loeb, who headed up Marvel Entertainment.

So they, like, separated Kevin Feigy, who was doing really well from, like, people who weren't doing super well. So Jeff Loeb got TV, Marvel TV, and they were fine with it because they didn't care. Netflix was paying a lot of money. They're like, you didn't do what you want. We don't care. They're not part of our cinematic universe. Then they're like, we're going to do Disney Plus. This really matters to us.

We're quality, not quantity. So they were like, can't deal with the guy who makes really bad TV shows. We're going to launch this new Marvel TV entertainment landscape that rolls into Marvel Studios. Therefore, Kevin oversees it. Does that mean that the Netflix shows are non-canonical? Yeah. I mean, like, you could argue. Wow.

I feel so betrayed. I just broke, Julia. It's all over right now. I watched like two episodes. Yeah, episode four of the Punisher. The Punisher takes a long walk, stares at the ground a while, says, ah, I've punished too many people, has a nap. No more punishing for me.

These shows are so bad. I think the rule should be, if it's good, it's canon, and if it's bad, it's not. That should be the whole rule. Yeah. I like that. No, it's fine. I mean, it's like bringing back to the business side of things, it's like that's their whole. whole goal is to eventually

you're just going to be like I'm so entrapped in this Disney universe that like it's just going to be a whole thing. But I mean they're not going to do that as much. I think it's just going to be more of like we want people to keep up. Pay us money. We want people to keep their

Disney Plus descriptions and we know that if we tease enough of this that they will return, it's what they do with agents with network TV. Like this post Super Bowl thing used to be like if you know like let's say it's an ABC moment, they're like, agents of shield's going to tie into this new Avengers movie, catch it after the Super Bowl.

And then it increased ratings. Then ABC could send up an ice email. That was like, our ratings hit a high. So deeply cynical and I love it very much. I get ratings emails every day. And I'm like, oh, good for you, CBS. So I was talking about CBS. Oh, right.

Your headline was at an early lead. They blew it. They're going to restart their streaming service. Yeah, they didn't do well. It's going to be called the I? So this is the greatest thing in the world. I literally have not. They're almost not talking about this all day.

They were calling this House of Brands. What? Literally, they keep referring to this as House of Brands. That's actually the name of the streaming service? I have no idea. House of Brand sounds like a discount mall where you buy cheap cigarettes. I'm just going to say it. And on the investors call, they kept being like, MTV, that's a brand.

And I was like, not in 2020. Wow. But, yeah, so basically the TLDR is that when Viacomans, CBS split up, once they got divorced in 2006, everyone was very sad. By everyone, I mean me. CBS lost a lot of, like, content. And when they, so fast forward to 2014, CBS is like, this streaming thing seems to be where people are headed. You know, Netflix is doing okay. So we're going to launch CBS All Access, which I believe officially launched in 2015.

At the time, they didn't really have any competitors besides Netflix and Hulu. Like, that was basically it. But they had a really janky service. Like, the service was terrible. You couldn't even use it. I remember when their first Star Trek show came out. People were like, I can't watch the show. The offerings of, like, the library catalog for some reason weren't very good.

And it just wasn't, like, there was really no incentive to do it. And so CBS All Access kind of was like, eh. I have a source that estimates they're probably at about, five and a half million subscribers total right now. Wow, after five years. After five years, which is like close to six, which is like an insane low number. Fast forward to last year,

CBS and Viacom, fall back in love, get married. I mean, to be clear, that was like a year long, literally a succession drama. There was personal drama. There was like rumors the CEO was in secret invalid. Like, it was nuts, but they're back together now.

Listen, there was a wedding. They're back together. And they're like, streaming, really taking off. We have to do more about this. So we're going to rebrand all access with the Viacom brands. So this is Nickelodeon. It's Comedy Central, MTV, all these kind of BET. All of which have their own streaming services, by the way,

like their own individual streaming services that you can get via Amazon channels. Yeah, so they're like, we have to rebrand this because this is our new big thing. So they're offering, from what we understand, a new version of the service. Called House of Brands. God, I hope so. Called House of Brands is how they're referring to it right now. That is also going to somehow include sports and news in like a weird premium tier. If I sound confused, it's because every source and analysts I spoke to this morning,

I asked them if they understood it and they said, nope. Like, I have no idea what CBS just announced. So CBS, when CBS and VICOM were split, they were owned by the Redstones. The actual holding company was called National Amusements, which is great because it started as a movie theater chain. Shouldn't they call the streaming service national amusements? Their house of brands? They're calling it House of Brands, which is close to House of Mouse, which is Disney's whole thing.

Brought it all the way back home, Julie. This is what I do. The Streaming Wars. The Disney Wars. No, but this is their whole thing. There's no pricing for it. They're going to soft launch it this year. No idea.

This is the best part. So you think of streaming stuff. You think of exclusivity, right? We're just talking to how Disney's playing their game. Netflix, originals are exclusives, all these types of things. CBS, not doing this. CBS is like, it costs a lot of minor on a streaming service. We're going to make these huge deals.

We're going to license. So South Park, one of their biggest shows on Comedy Central, HBO Max exclusive. SpongeBob, Netflix is getting a spin-off. and they're going to get a bunch of shows. And the way that they're thinking of streaming, Bob Back is their CEO, another Bob. He's referring to these as rentals. He's like, we rent them out. We get the IP back.

And if they do really well, hopefully people come back to the CBS, which is not going to happen. Like that's like, we know for a fact that doesn't happen. People just stay on the service. They find something else. This has been Netflix's whole thing. Like, we still have other shows. People have stayed around. So their whole goal is to bring people.

people in with their content, but then license a lot of that content out in order to pay for things. I'm very excited about this. I just like this idea that they are actually trying to make money. Because a lot of these are like, we will crush our competition by spending $700 million. They're monopoly points. We'll make it up on the back end. CBS is like, let's be profitable. Yeah.

It's a weird moment. I mean, like... It's bizarre that that's the riskier strategy. Yeah. Well, actually, so like everybody I spoke to a lot of who consult with these companies are like, the issue with CBS is that they have never been able to take the risk. Like they've never actually said, yeah, we're all in. If you compare it to what other people have said, and I think about this just because

it's a recent podcast I was listening to. I was listening to Eiger on Bill Simmons. And he was talking about ESPN. And he's like, ESPN is like fine. They're like doing fine. We're really happy with it. but ESPN Plus is where we're going to put a lot of stuff. We're going to figure out rights issues.

We're going to figure out international stuff. We're going to really bring ESPN Plus up because people are cutting the court. And Adam Silver, who's the NBA commissioner, just talked about that, I believe, this week where he was like, the NBA, every league is like losing viewers because people are just not subscribing or they're doing what Dieter does. There's like a Super Bowl. And he's like, I'm just going to subscribe to YouTube TV or whatever for the night. And then watch it this way. So they're trying to figure out ways to bring sports to court cutters, but it's the weirdest place to be in because of the regional rights. And so they can't offer every game the way that Disney can go, we're going to give you every movie.

YouTube can't go or CBS can't go. We're going to give you every basketball game because it's like, well, you're going to be blocked out in certain markets. That's just how it works. But Google Drive always comes through. Google Drive always comes through. We got to end it here. We've taken have too much of Julia's time. Thank you very much.

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in our time of need the stability that we need Yeah That's a call There's a segment I do every week

And it's called Top 10 LCD Betrayals This is very relevant To my interests Okay Well see That's what you think

And that's what I always Would think Okay So Tiger Is coming back With these these LCD

and I put LCD in quotes because that's what bugs me about it. So they're handheld games, right? They have controls. They've got a little screen. They look a little bit like a Game Boy Advance. It's hard to describe it. I'm sure everybody's experiences in their life, right?

It's LCD technology in the sense that there's liquid crystal displays. But it's not LCD in the sense that there is a grid of pixels like a Game Boy has, you know? And so these games are always stupid, and I hated them. And I feel like, you know, when I was a kid, I was pretty tech-aware.

Like, I would go to the library and read all the computer magazines. So I knew what LCD was. So when I go to Toys R Us and I see it LCD handheld, and then I discover that there's, like, basically your character in the game has, like, three different positions. You know, it's just like, anyways, Tigers coming back with the, like, remaking these. Like there's a Sonic game, X-Man Transformers, so they've got all the big IP. But the games are trash, and I feel like it just, I feel like it, I mean, it bugs me,

even like, you know, the game and watch guy, that's a similar concept. I don't even like seeing him in Smash, because I just think about these fake, these real LCDs that are just not, it's just not a grid of pixels. It's not good enough for you. You are super wrong what all of these things.

And I only say that because I'm old enough that I had some of these. these games. And I had the, there was one that was a no-name game that was like the Olympics and you were like running it on hurdles and it had three flat buttons. And instead of just punching them, you'd like run your fingernails over them to go really, really fast. Okay. And I wore that thing out. Yeah, you're right. These games are trash. But the, the, these liquid crystals were like in American homes before like LCD displays as you know and love them now.

So like there's a little bit of nostalgia that's worthwhile. It's been like a nostalgia week because they also brought back super. They like remade the original super soakers. They're way worse than the originals. Really? Like they don't, well, I mean, they're way better. They're safer, I'm sure, in various ways. How are the original's dangerous?

If you, the pump on the originals, you could, like, lose, like, the tip of your pinky finger if you were doing it wrong. Like, there was, like, not a whole lot of clearance there. I had a super sucker one on it. I don't recall. I remember we, like, we, like, we dyed the water so that you'd score people that look like blood. All right. This podcast is completely off the rails. Android 11 is half.

All right. Well, should we talk about Apple first or Android first? There's maybe more for Android. We can do, actually, no, that's not true. We can knock Android out. Android 11, they released the developer preview earlier than ever. You can't just go install it like a beta. You've got to flash it.

And it's mostly developer-facing stuff. But the stuff that is facing Real Humans is chat heads, bubbles, are making a grand comeback. There's this like conversation section, which I actually initially got wrong in my announcement post, where they're basically taking a whole bunch of all of your chats and they're putting them in a separate area notifications. They might actually finally do real screen recording natively, thank God.

And they also are going to have better sort of app security and permissions. And the big one is scoped storage, which means that just like on the iPhone, Android apps aren't going to be able to just look at whatever they want on your storage. They'll only be able to look at their special section unless they get special permission to look at like generalized storage. So in the same way that like, I don't know, on the iPhone, like I need permission to look at this

and the more Android apps have to do that, in the same way that MacOS Catalina is constantly asking you if it's allowed to look at the desktop. That's coming for Android. There you go. Anyway, a bunch of developers are going to have to like contend with that. And Google's finally just stopping saying pretty please update your apps to support this stuff.

They're just making them do it because security, I guess. Because some of the scope Yeah, storage stuff was already in Android 10, right? It was an Android 10, but it was an Android 10 is like, hey, we think we're going to do this, and a whole bunch of Android developers went, oh, I, no, they're like, okay, okay, we'll do it next year. But, like, please, please look at this. And now they're like, yo, we're doing this. Wait, are they doing this through the Play Store?

You can't issue an update if you don't support this thing? Because they can't. So it's, it's, it gets into like the wildly complicated territory of the difference between version of Android, the API version of Android, and which API version your app targets. In addition to all of that, there is a new complication in Android 11 where you can target the newest and latest API. If you want to use the newest stuff, you need to target that level of API. Like, if you want to use the cool new thing in API 27, you have to follow API 27's rules,

right? But sometimes, like, there's, like, features in it that are annoying or, like, whatever. And so now they're letting you, like, dynamically opt-in stuff in weird ways. You can, like, opt-in or opt-out of certain parts of the API. It's just radically complicated is what I'm getting at. Well, I'm just saying Apple puts out a new version of iOS. Yes, and then everyone has to hop to and do what Apple says. Because Apple, because, you know, they'll just put it across the entire install base very quickly.

Yep. Or if you want to target the newest and greatest phone, which is where probably the spendiest customers are, they'll have it. Whatever. You've got to follow the rules. Android has, well, Google broadly has Android. It's wildly complicated API situation. It has Play Store approval process, which is another lever it can pull. Yep.

Right? And then it has Play Services on the phone, which is like yet a third sort of... And it also has ads. If you want to use ads on your app, Google runs one of the bigger ad networks, and they have different rules there as well, including it especially for apps that are like for kids. They now have the Google Play subscription thing, which is another layer of approval.

But the biggest complication of all that's more important than any of this is the vast majority of Android phones are a couple of years old. You know, they don't have the latest and greatest operating system. And so there's literally no incentive for developers to, like, update to do things like get rid of the side drawer that interferes to the back button on the pixel because, you know, half of a percent of users have this stuff. And so if it doesn't bother 99.5% of your users, like, where's the incentive to, like, put the effort in to update it? I'm not calling Android developers lazy. I'm saying that they're following the incentives that the ecosystem offers them. You know, like, they're putting their time into other things that bring them more return. Sure.

So Google has to do things that, like, change the incentive structure. And one of those changes is, like, making scope storage a requirement, which is, like, well, okay, now if I don't do it, my Apple will break. And they're doing that in part because it's like it's a privacy and security issue. Yeah. But where is it a requirement? Like I guess where in that stack of things where they can issue requirements is it a requirement? That is there's like it's the API level if you want to target and you want to be and if you want your app to work, I believe, on Android 11. Okay.

And I think the game there is still the newest phones will run Android 11. If you want to run on the newest phones, you got to work with it. Right. Right. Yep. And then if you, but you can you can target. at the API and have it still work on, like, older versions of the OS in some cases. So. Wildly complicated.

Yeah. What else with Android 11? I mean, that's the big stuff, the big consumer-facing stuff. There's a, you know, you could go and look at, like, Android Police and a 9-to-5 Google, and they had just a blast of a day just finding all of the features that weren't technically announced, or at least a bunch of the features that weren't technically announced. So some of my favorites are scrolling screenshots finally coming back. airplane mode not turning off Bluetooth which is not you know it's been that's been fine on iOS for a while but they're doing it here

How do you how do you ship phones without headphone jacks and not have this? God They are going to let you maybe pin apps to the share sheet which is interesting because the share sheet has always been a disaster on Android It's just always been bad they tried to like do a bunch of stuff with like machine learning on it, it slowed it down, and then they tried to roll that back. And so there's like, screw it. You can just, like, put the apps you want there on your own.

The story of machine learning. Yeah. We try to guess what you want, but it turns out you already know. And then they are updating the Bluetooth stack for controlling Bluetooth devices to a new thing that has the code name Gabaldorsha. Just tell the Gabaldorsha story. Gabaldorsha. Gabaldorsha is the son of...

of Swain Forkbeard. His name is Swain Forkbeard. And, you know, that's the son of King Harold, which is the Bluetooth, where Bluetooth comes from. So it's like the successor to Bluetooth. They should have called it Forkbeard. Yeah. I don't get where Gabaldorce is the word for Forkbeard? His dad, King Harold, got the nickname Bluetooth. Right.

Yeah. King Forkbeard got the nickname Gabaldorsia. And he did not become a tech standard. So the blue thing is going to be way better now. Yeah, Bluetooth is going to be better next year. It sounds like a lot. It sounds like they're doing a lot. They're doing a lot.

And this is not the main consumer-facing stuff because they always wait for Google I.O. for that. But this is like the stuff that we've been able to like glean. Yeah. And by we, I mean, Android police, and 9 to 5 Google. Yeah. And XDA developers. It seems like a lot of stuff is holdover from 10 that they just push back.

There's a bunch of holdover from 10. So, like, we screen reporting, recording was in early 10 betas, and then it didn't arrive. These bubbles, same sort of thing. They're like there, but nobody used them. And the scope storage. And then the other holdover from 10 is in 10 they introduced permission changes for location, where you could, instead of having it be all or nothing, you could do while using the app. Now they're continuing to, like, chase what the iPhone does, and you can grant like a one-time permission for location just once.

and they're also extending that to, I think, like, cameras and microphones. And then on top of all of that, if an app just keeps asking you every time you open it for location permission and you keep saying no, eventually Android will, like, figure that out and they will block the app from asking you. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty good. See, that's interesting. I have a lot of apps that ask me every time for some permission. And there's an option that you can say never ask again, but I don't want to click that because there might be a,

time when I do want to... This is like a user interface design classic problem. Yeah, I don't know how I would recover that situation were I to want to. Whenever I screenshot these things and say the dialogue text is bad or misleading,

like a bunch of product managers and designers will tweet back in me and be like, we actually can't change it to the thing you want because then users will not push it because they think they can't recover. Right? So if the answer is just no, people are like afraid of that no. Like, what if I want it in the future?

Yeah, yeah. So that's why it's always some, like, wacky text that's like, I forbid you this time, but please gently ask me again. It's always like something like that, right? I think on Android it's deny or deny and don't ask again. Or I guess there's probably a confirm or yes. Hopefully. I wish the only options were deny and deny, deny, but let me recover.

But that's the thing. People talk about it all the time. If you just show the hard no, people won't actually choose it. Yeah. Which I think is interesting. I mean, broadly, it just seems like Google's big problem here. I mean, this is your column, is how are they going to get, I mean, this is the Android problem. Like, we're many, many versions in Android, and the problem is still, how do you move the ecosystem to the new stuff?

Right. And, you know, they're trying, the thing they're doing now is they're, they have nicer tools, which is sometimes an incentive. So Kotlin is a great programming language that's modern and it's sort of in the same generation as like Swift. and so that's great. People love that. They've got that. They've got this new thing they call Jetpack, which is like instead of having 50 ways to do a thing that you want to do on Android,

there's like O way, and so you can just follow those standards. So they're improving the ease of coding Android apps. But, you know, when they tried to get people to update their apps for Chrome OS so you could have Windows that could change size or tablets before that, you know, it didn't go super well because, again, And there's no incentive because how many people actually are you serving by putting all that work in? So at some point, they just have to be like, no, these are the rules. And that's what they're doing a little bit now with Android 11.

Yeah. Do you want to talk about this Verizon pixel drama for five seconds? Android police published a story that said that Verizon wasn't going to carry the Pixel 4A or 5. And then they had to retract it because Verizon said, no, we continue to have a good relationship with Google. Yeah. It's fine. We're fully committed to Google on 2020. It's what Verizon said.

the fire drill. The reason it felt like such a big story is legitimate and that is that no one really believes the pixel sells well. Yeah. And, you know, we're on the Pixel 5 when Rick Osterlo came and took over the hardware division at Google

and consolidated everything. And I talked to him. We all talked to Sundar and, like, number one question was when are you going to get serious? What's your time horizon? And they gave the answer that all tech people give when they don't really know. They said, oh, like five years.

In five years, we want this to be big. and like we're coming up. It's time. And the pixel is, you know, I'm holding a galaxy S20 ultra in my hand. And it's, what, six months newer than the pixel, give or take? And it feels three months or three years ahead, you know, like maybe two years ahead. It's the hardware quality in the pixel, it's always been like, it's had its charm. And I actually am often charmed by the sort of aesthetic of the pixel.

I do actually like it. But fundamentally, they're just like they are not keeping up with the flagships. And Google needs to either do that or admit that they're not going to and pursue a different strategy. And the way that they did and some of the Nexus years where they were like, yeah, yeah, Samsung makes the expensive stuff. We make the stuff for everybody that has got pure Google software. They should, if they just did that with the pixel and they just dropped the prices across the board by like, you know, $250. I think it would be great. Yeah.

They're not doing that. If they were just like, the pixel 4A is the pixel. Yeah. Yeah. Pixel 4A has a headphone jack. A bigger battery. What we think it has, headphone jack. Yeah.

Bigger battery and a headphone jack. That's all anybody ever wanted. They always put headphone jacks on the lower-end phones. Samsung does it too with like the one of the light phones that they just introduced at CES. Because Oxcourt are for poor people. What am I going to do with all this extra cash? I'm going to buy a bunch of wired headphones. Let's talk about this Apple thing for one second.

Because it's not a lot. There's no news yet. But Mark German, Bloomberg reports, Apple considers allowing apps like Chrome and Gmail be set as iOS defaults. Why are they doing this? Because of antitrust enforcement. I think so? I know it. I know it in my heart.

Why do you think that? Well, they're getting sued in Europe. There's a bunch of saber rattling in the United States, right? There's like the FTC and DOJ have divvied up the tech companies. There was just a hearing where we're tiled in Sonos, right? in front of Congress talking about it. That committee is going to issue its regulations in May. Tile is very unhappy about default app settings.

Like, if they're now talking about it, they were so religious about it, right? We cannot let you set mail. We cannot let you set another app as the default mail experience on the iPhone because mail is integrated in the operating system. It's a core capability. You talk to them about the browser, it's even more. It's like it is deeply baked into their ethos of the operating system. You guys all know my feelings on antitrust, but I really feel like as a company, you would just like, one of the most famous things that ever happened in antitrust is Microsoft saying like those exact words. Like, we are baking Internet Explorer.

It's a core component of the operating system. So. But that wasn't the thing that actually got them in trouble. The thing that got them in trouble was like a variety of pricing schemes in strong arm tactics to make sure Netscape wasn't there. So the internet explorer bacon was not the actual... I mean, it was like one piece of it. But like, if you look at that case, it was like, it was a massive range of behavior that was like deemed to be illegal. Not just, but that started it, right?

Like, did you tie these things together? Did you use your market share in one place to illegally compete in another? It was like basically the story. But like, yeah, and then Microsoft was like to PC vendors, the price of a Windows license skyrockets if you don't bundle an error explorer. Like, that's the thing. But yeah, but you're right. It's the most famous. What if you could pay $50 more for an iPhone where you could set the default apps?

I would pay the money. $50 to unlock a professional. I think one thing here that is true is most of these companies, the second there's even like the threat of this stuff, they start responding to it. Right? Because they want to ward off the threat. So even just talking about it, like makes for better competitive environment, right? Like even just saying we want to make sure, because you don't want the government to do it. I agree with you.

The government shouldn't tell Apple how to design the iPhone. Apple should. They should just improve their product by allowing us to set a default browser. That would be a nice feature. It would be great. So the government just like waves, like literally rattles the saber. Like committees are doing stuff. And then Apple's like, well, we've got to start talking about this.

Like that's a good outcome. I was talking to a smart antitrust person today. And their point to me was Apple is the most responsive to that. Right. So like governments around the world are doing this stuff. it seems like Apple is the most responsive. Like they are making the changes to get out ahead of it. And this person was also like, but if you look, like Google is the least responsive.

So it doesn't always work. Well, I could already set my own default browser. In fact, I just set my default browser on Android to duck, dot, go. Sure, on this level. But at the same time, Google is like, huh, everyone's interested in antitrust. We're going to go ahead and buy Fitbit. They're just like, what if we just buy another company? Like right now.

Like, hey, antitrust regulators, can you go ahead and improve this like multi-billion dollar equity? Like, they're not going to do stuff until they're forced to. So Google in Europe has not unbundled Chrome and place services and all that stuff because the European Union forced them to do it. Not because they wanted to or because they saw the lawsuit. Right. But again, they were. were all along way more open and flexible for users than Apple has ever been on iOS.

Yeah, but if you look at the contractual side, right? If you were Samsung and you wanted to ship a Tysen phone, Google would just yank your Play Store license. Yeah. But if you want to ship an iOS phone, you can't. Right. You know, like. Yeah, so it's just that. I understand that Google was doing dramatic things with its Android license.

I'm just saying Apple does not do anything with its iOS license. Yeah, and maybe that's just like a reflection than the two businesses. Like, maybe we're, I think we're saying the same thing in kind of like different ways. Like, the reason Apple is more responsive is because they're just fully in control. So they're like, we do not want anything to disturb our control. So we would rather do it on our own. So we see this threat. We're going to make our moves ahead of time and retain all the control.

Google has like far less control, as we were just talking about. They have this variety of complicated interlocking levers to sort of control what happens, but they don't actually just have one button to push. And so they just slow roll it and they try to do it contractually. And they end up at a place where the European Union is like, if Samsung wants to ship an Android phone that doesn't have your service, you have to let them. You cannot tie them to a contract that says you can't. So I think it's kind of just like two sides of the same coin in that sense.

Like Google is less willing to let go of its control because it already has. diffuse control. But it's interesting, like, this is all kind of like a sideline to the real question, which is Safari. And if you can set Chrome as a default browser, it kind of doesn't matter if Apple doesn't let another rendering engine on the phone. So, which is a whole host of problems. I've been sitting here waiting to make this devil's advocate argument just like,

ha, but it. So Apple doesn't allow alternative web rendering engines on the iPhone. And they will tell you it's probably for like security and privacy reasons, because It turns out a web rendering engine can do a lot of nefarious stuff, right? Cookies and tracking and who knows what else. And it's also potentially really like a security problem for the integrity of the phone itself, which is a thing that Google learned the hard way with Android. They were needing to update the web view for Android so often that they finally just said,

screw it. We're putting it into Google Play services so that we can just push out updates whenever we need to. So it's no longer like the Chrome browser and the rendering engine for Chrome. Chrome usually gets pushed out via the Google Play services now because it's faster and more convenient. So there might be a case that Apple could say, we will let you set Chrome as your default browser, but it still has to use the iPhone's web rendering engine because it's faster and it's more secure and blah, blah, blah, blah. On Android, it's a little bit more complicated. A bunch of the alternative browsers do, in fact, use blink, which is, you know, the Chrome OS, you know,

or they're chromium based or whatever. I'm pretty sure Firefox on Android is based on Phoenix, but I actually got to double check that. Don't hold me to that. But there is potentially a case to be made that they could allow alternative default browsers, but not let those browsers be a different rendering engine. But it gets super complicated. So, for example, when you click a link in Twitter, what happens?

You cry. It opens in an in-app browser. Yeah. The in-app browser is... Basically, Safari. Yeah. On Android, it's the same thing. But, you know, on the Samsung phone, for example, the in-app browser is like the

Samsung browser, right? Or if I set Edge as my default browser on Android, the in-app browser just becomes Edge, which is really fascinating. So on Apple, those things are a little bit more separated. So, for example, if you are logged in on your Chrome browser and you click and you open up an in-app browser and Twitter, well, it just... just knows that you're logged in, you don't have to do it again. Yeah.

So all these complaints that people have like, oh, God, I got to log in again, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, you actually experience that about half as much on Android as you do on the iPhone. That's wild. I mean, how does a world of logins work across services when cookies are illegal, which is, like, where we're going, is like one of the biggest open conversations there is? I think if they let third-party browsers using the Safari rendering engine be set as a default, I would not be like 100% happy. But that is a significant concession, right? That is like, it's still a huge move because the third-party browsers can do a bunch of other stuff that right now gets no traction. The infrastructure is there.

Apple doesn't give you like really, really clear access to it in the way you can on Android. But like if you click on a link that is like a Twitter link, it'll open the Twitter app. Right? Yeah. Most of the time in other apps. So like they know how to direct links to different apps if they want to. So like they, if they wanted to, they could let you direct just plain HTTP. W.

You know, you know, links to Chrome. They could, like, they could do it. They know, they have the technology. None of them are as egregious as male. Yeah. Like, just like, honestly. Yeah. Like you, they have to know.

Like, Eddie Q has to be like, I'm sending email. I'll be like, I, we didn't do a good job of that. That feeling when you click on somebody's name, because you think it's maybe, you think it's maybe a link to their bio or their Twitter profile, and it happens to be an email link. Like, no. Oh, no. Why did this happen to me? Like I said, it's just a German report.

They're talking about it. I hope it happens for, I think everyone would be happy. I think it would improve the phone. I think most people would still use the default app will be happy. But it's just the thing that is the most interesting to me is this connection between, okay, there's been all this noise. And now this company that desperately wants to retain control is going to give up a slice of it over here so that governments don't actually tell them what to do.

It's not necessarily a bad outcome. Yeah. It's the tension you want that still doesn't require old Johnny FBI to show up at your door. No, he just threatens you. That's what you want. Johnny FBI threatening Tinslow. He just calls you up and he just breathes into the phone, but he doesn't say anything. Now streaming on Apple TV Plus.

That's perfect. That's a very cast. Thank you for listening. We're back on Tuesday. Brian Seleski is a CEO of Argo AI, self-driving car company. It's just 30 minutes of saying when our self-driving car companies can happen, or when it's self-driving happen. I thought you already talked to somebody at... No, we've talked to a lot of self-driving.

Okay, okay. It's a different one. It's always the same. Is it happening? Is it here? When is it happening? But he's really fun. Andy Hawkins did that with me.

And then we're back next week at the chat show. It's just going to keep happening. We'll talk to you soon. You can tweet at us, by the way. I'm reckless. Paul's future Paul. Deter's back on. Deeter has a newsletter.

I do. It's at theverge.com slash newsletter. It's a processor. It's a newsletter about computers. Wink. Wink. Well done. Goodbye.

Rock and roll. Paul.