 Coming up on DTNs, Take Heart, Audio Snobz, Lostless Music is becoming the norm, YEsports players are becoming streamers instead, and the real reasons AT&T is spinning out Warner into a merger with Discover. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, May 17th, 2021 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Barrett. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And from Toronto, I am Jen Cutter. Yes, sometimes host of Daily Tech News show, or Daily Tech headlines, and writer and producer, Jen Cutter, welcome, good to have you. Always my pleasure to be here. We were just discussing Jack and the Beanstalk on good day internet, really breaking it down though. I think we learned a lot. If you'd like to learn it with us, get that wider conversation on good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNs. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Amazon launched an ad-supported video streaming service and it's Amazon India Android app called Mini TV with plans to come to iOS and the web in the coming months. The service mostly offers content that debuted on other platforms from large web studios like TVF and Pocket Asus, content from several comedians, and many more new and exclusive videos in the coming months. Samsung showed off a prototype double-folding OLED panel with a maximum size of 7.2 inches at its Display Week 2021 event. Also at the event, the company showed a slideable OLED display that extends horizontally, a 17-inch 4.3-foldable panel for laptops, and an under-panel camera display inside a laptop concept that would allow for edge-to-edge displays. App researcher Jane Manchin-Wong reports that Twitter's upcoming subscription service will be named Twitter Blue, priced at $2.99 per month. According to Wong, Twitter Blue will let users save tweets into user-created collections and could offer a 30-second undo feature after publishing a tweet. Microsoft Teams is now available for free personal use. This is after Microsoft announced a preview of that use of it back in June 2020. Apps are now available on web, mobile, and desktop. Microsoft will also continue to offer 24-hour video calls for up to 300 people, although eventually that will be reduced to 60-minute calls with up to 100 participants. But you don't need a subscription to Office if you want to get it. The smart home company, Eufy, confirmed that a software bug and a server update resulted in some users being shown live and recorded camera feeds of unassociated accounts. Although the company maintains this impacted .001% of users, so the company says almost nobody had this happen to them. But some people did. The company recommends users unplug and reconnect to the camera, then log out and back into their account to ensure no one else has access. All right, we got a big shakeout happening in streaming services. As we expected, the streaming market will only hold so many competitors. And one of the biggest signs of consolidation broke Monday morning. AT&T and Discovery have reached an agreement to combine their media divisions into a joint venture that will be 71% owned by AT&T shareholders and 29% owned by Discovery shareholders. So pretty much all of Discovery goes in here and the Warner Media section of AT&T goes in here into a new company. They have not named it yet, eagerly awaiting that. But the CEO will be Discovery's current CEO, David Zaslaw. The new company will encompass Warner Media's movie studio, its television studios, and all of its networks, that's the Turner Networks, TBS, TNT, HBO, et cetera, along with Discovery's networks. And that includes all the scripts networks they acquired in 2018. So food, HGTV, Discovery, Discovery Science, et cetera, et cetera. Discovery brings in a lot of unscripted content, international distribution, which is something that HBO had a little bit of, and international sports rights. So my thinking is we might see a new sports service spin-off out of this. Zaslaw says the company combined spends $20 billion a year on content. The new service will likely launch bundles, at least Discovery Plus and HBO Max will be bundled. They might add some new services here. Whatever they do, Zaslaw said, quote, in terms of bundling, we're going to do it differently. So I'm very curious what that means. One of the principal motivations behind the move is to reduce debt on AT&T. So AT&T is gonna get $43 billion in cash back out of this deal. And Warner Media retains some of the debt. That takes it off AT&T's books. AT&T believes this transaction will help it reach its debt reduction targets a year earlier than it expected. And that's gonna let AT&T increase its capital expenditures, mostly on networking. And they mentioned Fiber by name at Fiber and 5G. So they're gonna raise that from $18 billion to $24 billion this year, even though the deal is not expected to close until mid-2022. That's the most important part here is if you're like, okay, it's done. No, Warner and Discovery will not be together until mid-next year. So kind of forget this is happening until then. But yeah, Sarah, there are a lot of interesting things falling out of this. Yeah, AT&T kind of going off of Verizon's playbook as of late, wanting cash to build more infrastructure. Now, AT&T is still owning 71% of this new combined venture with Discovery. So it seems like a pretty good deal for the AT&T side. I know we've all been talking about when does the consolidation begin? I mean, it's already beginning, but this seems like a pretty good deal. Some pretty high-profile channels being added to this lineup. It makes the whole thing much more attractive to somebody who's saying, okay, I'm a new cord cutter or I'm gonna try out some services. This gives me more bang for my buck. We don't know what it's going to be called. I'm always curious about bundling anything that has attractive sports content without it being a standalone sports spin-off thing. Like you mentioned, Tom, I mean, is there a way to somehow bring sports into and offering without it just having to be full on sports so that people understand that it's there? I don't know. And yeah, I mean, nothing's gonna happen at least for the next couple of years and something could fall apart in between now and then. But it just seems not necessarily great for the consumer but smart for the companies. Jen, do you have any thoughts? Well, I'm definitely pro more sports and but the international aspect is pretty interesting. Like for HBO Max, you guys can just buy HBO Max. Up here, it's through Crave, which is through Bell. So with people doing bigger pushes internationally and clearing all those rights in advance, I wonder if that will be a standalone thing in Canada or whether it's gonna have to go through one of the existing media things and with our media rules, there's a lot in flux with that right now up in Canada. But better infrastructure is definitely huge. And I hope that people in the correct areas for that fiber get to benefit sooner than later than, you know, 2040. Well, and that's a really good point is that HBO has had different deals in every market depending on whether they want to operate like HBO Nordic or wanted to partner like with Crave. And this doesn't change that overnight but suddenly discovery is available in a lot of markets and they can start transferring deals over to that since it's all part of the same company here. I expect that you will see something along the lines of Disney Plus come out of this where HBO Max is sort of the, that maybe the Disney Plus analog, Discovery Plus is the Hulu analog and then there is probably going to be a new sports streaming service out of Warner Media. I say that for two reasons. One is Discovery has so much international sports. Turner has so much domestic sports in the US that I think the reason we haven't seen them commit to adding sports to HBO Max is they thought something like this might happen. They keep saying like, yeah, yeah, we're getting sports. We're getting hockey, for instance, in the United States, Turner is getting hockey but the obvious thing would be to say, and we're going to throw it into HBO Max and they've been kind of cagey about that. Like, yeah, we won't be doing any sports until next year and I think it's because they're probably going to come up with a sports package that will bring in some of the discovery stuff that Discovery has, which again, is mostly outside of the United States but all together it can be packaged up into a worldwide offering that would have different sports depending on what market you're in. Well, the lossless audio wars have begun, people. Did you know? Yep, well now you know. Apple Music will bring lossless music options to its entire catalog and spatial audio with songs authored in Dolby Atmos able to stream to any W1 or H1 equipped headphones. That's limited for now to the AirPods Pro or AirPods Max which support spatial audio. Apple did confirm though, no AirPods model supports Apple Music lossless files, just AirPods and other Bluetooth earbuds as well, streaming instead with the Bluetooth AAC codec. All of this starts in June at no additional cost for Apple Music subscribers. Apple's lossless uses the ALAC codec at 16-bit 44.1 kilohertz, 24-bit 48 kilohertz as well as high resolution lossless at 24 bits at 192 kilohertz, at least that's the top level. You can choose the format when it launches by adjusting audio quality settings in your app. Now, by complete coincidence, I mean, it's lossless wars after all. Amazon announced lossless music will be available to all Amazon Music unlimited subscribers without having to pay for the HD Music tier. Lossless music will be available to Amazon individual and family plans, no extra cost there, although does not apply to student plans. So student plans don't qualify, family plans and individual do. Amazon offers more than 70 million songs in CD quality and more than 7 million in Ultra HD. Now, Tidal, which was sort of the lossless king of streaming up until this point, has offered lossless and supported Dolby Atmos and Sony 360 Reality for years at $19.99 per month. RIP Tidal, now I'm just kidding, some people still like Tidal. Yeah, don't be predicting Tidal's death, my goodness. I just occurred to me that this may be one of the first symptoms of 5G. So increased capacity, increased speed combined with the burgeoning larger storage and higher processing power of phones means that it makes sense to be able to offer lossless encoding to people because even if they're streaming it or downloading it for storage, they probably can handle it. Whereas five years ago, it was just too data intensive. I know that most of the uses of lossless audio are gonna probably be in a home setting where you have really good speaker system and everything. But I think that may have been one of the things impeding folks was like, yeah, but do we wanna use up all that bandwidth when it's at more of a niche use? Whereas now they can afford to be like, yeah, even if somebody wants to put this on their phone, it's probably not gonna give them a bad experience. So for people, like obviously the people who already have the home system, they are good to go, they're ready for this, they're looking forward to this. If music is not your thing, is there a reason to upgrade if you don't have the speakers and the high fidelity, like perfectly treated rooms to do this? Because a lot of people I know, their best speaker system is in their car. Yeah, yeah, the option to upgrade doesn't mean it's a compelling, they're not compelling you to upgrade. You can keep that setting appropriate to your devices and you probably should, right? Just to save the bandwidth and the data, it's only there for people who have the devices that can take advantage of it and your wireless earbuds can't really take advantage of it. Sarah, you're gonna do this? Come on, you got good speakers, right? Well, I have put less emphasis on my home speaker system than I have in years past. I, listen, anything that offers the best option available, I always kind of gravitate towards that. But I've never paid for title, I was kidding about title, by the way, please don't submit your angry emails or do, it's fine. But I understand why someone says, hey, listen, this is what's important to me, sound quality is super important. Yeah, I have the equipment in order to enjoy the sound, the way it's meant to be, you know, meant to be enjoyed. And that's fine and good. I am using my Bluetooth earbuds for pretty much everything these days. It's to hear you during the show right now, it's to listen to podcast music, not the best quality in the entire world, pretty good. So this is not something that I will personally take advantage of, but I know a lot of people out there care. Yeah, well, I have Nate Langston on the show next week and I know, I know because he's listening right now and he told me, he has thoughts. So we may follow up on this. Wired recently featured a piece looking at a number of top gamers quitting full-time eSports organizations to pursue careers as influencers on Twitch and YouTube. Often pro gamers make this choice due to burnout with causes ranging from rigid practice schedules, uncertainty of how gameplay on titles will evolve in stringent contracts limiting their streaming options. But the shift isn't just limited to the players. eSports organizations, game publishers and sponsors have also been increasingly funneling resources away from competitive tournaments and increasingly into streaming influencers. While the eSports industry brought in roughly a billion dollars in revenue in 2020, wired sources say most eSports organizations operated a loss. Return on traditional eSports has also not been seen by publishers, Riot Games disclosed it was only approaching break-even on eSports and Epic Games disclosing at trial it overestimated eSports opportunities by $154 million in 2019. This is something that was happening before we all shut down for COVID but that certainly hasn't helped, has it, Jen? No, there are many factors in play here. And on the COVID note, yeah, last year and this year is a huge reduction in number of tournaments happening. There's been some great work done again over the last two years about making online tournaments viable. It's not the same, but you got to do something right now. And then as things start to reopen, it's still going to be complicated from people from certain reasons to get visas to travel to the same tournaments they used to go to before. So we keep adding different complexities on top of each other. When everyone is stressed, everybody is burned out, teams have been cutting their rosters because they're not seeing any profit, eliminating whole teams. So when you are a top player and you have your own dedicated fan base, if you've still got the drive to keep pushing in eSports, you could probably make a go but in terms of your long-term career, you are better off transitioning to becoming a content creator. Whether that means streaming on Twitch where you have to still keep up the grind day after day or if you transition to YouTube where you can be a little more relaxed about it, you can still stream live like daily, weekly, but you can also do a lot more things pre-produced so that you can actually like have a weekend off, go on vacation at some point, protect yourself from the burnout. And even the Twitch people still have to hire editors to get their content on YouTube because you need all those income sources. And yeah, now that companies are spending even more money on content creators, it's kind of a no-brainer move for a lot of players who have that fan base. I mean, having eSports, Epic Games for example, saying, yeah, we thought we're gonna make more money than we did this back in 2019. So not pandemic related, but this is, you know, it's kind of like a trickle down effect, right? Where it's like, huh, okay. Well, there's demand and there's certainly talent and the whole thing can happen and it's new and sort of exciting on its own. The fact that there is not the money being brought in and especially when you couple that with player burnout that it seems like something that happened in 2020 where everything got shut down just rapidly accelerated this burnout that would have happened pretty soon anyway. Absolutely. And with companies, they're realizing that instead of investing in a whole league and then everyone has to get players and coaches and a team house, they can do like these one-off charity events, get tons of press because everyone's gonna write about it because it's not happening every week. It's a special event and they get bigger bang for the buck and it's more immediate. You don't have to worry about a loss of $20 million at the end of the year. Yeah, I feel like eSports tried to jump straight from development to big league, which is very difficult to do. You have to have an established sport to do that. And even if you do, there's usually an established league that takes up all the air in the room. You don't see people starting new American football, hockey, baseball, professional leagues that are meant to compete at the top levels anymore. I feel like eSports is still in its late 1800s phase where back then you made your money barnstorming. There were organized leagues that you would get paid a little bit to play in, but you made your money going out in the off season and showing up in small towns and putting on a show. And that's what this feels like to me. It's the modern analog of like, sure, you can be in the eSports league, but they're really not paying the bills and they're really hard because it's competitive. So maybe just barnstorm on Twitch and make your money that way. And this also protects you from variety among us and Fall Guys. If you were gonna build like a league around that, what would you do with it now? Cause it was kind of a little bit of a fad and now it's on its way out and Rocket League has researched as a popular eSport and that's been going quietly for a while and it's now slightly more mainstream. So what's the next big multiplayer game gonna be this year? We're all still kind of inside for a while depending on where you are in the world. So surely something's gonna break through. We don't know what it is, but people who are already used to their audience knowing them as a variety streamer, they're good to go. They can jump on any trend. Yeah, I think we'll end up where certain kinds of games, maybe even games developed specifically for eSports will be created. And I don't know when that happens, but I think that happens eventually. And then popular games are the things people stream on Twitch because they're popular right then and you wanna see somebody playing them, but playing it on Twitch doesn't commit you to having to become the best in the world at it for a while, right? Hey, folks, if you wanna join in the conversation in our Discord, link up your Patreon account. You can be in there talking to scuba tetris and old guy and Zoey brings bacon and Nate Langston. They're all in there chatting. Join them, discordpatrion.com slash DTMS. The definition of what a game is and what a game is not has been on trial, literally on trial during the epic versus Apple court case. Now, Apple requires streaming game services like Stadia and Luna to either use web apps or submit each game in its service through the app review process. Apple says it's game, this is how we do it. But game creation platform Roblox has avoided this by removing all mention of games from its app and its web platforms. The games tab on its site has been renamed to Discover. While references to games across the site and documentation now instead references experiences. Throughout games, they're experiences. This is a key distinction for Epic in their antitrust trial with Apple because Epic claims that like Roblox, Fortnite is a metaverse rather than a game. Apple marketing head Tristan Kozminka testified that, quote, if you think of a game or app, games are incredibly dynamic. Games have a beginning and end. There's challenges in place. I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences that are in Minecraft. These are maps, these are worlds and they have boundaries in terms of what they're capable of. To the more fundamental question of whether or not companies should be forced to use Apple's in-app purchasing system, Roblox is plain ball. Yeah, so Jen, I don't play Roblox but I know just enough about it to be dangerous. And it does seem to me like it is more than just a game compared to Fortnite. I don't know that this is going to be a particularly compelling part of the Epic case. I think it's gonna more rest on whether iOS is in fact a market unto itself and all about in-app payments. But it's a fascinating question of, well, would Roblox call it an experience if they didn't have to to get through the Apple filter? Or are they like, no, no, no. It's an entirely new and weird different thing. If you had asked me before the trial where I thought it was going, I'd say like, oh, I think they're kind of getting into dangerous territory about how they want middleware to be handled on the store. And then if you asked me after the two weeks had passed, I'd be like, you know, we might end up with the term games struck from the dictionary as everyone would be brands as experiences. Cause yeah, it's a really fun sidetrack and an otherwise pretty serious trial. For Roblox, download the game. It runs on pretty much everything. I play it on my iPad too. Cause it's the only thing that thing runs right now. And you can get different game experiences. I would still kind of call them games. There's, you know, like the fall guys knock off. There's tons of Adobe games. A lot of RP servers are just role playing. If you wanted to run a pizza place, that is the thing you can do in Roblox. But in terms of the, like looking at the beginning and challenges, based on that, me taking out my garbage, well, okay, so there's a beginning. I have to get it out. I have to challenge myself by not hitting my car as I carry the garbage out. And then when the garbage is out, hooray, the garbage is out. I want the garbage game. Yay. So like, do all these games have an end? Does Counter-Strike have an end? And that's definitely a game. You're still doing everything on repeat. And everything technically ends. Cause when you die, the game is over. When you run out of money in some city, the game is over. Or you decide to, you know, put it down until the next day you've ended it in some respect. I have this issue all the time. And a lot of it is VR experiences. A lot of the VR apps call themselves that too. Cause it's like, it's not a game, it's an experience, it's better than a game. But there are definitely sessions that I will have that I might, I call it playing. I'm playing. But it's like, yeah, the definition of game can be a little wonky sometimes. And I don't think, I understand that Fortnite, Roblox, being something that's bigger than a game might be a little bit of a stretch. Because yeah, it's like, there's a beginning to your fun that you're having or the challenge that you're having. You know, there's some points that are applicable depending on what you're immersing yourself in. And yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's like, if that's really the difference between an experience and a game, then one would think that Apple would say, okay, well, then our game rules apply to experiences as well. You know, it's typical for people to jump to the conclusion that Apple makes these crazy rules because they're anti competitive and want to take all your money. And I don't know, maybe that's still part of it. But that's not where the rules usually start. Usually they start because someone has figured out a way to manipulate the system to get around the rule. The reason they review games is that malicious people were putting content that wouldn't be accepted under another category in as a game. And Apple said, well, hold on, no, we don't want that content in our store. Our stores are fairly tame. We don't allow porn. We don't allow violence. And so we're gonna review games to make sure that they don't violate those. And so we're gonna have different rules for games so that you can't get around it by calling it a game. But then you end up with this situation where Roblox is not trying to do any of that stuff that the game review was designed for. And then they have to say, well, I guess we're gonna call it an experience just to be safe. Or maybe they wouldn't call it an experience anyway, but either way, it looks like they're trying to avoid a rule, but it's a rule that wasn't meant to stop Roblox. It was meant to stop something entirely different. Yeah, there's what? I think two more weeks, like this week and next week, or maybe I think Monday they wanna wrap this up. And I cannot wait to see what comes up next. That becomes like the Twitter character of the day. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's Tim Cook doing the big appearance. So that'll be the grand finale to the Apple Epic trial. Folks, if you've ever wasted minutes wondering if the tiny corner of a car in a capture quadrant counts as a car and then making the wrong choice, no matter what you choose, Cloudflare wants to help. The company announced cryptographic attestation of personhood, a system to use hardware keys, you know, like a Yuba key, to confirm that a user is not a bot instead of using captures. The company said this is only an experiment on a limited basis in English-speaking regions with initial support for Yuba keys, Hyperfido keys, and Thetis Phido-UTF keys. Cloudflare is currently investigating adding other authenticators and indicated it's open to using a phone for authentication through NFC. CEO of the consulting firm WebAuth and works, Ackerman Urie, criticized the system, pointing out it only provides a device model is present. It does not prove that a human is using the device and Cloudflare even admits that pushing the security key button could be automated. They whimsically imagined, you know, one of those little ducks that goes into the water, so like, yeah, you can set that up, something like that. If you're pushing people to use a second factor anyway, a lot of sites might just go ahead and log you in, but there are still situations where, you know, setting up an account, often they will put a capture in to stop bots from automating setting up accounts and you wouldn't have two-factor authentication at that point, so it could be useful for that. Yeah. I got you skeptical, I can tell. You're both like, I don't know. This sounds like more trouble than figuring out where the cars are, is that it? Well, I, listen, I am not the capture apologist here. I think it's very silly. I actually don't have an issue with like, yeah, where's the bicycle in this picture? There's no bicycle in this picture, I'm a human. I'm okay with those. It's usually the strange words and letters that, you know, have been warped to the point where I'm like, no human could read this, you know? Start over, start over kind of thing. So yes, capture could be better. This, I can see where the automation and somebody getting very creative and it not being the real person that's supposed to be the person, you know, pressing the button could happen. I don't see that as like a real widespread issue, but then again, early days of this, but yeah, it's, capture always struck me as, this is this ridiculous thing that we do until we get something better. I would not mind an extra use for my UB key. And I would also love to never have to identify a traffic light again. Yeah. And if you could do it with your phone, cause phones can be phytomultifactors. So your phone just, you know, tap it or even, you know, using Bluetooth. It says, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there's an actual person here. Again, there's some mitigations that have to be done to make sure that that's not also automated. But I think it's an interesting thing to investigate on cloud players behalf. So yeah, that's good. Well, if you have interesting things that Cloudflare or any other company might be doing, you want us to talk about it on a future show, you got questions about anything that we talked about in the past, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. We also like to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including today, Miss Music Teacher, James C. Smith, and Justin Zellers. Thank you to our patrons. Also thanks to our brand new boss, Jeremy Matthews, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thanks, Jeremy. Your idea was class. Be like Jeremy. Yeah, be like Jeremy. Jeremy, you're the hero of the day. Also a hero, Jen Cutter. Jen, thanks for being with us today and what's been going on with you and where can people keep up with it? People can keep up with me at Jen Cutter on Twitter and Instagram, that's Jen with two Ns. And last year, I emptied all of my storage spaces that I had everywhere, holding all my game stuff. So I have spent the last couple of weeks unearthing those boxes and I will be posting what I have found, like eight billion boxes of E3 materials and all demos, tech that never made it, consoles that never made it. So that is all coming up on my personal feeds. Excellent. Well, we are live on this show Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, that's 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow with Rich DeMillo, back to you then. Rob, Rob DeMillo, Rob, good night, Rob. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.