The Vergecast - Threads' big moment, and Sony's big controller

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Richard Lawler discuss Threads' new web app, Sony's Playstation handheld, NFL 4K streaming, AI music copyright, and a whole lot more. Further reading: Elon Musk says (yet again) that X will stop letting you block users X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014  X fixed the ‘bug’ that broke images attached to tweets from before 2014  X tests removing headlines from links to news articles Elon Musk says news organizations can get a share of X’s advertising revenue, too. Threads on the web is here NFL Sunday Ticket has arrived on the Google TV homescreen Amazon is bringing a whole lot of AI to Thursday Night Football this season  Sony’s portable PlayStation Portal launches later this year for $199.99  Sony’s PlayStation wireless earbuds will cost a whopping $199.99  Sony’s PlayStation division is acquiring headphone maker Audeze This batarang houses Qualcomm’s next big bet on gaming Somebody already unboxed the Quest 3 Microsoft kills Kinect again  Corsair’s first standing desk is designed for gaming, streaming, and more Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways with AI and copyright Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel Netflix is going to let DVD subscribers keep unreturned discs for free White Noise Podcasters Are Costing Spotify $38 Million a Year - Bloomberg Sonic Spectrum: a journey into noise white, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple & violet Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Prompts 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 Skylar 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 first cast, the flagship podcast of sub 10 micron build tolerances. If you can't outdo a Coke can, get out of this company. I'll explain what that means in a little bit. Hi, I'm Neil. I'm your friend. David Pierce is here. Hi. Do you ever wonder what your own build tolerances are? This is like, like you could go down that rabbit hole and it could cause you a lot of existential dread if you let it.

Human beings notoriously have absolute shit build tolerances. Yeah. We are poorly designed and horribly built. And honestly, we could do it a whole hour on the evidence that we are alone in this world just based on how our knees work. You know, it's like, fine. But on the flip side, we are very good at making things with very tight build tolerances. Or are we? Richard Lawler is here to answer that question.

Hey, Richard, how are you? Hey, the only thing I want to talk about is how the human ACL disproves any theory of intelligent design. See, this is where I was not going. And Richard just, he'd gotten that cyber truck and he drove right off that. Cliff, just paddle to the metal, four-wheels, spinning, EV drive, triangle in the night. Yes, no, I also believe that's true. I mean, it's fantasy football season, which means for the next three weeks, everyone is a doctor and an injury expert.

It's coming. It's going to be really great. It's coming. Alex Cran's on vacation. Wish her well. But we got Richard. It's amazing. People love Richard.

So let's start. It's one of those summer weeks. Like, I keep threatening the Verge team with the concept of September. like we have meetings and I'm like September is coming. Because if you just look, once September begins, it is stacked. We assume there will be an Apple event. There's a Microsoft event. There's an Amazon event.

Google is going to court about bundling on search. The code conferences at the end of September. It is just relentless. The second September begins. But here in late August, there's just the looming threat of September. And then kind of just a grab. bag of news, right? Well, that's the thing. This is, this is like the biggest change I have noticed over the years I've been covering this is like, this time of year used to be dead. Like, dead, dead,

dead. Nothing happened. And we would sit around and be like, have you heard of gadgets from the 90s? Let's make a podcast about that. And now it's like what has happened is that every company knows that basically as soon as we get past Labor Day, the news is just like destroyed by the gadget onslaught of the next three months. And so if you have like relatively small, news that you like still want to get out in the world and tell people about, it turns out mid to late August is when to do it. So there's been like a flood of news. It's just that none of it is above like a six out of ten.

Like the fact that like Python is coming to Excel, which is like a big deal for some people, not nearly a big enough deal to have been as popular on the verge.com as it has been this week. Wait, no, I disagree with you. Yeah, you're alone on that take. You're the one who's all in on Excel World Championships. You had Python to that mix. These people have like bionic capabilities now. Oh, yeah.

No, you're going to be able to build a cyber truck in Excel pretty soon. That's just where we're headed. Yeah, on the calendar it says this is an LG Briefcase TV. Kind of weak. That's exactly right. There is some news at Sony and NASA PlayStation Portal. We'll talk about that. Microsoft killed the Connect again, which is pretty good.

Their first spawncon of the LG suitcase TV has arrived. It's delightful. There's a whole bunch of, I read about Google and copyright. law because quite honestly I'm an addict. And that's how I get my fix. So we have a lot of stuff to talk about. But I actually want to start with some reader feedback. So we have asked people to send us pictures of their childhood computer rooms.

And boy, have you delivered. Like, they're so good. These are the best emails we have ever received in the history of the Vergecast. It has been 10 years. And I have never seen the volume or quality of emails like this. Keep sending them to us. We're going to blow them out. We've been posting some of them on social media.

and on the site and quick post and stuff like that. But I want to do a big blowout feature and just talk about computer rooms because it turns out a lot of people have very fond memories of these rooms in these setups and the photos are just incredible. The one thing I'll say, I would like to see some more diversity

in the photo submissions. So if you're thinking about it, just do it because I want to show an array of people and how they came up with computers. And right now, probably not surprising, it looks like one class of people. Yes. So if you're listening to this,

You even half thought about citizen because I want to show that like this was a this was a time. This was a moment. Like we all experienced the same kind of place, which I think is an important thing to point out. And also photos are just, I mean, like, it's just, it's photos are a bunch of cute kids and then adults talking about what it was like to be a kid with a computer. Like, it's incredible. Well, it's super funny to me because like there's a generation that talks about like gathering around the radio on a Friday night to like listen to the, you know, war the worlds or whatever. And then the next generation, like, gathered around the TV when the TV was a piece of furniture. And they were like, what the hell do you mean? You would,

like, lie on the floor and listen to the radio. That's ridiculous. And then there was a generation of people who, like, had TV or who had computers in their living room for whom that was like a destination and a place. And now the idea of like having to go to a computer is absurd. And it just, it just like makes me think, like, I keep looking around at all of the other gadgets in my house and being like, what of these is like another generation from now going to think is totally insane that this is how it works? Like the idea that you couldn't like fold up your television and put it in your pocket. Like is that going to seem crazy in 20 years? I don't know.

But it's like these rooms all have the same vibe. Have you guys noticed? Yes. It's like insane. The thing that I noticed was what's something that Dan Seiford actually pointed out that Nelai asked for pictures of computer rooms. What he actually asked for was pictures of binders. Binders full of paper. They're everywhere.

They are near everyone's computer. We all had them, and now they're just gone. Just don't do that anymore. My niece and nephew are headed off to college, and they went to buy school supplies, which is hilarious to think. Like, you know, they did the target run for your freshman dorm room? And I was like, oh, did you buy Mead five-star notebooks? And they were like, what are those? And I instantly turned into like a stone.

I was like, no, these are the only notebooks. And I mailed them to them and they're like, thanks, grandpa. Like, whatever. But it is true. A lot of these photos feature an enormous one of favor. Anyway, please send us more. We want to blow them out. Just send them in.

These are, again, the greatest emails we've ever received. And I don't know why people keep calling them the childhood battle stations. This is a theme. This is like emergent behavior inside the email, which is incredible. But it's great. We love it. Please keep sending us photos of your childhood computer rooms with that weird office max wood. And there's just something great about these photos.

Okay. Second update. I also ask for people to send me examples. of real-world 5G experiences. And the one I gave was that if you look at the Taylor Swift Eros Tour, the network capacity in NFL stadiums is incredible. Like, everyone is in the state, 100,000 people in some of these stadiums streaming video from the Ares Tour.

That's a meaningful 5G... Now, is that a consistently reliable 5G movement? Like, does this happen to people every day? No. But it is kind of... That's it. That was the promise. deliver on. That's the only one I can think of.

It's also like really good Wi-Fi. I would just say it's like, even that might be giving 5G too much credit. Yeah, if they had just done really good Wi-Fi, maybe they would have gotten there, but it is true that mostly stadiums, massive investments in 5G from the various partners in the NFL, mostly Verizon,

and it's working. That's great. Like, we, fine. I asked for other ones. We got some that were like my, I have a pixel on LTE, and my friend has a pixel that has 5G, and where I live, He has better service than I do all the time, and the LT network is congested, so I'm going to get a 5G fund. And we've gotten a bunch of those.

I would just say that that is not a 5G experience. That's just your carrier choking you out of your network, so you have to upgrade to a more expensive plan. So that doesn't count. In my opinion, that doesn't count. That's just someone came to your house and clipped the ignition wires to your car and said, ooh, I think you need a better car. Like, send me more of those. I'm looking for meaningful 5G experiences, not just download speeds, but stuff like ERAs tour that could. could not happen on LT in the best case scenario.

The one thing more people have sent me than anything else is a video of a banana getting stitches. Like a robot surgery. Like it's a Da Vinci robot. Yeah, no, to be clear, that was a perfect description. Anyone who is like, oh, what does he tell? Like, no, it's just, it's that. Yeah. Like, the thing you're picturing at banana getting stitches.

So there is a very famous robotic surgery device called the Da Vinci Robot. if you are, someone who's been paying attention to this stuff for a long time, Da Vinci videos are very familiar, but they all kind of look the same. And it's been around for a long, long time. And so there, famously, there was a meme of one of these robots doing surgery on a grape. And people said they did surgery on a grape. I don't know if you recall this.

This was a real meme that occurred on the internet. So everyone is sending me a video. It's the same, it's the same exact kind of video, but it's a banana. And there's a caption on it that says, A surgeon in London did surgery on this banana located in California over 5G. And I've received 50 versions of this video in this caption. I'm deep into reporting the story. I will tell you that that is not true.

I will break this story wide open. This is the most investigative reporting it or done my life. But I know this story is not true. I'm almost there. But that's not it. That did not happen over 5G. I promise you. So this is just not a 5G experience.

This is somebody bootlegged a video, added a caption, and got views on Elon Musk's Twitter. And then it went viral over and over again in that horrible cycle where people just started writing about a viral thing without ever checking to see if it was true. And now everyone believes in the 5G robot surgery banana. And I'm just here to tell you, that shit's not true. And I'm going to win my first Pulitzer Prize breaking the story wide open. You can't stop me. So we had a meeting earlier today. And Nilai came on

It was like a couple minutes late As Nilai is to all of our meetings And was like Sorry guys I've been really busy There's a lot going on And what he apparently meant was banana surgeries We all thought you meant like

You know the code conference is coming And there's a lot of work to do in summers And no you just meant bananas I will say that I checked one of my inboxes today I saw I got a notification It was in the middle of another meeting And my immediate thought was I bet this is the banana surgeon

It was not But that's where my, at least half of my brain is on banana surgery right now. But I'm telling you, that's not it. There has been a surgery done over 5G in China. That has happened. But if you're sending me this banana, I just want you to, the hammer's coming. And by this time next week, I will have broken this story wide open. You won't, you can't stop me.

This is what we're here for. All right. Speaking of Elon, I don't know why this is true. You all tell us you don't want the Elon news and we look at our own statistics. And boy, do you. So we're going to do an Elon lightning round. Richard's going to take it this week. Richard, give us this week in Elon in 90 seconds.

Because Elon Musk can't chill. He has been up to things. Let's see. What has he done? He said that Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it might not let you block people anymore. What does that mean? Only Elon really knows.

And Lindy Akarino, apparently the CEO of Twitter, in case you forgot that he's not the CEO of Twitter anymore. They said that something better than blocking is coming. It sounds like an enhanced mute. Now, can they pull blocking? A lot of people have pointed to the App Store policies from Apple and Google that say that you probably can't. Elon doesn't care. We'll see how that works out.

Other things that happened. They wiped out all the pictures and links that people tweeted before December 2014. Just randomly, a thing that included the tweet that was the most retweeted tweet ever, the selfie from Ellen at the 2014 Oscars. It's now back. Some of those old images are back. Some of them are not. They said they fixed it and that it'll fix itself over the next couple of days. Other things have happened.

They've said they're going to remove headlines from news articles. The DOJ is suing SpaceX for saying that they won't hire people without green cards and not replying to the DOJ when the DOJ asked them to not do that. And Elon continuing to tweet that they are doing it even though they are not supposed to be doing to have that policy. Pretty hard to deny it at that point. We've got more pictures of the cyber truck showing the inside of it. Elon also emailed all the staff at Tesla and said that parts for the cyber truck need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy. Sounds difficult. But they're going to need to do it because if they get it wrong at all, those metal panels will look terrible.

And there was a threat about people seeing a carrier loaded full of cyber truck going down the road that looked really bad. And that might be all of them soon. Also, Elon said that news organizations can get a share of those advertising revenue splits. So, you know, we could get those Elon bucks whenever they show up. Has he done anything else in the next, in the last five minutes that I missed? No, that's it. Mercifully, no. What's great about that is that was both a lot of things and genuinely actually nothing.

Yeah. At least two of those things happened and then unhappened. And then unhappened. That's just the Elon news cycle. And I promise you, we have a conversation. It's like, are we going to, should we just wait for this to unhappen? And then we get incoming. It's like, are you going to talk about the thing that happened?

Revealed preferences. This is the secret to all economists' brains is they, say the market will act rationally and they know that when they actually measure people's revealed preferences are ridiculous. That's Elon traffic. Yeah. Well, and Elon knows that fact better than anybody, right? Like, it is, we, we are as guilty of this as anybody. We continue to sit around and be like, Elon says a lot of nonsense. Most of it is nothing. We shouldn't take it that seriously. And then every time he says anything, it's like, oh, crap, it's Elon Musk. We should probably do something about this. No, I'm saying we're in the customer service business here. When we start getting the

incoming and it's like, oh, fine. What we need is another button on a mouse that's literally labeled hate click. So I can just measure that intent specifically. Maybe we should start adding two links to every story on the front page. One is just like regular click and the other one is God damn it. And you can finally measure what's what. That's the cycle we're in with Elon. I know in my heart that most of those clicks are God damn it clicks. We just need our website to be able to turn on people's microphones so that when you click we can hear you go ah and that we register as a hate click every time all right well this is my favorite feature of ios 17 is the always on tap monitoring and the microphone that measures how much here it's sighing and despair but only for the verge

and we promise to only use your data for good yeah we're it's it's all happening locally on device we're just we're just measuring grunts per click uh and then that gets hashed into differential privacy and sent to us so we can figure out I cover Elon Musk. All right, that's enough, Elon. There's other news in the world of social media that I think is important to talk about. It's also hard to calibrate it, right? And we're getting similar feedback here,

and this is threads, Instagram threads. We're obviously covering threads a lot. It's fun to cover the launch and birth and development of a new social platform, especially one done by meta, which hasn't done anyone in quite a long time. They're being really transparent about it, which makes it fun to cover.

It also seems like they've adopted the very clever strategy of not shipping obvious features, letting people beg for them and then delivering them like it was their idea. Like, it's like if you ran a McDonald's and you're like, we don't have French fries. And then like six months later, like, based on overwhelming customer demand, we've launched French fries. No, it would be like if every time you asked for French fries, the cashier went, oh, what a good idea. We should have French fries. And then six months later, they launched French fries. That's what it is.

French fries are very complicated. We have a number of thoughts about French fries. We're testing French fries internally. Exactly. But it's smart because everyone is happy all the time because they're getting exactly what they want, which is clever. So this week, slowly rolling out, I think by the time you listen to this, rolled out to everyone, web threads is here.

And it's pretty bare bones, but it works. It's a timeline. You can post. It seems fine. You can post, but you can't quote post. If you try to do it, you'll get a little coming soon message. Dunks, coming soon. The feature that destroyed Twitter, coming soon.

I don't know if you guys wanted to do this, but I had to change, like, it wouldn't let me in with my Instagram password because the way I log into Instagram is by logging it through Facebook. And the way I log into Facebook is with like a meta account. So I wound up having to change every single one of those passwords all the way up the stack just to be able to log into threads on the web. It was a scene. And now I don't know what my Facebook password is. And I can't reset it because it goes to my Instagram password, which would log me out of all the web. my accounts. It's, it's bad times. I'm officially done with Facebook, I think, forever and ever. But I'm into, I'm into threads on the web. But I feel like we're still in this position of

like existential debate about whether threads is working. And we went through this weird thing where threads got, you know, this record setting number of users grew really fast and then went back down really fast because everybody joined it, found out it was, you know, it, I don't know, it hadn't like solved world hunger all at once. And then left because that's what people do when they join these new things. And then the narrative of threads is like a cool, vibrant place changed really fast. And there was that data that said the installs had gone down and the daily active users had gone down. And there are a lot of reasons not to necessarily trust that data exactly. But it does feel like the hype cycle of threads happened in like record time. And I'm very

curious how you guys think about it right now. Like is threads working generally? I think the answer It's no, for the most part. It does not work. It doesn't do a lot of things. And I think a lot of the discussion about threads, especially when it launched right after, you had people seeing all these influencer accounts, all these brand posts. And I think there was a lot of discussion and hand-wringing about what does this mean? What is meta trying to do to the social experience because they want to only show us influencers? And I think the truth was, threads really didn't work. It just couldn't show you the post that you wanted to see because it could not work. It couldn't show you the post of people you follow. It couldn't do anything. And they're very slowly, you know, kind of, as Neil, I said, beat by beat, adding small things that will actually make it work. But the people who registered accounts, they're not opening the app because when you open the app, you can't see anything half the time. Half the time, the feed is blank. It doesn't have people you follow. It doesn't have the topics that you're actually interested in. So they actually do need to get some content that's going to get people coming back there.

But I think that people should measure their impact and interest in threads with the knowledge that it basically doesn't work. It's barely held together. The app is semi-functional. And we're starting there. We're starting at the bottom. Yeah, I think a good example was last night during the Republican primary debate, which was a shit show. Just like flatly was a shit show.

I mean that if you were a conservative or a liberal and you watch that and you came out with any takeaway other than, wow, that was a shit show. Like, I don't know what you're doing. Because there's basically just a bunch of people yelling insults at each other, which is prime Twitter material. Yep. Like most of it, if you just take one step back, take the politics out of it. These people were trying to make tweets.

That's what they were doing. Like, they were yelling insults at each other to get the social media clip that went viral that people would tweet about. Like, that is our politics for better or worse. And, like, threads was just not capable of generating that work. Like, it was not happening real time. I found myself opening X to see what was going on there. And that was really weird because most of the journalists that I follow for that stuff have not paid for X. for X premium or whatever.

And so it was like a bunch of weird Bitcoin scams instead. Very confusing top to bottom. I think Threads has that opportunity. They need to build out a bunch of stuff. So a really simple one is right now when you actually make a thread on threads, the replies are downranked. So it doesn't work as well. Like your second thread in a line if you reply to your own, it downranks it.

Yeah. And this is something that, you know, if you're a long time Twitter user, This has become a very natural way of expressing yourself on Twitter, right? You write one tweet, then you reply to the tweet, and you get three tweets, and they're kind of all like out in the world doing their thing, getting boosted and promoted, and then people can see the whole threat. On Instagram, it's like the first one gets and the rest are, or they might as well not exist. I know the threads team knows this. They have posted about it, and they say they want to fix it and make replies and threads first class citizens on the platform. that's the basics beyond even where the button to switch from the 4U feed to the following feed is located.

It's like, does this algorithm surface all the content or just some of it? And right now it's like just some of it. The moments that threads are going to be good for, the moment that Twitter was good for was live coverage of things. What is going on right now? Twitter was amazing at this. Event shows sports. The NFL season is coming. If Threads doesn't have a bunch of features for this upcoming NFL.

season if they're not ready for opening day, but that's a huge miss, right? So I think they got to, they got to rush through it. I think this is why the desktop version is here somewhat unfinished. Like, they know a bunch of NFL beat riders are going to want a place to post at kickoff. They better have a version that works on laptops. Like, even if it's kind of broken, they need that thing for that kind of moment. But it's definitely, like, I think to Richard's point, it's just like not there. Like, it's still kind of dead. I think a bunch of reporters and journalists and people who are sitting at work with their laptops, now that they can post on the web, they will start. And hopefully that fixes it in some way.

But as of this moment, yeah, it's still just like waiting to be seeing what happens here. Yeah, I think the thing that has changed for me is at the beginning of threads, I mean, really, for the last like 12 months, it's kind of been like, okay, the debate is Twitter slash X losing its luster, right? And there were a lot of people who were like, yeah, it sucks now. I'm leaving the platform's bad. it's been overrun by all of the people who say things that Elon likes to meme about. It's a disaster. And then there are other people who are like, no, it's still pretty much the way that it is.

I think to me, the, you know, Twitter is still Twitter argument doesn't hold at all anymore. Like the thing, the Republican debate is a perfect example of that. Like, that platform felt dead in a way that I don't remember the last time it felt dead. And part of it is I'm sure there was stuff happening. I literally can't see it. Like, I don't pay an. enough money to be able to see that stuff happening. And it's just there are fewer people. They're posting less. The stuff is happening in weirder places. It's being surfaced in less effective ways.

Like that platform, I think, is pretty clearly dying. But it doesn't seem like it is sort of one-to-one threads the other way, right? Like, you would sort of assume that as X drops, threads would go up. Because I think at this point, threads is like the leader in the clubhouse to be the next thing, if there's going to be a next thing. It's sure not blue sky. It's definitely not blue sky. Massadon apparently had a good week. Like, I'm still very bullish on this space as a whole.

Like the open social web is going to be great. I wish it were more mature than it already is. By the way, we are trying to get Jay from Blue Sky and you can from Massadons come to the code conference. I'm just putting that vibe in the world. We've sent the emails. If you know them, you have a line to them, tell them to come on stage. I want to talk about social media with him.

Yeah. It'd be good. I'm into it. We will find a way to. Code is the same day as MetaConnect, also happening in September. What we have some ideas, and I'm bringing those folks onto our stage. I won't spoil them at this time. What David said makes me think of two things.

One thing is, first, I like having, like, eight different social media apps to open and see different things. It's cool. When I'm sick of TikTok, I can go to Blue Sky. When I'm sick of Blue Sky, I can go to Macedon. When I'm sick of Massadon, I can go to Threads. Then I can go back to Twitter and see what's going on. Do you what I love about this, Richard? I genuinely cannot tell if you're serious.

Like, I sincerely don't know whether that was like full sarcasm or earnest honesty. What is happening right now is that David and I have children and Richard doesn't. And Richard's like, you know what? Is sick is bar hopping. And both of us are like, we're too tired. That is, that is 100% the dynamic that just happened on the show. Richard's like, I like waking up on a Sunday and going to five different bars and just checking it. I'm like, I can't.

I'm so sleepy, man. Like, who doesn't just have unlimited time to open every single Apple? on their phone over and over and over again. Is that not your experience? Look, when I was in Chicago, I was an inveterate barcrawler. I understand. You know, you got drum and bass at one, you got house at the other,

and you got to just feel the vibes through the night. Maybe you're going to link, you know, anything could happen here on this internet. And then you get older and you're like, I can't be doing this anymore. And I think for a lot of people, that is a social media experience. So, 23 is like, well, I'm just like,

just tell me which one. cool. Like, which one has onion rings and my friends are going to be there? Like, I'll be at that one. First of all, it's not running rings. It's free pizza in the back. Like, that's the thing. Yeah. But also, wait, Richard, that was thing one. What was thing two? Thing two is that, yes, it feels like Twitter's been hollowed out. I follow like 7,000 people, which is not the normal experience and always use the chronological feed. So I kind of see a lot of different communities and how people are talking. And a lot of very important voices, like you said, either don't post it all or just don't post on that platform anymore.

But there's still people who do. So I think for a lot of people, the thing that they've experienced on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it is that it has always been so bad that if you use it, there's nothing that it could do that could make it so bad that you won't use it anymore. They've already run off everyone who isn't an addict. That's fair. So there's just nothing they can do at that point. Right. And those folks are the most addicted. So getting them to come to threads and post at the same rate requires that feedback loop.

And threads does not have enough people yet. And that's the chicken and egg problem. And again, I think the moments for threads are going to look like NFL season when a lot of people start tweeting the NBA finals award season. Like all the live events that Twitter used to capture more presidential debates, election season. All of those moments are moments for this particular kind of social. Like, these are not TikTok moments. No one's watching the debate and like opening TikTok to get live reactions. Like, you are a psychopath if you're doing that.

I tried doing it last night. I was like, I feel like a psychopath. Like, this is crazy. Because it's not there yet. And like, it's too fast. Like, these are live vlogs, right? That's kind of what you want out of this. We make a lot of live vlogs.

Like, that's how I, how I've always thought about this. And Threads isn't quite ready for that yet, especially with its bizarre insistence on the algorithmic feed. And then Twitter isn't either. This is the moment Threads kind of has to figure out what it wants to be, right? Because, like, most area of that whole team have been saying all along, they don't, want to be a place for politics and a place for news. And it's like, do you know how you become Twitter is by being a place for politics and a place for news? Like, you can't have it both ways.

The only things that get people that excited are politics and news. And like, I'm defining news broadly as just like things that are happening in real time, right? Like, the weather is news. And that includes sports. Like sports is news in a very real way, right? Like, it's, it is a thing that is happening right now that we all are talking about. Like, that's what it is. And for them to say, this is a place for text, but that isn't designed to be this kind of like real time up to the moment thing. I'm just not sure I know what that is. And so it does feel like it's going to be interesting to see what it looks like

on a football Sunday because that's a relatively sort of low stakes and unproblematic version of this problem. But this question of like, how do you stay that fast? How do you surface stuff like this in real time? As somebody is tweeting 100 times during it or somebody is posting, a hundred times during a single game, what is the threads algorithm going to make of that?

And how is like the open question for me about what the next six months are going to look like. And I just have no idea. I'll give you one very specific example. I have tweeted in my life during any number of Packers games, just the words, oh no. Mostly in relation to Mike McCarthy, but just in general, oh no.

Right? Like, and Twitter was very good. It's somehow finding the people who understood what I was saying. That it was, there was a football game going on. I had been tweeting about it. Here's just like totally context free. Oh, no. In the middle of a Sunday.

And everyone kind of understood what was going on. That is kind of magic, right? That felt like a hive mind moment. Yeah. Like you're in a community. You're all just sort of like chatting in this weird way. Instagram threads right now takes that, oh no. And like seven hours later delivers it next.

to like a John Cena tweet. Like, it makes no sense what is going on there. And that is classic Facebook. Yeah. And they want to get away from context collapse. And it actually turns out that the chronological feed provides all the context. And so, like, I think they have to make some big decisions, especially if they want, I get why they're saying they don't want politics and news.

Like, one, they all personally have bad experiences with that. Adam Messary ran the Facebook news feed. He has a bad experience with politics and news. I get it. second in Canada and Australia and all these other places, the governments are saying you might have to pay for links to news sites. They got to solve that problem. They're not launched in the EU, which is going to have its own weird rules. So I get why they're like, you know what, this isn't, we're not headed straightforward.

We're going to start with like fashion, Instagram stuff. But they're just going to quickly arrive at Boyd when it's Biden and probably Trump in a debate. If you are competitive at all with Twitter, you need that experience to happen on your platform. and not Twitter. Otherwise, you're just not going to have the value. We're not going to have the interest. And you're certainly not going to have the impact, which is what we have talked about in the show several times now.

Meta runs gigantic platforms that make more money than their rivals, but often have no cultural impact. And I think this platform lives and dies on its impact. And we really, like, so let's say, threads launched the beginning of July, right? And we really haven't had a sort of everybody on the internet moment since then. Right? Like there just hasn't been a thing that all of a sudden out of nowhere everyone was talking about. Has there been one? I can't like I can't think of. There was a viral NFT post that went around and that that was the most. And I think that alone tells you. Richard's talking about viral NFT posts. I'm shutting this time. Oh, come on. You need to buy board a club. I'll stop. This is not investment in place. The first cast is not investment in place. It is not investment in place. Right now you're buying low. There's nowhere else to go. All right. There has been one. I'm saying last night the debate should have been one, and it wasn't one. Yeah, but we're about to get 18 months of moments where people, people care about, are going to have to choose which platform they spend their day hammering away on.

And like, the fight is coming in a really real way. And I wonder if threads, like even infrastructurally is ready for it. I think the web thing is a big deal. But there's still, like you guys have been saying, a lot of work left to do. All right. Everyone, we're going to take a break. Everyone check on your NFT wallets. See if Richard is stolen from you. Richard will buy your board apes. He told me that right before we started recording. Click any link I send you. It's fine. All right. Please don't click links from Richard.

We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along? Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. From established brands like Allbirds and Hines to companies just getting started. Their design

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news this week. Do you want to start with the PlayStation Portal? Do you want to start with all the streaming stuff? Let's do the portal. This is the thing I am most flummoxed by. And Richard, as the gamer of the three of us, I would say, I'm curious to know. A, you should probably explain what this thing is because I think it's actually harder to explain than it seems like it should be. But then I want you to convince me that this is actually a thing that needs to exist in the world, because I'm not sure. I will do that, but I'll start by apologizing, because it's basically my fault that everything Sony and Aeisys Week exists. And I'll explain.

I'm sorry. I did this to the world. I will have to repay them somehow, perhaps in tokens that you could invest in on my blockchain. But click every late Richard sends you. So they have introduced the PlayStation portal. This is something, you know, they kind of handed at it. They said that it was coming earlier this year. It is a screen in the middle of a dual sense controller.

That's it. It plays PS5 games over Wi-Fi from your PS5. You can't really do anything else. It's $200. You cannot connect Bluetooth headphones to it. If you want to use some wireless headphones with it, you need to buy some of their new audio gear. They have $200 wireless earbuds. I just want to underline that means they cost as much as the PlayStation Portal.

Yeah. Like your full kit at app price for a portal and headphones is $400 because it doesn't have Bluetooth. At least, you know, $350 if you want the cheaper, crappier headphones. But it's, it's, I want to come back to PlayStation Link because I think it is preposterous. I just wanted to underline that price. Yes, the reason why you can't just use your regular headphones or perhaps Sony's other headphones that they've introduced, they just released the new XM5 earbuds, not that long ago. They don't have the PlayStation Link audio technology that lets you get lossless audio and low-latency audio,

which of course is important for gaming, but I think people use Bluetooth headphones with their Steam decks and whatnot. Yeah, you compare Bluetooth headphones to a switch. It's fine. Yeah. But yeah, Sony has said, no, you will use our headphones, these specific PlayStation headphones, or you won't use anything at all, I guess.

But the reason why this is my fault is I take a look at my desk, at the table that I have sitting next to my couch from my living room, and there's a lot of gamer headsets on there. It costs way too much money, and I've just bought too many of them. How many does one person need? More? Welcome to the Verchast, everybody.

There's always another one. There's always a new feature. There's always something else. You know, there's always, you know what? I think the reason why I lost that match is because my headset wasn't good enough. Oh, yeah. Which, it just, it's logical. It makes sense.

If you'd been able to hear them sneaking up on you in spatial audio, you would have gotten. I got you. I understand. Can I say the most old names? thing about gamer headsets. Yeah. So I mostly only play on them games with my actual friends, and we have all discovered that it is easier to make speakerphone calls on our phones than to fuck with headsets. So I just have my phone with FaceTime audio on a conference call, just like on the coffee table. It works so much better than gamer headsets. But that's only because

you guys can't figure out Discord. Yeah, that's true. I was just going to say you just described the whole origin story of Discord. I'm just saying, which is a bunch of nerds on team. speak and conference calls trying to make this stuff work. Like I'm saying, if I can avoid software in my life, I do it. And that's my soft. Anyway, continue, Richard, with your headphone purchasing honesty. Yes, I convinced Sony that this was a good idea because they saw how many headsets I bought and they said, we can sell headsets to idiots all day.

This is just money that we're missing. We need to have more audio gear for gamers. The other part is they introduced this handheld. Why is this my fault? Do you know how many switches I've purchased? A lot of them. An almost untold number. I do not play the Nintendo Switch.

I do not have one. I bought them for other people. My wife has two. I bought her one. Then I bought a Switch OLED, and I thought that I would get one of them, but it turns out that she has two Nintendo Switches now. That's cool.

And I think there are a lot of people like that where, like, they have multiple ones. They have one for this room. They have one for that room. They have one to take on the go. And that's what Sony is chasing with this device, I think, is that you've got a PlayStation, and you want to play it in another room,

and you don't have a briefcase TV because you didn't buy the 2000. dollar briefcase TV. Yeah. So what are you going to do? Are you just going to play games on your iPad like a normal? It makes sense for lots of like families, right? You got a PS5 downstairs.

You might have it connected to the big TV, speakers, whatever. That is like you don't want another PS5 and TV rig upstairs. Moving the games back and forth sucks. Like here's this thing. You just like go play it in your bedroom. You just like give one to your teenager that can play in the bedroom. That seems to make a lot of sense. Does it allow you to simultaneously play on the PS5

and remotely? I don't think so. I don't think it works like that. Yeah, that seems, I mean, that's the miss. Yeah, so this is my thing with this device is like, the one use case, I agree, makes sense, right? Like, there are times I want to play games sitting in bed or on the couch. Like, my PlayStation is hooked up to the same monitor that I'm on right now on my

computer. And there are other times I want to play games elsewhere. Moving my PlayStation is annoying. Completely get that. There are so many other things this thing could have done. Sony has game streaming that it could have done on the portal. Sony has some really cool old systems through which you can emulate old PlayStation games that it could have done on the portal. Sony could have done so many things that would have made this device cooler and better.

It could have had streaming apps so you can watch movies and things when someone else is on your PlayStation. There's just a million ways it could have gone and it picked none of them except like the minimum, viable, least thing this device could possibly be. and that just kind of drives me nuts. Yeah. They picked the things that didn't require a processor, right? I mean, that's like kind of what it feels like. They made it as cheap as possible, but limiting the amount of local processing that is happening here

and saying all of that's going to happen on your PS5. I will say the only case in which that argument holds is if the battery life is as good as supposedly it might be. And I think Sony said to CNET, I think that the plan is to have the battery last as long as the dual sense controller, which is like eight or nine hours, that's pretty good. If I can sit there and play games on it for eight hours on a charge, like, that's legit. It's still not enough. I still, I would trade two hours of that battery life for more things to do, but it's something.

Yeah, I would also point out, right, in one of the use cases here, what are you doing? You're on a trip, you're in a hotel room, you want to play your PS5 at home, your hotel is reasonably good Wi-Fi. You need, what, 15 megabits? That's the, that's sort of the recommended speed. You can get that in a lot of hotels nowadays. Great. You're playing. You know what you can also do is just bring a dual sense controller along and open the app on your iPad. And it's maybe not as seamless, but it also just like, I have friends who just like do this all the time.

Yeah. It works. Like it really, it's a totally valid gaming system. Like that's what I do right now in my house. And I have always thought that like some when like when they first announced this as the project Q, I was like, okay. Add a, add a switchy thing to my PlayStation. rig and I'm golden. This solves all my problems. This now just is like a slightly less wonky version of the system I already have. They didn't build a switch. They built the Wii

U, which was not popular. So that's not a great sign. But I think the thing that happens from Sony's perspective is that yeah, sure, you could just hook up your dual sense to an iPad and play that way. But then you wouldn't pay Sony $200. Which makes it less good for them. And they don't want to do more cloud streaming or anything because that would encourage you to buy fewer PS5s. And they don't want to do that either. It's true. You can also just do what I do, which is I bought a second power cable and a second HTML cord. And I set them up in the sun rim where there's a projector.

And I just move my PS5 around. And literally the only inconvenience of that is I have to remember to turn it off all the way. It will scream at you if you do not do that. Oh, it does that awful. It doesn't like it. No. But yeah, but I move my PS5 from the basement to the outside to play Madden on the projector all the time. It's fine.

Yeah, that's smart. That's what my series S is for. It's when I want to play Xbox somewhere else. Yeah, I got it. I love how Richard has just multiples of every console. There's an Excel spreadsheet, both Microsoft and Sony. It's just labeled like, Loller margins. No, you can pretty much predict what products people are going to come out by what I have six of.

because they're going to release more of those very soon. I think the other thing is that this signals that there's going to be another PS5 pretty soon. We saw that shell leak of the slim thick, whatever it is. The slim thick. If you look at it, you can see that they've released these audio gear that doesn't work with the PS5 without a USB dongle, which we love the don't.

They're going to need to release the system with that. They're going to do something. So we'll maybe have more clarity early next year, mid-next year, when we get another PS5 and see how it all works together. All right. This means we now have to talk about PlayStation Link. This is ridiculous that it doesn't have Bluetooth. It's ridiculous that these headphones are so expensive. Don't work with the existing PS5. And Sony's claim is what? Just lower latency? Yeah, that's about it. Something, something higher audio quality too. And they claim it's easier to switch between devices, which is funny because one of the things that Sony's headphones are notoriously not great at is switching between devices. So I don't know that I have a ton of faith in that, which is a thing you can do over Bluetooth and Sony does poorly.

But yeah, in theory, they have a list of reasons and I don't find a single one of them compelling. And I think PlayStation Link as a thing is just like totally outrageous. I mean, this is a sort of thing. And Marquez Brownlee made a video about this. This is a sort of thing that if Apple did it with the iPhone, like I would lose my mind. Like I accused Apple of wanting to do this when they released the AirPods and they took the iPhone and jack off the iPhone, right? Like we're going to get everyone used to wireless audio. Then we're going to build a proprietary wireless audio protocol.

And you can only use our headphones. And this is true in phones, like all over the place. And I will say a not small portion of that Apple has done. Right. And so is Google and so is Samsung. Yeah. Everyone's phones now. They've all taken the headphone jacks away.

And they have Bluetooth and then they have Bluetooth plus proprietary extensions that only their headphones can use. So AirPods, obviously, a bunch of features only AirPods can access on an iPhone. If you have a Samsung phone, there's a bunch of features that Samsung Buds can do. If you have a pixel, the pixel buds have custom extensions. That's all shitty over there. But the reality is like, unless those features aren't very good. Like, oh, no, spatial audio. Like, whatever.

Also, I don't necessarily hate that as a thing. Like, to say we support the standards, right? It's what Apple does with iMessage, too. They're like, if you want to send SMSes, that's fine. We'll support it. It works. but if you want to exist in our system, everything is better. And like, do I wish the world was not that way?

Yes. But, like, that's how it is. And that's roughly fine as long as you're in a position where you can still fail sort of gracefully. This is like if Apple had just said no more SMS is ever. Well, so the PlayStation Portal does have a 3.5 millimeter headphone track, which presumably has low latency. It's just, it's weak. It doesn't have the middle thing. Right.

It doesn't have Bluetooth. So if you wanted to, you could get one of those like AirPods, Bluetooth dongles that you use on an airplane seatback and plug that into your PlayStation portal and then pair your response to that. You know, we're going to make Sean Hollister make that video one day. I can see it coming like a train in the night. But it is like, it's weird that you would build wireless radios that support your proprietary thing. You would have a headphone jack and then not the most common thing. But it isn't weird. It's the most classic Sony thing.

ever making a weird proprietary thing that doesn't work with anyone else's stuff. The problem that you point out is that it doesn't work with their own headphones. Like I have a bunch of XM headphones here and none of them have it. Why is that? Like you get the feeling, you know, I love talking about an orchard. You get the feeling that when like people walk into the Sony office, it's a little bit like Memento. Like they're just constantly introducing themselves to each other like, oh, you work on headphones? I don't know. We did headphones here. We did headphones? It's like, no one knows who the boomer speaker guy is. Yeah, they're like, oh, we do, we do PlayStation's?

We should maybe... The one-party speaker guy is just in the back, just jamming the whole time. He's just like, livid. He's like, super base. You know, and like the megabase team is like, what the fuck? You know? Like, that's just Sony all the time. True.

Well, and the PlayStation team seems to be especially that way. Like, the PlayStation team seems to not have to play by any of the other Sony rules and just kind of does whatever it wants at all times. Yeah. The Memento comparison, I think, is a little dark. It's more like Dory in finding Nemo. Every time it turns around, it's like, who are you? I don't think everyone at Sony is heavily tattooed and trying to solve and murder.

That would, I think, give them a little more purpose. This is much more like, hello, who are you? You seem nice. Yeah. That was the Phil Harrison, Sony. That was a few generations ago. There's actually a lot of other gaming stuff going on. Qualcomm has sort of a portable device.

We've described it as a battering. The Quest 3, which we're expecting to see a... MetaConnect is leaked out. People are unboxing it. There's a new Atari 2,600, which is very good. Samsung TVs are getting cloud gaming. There's just kind of a lot going on. I think the Qualcomm thing to me is the most exciting, which is basically like Qualcomm is making a big bet on handheld gaming as a thing. And this is kind of what Qualcomm does, right? They sort of look around and they say, okay, we really only know how to make one thing. What other industry can we make it for? And they've done this with cars. They got really into wearables. they got super into headphones for a while.

And now the thing that they're trying to figure out is how to do, like, custom chips for gaming handhelds. And so they came out with three different, like, tiers of chips. There's the G1, the G2, and the G3X, Gen 2, which basically ladder all the way up from, like, as far as I can tell, basically, like, a phone level thing to, like, a steam deck level thing. And I just think that's awesome. Like, there are lots of problems with this, starting with the fact that they run Android. and there aren't that many good games for Android. The gaming ecosystem is not that great. But game streaming is going to help solve some of that problem.

And so, like, the idea that we might be about to get a run of different versions of these devices because they're going to get easier and cheaper to make and source parts for, I think is super exciting. I don't know that I love the idea that they should all look like a screen in the middle with two halves of a controller on either side. But that seems to be where we're aligning as a world on what these things are supposed to look like. but I don't know, Richard, are you going to end up buying 15 different versions of handheld gaming consoles? Like, I'm excited about this thing.

I'm not 100% sure why all the time, but I am excited about it. No. They predict that you'll go outside that you'll use in places, and I don't touch grass. So, no, not going to do it. Listen, if you use all your Nintendo Switches indoors, you can use these indoors also. But I don't play the Nintendo Switch. Oh, yeah, all right, fair enough. Let's get your wife on here.

What does she think? Okay, she might have a few. All right. So we have long asked for emails from people who buy Android phones to play games, pro gaming phones. The potential customers of the Razor Edge or this Qualcomm thing. I'm just looking. I just searched the Vergecast inbox for Android gaming. This one is spam. This leaves us with six emails, one of which is not about gaming at all on Android. But I'll just read some. This one starts out with I do not own an Android gaming phone. So you can see what this call for reader feedback is like. But they own an Android gaming handheld called the Pymax Portal. I bought it specifically for one game, Jension Impact, so I could play it on the go. I want to be able to it with the controller, which is not supported on Android, but does on iOS. It works okay, but you can get controllers to press the virtual buttons.

So that's, this is like, this is why people buy Android gaming devices. I want to play one game that supports controllers on one platform and not another, and this thing, let me do it. This person actually bought a razor edge. This is a quote. There are a few games optimized your controllers on Android, most are pretty good. I use the edge to emulate games. I definitely own in other forms,

definitely emulators up to PS2, 3DS, and Switch. And then this is a very important line. I'm one of the people who have more fun getting something to work than actually having the thing, which is after my own heart. I am absolutely that person. These are our people. And then he finishes with,

this explains where the next thing I bought was an R-G-E-L-I. Fair. Amulators are not a small piece of this, though. I think the deeper I get into this world, the more I realize there is like a vast ecosystem of weird ways to play games that are at least 20 years old all over Android, especially. And I think that's very cool. But yeah, I mean, we're due for like what happened to the Android tablets, right? Like everybody's going to beg Google to care about this and push things along and make them try any things. and then Google will be like,

we think Android gaming is the future, and then eight years from now will be somewhere. Yeah, we got one last one. This person likes to play free to play games of their phone. He says, I've had legitimately rewarding gaming experiences in mobile, especially puzzle games like very little nightmares, where shadows somewhere in Monument Valley.

And then they finish by saying, I live in Minnesota, and anyone who says water is a good windshield fluid as a monster, which is an important callback to our other reader feedback. But I just want to point this out. Like, we have been asking, on the show, if you are a hardcore Android gamer, let us know. And this is a pretty good, just stult of what the responses have been like. I'm a big nerd and I like to tinker, which again, you're

listening to the right podcast. We love you here. I want to play one game and solve one problem. And Android helps me solve that problem very directly. That is just straight Android stuff. Like iOS is not like, we want to help you solve a problem that you've made up. iOS is like, welcome to our world, right? Like, we've issued you a blazer. Android's like, whatever you want. So that makes sense. And then the third one is like, I'm able to do things over here with emulators.

I wasn't able to do some more else. That all makes sense. Yeah. But there's not the, I don't think there's a culture of, like with gaming PCs, right? There's a gaming PC culture. The Razor Edge does not have that kind of culture around it.

I think the Steam deck is getting there, but that feels like a whole different kind of thing. Well, there has to be two sides to it because you have to have the culture and you also have to have the working business model. And the problem for Android gaming is that you don't, really have a business model that makes someone make a great game for Android. So the best game that you can play on your Android gaming device is a 15-year-old PlayStation game.

Yeah. Which is fun. Great for you if you have one. It's just not like there's no business in that. Well, they're about to release all that remasters the Middle Gear games. And boy, are they going to get that money for me again. They're super going to get that money for me again. Let's end by switching gears a little bit.

We've talked about football season a bunch already in the show. It's coming. So it's just a couple weeks away here. And the tech platforms that are invested in football are starting to do stuff. So NFL Sunday ticket, obviously, it's a big YouTube deal. They're doing pricing promotions for college students, which is a Sunday ticket mainstay, lying to the NFL about where you live to get cheaper Sunday ticket. I think a cultural phenomenon underreported.

But you can do it. And it's getting more integrated into the Google TV home screen. And then Amazon is like, you know, we have the CEO of AWS on Decoder a couple of a couple weeks ago. And he was like, we advertise in the NFL because it shows off the capabilities. And the decision makers of big companies are like know who we are, which is, I always wondered, like, have you in the market for AWS? Why do you need to know about it? How do you not know about it? The IBM Super Bowl at it. And it turns out like a lot of people don't know about it. And like next gen stats powered by AWS makes it easier for people to go to their boss

and say we would like to work with AWS. Incredible. Incredible to that that is. still the case in 2023. But they are rolling out an awful lot of additional next-gen stats on Thursday football. Yeah, I spent some time earlier this week with some of the folks working on this stuff. And it's super interesting to hear them talk about it because, like, we're all football fans. And the thing that we know as football fans is that if you in any way mess with football,

people freak out. Yep. Like anything where, like, if you move the camera angle that it's, at when they snap the ball, people freak out. Oh, yeah. The scoreboard display. Yeah, exactly. Like, if it was, if it's up here versus down at the bottom of the screen, people have

really strong opinions. Like, it's, it's, that stuff matters to people. And if there is one media property on the planet that you don't mess with in general, for lots of reasons right now, it's the NFL. But now Amazon, like, they did Thursday, I football last year. It went pretty well. They didn't have any, like, huge disastrous errors. Ryan Fitzpatrick were like a lot of,

weird shirts during the halftime shows. But like it was fine. And so this year Amazon is like, okay, we have some confidence. And we know we can do this. The numbers were pretty big last year. They weren't as big as linear TV numbers have typically been for Thursday night football, but they were bigger than everybody expected for streaming. And so they're like, okay, what wild new stuff can we do?

And they've invented some genuinely cool stuff. We'll see if it works in actual, you know, live games. But in the stuff they've been testing, like they have a thing. they call it defensive alerts where it'll actually on screen in real time flag players it thinks are likely to blitz. And the idea is it essentially teaches the viewer how to read the field like a quarterback does. So you see a player's body language or how they move before the snap or what they're saying to each other. And it'll actually register like this player is likely to blitz keep an eye on them. So it's like it's a cool way to watch but also invites you like into the strategy of the game.

And again, I suspect we're going to see this go really haywire a lot of ways in the way that all of these large language model systems go haywire, which is going to be deeply hilarious. But it's a cool idea. And as like a kind of stat nerd on top of just liking watching football, it's going to be super fun. I'm kind of into it. But the danger is that you build Fox tracks, which we remember for the wrong reasons, which is how much people hated it. First of all, they were right. The puck is hard to see on TV, or at least it was back before high definition. No, it was the right thing.

Yeah, Fox should have stuck that out. Maybe not the right application, but they were correct. They identified the problem and they dealt with it, helping you follow the puck around during NHL games. But, as you said, messing was football. People have been watching football their whole lot. They know how to watch football. They decided how they want to watch football. Again, I do not watch the Lions anymore because I like to have happy Sundays filled with joy and mirth.

But if I did watch the lions... Just wandering the streets going to bar after bar. And my TV told me, which... Which blitzer, the Lions quarterback, is not seeing coming. Because of course he isn't, because he plays with the Lions, so he sucks. He's not going to make the correct read. Every single time, I would stop watching Lions games again. So I don't know.

This might not work. So what you're saying is knowledge is rage in this case. But here's what I'll say. Last season with Thursday football, Amazon had the worst games in NFL history. Like some of the worst games I have ever seen. And, like, maybe that's luck and maybe that's scheduling. Who knows? They were all, like, uniform.

Like, the broadcasters were, like, what are we doing here? Like, Al Michaels was like, I'm, like, you know, audibly opening his flask, just trying to get through it. You can hear them, like, swiping on Fanduel themselves, like, looking for prop bets to talk about. Like, and so, like, maybe all this stuff just makes that stuff slightly more interesting to watch if you're not betting on the outcome of the game, which is, currently why people watch NFL games to the end. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the thing that was not in Amazon's plans that I expected were fantasy or gambling. Because, I mean, that's the two places everybody is going, right?

Like, you watch football either because you have a fantasy team or you have bets on it. And, like, ESPN is now into betting, which we've talked about. Like, that is where all of this is headed and it's where all the money is. And Amazon, it's a long deal. It has like 10 more years of Thursday night football to do. I suspect we'll get there. But none of that. yet. Ten more ears of bottom of the barrel teams. Kind of not scoring any points. Oh, and wait, before we go, we should take a break and stop talking about football. But it's not in 4K. And I mentioned twice in the story that I wrote about it, that it's not in 4K, which was just little tiny nods to Eli Patel each time. They failed. How angry are you that it's not in 4K? So they are all doing this thing, where they all promise that they've invested in 4K delivery. So, like, the cameras are 4K now.

Cameras are actually high resolution because they like being able to punch in. And they're like HD. Which is why they like the twice a game, they show that thing where you get like the tons of Boka on the shot. And everybody's like, this is amazing. It's like, yeah, they could do that the whole camp. It'd be amazing. No, so those ones, that's actually, that's something different. That shot, they've started using basically prosumer level DSLRs.

And this was like a whole invention. Like, oh my God, like NFL broadcast teams are using Sony A7R2s. Like, great. And people lost their minds and thought it was AK and we all had to be like. No, those are signing a 7s. Like, that's every YouTuber has this camera. Fair enough. But they're already shooting at higher resolution because they like to be able to zoom.

Right. And they shoot those pretty crisply. So they've built these like 4K HDR workflows. And then to go out to all of their additional partners who are not 4K enabled, they bring it down to 1080P. And then, you know, if you're Fox, you then re-upscale it to 4K at delivery, which is insanity. Right? It's like, it's so frustrating.

and they have all landed on this line that says we're going to do HDR because that's what people can see. And I'm like, you are nuts. What people can see is more detail. If you're like, look at how much brighter it is, I believe you, right? People are, every year Marquez does the photo comparison bracket and every year the brightest photos win, regardless of quality. Like, I believe you that people can see brighter stuff. but in the context of an NFL football game, there is actually so little dynamic variation

because the whole field is a wash in lights. There are no dark parts of an NFL football game. They do that on purpose. It's like, yeah, they're trying very hard to make everything bright regardless. Even in the, the like promo material that Amazon has for this, the thing that is the most different between SDR and HDR is the sky. Yeah.

And it's like, fine. Like, how many, for the four establishing shots that they do every game of, like, the city that they're in, it'll look great. But I don't know what this gets me for football. Yeah. It's just, it's bananas to me, especially because Amazon owns it end to end, right? It's their broadcast, their distribution, their app, they should be, they should at least be able to do it.

And they still have it. Fox still hasn't done it. It's been years now since we've been dunking on Fox. We're not doing it. CBS, God bless them. they were at least they're at 1080p whereas fox is at 720 and ESPN is at 720 like that's horrible but they've all adopted this middle ground of HD HDR instead of QHDHDR which is crazy it's like horrible like just stop it like it's especially galling because everywhere else in the

world like the Premier League is in just full like you just get it in true 4K across England you know who has the Premier League in England is it Amazon Prime Video is it Amazon Prime It is Amazon Prime FDIC. I thought NBC had it. It's a mix, but Amazon streams it. Of course. Right. And it's in true 4K.

In Japan, every year that the Olympics come out and NHK in Japan is like, we're doing a test, a first ever test. And last year it was like a first ever test of native over the air 8K broadcast, which just worked. And like next year, like 24K native over the air broadcast. And we're here with 1080 PhD. This is why David didn't bring it up. And I'm going to stop now. What are they doing? These are the most lucrative sports rights in America.

Just do it. Neil Mohan, if you're listening to me, man who runs YouTube, I've sent him this email. Why won't YouTube just pay to do this in 4K? I will pay them more money. And he was like, that's a good idea. That's as far as I've gotten. I'm doing the Lord's work.

That's a good idea. We're the Detroit Lions of Resolution. Richard, the lines are good now. I'm totally over it. It's fine. They haven't hurt me. We'll talk about that while we're at break. Flaghart.

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All right, we're back. Is this a lightning round? Is that what this is going to be? We're already over. Yeah. We're going to do this one fast because you, you specifically, Neli, look at me. The thing you picked for the lightning round. This was a sign to me.

That's true. I picked it for you because you wrote about it for the website. I feel the urge to like set a timer that lights your house on fire after several minutes. All right. I'll just do this. Okay. So you might remember a friend AI Drake. Can we get a little laser bong?

AI Drake is an existential threat to the music labels, to YouTube to everyone, because you cannot copyright a voice. Can't do it. And if you want to do likenesses in publicity, that's state law, there's no federal law. So Google this week announced a deal with Universal Music Group, which represents a deal with Universal Music Group, which represents Drake and the weekend, saying we're going to figure out some sort of something, something, or the other. We're going to have a working group called the YouTube AI Music Console, like Frank Sinatra's children will be in it,

Ryan Teter from One Republic, he can always be drafted into making consequential music. It's going to be fine. So they have a council, like figure out some AI stuff that's good. And then this line, we will figure out how to expand content ID to cover generated music. YouTube content ID is not a perfect system. It is necessary for YouTube to exist.

So YouTube in the early days, full of like South Park clips their own licensed, Viacom sues YouTube. This is existential. YouTube full of pirated music or music without licenses. Parents are uploading videos of their kids dancing to prints.

You can't sue YouTube, Section 230, so the label sue the parents for posting videos of their kids dancing to prints. This is a real case. I went to the appellate. at courts in this country for that to be ruled fair use. Banana situation.

So YouTube over many years has built the system called content ID, which I promise you, most kids in this country think is the law. This automated content identification system that only operates on YouTube. Like whenever you see YouTubers thinking about copyright law, they are not actually thinking about copyright law. They're thinking about YouTube system that it built to enable itself to exist in the face of existential copyright. which is not a crazy assertion. I mean, for all intents of purposes, it is the law.

Yeah, it's the thing that, it's the enforcement mechanism of the platform that pays a lot of people their money. Sure, it is close to law. And it has a relationship to the law, which is really important, right? If you are ever in the middle of a content ID dispute, if you make a piece of film critic, we were talking about this last week, if you make a piece of film criticism and it gets flagged by content ID and a studio gets a hold of it and they say, take this down, it's not fair use. YouTube doesn't step in to say, no, we think it is. YouTube says, well, you guys talk to each other. And then after a minute of that, it says, well, you should go to court. And let us know how it goes. Yeah, basically, like, let us know how it goes. Like, whatever.

Because it has the whole legal system to fall back on. Because fair use for that kind of stuff is, like, well within the law. What they're going to do with universal music, I promise you this will happen is one, next year at Google I. will get a video of Ryan Tetter being like, make me some beats. And Google part making a beat. And Ryan would be like, this is great for creativity.

That video is coming, 100% coming. And then next to it, content ID will be expanded so that if you are using the AI generated voice of Drake in a song, Universal Music Group can push a button and take that video down

or monetize it for themselves. I guarantee this is where they're going. That second point, I think, is the one, right? Because what Universal is going to say is like, we don't want to pick this fight. We just want to make the money off of it. Right. Like, it's, if Universal and the other labels can play this correctly, it's all upside. Like, they've just infinitely scaled the amount of Drake music there can be in the world and they'll get paid for all of it.

Right. Like, maybe. So we don't know what the rates are going to be. Right. They just, they've just said it enough to suggest this is what they're going to do. They haven't done it yet. We don't know the details. But, you know, they put out blog posts.

One was Neil Mohan. The other one is Lucian Grange, the CEO of Universal, and they put out, like, paired blog posts on the YouTube blog. And they all sound very proud of themselves. You can just see that this is what they're after, right? If you train a bunch of AIs on Drake and then it can rap like Drake, Universal's like, you should pay us. And I think a lot of people say, okay, common sense, that makes sense. The flip side of that is that is not anywhere in the law. So if you get that notice from YouTube, it says, constant ID has flagged fake Drake.

We flagged a laser bomb. take it down or blah blah blah and you're like no i disagree and they're like go to court and you show up in a court and the court's like like what the hell are you talking about so like that out doesn't exist so then youtube has to make decisions and it's going to be like you drake universal music group in youtube and i just feel like i know who's definitely going to lose i don't know who's going to win but i know who loses in that situation i also know that content id notoriously overzealous right It's too protective of copyright material on YouTube. YouTubers know this.

Our own audience, we got some emails last week after we talked about it. They know that the YouTubers are all trying to dance around it to just do film criticism. What happens when it's just a kid trying to rap like Drake? No AI, just an impersonator of Drake. Do they get taken that? Like, there's no law that distinguishes that. There's no AI system that can reliably at 100% success rate distinguish between AI Drake and a kid who just is really good at sounding like Drake.

who's going to lose that one? I don't know the answers to this, but I do know that in order to keep YouTube going and in particular competitive with TikTok, which has huge influence for the music industry, Google has to invent some kind of additional licensing scheme for the labels. The labels are going to get paid for this,

or they're going to take their music away, and Google can't have that. Right. Yeah, I mean, I was trying to think about this after you wrote this story, and the number of industries out there that have this kind of leverage over YouTube, I think it's just one. It's just music.

Like if the movie industry decided it hated YouTube, that would be bad, but not like crush the creator economy bad. But if you suddenly lose access to music for creators to do stuff in shorts, like there goes shorts, it's done. No more dances on shorts. It's all done.

YouTube music goes away. A huge percentage of YouTube's views are music videos. Like there's, Literally the Mr. Beast just set a record for the most views in 24 hours for a non-music video. Like, that is a, that is, that is how big music videos are. And I think it's pretty clear that the music industry knows it is this powerful over YouTube. They definitely know. And so you can just see what YouTube is forced to do.

A couple of blog posts saying we're all friends. Here's the AI council. We're going to build some tools together. Ryan, Tedder, get in here. You know, just do some, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll, do anything for money. What do you even against Ryan Teter? I just don't like one of all.

Are you just, like, mad that he's wrote so many good songs? Is that what it is? Is that how you describe them? Someone today described the new Addison Ray record to me is, like, the return of the Kia commercial music. It's just like that's where we are in music history. The hamsters? Yeah.

It sounds like royalty-free car commercial music. Like, a lot of music sounds like royalty-free car commercial music right now. Yeah, and it's all because Ryan Teter invented it, so you're welcome. He's an innovator. He's right up there with slash. Exactly. Eddie Van Halen slash Ryan Tudder. That's the pantheon of rock music.

Anyhow, but you can see what they're doing with the music industry, right? They're making nice. They're going to find ways to work together, and they're going to invent a revenue stream for them. The flip side of that with Google in particular is Google is looking at the whole web. No one has leverage over Google when it comes to the web. And they're saying, oh, this is ours now. And so if you allow Google search crawlers to look at your website, you are training BART. And you are training the search generative experience.

And there's fundamentally zero difference between I'm going to hoover up all the songs in the world to make a Frank Sinatra AI. And I'm going to hoover up all of the articles about bikes to make the search generative experience answer questions about bikes. That is it's the same thing. And Google, on the one hand, is saying, okay, these. This partner is important. So we got to build custom copyright private law on YouTube for them so they can get some money and be happy. And then to the entire rest of the internet, they're saying, if you want search traffic, we're taking your shit. And you're watching this play out in like absolutely bananas ways.

And I think they're going to come around to signing some deals. I think OpenAI is going to come around to signing some deals. Google has some kind of deal with the New York Times. They won't talk about the terms. Open AI has some kind of deal with the AP. They won't really talk about the terms. But you can just see, like, their choices are either a decade of fair use litigation. Some of these cases are already going from Sarah Silverman and others.

Or we're going to pay the biggest and richest players to participate in our experiences and, like, compete that way. And all of that just feels like, oh, we're just kind of like getting back to AOL, right? Where, like, AOL had a bunch of media partners and you would, like, get AOL in there. And then there were, like, some forums that you could, like, also go to. like you could dump out to the internet, you know, through AOL. But like really like AOL's media partners were the thing. And it just seems like that's where everyone is going. Because to solve the AI training copyright problem, you're either betting on a decade of litigation with our current court system. I'm going to make a multi-billion dollar bet on how Clarence Thomas

feels in five years. Or you can pay a bunch of money to the New York Times. And I'm just watching this play out. And it's like, oh, this is all kind of icky. Like, It's important to take a step back and just be like, this is what's happening. The copyright law is so broken and weird that on the one hand, the estate of Frank Sinatra gets paid whenever there's a Frank Sinatra impersonator on YouTube. Weird. And on the other hand, most websites have to give all their shit to Google for free or basically commit suicide by not getting any search traffic.

Weird. And either way, anybody who doesn't have this way to pick and win that fight gets host. Like if you're an independent artist Google's not signing that deal with you for YouTube and isn't signing that deal with you for SGEE and you just have to bank on the fact that that what it supposedly delivers you is worth it. But anyway, Nealai, you went about six times longer

than you were supposed to on that one. I can keep going. No, listen, if this were banana surgery, I would say you can have as long as you want. The whole hour next week is banana surgery. I'll go next. Mine's quick. And then, Richard, you can go last. Mine is just mostly a shout out to my father-in-law, who I think was the last subscriber to DVD.com.

Nice. Which is what Netflix's DVD system has been called for the last bunch of years. And obviously, DVD.com is going out of business. And PSA to anyone who has DVD.com, Netflix is both sending out a bunch of random DVDs. It just seems to have like a warehouse full that it's just shipping to its subscribers. And anything you have when the system goes away, you get to keep. So I told this to my father-in-law over the weekend,

and without one word, he ran into their computer room, which they have, sat down and managed his cue to put all his favorite movies at the top. Because he's like, okay, now I'm going to get a bunch, and the system is going to think these are the movies I want to watch, so maybe they'll ship them to me at the end. So if you have DVD.com, now is your time. You're going to get a bunch of free movies. It says DVD.

It's a DVD.com ship Blu-Rays? I got to go. I'm just saying. I got some work to do. I'm here for you. And there's so much stuff that has never been released digitally that you can't get streaming video on demand anywhere and it's just on disc. And it's a pretty good chance to get it.

Like take your five favorite movies between now and September 29th that are probably never going to come to streaming, make it happen. Pump up the volume. There you go. It's never coming. The music rights are too hard. Yeah. All right.

Well, now we've lost N Eli to his DVD Q. So Richard, what do you have? The only thing that any of us should be talking about? Samsung release, or Samsung has announced a price and a release window for their 57-inch dual U-HD gaming monitor. I'm assuming you have like four or five of these already. I am looking at an Odyssey G9 monitor right now, the 49-inch one, which I feel like many people think that is too much to have essentially like two 1440p displays. People are saying that as one. Giant curb display that takes up most of your room.

I now feel like it's too little because you can get a 50-1. 57 inch that it's like two 4K displays in one giant curve screen. And in the U.S., it'll be available in October for about $2,500. Yeah, I need that. Steal at any price, man. Yeah. The bad news is, you know, having had the G9, it's not great for gaming. Like, you think that, like, you can play games that's going to wrap around you,

and you feel very immersed. Basically, no games support 32 by 9 aspect ratio. Surprise. Which, you know, one guessed. Everybody's favorite. a lot of time developing for this aspect ratio that no one uses. And the games either stretch in bad ways or they just take up the middle of the screen and other stuff like that. So it's not great for gaming, but like if you, I don't know, maybe run news for a website and you have

a billion tabs open, you can just, you can have all the tabs. You can have so many tabs on a 57 inch screen. So I'm thinking game in the middle, slack on the left, browser on the right, and you just crush the internet. You described my head. And fools all day. I love this. $2,500 actually is less than I thought this was going to cost, which is like an insane thing to say out loud. But I was pretty sure Samsung was going to be like, this thing is $5,000.

What are you going to do about it? Here's what I want you to do. If you watch the video where they introduce this thing, the monitor is Elysium. Like, it's a spaceship flying over a city that's in the curved monitor. And I don't know that they watched Elysium because that truly implies the monitor. House is a deeply inequitable class system. It's not Elysium. It's Halo.

And when you visit the Ringworld and Halo, everything was fine, right? That's how that story went? I would just say, in general, ring worlds, not great in fiction. I'm getting one of these. Look, I got to kid out a new podcast studio. We're moving. So we get a new hat. We've got to figure it out.

So I'm fully in the market for like gamer lights, crazy displays. This is going to be a good time. I think there's going to have to be a Vergecast series of Neelai doing his new podcast room. Just installing Gamer Lights. If you're an interior designer or have ideas about what Nealai needs to put in his new studio, email them to us, Vergecast, the verge.com. We didn't talk about the gamer standing disc. Oh, man.

This thing looks ridiculous. I love it. I love it. The only thing that would be better if the top was a true patch bay with like, like, quarter inch plugs. This to me is like if you took the R slash battle stations subreddit and like fed it into mid-jurney and then just said, show me a desk, this is what it would spit out. It's like it's got a bunch of monitor holders. It's got two different lights. There's speakers everywhere.

It has a stream deck. It has a thousand different places to hang things. It loves a pegboard. It's got some controllers. It's like it is just the perfect average of every insane gamer system you've ever seen. scene and then I mean that as a compliment. I'm kind of in love with this thing. And that's great, but like they invented a

workbench and a pegboard. Yeah, it's good. We started the show with show us your vintage computer rooms and we're ending the show with like there's a motorized standing desk with a pegboard. This is the new computer room. Like all the old office max hutches have been replaced by

sit stand desks and pegboards. I'm into it. Maybe I'll get maybe this. I'm going to build my new podcast studio around this thing. There you go. I don't know if I'm going to do that. We'll see. I got to look at this more carefully. All right.

We've got to end the show. We're way over. This is for a show at a slow news week. I don't even know how we pulled this off. And there's like stuff we didn't even get to. For example, a full hour on Python and Excel. It just didn't happen. One thing I want to call out.

This is one of the funniest things that has happened to me today. Our friend Ashley Carman, Verge expat, now at Bloomberg. She's their podcast and music reporter at Bloomberg. She wrote a story about white noise podcasts on Spotify. in which there are many. And Spotify freaking out because they're official, like, white noise license streams make more money than the podcast. So they're like, we have a $38 million white noise podcast problem, which is just the most capitalism thing. That's amazing.

This white noise, if we move it from this bucket to that bucket, is $38 million is ridiculous. So our friend Charlie Harding, who you might know is the creator of LaserBong show. And the co-host, Switch on Pop. he made an entire series of white noise podcasts. We'll link them in the show notes. Now he's worth $700 million. My goal, and they all have just truly ridiculous names. They're called Sonic Spectrum.

They're all colors. He made Chat. GBT write the descriptions of them. Venture into the vastness of white noise, encompassing every frequency. It's all great. My goal is that we make this a real thing. We get some wellness blogs to cover it in a serious way. And if we can just get to the point,

where Aaron Rogers is listening to Sonic Spectrum pregame because he loves Crystal Healing. I'll be very happy. Make this happen for me. Neelai's end games always end with either Aaron Rogers or Mariah Carey. Those are the two long cons. The Mariah Carey Long Con is very different. I got to upend my family for that one.

This one is very direct. Just share Sonic Spectrum as much as you can and see if we can make it a thing. I mean, these descriptions are some of the funniest chat sheet I've ever read. And then it's just white noise. It's very good. We'll have a link in the show notes. There's a quick post on the site. Go check it out.

It's very, very funny. Okay, that's it. David, what's in this taller this week? Anything good? A bunch of good stuff, actually. The PlayStation Portal will be in there. Spoiler alert. But I found a new app for organizing all your crap online,

which I am, of course, deeply obsessed with. And there's a bunch of new, like, creator stuff and YouTube stuff. And I found this was a surprisingly good week for, like, random things appearing on the internet. So it's going to be good one. I like it. Okay, that's it. That's a Vurchcast. Bye for all.

And that's a wrap for Vurgecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.