Upgrade - 255: Peacock Plus

Episode Date: July 22, 2019

There's a lot of streaming media news in the mix this week, as Apple is rumored to be pondering premium podcasts and Netflix loses subscribers just at the moment its stiffest competition yet is about to arrive. But that's all just a prelude to our special Summer of Fun segment, as Myke and Jason draft the most appealing video streaming services of 2020.

From RelayFM, this is Upgrade, episode 255. Today's show is brought to you by Linode, ExpressVPN, and Moo. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined by Jason Snow. Hi, Jason Snow. Hi, Mike Hurley. Did you know that 255 in hexadecimal is FF? No. That's Chuck Snow talk question this week.

It comes from Mark, and Mark wants to know, do you listen to podcasts in a particular order or pick and choose based on your mood? Oh, I have a primary, like, priority playlist that is my favorite shows, and the most favoritest go to the top. And I definitely, I'm usually in there, but there is an aspect of it based on my mood. I will sometimes pick and choose because I will, especially when my favoritest ones are not, they're already played.

I will then sometimes scroll around in that list based on mood. And then I do have another playlist that's got like the D&D podcast in it. And for those, I want to be, I tend to listen to those on like long drives, not when I'm just walking the dog. And I will go on a binge of those, of like Dragon Friends or Adventure Zone or also it's not D&D, but like Hello from the Magic Tavern is like that. Where I will get into a run where I'll listen to a lot of them and it's usually when I'm going to be spending a lot of time in a car, which I don't normally do.

So that's how I do it. Yeah, I have a few shows like that now where I, shows that aren't, that don't have a news component to them so they won't outdate themselves, I will stack them up for traveling. Especially if I'm going to be on my own when I travel. Sure.

Then I will do that. But I manually manage my podcast playlist now, which used to be a thing I didn't do. I used to do like the priority playlist stuff that you did, but now I just have an all unfinished and then a queue, like the two different playlists and in overcast and i will just kind of manually manage them and i have you know that they will they will automatically start playing the next episode like once it's done but i'm pretty much manually managing what i want

based on how i'm feeling or what's most relevant for the time so thank you so much to mark for uh submitting that snell talk question hashtag snell talk just send out a tweet with that hashtag and you may be included for a future episode of the show to help us kick things off the first item of follow-up appreciation is just entered because he's remembered having listened to me we should probably explain that you're sick yeah i'm sick i you can hear my decline over my Wednesday shows, which was The Pan Addict, then Interconnected. By the time Connected came around, I'd completely lost my voice.

Well, I was limited to one word at a time, which was about the maximum that I could cope with. It led to one of those classic Connected moments a little bit. Not quite Federico doing a weird fish but close yeah where where um you became like the mysterious mystical seer who could only answer in one word pronouncements so it was you know i know it was terrible for you but it actually ended up being kind of a classic moment um But yeah, quite a week. Like the adventure of Mike of first our backward show, Downgrade, and then the pen addict as you lost your voice and then connected with the one word, Mike.

So your voice is not 100%, but hopefully we will make it through this episode. Yeah, meant to speak about Downgrade. Let's just reflect on last week's episode our summer of fun uh was to reflect is the right word right it's sort of backward there you go it was to present an episode of upgrade in reverse this was upgrading joe steel's recommendation many months ago uh me and jason were very excited about this. So we did the episode in reverse. People seemed to really like it, which was a surprise. I wasn't sure how people were going to take it.

I thought I was going to get a lot of people, little armchair podcast critics saying, oh, this is just too clever for its own good or whatever. And those people are probably out there, but they didn't send me any messages. So that was great. Instead, people said, this is great. I love it. And that was good instead people said this is great i love it and that was good that was nice i was scared to publish the episode because i was concerned that people were going to think something was broken why you put it in the podcast machine and it came out backward well it was more that like they were press play hear me say goodbye

and think something was wrong or they would see that we flipped all the artwork upside down in all the chapters so i was worried about these things nobody i didn't get anybody tell me i'm sure there were many upgradians press play and thought something was wrong but it was quickly rectified right so which is fine because that's kind of what i wanted i wanted you to think something was broken but immediately realize oh we're doing something silly um i actually texted marco because when people think something's broken yeah they include the overcast it's always marco they blame overcast yeah yeah so i wanted to just tell him because he knew we were doing this because we told him when he was the guest the previous week that this was what we were doing

and i just wanted to say okay not only are we doing that, I'm also flipping all the artwork upside down. So, you know, I wanted to just let him know. Yeah. And a couple of people were sort of like, wow, how did you do this? And the answer is we have a little document we go through and we just kind of reversed it. And it was mostly not that hard, although there were definitely moments where like,

well, wait a second, how should we do this? Because we had this sort of premise of uh keeping the segments forward obviously because that would be really weird if we just spoke everything backward and it was unintelligible so the segments ran forward but they were in the reverse order and there were a few moments where while we were recording we're like oh wait a second yeah and the logic is broken by playing the music in reverse but that was just too fun to not do. It was, yeah. The Summer of Fun music backward is kind of creepy. It's great.

Yeah, it's horrifying is what it is. Summer of Death! It was very upsetting, but it was fun at the same time, so that was why we went with that. All right. I also have a little bit of follow-up from the real world that I just want to throw out there. So your friend of mine, Dan Morin, who is my Six Colors compatriot and the host of the Clockwives podcast here at RelayFM, I want to send out a congratulations to him. Last weekend, he got married. I got to go to the wedding. It was very nice. It was lovely in Bostonoston so congratulations to dan and his new wife kat and their uh their new married life together and the day before dan got married his nemesis

scott mcnulty who has been on this show multiple times to talk about kindles he and his wife marisa welcomed two new kindle users into the world. Oh. They had twin boys. Wow. And the boys are doing well. Marisa had to be in the hospital for a while before she gave birth just because having big giant twins is complicated. It's a big giant problem.

Yeah, but everybody is doing well and there are two new Kindle users slash Star Trek fans slash people who make canned food in jars because that's what Marisa does. And so congratulations to Scott and Marisa as well. Big life moments for the nemeses, Dan and Scott, last week. Wow. Scott was trying to upstage Dan.

Oh, yeah, yeah, really. I mean, it's nice that they scheduled it for the day before and not the day of the wedding, because that would have been... But he did Upstage Dan in that way, I suppose. Babies came first. Very Upstream-focused episode today. I have a bunch of Upstream news, and we're going to be doing, guess what, everybody? A draft later on in today's episode of Streaming Services.

Summer of Fun! We'll get to that a little later on. That's our Summer of Fun topic for today's show. But before, I have some news for you jason big news are you sitting down uh i am as always good because apple has renewed carpool karaoke for a third season sorry i need to compose myself a little bit it's worth noting this is important right because people see this is why i want to talk about is people see this headline and then they tie it back in their brains again

to apple can't do tv this is actually not going to be a part of apple tv plus this is still going to exist in apple music same as before is this i my assumption at this point is that carpool karaoke is actually not even in the organization of the video programming team like it is 100 in the organization of music and they are doing this um so i think honestly like if anybody was still holding on to this notion of we've seen what apple can do with tv and they can't do it i actually think this is is proof of how it's going to be different because they are renewing one of those shows, but it's not even going to be in TV+. It is an old team,

which is a part of Apple Music. And they're happy with it. They're happy with it. For whatever it does for them, they're happy with being part of it. Otherwise, they wouldn't renew it. Yeah, because they didn't renew Planet of the Apps, did they they but i would expect that this is a low budget show and it's got big names on it so people watch it uh carpool karaoke is a good brand even though cordon isn't on all of the episodes

so yeah it works well for them all right speaking of apple they have also released another trailer uh they released a trailer for snoopy in space, a TV show which is coming to Apple TV+. It's a part of their deal with Peanuts. This is one of the many Peanuts-related Charlie Brown Snoopy things that's going to exist. Snoopy in Space, this is a quote, follows Snoopy as his dreams of being an astronaut become a reality when he and Woodstock tag along with the Peanuts gang on a field trip to NASA and are chosen for an elite mission into space.

Of course they are. Why wouldn't they be? They're obviously the right people for the job. It's a fun Peanuts special. It's great. There is a couple things going on. So, what? A few weeks ago they did a For All Mankind trailer, the Ron Moore space show.

And trying to capitalize on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, which was over the weekend. showing the American moon landing and the Apollo mission, which is not quite what the show is about, but they use that stuff in an interview with Ron Moore. And it is like a salute to Apollo on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which I thought was an interesting way. It's like, hey, we've got a show that is set at least partially during that time. We don't know a lot about that show, but we know a little bit about it. And I thought that was a nice way for them to kind of like craft something that lets them get awareness up of the fact that there's this Ron Moore show that's coming to Apple TV Plus this fall about space stuff. And I liked it because I thought it was sufficiently appropriately honoring Apollo, even though the story goes a little differently in their show.

honoring Apollo, even though the story goes a little differently in their show. I did have another thought, though, which is a little bit less charitable, which is it's got to be killing them, right? That the show isn't out. Because it's probably done, and it's probably sitting there, and it's the 50th anniversary of the

moon landing. And I keep thinking... They want to... You want this. The marketing campaign you could do right now considering what this show is about drop the first episode right now and then say the rest of it's coming this fall oh well so again if you don't remember the conceit is that the russians got to the moon first like that's where the show begins yeah and that's in the trailer and so they keep so the u.s keeps stepping up the the uh the space race and the space race continues and that's in the trailer and so they keep so the u.s keeps stepping up the

the uh the space race and the space race continues and that's the that's the story is what if the space race kept going because like the ads you could do like you could do an ad like a tv ad that's like pretending to be some kind of like oh like we're at a great imagine this remember this great time and then it shows like a russian flag then it shows like a Russian flag and it's like, oh, shock factor, right? That's in the trailer. That's how the trailer does it. Not this other video. But like you could do it now.

Yeah. Oh gosh, yeah. It must be killing them that they can't do it. Yeah. I've got to wonder if that was actually part of the original conception of the show was like, oh, this is perfect. And we can get it out right around the 50th of the moon landing. And nope, not going to happen.

Oh, well. There is something i noticed in these trailers i haven't seen the wording before um both of these trailers or these videos open with the phrasing an apple original yes i've just not seen them call it that before and it's also i don't know why it's not apple tv plus original but like you do you right it's interesting to me right that they're not i know it's all coming from the same company but apple tv plus is the only place you can get this content so why is it not an apple tv plus original i know that's not as nice to say but it would look fine and you'd get the logo more. But, you know, whatever.

But yeah, I agree. Like, oh, what a shame they can't have this go up now. They should just publish the first episode on YouTube. Like, just do it. I know. Just do it. Whatever. Never mind.

Netflix have seen a drop in subscribers after price increases. So they had an earnings call. Talking about earnings calls for streaming services is not a thing I want to do a lot, but there are a few things in this particular quarterly earnings for Netflix which are interesting considering everything we've been speaking about this month. So they lost 130,000 subscribers in the US and missed their international targets by 2 million,

which is very big. This is their first decline in eight years. The last time thatflix had a subscriber decline was quickster when they tried to split the company in half which was hilarious it's like such a blunder from them um that this does mean that they have 151 million paying subscribers right now which is a lot of people um they are blaming a weaker content slate during the quarter as the reason but they also put up their prices during this time so it's a bit of both i think um they have forecast huge gains for q3 800 000 new subscribers in the u.s and 6.2 million internationally i mean that seems great it means they would miss they would fix what they

missed but that seems incredibly aggressive considering they just missed out on this quarter exactly but one of the reasons i wanted to bring this up is they are specifically asked about friends in the office right which we know it shows that they're losing netflix is saying they're trying to kind of like brush this off by saying it will give them more budget for original shows, which is, I mean, fine. But like you could find that budget elsewhere, surely. And they also said, from what we've seen in the past, when we drop strong catalog content, our members shift over to enjoying our other great content. They also said that no single show makes up for more than a single percentage of their overall viewing. Yeah, I get it. I mean, I think there's truth in that. They've probably done some research

about what happens when a viewer of a catalog show drops off and how do their viewing habits change. I mean, they've got data scientists. I'm sure that they've done the analysis of what happens. That said, I think of my daughter watching The Office on an endless loop on Netflix. This is it. It's like, I agree that the data is correct, but I know you're spinning this. Yeah, I mean,

I think there's truth in it, but I think there's also the fact that it probably, they probably shift over to other Netflix content and reduce the amount of hours they're using Netflix, which in the long run, as long as they keep paying is okay, shift over to other Netflix content and reduce the amount of hours they're using Netflix, which in the long run, as long as they keep paying is okay, but it does decrease the perceived value of Netflix. I still think it's sort of Netflix's game here. They've got this huge catalog. Even

when they lose parts of it, they're number one in streaming. But let's keep in mind, they missed... in streaming but let's keep in mind they missed by the way i love that the a weaker content slate they're basically like throwing up the uh the the stuff from the last three months under the proverbial bus which is what i thought that was a crazy thing to say it is pretty well on putting the prices up just blame it on that you have a good excuse yeah but they want to they don't they want to justify the prices going up they They don't want to do that. So they just kind of blame the content. But the next content apparently is going to be great. But what they've said is, we're charging you more for worse content.

Yeah. So there's that. Also, let's remember to keep in mind, they missed their target. They lost subscribers. They claim they're going to make it up. But their strategy has been a growth strategy. Netflix's strategy is spend huge amounts of money, which they borrow. I mean, they're going into debt, spending billions on content.

They do like $4 billion a year in revenue, a quarter or something in revenue, which does not seem like enough. Yeah, so they're borrowing money in order to get uh audience acquisition because the idea is that the netflix and it's worked for the most part like they have a huge subscriber base people who are giving them money and the idea is over the long run those people are going to give them a huge amount of money and they need to fill the catalog with stuff that they control for that moment that's about to come when all the stuff's going to drop off the catalog from other people and the competition's going to going out there. And they've done a pretty good job. But I think what's interesting is this sign of weakness is happening now when the big competition

hasn't started yet. And it makes me, you know, I'm not saying that Netflix is going to go down. I'm saying that Netflix is showing weakness before Disney comes in, before HBO Max comes in. This is blood in the water right now. Yeah. And so this, they are, what this, what I walk away, because I'm not making charts about Netflix earnings or anything like that, but I look at this and I think this is vulnerability from number one in a way that we didn't really maybe expect to see it so soon. And we know that the competition is about to get a lot stiffer and their catalog is going to get a lot thinner. And that makes me think, well, this is going to be interesting in 2020, isn't it? Just to see how Netflix deals with dramatically increased competition. And I don't think they're going to fall apart or anything

like that. But I do think there's a question also in the long run, how much content spending are they going to be able to do in the long run? Once they've reached a point where they're not growing as much, are they going to have to scale back their content? And what does that do to the competition? So fascinating to see the weakness of netflix now before the you know disney service has even come in yeah they didn't need this right now because i can't imagine the rest of their year going much better for them i i'm i'm really keen to see where it goes but i agree this is like you didn't want it right now um BritBox. We spoke about this a while ago. BBC and ITV's joint subscription service,

which is something that's in the US. It is going to be coming to the UK. They have announced the joint streaming service will be launching in Q4 of this year for £5.99 a month. £5.99 per month. It will show current and classic content. Basically, you get stuff with no ads that's current and you

get classic stuff that you can't stream on this on the network's free services i think six pounds a month is too expensive for this content um but we'll see yeah it's we talked about this when it launched in the u.s and and i know you had your uh your your skepticism there but you were really wondering about the UK. Yeah. Yeah. So here it is where the current stuff is going to be just, you know, you get it with no ads. And then there's all the classic stuff that is not currently available.

And, you know, what this is, and it's in the name, but especially for people in the UK, what this is, is people don't buy DVDs anymore. So how do you get value out of and make available all this old content? And this is BBC and ITV. And apparently they're talking to other broadcasters in the UK. I'm talking to Channel 4 about this. But I think having competition for Netflix and Amazon in the UK and having BBC and ITV do this with some of their stuff, we'll see how it goes. I do think that I believe the premise, which is people don't buy DVDs anymore, so what do you do instead? And the answer is, well, this is the stuff we used to sell on DVD, and now we're going to put it on a streaming service. But rather than licensing it to Netflix, they're going to put it on their own thing. And I don't know.

ITV is basically running it and they own like 90% of it but BBC where they share in the US or in North America because it's in Canada too they're gonna like ITV is basically running it because the rules around the BBC are a lot more complicated in in the UK right because they're a public broadcaster and there's a lot of stuff that just goes on iPlayer and my impression is this is the this is another collection of stuff and it's the stuff that's not on iPlayer and it's not licensed and the only way it used to go out was basically by selling blu-rays or DVDs of this stuff and and those sales are are mostly down yeah I'm I'm skeptical about this one like I don't think that this is close to Netflix value yeah oh and it makes it

makes more sense in north america in a way because then it's like look at all this great british content that you don't know about or can't get you can't get in the uk it's sort of just like itv and the bbc have decided well we don't really want to take money from netflix if we can take money directly from the consumers so we're going to to build our own thing. It is the equivalent in some ways of what's happening in the US where people are saying, why are we giving this to Netflix and Amazon? We should set up our own thing. But whether it'll work in the UK market remains to be seen. Yeah. I think one of the bigger problems is that all of the new stuff, which is the stuff people will probably want more you can watch for free like especially the bbc stuff there are no ads so what that doesn't make any sense i wonder if they will do originals too which is not something brit box has been a catalog thing

but would they would they try to do some original programming i'd be surprised they need content for the actual broadcast television well well that's it like if ITV is going to pay for a show, they're probably going to want to show it on ITV. Yeah. This one's a big question mark for me. I can see why they're doing it because it's probably not going to cost them a lot to try because they already have an existing business. And if it's anything like BritBox in the US in north america um it is a place for the catalog and anything that is um expensive and high profile is not on brit box in the u.s it's on netflix or amazon people signing up for a week or two to watch a show that they want to watch right because then you pay like six pounds and you get the back catalog of the office

and you watch it and you're done uh and that's it but i don't know we'll see i'm gonna keep my eye on this one one of the reasons i want to talk about it is because it's finally something outside of the u.s yeah how about that but i don't want it which is a real shame uh all right today's episode is brought to you by our friends over at Moo, the online print and design company specializing in customizable business cards, postcards, stickers, and more for your business. is left when you're listening to the show. I have 25% off of everything. This excludes shipping and gift cards, but this makes it the perfect time to reorder and stock up or design something completely new. Moo rarely has sales like this, especially at 25% off, so you don't want to miss out. So go to moo.com slash relay right now and you can check out their full suite of products that includes business cards and postcards, invitations and letterhead, stickers, notebooks, flyers,

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checking out. So once again, moo.com, M-O-O dot com slash Relay. Go there now and save 25%. That's until July 23rd. So do not waste any time. Our thanks to Moo for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Apple may be expanding into exclusive podcasts, according to Bloomberg. They published a report saying that they are reaching out to various media and podcasting companies about creating content that will be exclusive to Apple podcasts. Quote from the Bloomberg report, Apple has yet to outline a clear strategy, but has said it plans to pursue the kind of deals that it didn't make before.

So this is something like we're seeing. We were talking about this just a couple of weeks ago. What incentive does Apple have to do this? Like Spotify, we believe, and it seems pretty clear, I mean, they've said it actually, they're doing this because of music royalties, right? Their music royalties are too high because they have to keep paying out, right?

So they want to get some content that is either their own or they're buying in and then they can have it forever and they can even make money on it, right? If it's advertising focused, which it still can be if they want to. And then they have people in their platform giving them money, spending time on the system, and then not having to pay royalties on that content.

So they create exclusive shows to try and bring more people into the platform, et cetera, et cetera. Apple's not doing it this way, in theory. They don't charge for Apple Podcasts, as it is right now. I mean, we can get into Podcast Plus in a second, but just on the face of it, the incentive seems very different to other companies that are doing this kind of thing, right? Apple don't need to claim market share either because they have half of the market to themselves. So what is the incentive?

I'm not sure they're losing a lot. I mean, Apple's percentage share is going down because there are other companies like Spotify pushing up, but I'm not sure that that's actually Apple losing people as much as it is Apple, Apple, you know, probably still growing, but also the total pie is growing a little bit faster. I do think, you know, you could make the argument that even though Apple's got separate apps, every minute listened to podcasts on an Apple device is a minute not listened to Apple Music. And so there might be some savings just in having the percentage of time people listen to Apple Music be a little bit less. The difference there is, of course, that if you're not listening to Apple Music as much,

you might feel like the perceived value of Apple Music goes down and you might lose some customers if they're really into podcasts and they don't need music i don't know if that's plausible or not um what is indisputable is that apple has a huge amount of leverage here because they have the most popular podcast app and they have up to now not done anything with that leverage right like they they are a tiny group inside of Apple, but a huge presence in the podcast world. And they haven't taken advantage of their directory or their app or their market share. They are the podcast world. Let's remove from our typical thinking. If there is advertising, which is happening more and more for podcasts, people say, they print it it on billboards they put it in newspaper ads

find an apple podcast like yeah to the wider world podcasting is apple's thing yeah yeah so they've got they've got the power and i think so if we talk about the incentive i think the incentive probably starts with somebody saying look look, we have this huge power base in this market and have done nothing in the 14 years that we've basically been ruling podcasting. We've done nothing to take advantage of that power. And now you're seeing money pour in from all these other players trying to mess it up, trying to take away some of our advantage. And they think there's an opportunity here. So whether we're playing defense or whether we just think that there's a missed opportunity here, you know, I could see somebody inside Apple saying, you're investing what in television where you have no leverage? where you have no leverage. And we are the big fish in podcasting. And all these other people are investing Spotify spending half a billion dollars on podcast stuff. And we are the ones

who are the big fish there. So you want more services revenue. Why are we not finding some way to drive services revenue with this now, services revenue can go in a bunch of different ways. It could simply be accumulative to something like Apple Music, where there's either audio content that's actually in Apple Music, or it's in the podcast app too, but you can only listen to it if you're an Apple Music subscriber, right? They could do that, or, and I say this because we keep not believing that they're going to add more services to their menu and they're going to start bundling things together, but they just keep adding services. Maybe that they make a podcast service too. I mean, that's an option.

But I think in the end, it comes down to those two things, which is we have a lot of power in this market that we have not exerted. And we're looking for ways to increase our services revenue and somebody with probably a business degree inside apple making the case uh why are we not investing in this when we have so much potential return because of our position of power and also like you have a huge market share in a growing business that you have to yeah you're doing not, on the scale of things compared to other companies, have to do nothing to keep. Everybody else is investing money, but you have to do nothing and you've still got it.

People keep talking about podcasting and there are always these stories about like, is it a bubble or has its moment passed? But all the stats suggest that this is, it's a little bit like saying, oh, the web, it's going to go away and newspapers are forever. It's like, no, this is a long-term move to on-demand audio where it's going to continue

pulling people away from things like radio for things like podcasts and audiobooks. And that's just, it's happening. And there's a huge, it's an under-monetized business, as you know, like when you do the analysis of who's listening, digital advertising in general has dramatically lagged its popularity and it takes a long time to catch up. And podcasts are on the upswing. So you look at your Apple and you're like, we rule this market and we're making no money from it beyond the ancillary benefits of having podcasts be something that makes people love

using their iPhones or whatever. Like it's very tenuous. Um, and you've got this position, so maybe you don't use it. I could, I can totally see the argument. The question is what happens then, right? Like, all right, you got power, you see opportunity, you want to make money for your services line, especially now what? And I think that's an interesting question because I don't think there's a one right answer that obviously pops out. Because on the face of it,

I think to myself, Podcast Plus seems unlikely. They have another service that you pay for and you get content but news isn't compelling they made that a service and they did that and and like that was one where everyone was like oh yeah they're gonna do the apple news thing but you'll get it as part of a bundle but no they're just charging for it and like there may be a bundle that we haven't come across yet i still think there will be but it will that that service will

be available would have been available for like six months on its own for not really much and like there could be something to do i wish i could give credit to the person i saw say this so i'm sorry to whoever it was and i don't remember where i saw it or heard it about like they could really do a good job in creating the watch along podcasts of the tv shows that they're making so you mentioned the was the good place one called oh it's the good place the podcast but uh yeah you or you think about like um oh steven said it on connected that's where the show that i do he was talking about the better call soul podcast as well right there's another one right that you could have it as a thing you could although i keep

thinking you know that would also be a video program you can put on apple tv plus that right like literally do a video after show and then you could podcast that too um and yeah that that could be that's not something people are going to pay for but that would be a promotional material that they could use um you're right though like news news plus gives me pause that maybe apple's strategy is they want everything to be its own service and then there will be a bundle or something that will happen as well but like they want they don't want confusion of like well i want these podcasts why do i have to buy music i don't want the music i want the podcast it's like all right well you can buy the podcast but you'll also get it if you're an apple music subscriber or something like that they could

they could do that one of the differences between podcasts and news is that news didn't require apple to give anybody any money they were just like we're going to give you a cut of this but a podcast because of it they're more like tv in that sense of like you need people to make them if they're going to be exclusive to you you have to commission them and that is a pay we will pay you some money and then hopefully make it back that makes it from a business model perspective a little bit different. Yeah. And as we talked about when we were talking about Luminary, especially, but also Spotify,

there is a challenge of bringing anything behind a paywall. And Marco talked about this when he was here. What do you drag behind a paywall? Like if you drag a popular show behind a paywall, they may write you a big check, but you're going to lose a huge chunk of your audience. And that's also going to impact you in other ways. You can cash that check and feel better about it. But like your audience growth over time is going to be severely restricted because people

aren't going to be able to discover your show anymore unless they're a paid member of a very specific service. And your merch sales are going to go down because you've got fewer fans, even though you're getting paid a lot from the service and your live tour is not going to sell out because you've lost a lot of people who don't listen now that you're charging for your content. So taking an existing property and dragging it behind a paywall is hard. Most well-known people already have that, are already cashing in and being paid or having big advertising things. So you're really talking about like new original content from studios. This is why Spotify bought Gimlet, right? It's like, we're going to make new podcasts that are going to be buzzworthy and people are going to talk about. They're not hung on celebrities.

They're not existing shows. And you can do that. And, you know, I think it's not out of the realm of possibility that that's just what Apple wants, is that they want to create some buzzy podcasts that live in Apple Podcasts and aren't available elsewhere. I also wouldn't put it past them entirely, even though this goes against the whole idea of the services narrative, wouldn't put it past them entirely, even though this goes against the whole idea of the services narrative, wouldn't put them past entirely to just make some podcasts that are branded as Apple Podcasts

and put them in the podcast app and promote the podcast app. And they could still be regular podcasts, but they'll use them to imply that they're best listened to in the podcast app. I think that that's very wishful thinking. I think anything they do it will be only an apple podcast they won't it won't be anywhere else hard not to believe that that would be what they would do there is i can't see the business degree person coming up with that part of the idea but what i will say you so here's the thing when you were saying put it behind a paywall

and we're talking about it right put it behind a paywall you lose your audience what if it's just a wall you don't pay and that's different because right it's just it's it's a apple podcast exclusive yeah and you could you could call mark maron and you could say mark we're going to give you a bunch of money and you're exclusive to us now and why would apple do it just because and they could do it with um they could make different deals right they could take there's original content they could say make it for us there's existing podcasts that you throw behind the wall that's not a paywall you say this is now an exclusive and you can also do another thing that a lot of these companies are doing which is the ancillary stuff which is you know hey john august and craig maize and what if

we wrote you a big check to put script notes all the stuff that you're currently selling like to third to premium patreons or whatever like we just want it on apple podcasts and they'll just all be there or you're the magic tavern spinoff i know they've already got a deal with with uh spot or with the earwolf and stitcher but like they could do there are lots of different deals that could be made here. The question is like, which ones are they going to do? But I think you make a good point, which is the business school person

is not going to say, let's give it away and it's just a podcast that anyone can get. But you could say it's free, but only in Apple Podcasts. And what does that do? It does not give you services revenue,

but it does make Apple Podcasts, it provides a little bit of defense against people switching away from the podcast app if they're concerned about that, which is nice, but now you're spending millions of dollars on something just to keep your app that already exists. And I mean, it is a platform thing because it's not available on Windows, and it's not available on Android, and it's not available on android it's not available anywhere but on apple stuff but still you're not directly generating any revenue from that and i i i it could happen but i have a

hard time seeing it because it is really hard to put down that lens of apple wants to grow services revenue when you hear about them spending money on content i know this is strange and i don't uh i don't understand why they would do it particularly but they could just flex it right they just put the money behind it they could that i wouldn't put it past them they've got them they've got all the money they've got huge dominance and and it what it does is it says i know spotify wants you to listen to all your podcasts and spotify but you don't want to do that you want to listen to all your podcasts where you are let's not forget who that company is for a minute apple and spotify do not like each other and i wouldn't put it past them to just be like there is a side benefit of

causing pain to spotify yeah yeah no that that would be part of the defense would really be um you know you want to stay you don't want to move all your podcasts out of apple podcast spotify you want to stay here and here's another reason to stay here is that there's extras that you get that you don't get anywhere but in this app maybe it is just going to be a shame to see non-podcast podcast content more of it coming from apple especially because they have they you know they kind of helped kick the medium off and have been very true to it over time they've never done anything really weird they still really like they accept like everything is based on RSS. There's nothing strange going on in Apple's app, right?

Like it's all RSS based. It would, I think it would just be a shame to see them have these podcasts that aren't really podcasts. Yeah, because fundamentally, if you can't paste a URL into a podcast app of your choice and listen to it, it's not a podcast, right? It's premium audio content and it's not a podcast anymore. And I know people roll their eyes at that when podcasters say it's not a podcast, but like, if you can't load a thing in a web browser that you choose, it's not on the web. And that's the point here is, if you can only load it in an app, it's not a website anymore. It's an app. And there is a

difference in the open web. The beauty of the open web is everybody puts their stuff on the web, and you get a web browser and you point it at that site and you can read it. And it doesn't really matter with some exceptions that are going away, generally. It doesn't really matter whether you use Safari, or Chrome, or Firefox, or Edge, or anything else. It's just a web page, and you load it. And when you break that and say, oh, we're doing this thing, but you can't see it on the web, you must use our app to see it. That's the only way it can be done. You do lose something. You lose choice as a consumer. You lose, like, I've got everything else bookmarked, but I can't bookmark you. I've got to open this weird app in order to see your stuff. And that's not great. And that's

why it's not a podcast. If you do this, it's something else. It's audio content that's walled off in one app. It's not open anymore. It's a, you don't get to choose anymore and that you do lose something there. And I think that's a shame. And I think the truth is, and I mentioned this in my Mackerel piece this week is the, um, the thing that I brought up, I think two weeks ago, which is like, I'm, I subscribed to the sports site, the athletic, and they have podcasts and their podcasts I want to listen to. And I never literally never listened to them because they're not an overcast. And I'm not interested in opening their app because I'm in the context of listening to a podcast. So if you use Apple Podcasts, this is great. But as an overcast user, I look at this and I'm like, oh man, am I really going to open Apple Podcasts app every so often just to listen to their premium whatever? Probably not. Knowing

my track record with other stuff that I get and I pay for that I don't bother listening to because it's in the wrong context, that would be the case here. But then again, the flip side of that is the stickiness of it, which is that again, if you are an Apple podcast and you have these podcasts, you're not going to leave.

I'm very intrigued to see what comes of this, if anything. If anything, I think that the key point that you made earlier from the Bloomberg article where they said Apple has yet to outline a clear strategy. I chuckled at that because it's like that may mean Apple has no idea and it's just investigating. Why don't you call some guys up and see what it costs? Like, see what it costs. What would it cost to do it? Come back and that business school guy that we've invented who works somewhere at Apple and he's got a tie. And they tell him, Jimmy, go call Jimmy with a tie.

Go call some people and find out what a podcast costs. Because, you know, we don't know. So find out and then report back and then we'll see if we have a budget for this or not. It may be something, I mean, that's a little bit ridiculous, but like a scenario like that where they're just feeling it out. And they don't really know internally what they really want to do because the way the bloomberg article has said it's very much investigatory now maybe they're playing it close to the vest and they're like don't tell anybody what we're doing because that's apple but i don't know i get just this little inkling from the way that's word that like

maybe apple doesn't even know what what i would expect it is incredibly early because i follow enough uh and pay attention to enough podcast industry trade press to know the podcast industry cannot keep their mouth shut any little thing that happens someone's telling someone it's like tv in that regard it's it's exactly it's to media clearly witness this bloomberg article technology the technology industry is not like this, right? Where things leak out, but it's trickier. The podcast industry, people will talk. People talk quick. They talk fast.

We all found out about the Gimlet thing way before Spotify wanted to talk about it. There's a lot of that sort of stuff. It is an industry like a lot of other media industries where people need their press contacts. So they are very giving with information when they get it. Yep. This episode is brought to you by Linode. With Linode, you can instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode cloud. In seconds, you can get everything up and running

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and you will get $20 towards any Linode plan. So if you sign up for their one gigabyte of RAM plan, you get four free months of service. They have a seven-day money-back guarantee as well you have nothing to lose go to leno.com upgrade and use the promo code upgrade 2019 to learn more sign up and make the most of that 20 credit and thanks to learn for their support of this show and all of relay fm jason what is the streaming services draft well it's a dumb idea for the summer of fun that's what it is summer of fun don't do that you're gonna kill your voice yeah i was i was very upset today when i realized i couldn't give the summer of fun its full gusto it's true it's

true um i thought it would be fun on the summer of fun to do another draft or two. There may yet be another one this summer, who knows depending on, on who and when and where. But I thought since we do a bunch of upstream stuff, maybe we could do a streaming services draft with the idea there that you and I would try to imagine ourselves in the future, maybe a year from now, year and a half from now, end of 2020, let's say,

and try to imagine what streaming services we think are the most compelling. Just to give ourselves a little bit of a reference point of like what we personally as consumers will find the most interesting in terms of what's available out there for streaming services. Things are going to change in the next few months. So we're going to kind of put this in the future. And it serves those two purposes of sort of like ranking sort of where we think these

services will fall in a year, year and a half, as well as, you know, our personal preferences about what we find compelling in terms of streaming. Does that make sense? year and a half. As well as, you know, our personal preferences about what we find compelling in terms of streaming. Does that make sense? I think it makes perfect sense. I'm not convinced, but we're going to do it anyway. Now, you've been very kind in giving me first pick,

which I appreciate greatly. Which is helpful to me because there is a selection. We have a list that we're picking from that Jason's put together. There are streaming services in this list I've literally never heard of before. So maybe we can talk about some of those. That's the world of the streaming service, isn't it? So we're imagining it's 2021, right?

What streaming service do I think will be the most compelling? This probably feels like an easy answer, but I was actually struggling to pick between two but i am gonna go with disney plus as my as my topic why why not netflix why is it disney plus right so this is what i was thinking of now the the reason that i decided to put disney plus over netflix is honestly the price so disney plus will be cheaper and their content offering is going to be very strong like we're presuming at this point that they will have some of their marvel shows and some of their star wars shows the original content that they're producing will be available and i think people are going to want those let alone just the movies or like all of the incredible amount of content that disney have been buying up over the last few years but i think the marketing push that they're going to

have behind it with the content and the price it's going to everyone's i i genuinely think the amount of people like you know how we feel like everyone you know subscribes to netflix they're going to think everyone you know subscribes to disney plus as well it will just become one of the one or two services that most people want to have in their homes because it's disney disney own all the good stuff so why would you not want it they have all of the properties you love they have all the properties your kids love right like i think that's going to be a huge thing in families disney plus has the content that kids want to right like i think that's going to be a huge thing in families disney plus has the content that kids want to see and i think that that is going to be a massive boom for them as well as all the other stuff that you're going to want and all the you know the programming that's

that's tailored to everybody so i think disney is going to disney knows what they have available to them and they decided to price it cheaply because I think they know if they do, they can capture everybody. It's super compelling, and let's not forget that at least for a little while, it's going to be very, very cheap compared to other services. It's going to be like the cost of one of these add-on services. Isn't it the same price as BritBox? $5.99? Yeah, I mean, that's all of those services that are like, oh, we're not Netflix. Just toss this one in.

We're a bonus. And you just add it in there. Yeah, yeah. And the properties are amazing, right? Star Wars, Marvel, Disney, even throw in like National Geographic in there, which has a lot of great nature content and science content.

It's awfully compelling and the difference between this and some of the other services from the big players is that disney has been working up to this for a few years now they've known that this was going to be their strategy whereas your nbc universals and your uh warner media's hbo max's boy you know they they seem to have gotten the message that this was the strategy much more recently yeah and it will take them much longer to unravel all of their unravel their deals that they made like harry potter is going to be some at nbc universal even though though Warner owns it, until 2025. Okay, that's bad, and there's nothing they can do about it, so they're going to have to wait that out.

And also they've got to crank up, as we've seen watching Apple do this, their development of original material. Like, you can't just flip a switch and have a whole catalog of originals rolling out onto your network or your service. It takes years, you know, it takes more than a year really to make deals or put shows in development and then get them ready to go and ready to roll out. And so Disney's been playing the long game here better than most of their competitors. And that's why I think we all expect that that service is going to be way more fully formed. Not 100%. They've still got some deals that have to lapse, but way more fully formed than maybe HBO Max and whatever NBCUniversal does. 2021 a lot of these other services probably won't be and that is and when we're looking at like what is the strongest what is the most popular streaming service by the end of that time period that puts disney at an advantage because like we'll talk about hbo max i'm sure shortly they

have no no word on international rollout and i mean it's going to take disney some time but they're going to do it and i think that's going to take disney some time but they're going to do it and i think that's going to make a big difference yeah joe and the our friend joe steel who is responsible for the downgrade episode by the way just going to mention that again um asked if if the goal is to make a popular list or a profitable list and yeah profits i mean as netflix has shown us profits is not what we're looking at here we're we're i'm approaching this as each of us gets to choose what we subscribe to and if somebody else takes one then we don't get to subscribe to that one which has the effect of it being popularity yeah or whatever like appeal however you want to

put it we're in the end we're going to get a rank list of appeal here and disney plus is going to be at the top which is very interesting i'm going to go netflix next uh because i was giving you netflix and you didn't take it uh and so i'm gonna take it and it is as as i said earlier right like they're showing signs of being a little bit shaky this is why i didn't pick it because i like the cat i love netflix's original stuff but i love a lot of their catalog stuff and they're losing so much of that it makes netflix a little less appealing to me like i'm going to keep it because like i love their originals right and i'm sure they're just going to keep building on those but i think that it is losing its shine a little well first off you don't get to keep it because i took it well okay until 2021 and

until jason takes it away from me uh yeah yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna wrestle it away also i am less a catalog viewer of netflix than i am of originals so i i it doesn't bother me as much but i will say this i think it is going to be overstated about how much catalog content netflix is going to lose because Netflix has an enormous audience and that creates value for catalog content. And these companies like Warner and NBC, they, they have to offer those shows for sale. And that's the reason why Friends was $100 million or whatever it was. And the second best offer was $90 million. They have to do that for some legal reasons. There are people who make money, people who made the show or starred in the show,

make money based on the sales price of the licensing. And so they can't write themselves a check for $5 and be like, haha, we bought it for $5. They have to show legally that they put it up and they found the market price for it. And while they'll bite the bullet on something like Friends or The Office, in the case of Warner and NBC, because it's super high profile and very popular and they want it as a major part of their assets of their new thing. There's going to be a lot of stuff that they own, that Warner owns or NBC owns, that they're going to put out and Netflix is going to be like, we have such scale that

this is worth 50 million to us. And NBC is going to go, you can have it. Because it's just not going to be worth it to them. And it'll be worth it to Netflix. So I think Netflix is not going to lose as much catalog as you might think. Which is just putting it out there. But I do think that they have been playing this game the longest. And they've got great originals. And while they are hurting from losing a lot of catalog stuff,

as well as deals with places like Marvel, where, you know, they had to end that relationship, they have been busily acquiring other stuff. And I think that they, I, I think as much as we talked about them having a little wobble here,

I think they're going to go into this fall and next year being more motivated than ever by the competition. So I do think we're going to see Netflix kind of change their strategy a little bit. They've been able to coast, believe it or not. This is Netflix coasting because they haven't had as much serious competition. And now they will, and I think they're going to up their game. So that's why I'll pick them second. I'm going to go with HBO Max.

i'll pick them second i'm gonna go with hbo max now all right i'm just gonna assume that uh either i'm american or i can get american yeah you live in a magical american location enclave inside of london where the upgrade podcast lives uh hbo just has outside of disney the best catalog content available um i mean even if you don't even think about the fact that it's warner media and what that will mean eventually i'm talking like just hbo you know like some of the best tv shows ever made hbo shows and people like to watch them like i like to watch sopranos every couple of years and i would like to watch them. I like to watch Sopranos every couple of years. And I would like to not have to keep buying all of this stuff. We just re-watched Veep again. It's a wonderful TV show. I think that it's going to continue to be good for them,

especially Game of Thrones and all that kind of stuff. They continue to build good properties that they have available to them, and having those catalog shows available is great but having access to the overall warner media catalog over time right because we spoke about this they won't get all of it i just think that's going to be great for them they're going to be able to put originals there they have a very strong uh tie with people that can make that good content, right? That like maybe a lot of these other services don't have or companies don't have. It's Warner, right?

Like they can make it happen. So I think that HBO Max, and again, like there's a very strong brand, right? HBO is a very strong brand, which is why that Warner's putting all of their weight behind the HBO brand. I know that it's a service that I would want. I think it's a service a lot of people are going to want. Yeah, I think... People already pay for HBO, right? I think they are doing the right things,

but they're going to be hamstrung for a while by bad decisions made by the previous management and the previous owners. But I do think that they are so strong and they have the wherewithal to really make something compelling. And using the HBO brand is not a bad place to start. And their catalog is going to be really solid as somebody who's an HBO subscriber already. That's a great place to build from. And then you pour in content from all the other ancillary stuff that's owned by warner now and uh there's a lot i think i think it's a compelling thing i like how you are putting your bets down for the new stuff which is leaving me to pick the guys who have been uh doing this for a while yeah and have

been playing this game but i'm gonna i'm gonna be boring and I'm going to pick Amazon Prime Video next, I think. Because it's free? Well, it's not free, right? Like, it's not. You've got to be a Prime member or pay whatever, some annual fee for it. But I think Amazon is aware that this is a period where everything's in flux and it's all to play for and that they're better positioned than anyone but netflix right now so i think and we've seen it in what was it a year year and a half ago where jeff bezos basically said i want the next game of thrones i

spend a lot of money to and they did with the lord of the rings, but they're spending a lot of money to try to find blockbusters. They want everybody to want Prime Video and they've got new leadership there. They fired their old management. They got new leadership in place. They're making interesting and I think good creative decisions. We'll see what they come up with, but I think the next year or two, we're're gonna see the fruits of what they've been doing at

prime video and i think they they see an opportunity also a threat right which is the threat here is that these other companies are going to come in and kind of elbow them and they're going to end up sort of like fourth or fifth place and so for both reasons i think amazon is going to be um they're gonna they're they're going to try to shine in the next year or two. Lord of the Rings could be big for them. Could be. Right. Or it could be really expensive and embarrassing, but it'll probably be big.

It has the possibility to be like, hey, you like Game of Thrones, right? We have a show that's kind of like that. And that could turn a lot of heads. Yeah, Warner Media is going to have a show that actually is that when they do the spinoff. But until then. Until then. Yeah, but you can have more dragons. Everyone likes more dragons in their life, right?

Isn't that a thing? Everybody. You can never have too many dragons in your life, Mike. Hulu. Yeah, that's right. You're right. Hulu. I'm going for Hulu.

More Disney in Mike's life. More Disney corporate synergy happening. I think the good thing about Hulu, they're going to go international, right? Which they've not done before. They still have content that people want to see and Disney's going to fill it full of stuff that's for adults.

Like, why not? Right? Like, it seems like a good bet for a lot of people. Hulu has always been something that's been pretty popular anyway, and I think it's only going to become more so once Disney finally takes it over.

It gets all of the... John Landgraf is the guy who runs the FX Networks, which is obviously formerly owned by Fox, now owned by Disney. Super smart guy good programmer has done lots of great content on fx and fxx and they he's basically in charge of that part of the business which i think is going to be feeding hulu as well and i think hulu is going to be a really you know it's going to slough off It's sort of like we're reruns of shows that are on broadcast.

And Disney is going to make a big investment to turn it into the streaming service for stuff that is not fitting with the Disney Plus brand. Things that are a little more adult. And I think it is, I'm optimistic about it. So I think that's a good choice. I'm optimistic about it. So I think that's a good choice. I think that the kind of content that John Lennon Graff has done at FX could translate to a really compelling,

fun streaming service with Hulu. So I hope that's what we get. But I think, you know, Disney, and they do have international aims for that service, but they've got to get it up and running, you know, and change it over in America first too. But yeah, I think it's compelling. There are shows that like,

so like adina's been trying to watch the show rami oh yeah which you recommended we can't get it yeah because it's a hulu original right and they haven't sold it in the uk to anybody it may be and that may be a sign right that they've decided to hold back yes on some of this stuff because they want to do they want they're going to launch hulu in the uk that's the easiest place for them to launch it right let's not get ourselves into a mess here let's just yeah we're gonna just hold on like what what what is itv gonna pay us for rami nah nah we'll just hold on to it and then and then it's it for people in the u.s who have hulu it's a it's a good it's a good little comedy in the this whole line of sort of comedies from people who didn't used to get to make TV shows with their perspective on life.

It's a guy in New Jersey who's a Muslim, and he is kind of like trying to figure out ways of living his life between being devout and also being a modern dude who's dating. And it's good. It's a good show. It's very good. So I got a story, Mike. I got a good show it's very good um i so i got a story mike i got a story a little little and this is actually news related i'll throw it out here which is something funny happened this week there's a tv show there's a sitcom called ap bio on nbc broadcast network they did two seasons it was a very low rated show they did two seasons of it um uh patten oswalt is

in it and uh they canceled it and patton oswalt started this whole like save ap bio thing as you do whenever anybody has a show canceled they try to get it saved somewhere because it worked for brooklyn nine nine that's like yeah and it worked for the expanse and it worked for star trek right literally people have been saving shows for 50 years now uh it all but with social media and stuff it always happens somebody loses the show there is a campaign it usually goes nowhere sometimes it goes somewhere and with all these streaming services around there's like more places it's not just like maybe another network will want it now it's like maybe amazon can save it

maybe netflix can save it whatever so they they did this save AP bio thing. Uh, but something really funny happened, which is this week, the forthcoming untitled NBC universal streaming service. Oh, let's call it NBC plus. NBC max. NBC big. NBC good.

NBC mucho. Plus, uh, they picked up season three of ap bio now and they said that they had to they're gonna have to renegotiate the contracts because the contracts all lapsed there's a the way tv contracts work is beyond a certain date uh all the actors and stuff are like let out of their deals and they can go find other work but before a certain pickup date you know they have to make themselves available to work the next year on the next season that's sort of how those contracts work and then those all lapsed

but they uh the the cast seems to be inclined to sign new deals and come back and they're going to bring it back and um okay so crazy this story so i have i have two i have two things I want to mention about this story that I find bizarre. One of which is NBC makes the show with Lorne Michaels' Broadway video. So it's an NBC Universal joint to begin with. It aired on the NBC broadcast network. NBC canceled it. nbc canceled it and then a month or two later nbc's own streaming service saved it from cancellation okay let's let's there's more here there's more i really want to believe that this was somebody's cunning plan oh i i think it's just i think it's just incompetence

that's what it is so what you're saying is you let all the contracts lapse, and then somebody in some other building somewhere at NBC was like, oh, I like that show. We could pick up that show. It's like, well, we already let the contracts lapse. You canceled it, and now you're bringing it back, and you waited so long that you have to make new deals with all of the actors? It's weird. And I'll throw another piece on on on this story which is um according to the news story i read

it was their best performing digital show in season one and season two it was their second best performing digital show behind brooklyn 99 which had come over from fox in other words it got like an 0.5 rating on the network. But after 100 days of streaming, its rating was like 5.6 or something, which is spectacularly good, actually. It shows that demographically, in the key advertising demographic, 18 to 35-year-olds, it was actually pretty popular. But the 18 to 35-year-olds weren't watching it on NBC. They were streaming it. Okay, well, that explains why NBCUniversal's untitled streaming service might want this show. What it doesn't explain is why they canceled it and then sat there for two months and then brought it back. I don't understand. So what I'm saying is maybe NBCUniversal

is not being run really well right now. And that all said like that show and uh i'm gonna pick the nbc universal unnamed streaming service because who knows the office will be there i guess well i'm brooklyn 99 and you know it is for that reason like nbc actually have some of the better comedy content for the age group of people that enjoy streaming services for the age group of people that enjoy streaming services right and then they also have a bunch of other good stuff depending i mean i don't know what's going to be in their catalog right like will they get 30 rock uh probably probably at some point yes and the office right like i just figured like they haven't they have pretty good comedy content and i think we'll do and they'll get the good place eventually at some point and and they'll get parks and rec eventually probably like again

they're gonna have to wait for the deals with netflix to time out and grab them back and pay for them and all of that pay themselves for them um but yeah yeah i i don't know i i think there's i think there's a lot of good content at nb. I'm not really sure they know what they're doing yet. They don't. But when I look at everything else that's on here, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to give NBCUniversal a flyer. They got a lot of content, not just on their broadcast network, but they also own a bunch of cable. So they got a lot of content there that they'll roll in here. Sci-fi channel, USA Network, those are all part of NBCUniversal, so they've got a lot of other stuff too. The remaining list includes some services I've heard of by name

and services I've literally never heard of and a sports option. If I'm picking for my own list, I don't know what to choose if i'm picking for what i think will be popular i'll pick espn plus because it's probably going to do pretty well um so let me just i'm just going to say espn plus okay not merely to just bring up the fact that like don't forget disney has another one it's got cricket i'm sure it's got volleyball it's got lots of uh my two favorite sports cricket and volleyball how did you know no so you're you're just loading up on disney which is i think it does highlight disney strategy here which is they're

doing three different streaming services maybe they'll do a bundle at some point but three different streaming services targeted at different audiences different yes services which none of these other companies can do. No one else can manage that. And the idea is that right now they've got four ESPN branded linear TV channels, and they still don't have enough space for all the content that they can get. So I think this ESPN Plus is ultimately the future of ESPN. As linear becomes less important, it would not surprise me if they start dropping linear channels. ESPNU and ESPN News go away at some point when the dynamics of the way that they get paid change. Or maybe they

keep them forever. But the future of the ESPN brand is probably in this service, which will increasingly accumulate sports content. Right now, it's a lot of kind of edge cases. Like I said, I think cricket is on there. There are like smaller college basketball games and smaller college football games on there, but they've also done some interesting things like Wimbledon. Hey, Mike, I'm talking about something from London now. Wimbledon, they had matches on ESPN and ESPN2, but there are a lot more matches that go on at Wimbledon. There's matches in the doubles. There's matches that are happening in other courts, in the singles tournaments.

And so what they did was they put matches on ESPN and ESPN2. All the other matches that were going on were on ESPN+. And I thought that's a good example of like, if you want to see that match that's on court two at Wimbledon, you can, but you have to watch ESPN+. And I know that ESPN doesn't get it, but just as like an example of something else

that could work like this would be like the Olympics, right? I know that NBC has the Olympics in the US, but which interestingly, that could be good for NBC Universal too if they keep the Olympics. I would not be surprised if that's exactly what they do is take a bunch of Olympic feeds and put them in their service. And they will put main stuff on NBC and on their NBC networks, but they will probably be like, do we really want to put the basketball on MSNBC or just put it on the streaming service and say, sign up for our streaming service to get it?

And if they launch it, I'll point out, their plan is to launch it end of this year, beginning of next year, and the Summer Olympics are next summer. So yeah, yeah. I think you make a good point. We're only picking eight, I guess, and you're already picking things that you don't even know. There are a bunch of niche cable services, some of which have premium linear channels that they also are now trying to reposition into streaming services like Showtime and Epix is a good example of that, and epix is a good example of that and stars is a good example of that um i well okay i'm a star trek fan so i'm gonna pick cbs all access this was

why i didn't pick it because i felt like it would thank you mean if i chose because this is one i've heard of but like i've never seen it and don't really care about star trek so it felt mean to pick it i'm tempted by acorn and brit box which are two competing british and european themed um or commonwealth british commonwealth and european channels where they get they get uh it's not just uk stuff but it's stuff from ireland and australia and uh sometimes from other parts of europe uh with uh dubbing or mostly with subtitles which is kind of fun because there's a lot of, you know, I was visiting my friend Anthony in the UK and he and his partner were watching a French detective series that they really like. And I had a moment where I thought,

this is not available in America in any form, but it probably will be on one of these niche streaming services if it's not already. And so I like those services. I'm not going to pick them here, but I think there is a place for these smaller streaming services that are not fighting it out with the big ones and that they have lots of really good value. Something like Brickbox, which has the whole Doctor Who catalog or Acorn, which has some originals, as well as a really good selection of stuff from UK and Commonwealth and other parts of Europe. But I picked CBS All Access for two reasons. One is Star Trek. In North America, or in the US, it is where you get all the Star Trek. All the original Star Trek that they're doing goes on CBS All Access. So it's basically the Star Trek service for me. Great. And I've actually come to find it valuable for some other

stuff that's on CBS, the TV network, which I never want to watch as a network. But because they own this, they put all their episodes of all their shows commercial free because I'm paying for the commercial free option. And so basically, if there's a show I watch on CBS, like Survivor or The Amazing Race, or my daughter's watching a couple of things, their catalog is just there, commercial free. And so we watched Survivor last year for the first time in many years. And we just watched the episodes when they dropped, when it was basically when they were broadcast, but we watched the commercial free versions that were on CBS All Access. It was a great bonus. So I think there's some value there.

I think they're going to obviously need to step up their originals. And what's ultimately going to happen if I'm forecasting out a year or two is the people who own CBS also own Viacom, which is like Comedy Central and a bunch of channels, MTV. It feels that if they don't get bought by a larger company, at the very least, those two companies are going to get merged back together. And CBS All Access is going to either get that content or it's going to get transformed into a different name that's going to have all the CBS content and all the Paramount stuff and MTV and Comedy Central. And it's all going to bulk up into something that's more compelling than maybe CBS is today.

And that leaves off Acorn, BritBox, Crackle, Criterion, Crunchyroll, Epix, Canopy, Showtime,

Shudder, and Stars. By the way, if you like horror stuff, Shudder, there's a whole niche streaming service for people who are fans of horror. So that's pretty cool. I like that

idea i'm surprised that there's not a like a sci-fi niche streaming service but there probably will be someday all right let's do some hashtag ask upgrade questions to round out today's episode but before we do let's thank our final sponsor and that is express vpn when you're preparing to travel abroad this summer, there's going to be a lot of things on your checklist. But there's one very important thing that could be missing that you don't want to be missing, an app that's going to keep you safe and secure online when you're away, and it's ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN doesn't just encrypt your data while you surf the internet in a public airport or hotel Wi-Fi. It also lets you stream and access

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That is expressvpn.com.upgrade. Our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. All right, Jason. Should we do some hashtag Ask Upgrade questions? Yes, let's do it. First one comes from Michael. Michael wants to know,

how many passes do you have in your wallet on ios and have any passes fully replaced carrying the physical counterparts to them um so i have i have four cards like debit credit cards in my wallet but i don't think that's what they're asking but i do have those and no i still carry my cards with me and then i also have four passes um i have something called priority pass which is this like airport lounge thing that i got was a bonus of a credit card i have uh the apple business card so you know like if you have a business account with apple uh they give you a little QR code now that you can scan. So you don't need to give them all of your details every time.

I have one flight, like airline company thing, you know, like a rewards thing from an air miles thing. And then I have one pass to, have you ever heard of Secret Cinema? No. It is a, it's an event. You will probably see me sharing pictures of these once where they recreate a movie and you go and experience it so i've done like back to the future and uh star wars they're doing uh casino royale and we're going later this year so that's an actual ticket not a pass but that's all i have and the two of them i don't have physical cards for so i guess in the priority pass one i never actually

use it but yeah i don't i don't do public transit anymore although the buses that i used to take i think still have not been upgraded i believe bart in the in the bay area now has the ability but they don't do a pass i think it's like the tube in london i think they're just doing apple pay from a credit card i do have one non-credit card pass in my ios and watch os and it's charge point which is a electric car charger network and they have a they have an nfc based reader on their charging stations so if i go to Target and want to park my car in the electric car space and charge it while I'm there, they give you a free hour or two of charging while you're at Target. But you still have to tap with your account. And I can do that with my phone or my watch. And instead of like running a card or something, most of those services have like a

little card with a swipe or with an NFC in it, but ChargePoint already has it as a pass. But most of my wallet is still like scanning stuff. I would love for there to be more NFC stuff. I'm excited, by the way, about shortcuts, letting you read NFC stickers in iOS 13. That's going to be fun. But right now my wallet is mostly populated with things like plane tickets and baseball tickets because all the baseball stuff has really moved. A lot of the sporting event stuff has moved away from paper tickets to digital tickets. And I still have my World Series ticket from 2014

in my Apple wallet. I see. I delete all my tickets because I hate how busy it gets. I wished that there was an archive. I agree with you. I wish it was a little bit easier to delete them in mass and also I wish that there was an archive. I did take a screenshot of my World Series ticket

just in case I lose it, but I have not lost it yet. It's still in there even though it's almost five years ago. Well, you know, that would be just terrible. But instead, I look at it and I smile every now and then. It's like World Series, Game 5. It's like, yay, that's fun.

So yeah, but in terms of actual passes, only the electric car charger won so far. Tim wants to know, Mike, what are your thoughts on American breakfasts? And Jason, what are your thoughts on English breakfasts? You go first. I love American breakfasts. I like all of the different foods that are sweet.

And specifically that seem to only really, well, are popularized by American breakfasts, pancakes and waffles and French toast and stuff like that. I mean, brunch food really is what I like the most. And I think the Americans do that better than anybody else. Nice. I love English breakfast. You get some some english breakfast tea you got the you got some eggs you got some sausage or some streaky bacon or another kind of bacon that tastes good that they call bacon that

isn't quite our bacon but it's still good uh it might have a potato might have a potato of some sort little potato triangle or potato blob of some kind. I like all that cooked potato stuff. And then there's like tomatoes, and I'm not interested in those at all. Beans. Big thumbs down. Beans is weird because that is not a breakfast food here, although it's the same food. But you know what?

Beans are good. I like beans. I'll eat them in the morning. I don't care. I just don't want your tomatoes. Tomatoes at breakfast. I mean, I reject tomatoes anyway. Why do you have to ruin a perfectly good breakfast with tomatoes so thumbs down on that oh yeah the fried bread

is good see this is the sad thing about breakfast that i've realized in the last few months because if for those who didn't listen to that john syracuse episode back a few a while ago i can't eat stuff with gluten in it anymore i am i am officially off of gluten forever of my life and that means that uh breakfast is way harder than it used to be because so much of breakfast is breads. Yeah. Well, cause I, I'm mostly don't eat carbs.

Yeah. Right. So it's the same thing. Same deal. Breakfast is the hardest meal. Right. So when we were in Boston for Dan's wedding, um,

we went to a diner and I found out that the, the one thing that makes me happy, uh, that's a traditional breakfast food that I can still get very easily is eggs. So give me like two eggs scrambled with some bacon. I can't have the toast sadly, but I could have like bacon or sausage

or something like that and some tea and I'm happy. So yeah, breakfast is good. And oatmeal, I like oatmeal too, but that's not, that's just a breakfast that you can have, Scottish. Steven says, I got an Apple TV 4K last November and I like oatmeal too, but that's just a breakfast that you can have. Scottish. Stephen says, I got an Apple TV 4K last November and I like it. What do you think the upgrade cycle is for this product? It seems like Apple has been updating the hardware every few years.

I feel like Apple only updates that hardware when it absolutely needs to. So they gave it that 4K HDR upgrade and it supports all the 4K HDR, Dolby Atmos, all of that. So I'm not sure why they need to upgrade it again right like it seemed it's actually seems over engineered right and i think they do that because it's just going to stay there forever i also think they're less likely to do it now they're putting all of the stuff on tvs that's true too that's true i feel like it's more likely that they would make a new product that was that was just a cheaper version of the old product that they specced down that they would spec it up again i think it's an over-engineered overpriced product and they'll probably just let it sit there for a long time

and the truth is it doesn't matter no it doesn't i don't think it's going to change until like 8k is a thing yeah yeah it's i think so i think it's going to take some huge standards thing unless they have a serious problem with performance where people are trying to run games on it or something and it's not working but it seems really over engineered for that kind of stuff for the kind of stuff you do on that device on device so i just can't see it i think it's just going to be with us for a long time jose wants to know what is the one feature or use case that will help me decide between whether I buy an iPad Air

or an 11-inch iPad Pro? I was struggling with this one, other than to say that I like the new Pencil a lot better than the old Pencil, but there's got to be more than that. Do you have any thoughts about this one? Pencil's one of them. Overall hardware design is another.

It's very nice. The new design is beautiful. I know that it's not necessarily compelling for everybody, but the 11-inch iPad Air, I think, is one of the most beautiful products Apple has ever made. So if that is important to you, it is thin and light, which is really good. It is powerful.

It is going to run a lot of the iOS 13 stuff better. Those are kind of your typical things. It really does depend on what you're using your iPad for, honestly. But if you are thinking it's a device that you want to do some, like you want to maybe try and do some work stuff on, then maybe look at the Pro. If not, maybe look at the Air. But if you want to do art stuff the apple pencil the

improvements to the apple pencil are so huge for the ipad pro for the new one than it was it's just i feel like it's just not with the new air and then and the and the pro the differences are not as stark as they used to be because there's a pencil but it's not as good there's a keyboard but it's not quite as good. Like, it's close. Closer. The screen is smaller. You have to be a heavy user of one of the new features. Like, one of the differences, right?

The differences, as you say, being keyboard, pencil, overall performance. Otherwise, you're going to save yourself some money. Yes. If you think you're going to be a heavy user in one of those areas, then go for the Pro. Otherwise, go for the Air. Yeah. Honestly, same as laptops, right? Yeah. Like, you go for the Pro if you think go for the Air. Honestly, same as laptops. You go for the Pro if you think you're going to be a heavy user of one of the things that it does better than a

MacBook Air would. Anthony has a question for me. It's a question for Mike. Now that you prefer mechanical watches to the Apple Watch, which mechanical watches are you shopping for now? Or which mechanical watches would you recommend? I would like to recommend a brand that I enjoy. watches are you shopping for now and or which mechanical watches would you recommend i would

like to recommend a brand that i enjoy i have one of their watches and i'm going to add another one to my collection at some point this year called farer f-a-r-e-r they are a british brand and i think that from design and price they're one of the like more interesting brands that i've found and marco agrees with me so like i felt good about that when i found them i was like what do you think about these this company is like oh they're really good for price and design that's what i thought marco is obviously my my watch guru right uh so i would recommend them i they have like one of their watches that i wear the watch that i have of theirs that I wear a lot, which I really, really love.

It is called the Pendine and it's a chronograph quartz watch and it's cost 500 pounds. So it's not cheap. Right. But it's not big watch expensive. And I think that for the price, it is beautiful and i love it very much so i recommend them as a as a really interesting company uh to look at if you are interested in this type of stuff uh in regards to other watches like i always have my height my like sights set high on something but there's nothing in my near future right now there's a lot of mechanical watch talk right now because they've been talking about the Moonwatch for the moon landing anniversary. That the only officially approved watch for outer space use is the Omega Speedmaster, where they wore on like Gemini and Ed White wore it on his spacewalk.

And I think and then they took it to the moon. it to the moon. The problem with it is that it is just a giant, many-faced, clunky thing that even as somebody who does own a few, like I own a couple of mechanical watches as well as my Apple watch. Like this kind of watch, the, you know, lots of features, big, heavy aviator astronaut watch has never really appealed to me. But people have been talking about it, which I think is kind of fun. And pointing out that this is a product from 50 years ago that is still available which is not going to be the case with computer watches no last question today lax dude asks with ipad os can i now get playback speed control in youtube via safari this is a key factor in me not buying an ipad uh yeah but you can also do it in the iOS app.

The iOS app has speed controls. You could have bought an iPad by now. You could have bought an iPad. Like, dude, what's stopping you? When you're watching a video, there's some buttons at the top. I think you press a three-dot button and you get speed controls.

It's in there. You can do it. It's not as easy to find, but it's something you can do. But if you're watching Safari, yes, you now can get access to all of standard controls because of safari's desktop browsing stuff all right that about does it for this week's episode which is just in time because i'm losing my voice you made it your voice is still kind of working if you want to send in a question for a

future episode of the show just send out a tweet with the hashtag ask upgrade and it will be included in our spreadsheet and maybe picked. Thank you to everybody that does that. We really appreciate it. If you want to find show notes for this episode, relay.fm.upgrade.255. Jason is online at sixcolors.com

and he's at jsnall. I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. Thanks to Moo, Linode, and ExpressVPN for their support of this show. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, everybody.