 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Johnny Hernandez, Hi Tech Oki and Logan Larson. Coming up on DTNS, Tim Stevens tells us about tech to keep EV safe even after a crash, plus YouTube's bid to become your place to watch everything, and Amazon gives you more free music. Oh, nice. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, November 1st, All Saints Day 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. Lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Rich Strafilino. From Tokyo, Japan. I'm Tim Stevens. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chen. What are you doing in Japan? All sorts of fun, Stefan. Driving cars around Mount Fuji. I went to a race track to see some beautiful Nissan GT-Rs and chasing down a bunch of cool features. Oh my gosh, the life. I love it. Well, we're going to find out a little bit about what you did in Germany now that you're in Japan. I won't say something I shouldn't say. Let's just start with the quick hits, shall we? According to a message from Twitter sent to publishers and seen by The Verge, Twitter discontinued ad-free articles at the end of October. Twitter included these articles in its Twitter Blue subscription. It's kind of a weird thing. If you were a subscriber, you got access to ad-free articles from select publishers. Twitter says removing the feature will let it focus on resources, on adding additional value for our members. And in a clue for what that added value might be, Elon Musk posted to Twitter on Tuesday that Twitter Blue could be $8 a month, which include verification, priority and replies, mentions in search, which is essential to defeat spam, scam, ability to post long video and audio, half as many ads, and paywall bypass for publishers willing to work with us. Look forward to seeing the official announcement on any of that. In Sony's Q2, the number of subscribers to PlayStation Plus fell from 47.3 million to 45.4 million. In the Q2 quarter, despite Sony's launch of new tiers and perks for the subscription service, despite subscribers going down revenue from network services, that includes PlayStation Plus, the now defunct PlayStation Now, and PlayStation Network advertising revenue increased 17% of the year to $794 million. PlayStation 5 sales are at 25 million consoles as of this quarter lifetime. So PlayStation's got easier to get and people stopped buying them? That's just ungrateful. People stopped subscribing. Alphabet's Waymo will expand its RoboTaxi service in Phoenix to include trips to the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, a first for a U.S. autonomous taxi provider. These types of trips are big business for ride hailing services in general, so it's kind of a big step. Lyft-reported airport trips made up 10.2% of its total ride share in Q2. Waymo Airport rides will run 24-7, but be limited to the Trusted Tester program initially and use human safety operators as well. Waymo expects rider-only operations to start over the weeks to come. In the spring 2023 semester, Parsons School of Design will offer a class with Roblox to explore the intricate relationship between digital and physical fashion set in an immersive future. Parsons students will learn how to create 3D digital fashion with Roblox's toolkit as well as physical clothing. Roblox will collaborate with Parsons faculty on the course. Students will be able to sell items from the course at Parsons and in the Roblox marketplace. Parsons' big name in the world of design education, so definitely caught my eye. Very cool. Search engine marketing firm SEMrush, SEMrush, published a study showing that 27.6% of people are redoing their Google searches by either refining or extending the queries that they type. The data came from 20,000 anonymous users making almost half a million unique searches. 70% of people took less than 15 seconds to make a secondary click, meaning they found what they were looking for probably. 27.6% needed to adjust their search somehow, although they might have still found what they were looking for. And of those refining searches, 17.9% made changes to the search query while 9.7% clicked on an image from a carousel generated by the search. SEMrush noted keyword changes happened more on mobile at 29.3%, over 17.9% on the desktop. I'm going to guess that's typos. On desktop, the study also found 25.6% of results were zero clicks, either meaning the answer they needed was available right on the page they were looking at without having to click anywhere or they just gave up. Keep in mind, the survey did not measure search satisfaction. It only looked at the behavior of the clicks, hence the, maybe it meant, it could have meant all that sort of thing, but it's interesting nonetheless. But this remained within the YouTube TV app. Until now, Tom. Yeah, that's right. Google's starting to bring down the wall between its serious TV quality content on YouTube TV and the wider world of YouTube. They've integrated movie and TV show rentals before, but this is a step beyond that. The main YouTube app is going to offer something called primetime channels. If you go in the US to the movies and shows hub, you're going to find more than 30 channels. You can get to it from the Explorer tab as well. When you add a channel this way, the channels appear on your YouTube homepage next to your other subscriptions. So you can have a new Star Trek Picard and that might show up right next to Daily Tech News show and curry cakes from Incheon. Paid channels will integrate with their free YouTube channels. So you could have stuff like AMC Plus content living alongside AMC's free YouTube channels for trailers and that kind of stuff. At launch, the channels available on movies and TV show hub will include Showtime, Paramount Plus, Stars, AMC Plus, Epic, Shutter, Acorn TV, Hallmark Movies Now, and a couple others. YouTube plans to work with partners to expand channels over time and will bring it to international users in the future. So Tim, are you excited to be watching your AMC Plus content potentially in your main YouTube app? Yeah, I mean, I think initially this is definitely a great move. It'll be much, much easier to add these channels to your subscription. You know, much like you can on Amazon now with just a couple of clicks, you could get access to much better content without having to create a new username, a new password, type in your credit card number and go through all that to subscribe to Paramount Plus or whatever. I must say some of the selections are not that great though. I've never heard of dub channel. I had to go look what that is and it turns out it's mostly Canadian made for TV movies and off-brand. Wait, you just said it was not that great. Sounds perfect. You're trying to get you excited there. But I must say, I wonder what this means for going down the road. I'm a little concerned that we are starting to go back into the era of conglomerations of premium access channels to the point where instead of paying the hundreds of dollars to our cable providers that we were years ago. Now we're going to be paying hundreds of dollars to Google with forced packages and bundles and things that we won't necessarily want just to get the content that we want. I fear that we could be slipping back down to that dark, dark place that we just barely escaped. Let me assuage some of these fears potentially because I think we've always wanted cord cutting to be a way to save money and it can be. But it's actually not its biggest advantage. I've for years been saying the biggest advantage is control and what this gives you is the ability to control your channel. So instead of having two options, pay a lot or pay a lot more, which is what cable gave you. You had to pay a lot to get most of everything and then there was a small tier you could pay more for. This says individual channels. You have control over them. You decide which channels you want. Now right now, like you say, the 30 channels are not all the channels you could possibly want, but it might be the template for that becoming the case in the future. So I think it is good to have this kind of control because this isn't the only place you can do it. You can also add these on Apple TV, on Amazon, on Roku, on Sling, on Hulu Live, on Direct TV Stream. There's lots of places to do this. So you have choice, you have control and I think what's really interesting about YouTube doing this is there are more people watching things on YouTube than ever before from creator channels. And so saying like, hey, you're going to watch Picard and you're going to watch Carey Cakes. Why not watch him in the same interface? Could be a compelling pitch for YouTube here. Well, and my question is when does the rest of YouTube TV start moving over here? Because I get having a dedicated TV app. There are just some subscribers there. I just want a TV experience. I don't want all that crazy YouTube stuff. I watch a ton of YouTube content as well as over the air or what have you cable kind of related content. And so it would be really nice to be able to say like, hey, my cloud DVR, there's no reason that just can't automatically be a tab in my YouTube interface. Maybe that gets a little busy. Maybe it's still like still the YouTube TV app is the better experience. But there are so many shows that have analogs over the air that I watch that I'm having to go between apps on my Roku TV that would be just so nice to have that. So I hope this is a sign that the walls come down on this even more because I just want my entertainment. If I'm paying Google, especially from a premium subscriber, I'm paying Google for all this stuff. Just put it all in one spot and make it easy, Google. Yeah. Well, they were having carriage disputes with Roku. They were putting YouTube TV available through the YouTube app on Roku. So there's precedent. They could just make it easy, make it all one out. Do it. All right, let's talk music. Amazon has long given prime subscribers access to a limited collection, around two million songs in Amazon music at no additional cost. If you're a prime subscriber is like a sampler. You like two million, we got more. If you wanted full access to the whole catalog, which would be more equivalent to what you get from Spotify or Apple music, you had to subscribe to Amazon music unlimited. That's an extra 899 a month and gives you 100 million tracks, including new releases, exclusive artists back catalog stuff, stuff like you would expect from a full on music service. So it was two million for free just, you know, as a taste and then an 899 a month service. However, Rich, that's not the same anymore. It's not things, things they are a change in much like the times they are changing things up now offering some access to its full or now offering access to its full Amazon music unlimited catalog to all prime subscribers at no additional cost. Prime subscribers can only shuffle play songs from an artist album or playlist, but you have access to that full catalog. Now you can also stream personalized playlist. You can make, you know, make your own and listen to that as much as you want and download songs for offline listening. However, a prime subscriber can't stream a song on demand or in higher quality with spatial audio HD and UHD formats. Those are going to still be limited to prime music unlimited. So the limited things are in the unlimited subscription. Just to be clear. So the limits are now on features, not on songs. Yes, the catalog is makes sense. Yeah. Amazon Prime subscribers also going to get many of the top podcasts in their Amazon music app without ads. Not all of them, but some of them. So shows from CNN, NPR, wonderies, shows, ESPN, some Amazon exclusives, etc. The Amazon music app is also getting a redesign and it'll include a new podcast preview feature. I mean, you can listen to some clips from episodes to kind of help folks discover new shows. It does feel like this is a way for Amazon to say, we know we raised Amazon Prime's price earlier this year. So we're going to give you something new, right, Tim? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the podcast up here could be really compelling for all prime subscribers. I think having access to premium podcasts at free will be definitely a win. And having access to that content is great too. I'm actually excited about the addition of really high quality audio here. This is on par with what title is offering in terms of bit rate and having spatial audio as well. That's something that really only Apple music is making a big deal of. And if Amazon can make a big push on that front too, that could make this a pretty compelling option for those who have their new Atmos setups at home. I think they want to have a little bit more music going through there as well as movies and things like that. Well, I think Amazon hopes that it will be compelling because that is the stuff that they are enticing people with the unlimited tier. And, you know, Tom, you pointed this out that the catalog is no longer enough, I guess, to draw it. They feel like enough to drive people solely to that. Instead, they're baking it in as a value add to prime and say, listen, music. I always maintain music has so much more stickiness. Like then video stuff where when you can unsubscribe to anything any given month, yeah, you can binge your your House of the Dragon or whatever you have. And you don't need to keep that like on you. You don't need to feel like you can access that anytime. Whereas music has so much more repeatability and you want to have your same playlists and stuff like that. So I feel like it's smart if they want to keep people on that prime bandwagon to do that. I actually did enjoy that the weird, really tiny two million song things. I have two small kids and there was a ton of kids music on there. But that actually onboarded me to YouTube music because I still felt like Amazon unlimited wasn't offering me enough of the integrations with some of the other smart home stuff that I had. So there are there are some other things that can push people into that. But if it was included for free, I probably would have figured out how to make do since, you know, if you're already paying for prime. I do feel like that is a really, really interesting catch there. Yeah, I do feel that nine dollars a month is asking a lot for not a lot in this case. I mean, having you HD and spatial audio is great. But I think for most people having access to the music is really what they want. And so that seems like a big ask for not a major return when you compare, you know, what you get from zero to everything on Apple music, that kind of thing. So I wonder how many people are really going to be willing to spend an extra nine dollars just for our quality, just for streaming what they want to just for offline access. Yeah, well, the bigger one to me is being able to say, Oh, I want to listen to anti fragile by Lucera film right now, pick that right. That included with prime video, you can't pick that. You just have to listen to a playlist and hope it comes up. So that that seems to be the bigger compelling paywall you'd run into that would make people pay. I just don't know how they run into that. You have to choose to be using Amazon music in the first place, which probably means you know this is available through prime. And you don't have another music service. It just seems to be a, you know, you start to slice the potential audience pretty thin at that point. The interesting thing to me is how this compares to what Spotify is offering, right? The market leader, you know, in most markets when it comes to or in major market, few major markets. I don't know why I'm qualifying this so much when it comes to streaming music because you have their ad supported tier and you're basically getting all the functionality of the ad supported tier. But you don't get ads like this. You don't get ads. Yeah. It's a, you know, the same thing with the podcast stuff like Amazon's going or Spotify is going super hard to expand their podcast offerings. But even for premium subscribers, when you're paying a monthly fee, there's no way to get ad free stuff. And they're throwing that in there with prime where, you know, the, the, the cost of that is massed to a once a year payment for a lot of people. Some of the people do monthly. I know on that one as well. So I think you have to look at it also in terms of how they're, you know, kind of going after the market leader there. And, you know, if you're looking at that, trying to get people to move over from someone that has the dominant market share, I think it's, it can be theoretically a compelling argument, depending on how you listen. Well, folks, it's time to get our holiday gift card list in order. Each year we send every patron who wants one a holiday gift card with exclusive art from Len Peralta. I think this year is his most beautiful art yet. I can't wait for folks to see it. If you'd like the card, make sure you're a patron if you're not already and then check patreon.com slash pledges. Make sure we have your proper mailing address by November 15th and you'll get the exclusive DTNS holiday card mailed right to you from us. Thank you. Gasoline petrol powered cars have had more than a century to develop safety systems prevent controlled explosions of petrol from turning into a fiery inferno during a crash. But EVs have different challenges. They are less likely to explode. They still can. They also can electrocute a passenger or a first responder. Tim recently visited Mercedes Benz at their testing facility in Germany to look at what they're doing to improve safety in the EVs. Tim, what did you find? Yeah, it was a really interesting visit after their facility in Immendig in Germany, which is this massive place where they have miles and miles of test roads that are all designed to replicate different areas of the country. They have miles of South Korean paint lines and road signs, American signs, Europe, everything else. So they can test all their vehicles and all the markets in the world that they're going to be sold in. But the main thing that they do there is really test safety. And so we got a lot of demonstrations about driving on ice, avoiding collisions with pedestrians and things like that. But what was really interesting was to sit down and talk with their engineers about the things that they've been doing to improve the safety of their EVs, particularly the EQE sedan and the EQS sedan, which are coming to market now. And it's interesting because a lot of stuff that applies to a normal luxury sedan like stability control, traction control, that all applies here too. But also we need extra stuff to make sure that these cars are safe both before collision, in a collision, and then after collision too. Because if you think about a first responder, I had a conversation with a captain of the FDNY this spring. And he said that when they're arriving to a car crash these days, they often don't know if a car even is an EV because they're not often clearly labeled. And if it is an EV, they don't know where they can safely cut without cutting into a high voltage line. So Mercedes-Benz are doing things like automatically disabling high voltage systems in EVs and routing their cables in a smart way to make sure that first responders are not at risk when they get to these cars. Yeah, I thought it was interesting, all the automatic protections were used to the ones like airbags that you talked about in your article. But having an automatic cutoff that says, we think we've been in a crash, let's keep the minimal power on for displays and emergency calling features. But let's stop the battery from running power through those lines. Because like you were telling me earlier, even if they're well marked, you may not know they're there if they're crumpled under something. Right. These cables, the high voltage ones are the ones that provide power from the battery to the motors basically. They're orange, they're wrapped in Kevlar, they're very hard to damage. So in that case, the occupants are particularly safe. But when it comes to a first responder, they're going to bring out the jaws of life and they're going to start cutting that car up. So another thing that Mercedes has done is they've run a cable through the A-pillar, which is the pill that kind of wraps around the front windscreen. If that cable is cut by the jaws of life, then it also will immediately disable all the power in the car too. Again, adding more safety and security to make sure that nobody gets electrified. Yeah. And the batteries can also explode. They may not be quite as explosive as gasoline, but is there anything they're doing to prevent that from happening? Right. So there is a lot of advanced battery monitoring that's going on all the time. So each individual cell, there's a massive battery pack in the floor of the car, but that's made up of a lot of different cells. And the car can monitor the temperature of those cells to make sure that there's no thermal overload going on, which would cause the battery to potentially rupture and catch fire. So that's going on all the time and certainly continues going on after a crash. But they've also wrapped the battery in a honeycomb of extruded aluminum, which is this really thick webbing of material to make sure that if you are in a major side impact that the car absorbs the energy from the crash and that doesn't actually then get into the battery pack and cause any ruptures there. So it's physically protected, but there's also a lot of smarts going into the temperature monitoring and management to make sure that the car is basically keeping itself safe. Because once those battery packs start to go up, they go into a thermal overload, which is basically once cell ruptures gets very hot causes the next one to explode. And that's when we see these giant clouds of sparks from EVs when they've caught fire. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's a very dramatic, very scary thing. And all that you can do at that point is just start dumping water on it and wait for it to finally go out. Yeah. So better to stop it from happening in the first place. Absolutely. Yes. A little bit of prevention is a very, very important thing. Tim, with all this stuff, obviously, safety is a product differentiator for an automaker, but is there, have you heard any noise from Mercedes or any of the other EV makers about kind of safety standards best practices? Obviously, like you mentioned, like the high voltage lines wrapped in Kevlar orange, but like something like that, even if they're not not even talking about licensing, but just like standards. Is that out there? It's definitely one area that needs improvement for sure. Orange cables for high voltage is definitely standardization, but in terms of wrapping in Kevlar and things like that, that's definitely something that Mercedes is taking to the next level. But one thing that Mercedes is hoping to bring to the table is providing more information to first responders. Again, when I was talking with that captain from the FDNY, he said that they really don't have any standardized information from manufacturers. They don't even know where to look to find out where they can safely cut. What Mercedes-Benz is doing is putting a QR code inside the door frame so that you can walk up with your smartphone, scan that and very quickly get all the information that you need to know where you can safely cut and what the details about this car are. That is not a standard yet. The industry is really working to try to come forward and try to find a way to make it easier for first responders to figure out what they can do safely, but there's still a lot of opportunity there for improvement and I hope that comes soon. That's a perfect use case for augmented reality. If you have a properly working augmented reality headset that can recognize the car and then mark the places where it's safe to cut and where the power lines are, incredibly useful stuff. That'd be great. The last thing that I thought was interesting in your article was the thing they're doing to protect your ears during a crash. Tell me a little more about that. They're using what's called pink noise, which is basically static. If the car thinks that you're going to get into a crash, the speaker suddenly blasts out this pink noise, which is actually kind of scary. I heard a few times as we were going through these demos. What that happens is it causes the inner ear to close a little bit and it protects your ear from the incredibly loud sound of the collision and the airbags going off as well. It's actually proven to reduce hearing damage because oftentimes you'll hear people getting out of the car. They can't talk to the first responders but they can't tell them if they're injured because they can't hear anything because of those airbags. Pink noise actually can save your ears permanently and also in the short term. Wow. That's crazy. Tim is in one of the last bastions of fax machine technology, Rich, but it's fast becoming one of the only places where you can find a thriving fax machine community. You got a couple of business verticals, but Japan is really one of the holdouts and the UK is maybe trying to accelerate that their communications regulator, Ofcom, is putting another nail in the coffin of the facsimile machine. It's proposed changes for telcos to no longer require providing fax services as part of the Universal Service Obligation or USO. Currently, two telcos in the UK are responsible for universal service, BY and KCOM. It's consulted on the rule change, finding it was appropriate for fax to be removed from the USO given it's limited on going use. Ofcom expects to publish a statement on the changes in early 2023. It doesn't sound, at least from the BBC report we were looking at, that there is the groundswell of no, please save our fax service. I'm sure someone's upset about it. Tim, can you do us a favor and send a fax while you're in Japan? I actually don't have one in my room. I've been here in a couple of years. It's interesting to see there are, there's less forms to fill out. In fact, you know, when you used to come to Japan, they'd stick like a whole book of paper. They'd stick it into your passport, basically, and there'd be just minutes of them filling out forms in the back end. It's getting a little bit easier here, but there's still an amazing number of forms to be filled out. Whenever you buy anything, Japanese folks still seem to love their paperwork. Yeah, I know they're trying to move them on to a digital ID, and that's not going well. People are resisting that. So, yeah, interesting to see. But sad to see the receding of the fax. Cutting the infrastructure to kill the service. Soon it will just be a sound effect. In a movie, yeah. That's all people will know it from. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Yesterday on our extended show that the patrons get good day internet, Dr. Nikki was talking about her experience with the haiku box. It detects bird song and can identify which birds are singing, she said bird song. She also mentioned the Merlin app that can do this on your phone, and Steven Broomfield heard that and wrote in and said, a few weeks ago while my wife and I were out walking our dog in suburban Denver, we heard this strange noise, like a high-pitched trill. I can honestly say that in the 50-plus years of living in this area, I have never heard this sound before. When we looked up, we saw what we thought was a flock of Canada geese. The sound, however, was so strange there was no way these were geese. I then remembered the segment you did on the Merlin app. Within a second or two, it identified the sound as the Sandhill Crane. My wife gave me that oh-so-common look that says, you're such a nerd, but I'm glad you knew how to do that. Steve says, now we just need Google to build this into Android, like the now-playing feature, which also comes in very handy for impressing my iPhone-carrying wife. Thanks for the nerd flex, Steve. Don't get them ideas. Merlin being acquired. It's so cool. It's good stuff. Well, also good stuff is having Tim Stevens on the show. Tim, thank you so much for being on. This was awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me. Like I said, I'm not here in Japan. I'm really excited to be here and working on a lot of cool features, which you'll be seeing in a lot of different automotive and technology publications in the next couple of weeks. Where can people check you out if there's one spot? Definitely check me out on Substack Tim Stevens at Substack.com. Fantastic. And a special thanks to Louis Saint-Amour, who's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thanks for all the years of support, Louis. I mean, double thanks because Louis Saint-Amour is, and it's a thing supporter too. So Rich and I are well familiar with Louis from that show as well. So thank you so much, Louis Saint-Amour. It's good to have your name read over here as well. Of course, Louis Saint-Amour, one of the people who recognizes the importance of independent technology news voices out there. If you would like to be like Louis, support us. Patreon.com slash DTNS. And if you are a patron, stick around. That extended show, Good Day Internet, starts right now. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then.