 Coming up on DTNS Paypal starts taking Bitcoin, Amazon's Luna game streaming service launches. And is this the end for Quibi? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 21st, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. In the Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Adresha. We were just talking about Quibi and some of our thoughts extended on that as well as what comes after Gen Z. That's all on good day internet. Get that wider conversation at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Dropbox family plan is now available worldwide. The new plan gives up to six users access to one interface, a shared space called family room, two terabytes of shared storage and all the features of a plus account for $20 a month. For users who pay for a full year up front only pay $203.88, which averages out to be about $17 a month. As Netflix predicted its subscriber growth slowed in quarter three to a rise of 2.2 million subscribers, mixing its own forecast of 2.5 million revenue exceeded expectations, but earnings were off as well. Netflix also announced it will test a 48 hour free streaming event called StreamFest. This only happened in India though on December 4th. Acer announced several products, including a $109 smart speaker called Halo with Google Assistant and lots of LEDs coming in Q1 2021, a 14 inch Acer Swift 3X laptop with Intel's Iris Z Max discrete graphics card starting at $900 in December. The Chromebook Spin 513, the first Chromebook to run on Qualcomm Snapdragon 7C processor coming to North America in February starting at $400. New game monitors and its predator and Nitro lineups, most of them are IPS panels compatible with Nvidia's G-Sync and the Porsche Design Acer Book RS designed in partnership with as you guessed Porsche with the 11th gen Intel processors and Iris Z graphics. That one starts at $1,399 which isn't all that bad. Ubisoft is merging Uplay and Ubisoft Club into a single hub for quote in game services called Ubisoft Connect. This starts October 29th with the launch of Watch Dogs Legion. It's a big game release coming up for them. Ubisoft wants to make cross platform progression and cross play available on most of its games. Ubisoft Connect will connect or rather launch on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch and come to Xbox Series X and S and PlayStation 5 later. So you'll have to watch for that. It will come to Nvidia's GeForce Now and Amazon Luna later this year. Facebook is testing a service in that place that always gets the coolest stuff first, Calgary, Alberta. It's a service called Neighborhoods that lets people connect to folks who live close to them. Kind of the next door clone. To join a neighborhood you have to confirm your location and agree to let others in the group see your post there. But it does not automatically grant other neighborhood users the right to see your profile info. All right, let's talk Bitcoin because Scott's here. PayPal will let US customers buy, sell and hold not just Bitcoin but also Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash which is a different cryptocurrency that's split off of Bitcoin and another cryptocurrency called Litecoin, those four to start with. They're partnering with a company called Paxos to do the wallet management for all of these features. Money and selling will roll out in the US this month with the ability to fund your purchases coming in early 2021. So right now, once it shows up in your PayPal account, you'll be able to buy Bitcoin, you'll be able to I guess send Bitcoin to your friends, but in early 2021 you'll be able to actually use them to check out at PayPal which includes 26 million PayPal merchants. Now you would use your Bitcoin for the purchase but it would be converted into dollars or euros or whatever local currency to give to the merchant. So the merchant would never see the Bitcoin, they would just get the money in the local fiat currency as it's called. That'll eventually cost you a conversion fee as you convert your Bitcoin into the local currency. Those fees are laid out there around a few percent depending on how much the amount is and PayPal will expand the features to Venmo and other countries in the first half of 2021. However, if you're converting Bitcoin into cash right now, which you can't do with merchants but you could just do in your own account, they're going to waive those fees through early 2021. Oh, and by the way, Bitcoin's price jumped 8% to almost break $13,000. It's highest point since July of last year. I was going to say that's a lot. So really what you've described and we've gotten a little more sense of it since we talked about it on our morning show this morning, it's like any other currency transfer right now. If I want to send money to a Canadian or pay for a Canadian product or European or whatever, I do that with PayPal. As far as it's concerned on my end, those are dollars going out and they're getting euros or pounds or Canadian dollars, wherever it happens to be. This is that just Bitcoin is the money you have in your account and you're paying for items and they still get those currencies, those denominations. Yeah, that's the way it will work next year. Once this is all up and running, you can have two Bitcoin in your account, which right now would be $26,000. That'd be quite a lot of money. And then if you're paying for something that's $1,000, they'll take the equivalent slice of Bitcoin out of your account, convert it to $1,000, give it to the merchant and deduct the Bitcoin from your account. But it's a way for you to use your Bitcoin to buy stuff without a merchant having to take Bitcoin. PayPal's acting as the intermediary. Paxos, if you're familiar with Coinbase or anything like that, Paxos is acting like that. They're the wallet where you can buy and sell your Bitcoin and PayPal is doing the interfacing with the merchants and everything. So Paxos is essentially providing the back end, which is the function you'll get now. What you'll get now is the ability to buy and sell the Bitcoin. In the future, you'll be able to convert it at checkout. I think that's the big innovation here is, man, PayPal, you can actually buy things with Coinbase accounts, but you have to have a participating merchant. PayPal is making that super easy. This is going to skyrocket Bitcoin usage quite a bit because instead of having to look for the places to take it, suddenly everywhere you see that has a PayPal checkout, you'll be able to use your Bitcoin holdings to pay. So do you think there's ever a day where you say, hey, Scott, I really, I'm going to buy that couch you have for sale and I'm going to give you a 10 Bitcoin for it and I'll be able to accept it as Bitcoin. And it went from your Bitcoin PayPal to my Bitcoin, Bitcoin PayPal and there was never any other dollars involved or anything. Do you think that's don't know? I wouldn't say that'll never happen. But I think that's an end consequence of a lot of other factors. I think for the, for a long period of time, it's just going to be, oh, I was able to get some Bitcoin. Oh, I want to buy a couch from Scott here. Let me convert it into $300 or whatever he's charging for it. Sure. Well, it's a nice couch moving on. So Bitcoin ain't going to save these guys. Quibi just launched apps for Apple TV, Android TV and Fire TV, but maybe hold out on downloading them unless you're really curious and just got to try a trial or whatever the information sources say NBC universal and Facebook declined to buy Quibi's catalog of video and Quibi chairman, Jeffrey Katzenberg. And according to the Wall Street Journal, during a call with Quibi's investors Wednesday, Katzenberg announced the company would indeed shut down Q of the funeral music as Norman Chan on Twitter said, Ninja lasted longer on mixer. Oh, Norm Chan and Chan getting in the burn. Well, it's it is a fact. Actually, we don't we don't know the end date for Quibi, but probably. Yeah, I feel a little bad that I never tried Quibi because it comes up on the show. We got to hurry. That's true. I can still hop in there and check it out. But somewhere someplace thought that was a really cool future for content and figured that all the kids with their phones are going to want this. And I don't know, it feels pretty misguided. So are you I guess you're probably not surprised that we're here. We knew this was all coming. I'll tell you what I am surprised about. I am surprised that they are ending it now. I thought that they would burn out the cash. They've got, according to the Wall Street Journal, something like seven or eight hundred million dollars still left to burn. And I would have expected Katzenberg to go down swinging and just just use all the money until there was no more money and say, Hey, sorry, investors. I don't know if he's under pressure from the investors not to do that. I don't know if the continuing pandemic made him realize that he could spend all the money he wants. It's not going to change the conditions soon enough. He needs people to be back out in the world to be able to fit his original business model, which is I'm waiting in line for a thing and a crowd of people. And I just want to watch something really fast, whether that would have ever worked either I'm skeptical of, but it's certainly not going to happen now. And and they're slow to get these Apple TV, Android TV and Fire TV apps up, even the ones that they they have done with Chromecast and such probably aren't delivering a whole lot of numbers. So it sounds like maybe he just, whether it was his own decision, a combination or just the investors decided, you know what, I'm just going to give you what money we have left back and you can cut your losses. All the TV apps feel like a weird last ditch kind of last breath effort because the whole point of the service was everyone's holding their phone and they're holding it this way. And we're going to give content that will feed into that. It'll be shorter, but it'll be triple A names and people, you know, and stories and directors and stuff that's cream of the crop, but not your TV and not movie theaters where you don't have that phone. In fact, you're encouraged to put it away during those experiences. So the last ditch effort toward the end say, and we're putting apps out on all these, you know, TV boxes just seems weird to me from what I was reading. One of the reasons that NBC and Facebook didn't want to buy the video was that Quibi doesn't own most of it. So most of this video that was produced will just go back to the production companies that were contracted and they'll do whatever they want with it. I'm curious if they're able to sell the turnstile technology to some people keep an eye out for that. Following up on the antitrust lawsuit that the U.S. Department of Justice filed against Google yesterday. We have some more reactions and clarifications that I think shed some good light on the situation. We talked about the basics yesterday, but now that people really had a chance to process it, protocols Emily Bernbaum notes that the suit is quite narrow. The lawsuit itself focuses just on Google text search. It doesn't focus on video. It doesn't focus on image. It doesn't focus on shopping, which has been a subject of antitrust in other places. It focuses on contracts Google has with other companies to make Google a default text search engine. The suit does not bring up Google preferring its own products in that search, which would impact cases against Amazon and Apple. So it's not going to set a precedent there. It doesn't bring up Google acquiring companies to put them out of business as competitors. That's something that would impact Facebook. That's not going to set a precedent there. That means the facts of this case are fairly unique to Google and less likely to impact possible suits against other companies. That's one thing that's important to note. The New York Times Steve Lohr also notes the focus on restrictive contracts and how that's been a successful basis for showing antitrust as far back as the beginning of the Sherman Act back in 1890. In fact, restrictive contracts against distributing Netscape was part of the winning case against Microsoft in 1998. One of the holders of a Google text search contract, Mozilla, however, says, be careful what you do. It could end up hurting us and not Google. Mozilla's Amy Keating wrote in a blog post, the ultimate outcomes of an antitrust lawsuit should not cause collateral damage to the very organizations like Mozilla, best positioned to drive competition and protect the interest of consumers on the web. So they're like, don't just say they can't do contracts or pay for stuff anymore or we run out of money. Back to protocols Burnbomb, she also notes that the suit calls out Google's use of personal information in exchange for free services. This is important because it can be used to show consumer harm. Google's defense is, hey, man, everybody gets our products for free. It's not harm and consumers. So you might see the Department of Justice saying, well, they're not really getting it for free. They're giving up personal information that you then monetize. They're paying for it with their information. And the New York Times Lohr notes that Internet Explorer was also free and the US won its case against Microsoft because its practice of bundling a free browser reduced innovation and consumer choice. So that's another argument the Department of Justice can make against Google. Finally, I want to note Ben Thompson over at Stratechery has an excellent, as he always does, a writeup of this and notes the narrow focus on contracts, writing, quote, instead of trying to argue that Google should not make search results better, the Justice Department is arguing that Google, given its inherent advantages as a monopoly, should have to win on the merits of its product, not the inevitably larger size of its revenue share agreements. So if you've been out there saying, like, yeah, but isn't Google just making a better product? That's why they're so popular. The Department of Justice in the suit, according to Ben Thompson's interpretation, is saying, sure, they make a better product, but now they're staying in their position of market share, not because they continue to make a better product, but because they've locked everyone else out of the market and they should have to continue to compete on being a better product. And then if they keep their percentage, that's great. But if they're not competing on being a better product, even if they maintain quality, it's not fair. It's not allowing anyone to compete with them. While Thompson does expect that Google probably will win this case, he points out that the issues that come up in the case, how they are explored, how they are judged, will provide a template for new legislation as to, like, ah, the courts found this to be legal. We think it should be illegal and we'll make legislation to change that. Well, one thing you said during all this really kicked something off of my head that didn't come up in my head earlier when we were prepping today's show, and that is the idea or the concept of quantifiable personal information designated as currency. In other words, could any of these rulings or could any of this future be, hey, turns out the personal information we give Google is worth something. It isn't just, hey, free product. We actually are paying with the thing we previously have not quantified. But maybe we should start quantifying what that is. Name an address. OK. How about all this other info? What if it's also this info? What if it's all my login or my web traffic info or whatever it is we end up giving Google in the end? Maybe that's worth something. And that's interesting. Like it has a lot of ramifications. But that is a part of this I hadn't really considered before. Yeah, depending on how this plays out, that could be very precedent setting in other ways as well. Well, folks, if you want to talk about this or lots of other things like how much Bitcoin you need to buy a GPU, that's one conversation that's happening right now in our Discord, join on in. Link it to a Patreon account by becoming a patron at Patreon dot com slash D T N S. Amazon's Luna game streaming service opened up to users by invite only. It costs you $5.99 a month, even if you get invited, for access to around 50 games in the default Luna Plus channel. Now, channels from other game publishers like Ubisoft will eventually be available for purchase as add-ons. They're not now. Ubisoft is the only one we know is coming. It's not there yet. But if you want to get Luna Plus for $6 a month and you can wrangle an invite, you'll be able to play it on Windows, Mac, desktop browsers, Fire TV, iPhone and iPad. Not yet on Android. That's interesting. Luna Streams at 1080p. It doesn't support ray tracing, it seems like yet. Although they say they support ray tracing, the ray tracing wasn't able to be turned on in a lot of the games that reviewers were trying. So the reviews are like, this is a pretty good service. They're not raving about it, but they're not trashing it either. Yeah, it seems all right. I mean, they have one up on stadium, which is, you know, we're not charging for the games. You're paying for this service and then the service has games. And then of course there's this whole, you know, add-on thing that they'll be working with people like Ubisoft so that you can do it like you would with movies and say, well, yeah, I really like Prime, but I'd sure like to add Showtime into my list and that's a little bit like that. So those are interesting options and an interesting model to follow. The thing about ray tracing is a little confusing to me because that shouldn't be an act of the service itself or the conveyance of the game to the people. That's all the streaming tech where that should be happening is in a rack of servers that are equipped to handle ray tracing. Then the stream, it's just whatever the stream is. Well, ARS Technica has an explanation. This isn't from Amazon, this is from ARS Technica, but it says, Amazon said its Luna server stack would include Nvidia's ray tracing capable T4 GPUs, but those are from the touring generation whose ray tracing prowess isn't as robust as this year's Ampere line. Gotcha. So they just don't have the newer cards or the newer chips. And I mean, that's fine, that makes sense. Also 1080p, there are a lot of people that are like, well, if this isn't 4K 60, then I'm out. And I'm not one of those people. I think 1080p is perfectly suitable for a service like this. It's pretty suitable for almost any kind of games. And before you call me old man stuck in his old resolution, I'm just saying we're at the point of diminishing returns. Instead of worrying about 4K HDR or everything else, give me a really reliable 1080p service that comes over fast and as latency free as you can, make that the basis for your growth. If you can do better than that down the road, great. But all those promises are fine. I just think for now, just give that a really good shot. And you might actually have something here, or at least the very least a decent competitor to things like XCloud, Stadia and Nvidia's now service. So we'll see how they do. It feels to me like this is good if you want a supplementary service to your normal way of playing games that allows you some more flexibility to play on a bunch of platforms you wouldn't otherwise play on. And you probably don't care if it's 4K, if you're playing on your iPhone to be honest, right? And it just wants the thing to work. It's hilarious. You should be playing that on your iPhone and not your Android phone at first because usually this is flipped, right? You've got the whole trying to get to Apple's mess and you could get conspiratorial saying, well, they've got some deal because of their streaming services or whatever. But we know how they're doing it. They're doing it through this browser method and why they're not doing that on an Android yet. I don't know. It's a web app over at Android, but maybe that's just taken longer to get that done. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Well, let's play a little time for, did you know? Oh, tell me. All right, here we go. App Annie released a report comparing Gen Z movie behavior. Tom, we're one of those, by the way, the Gen Zs. Movie behavior with everybody older than 25, which is, well, henceforth, be referred to as the Olds. So I guess. Well, I think we're the Olds. Are we the Olds? We're the Older than 25. All right. Gen Z are the younger than 25. Oh, I keep thinking Gen X. I did that again. My son's Gen Z. Yeah, this is how you know a Gen X or because he can't remember which letter he is. Yeah, remember, there's only three generations, boomers, millennials, and Gen Z. And then I guess there might be another one that everyone always forgets about. That's how I remember. That's how I remember it as well. All right. Gen Z spends 4.1 hours more per month on non-game apps. That's 10% longer than the Olds. Oh, I have a really good anecdotal thing to say at the end of this. However, the Olds spend 20% longer in their most used games and access them 10% more often. Hmm. So that's interesting. The Olds spend more time playing the games. What are they playing? We don't give up, move on. I don't know, maybe World of Warcraft because we're old. The most popular game category amongst the Olds are puzzle games. All right. Tops. Tops among Gen Z, action games. Both categories have simulation games as number two. Oh, look, old people and young people agree. Simulation games are almost our favorite. Yeah. Some of them are very action-oriented, though, so it leans Z, but anyway. The top apps among Gen Z were Snap, TikTok, and Discord. That order, I assume that's order of most used. I don't actually know that, but that makes sense. Well, it's actually a weirder thing. It's the most over-indexed. Oh, interesting. So there's some math behind determining, like, what's the index of usage and do they use these higher than the normal index? And that's where you get Snap and TikTok. And it goes by market. It's different in different markets. Well, speaking of that, Discord is definitely third. Snap and TikTok might be one or two, depending on which market you're talking about. And speaking of that, this is interesting. Active Gen Z users, rather, are rising faster than the old with Indonesia and Brazil seeing the most growth. So a lot of interesting international points of data and finally, 98% of Gen Z owns a smartphone. That makes sense to me. I don't know why I'd be any different. They basically don't know life without them. Now, I have a son who is a Gen Z. He is 20 years old. He fits nicely into that little category. He's born in the year 2000. And I can tell you almost all of this rings a bell. Almost all of it seems right to me. Just from my own anecdotal experience with him that he spends more time on non-game apps than a lot of us do. He spends a lot of time watching stuff that was popular before I was even old enough to think it was popular. Things like taxi. Like he watches taxi over and over and over. He loves the show taxi. Can't figure it out. But again, spending a lot of time watching things that don't have anything to do with games. And he watches them on a mobile device. He doesn't watch them. On mobile devices. Whereas old people watch things on television. Why am I gonna watch this on my phone? Honestly, on the big screen, my eyes are bad. At the most, it's like a TV or, you know, he's using a computer screen or he's watching it while he's playing a game. Like this concept of sit down in front of a television for the event that is television watching, not in his vocabulary. It's just not a thing he does. This other bit here about TikTok, Snap and Discord with the exception of TikTok, he totally loves that in that order. He loves Snap and he loves Discord. He thinks it's cool to hate on TikTok but that may just be a, I don't know what that is. That's how you know it's popular. Yeah. And then the other bit that really stood out to me was them spending less time in the actual most used games and moving maybe, you know, the theory is moving on to something else. He totally does that. He will sometimes rip through it, destroy whatever game he's playing and then move on or get bored and move on. But either way, it's not like a long, I'm gonna be in a community playing this one game for a really long time. It's new and shiny, go get on that, play it until you're sick of it, go move on to something else. Definitely different behavior than I have. So anyway, interesting stuff. We're still sitting there playing our puzzle game, trying to get it to solve. What's great about this little segment today was, did I know, I guess I did. I just didn't know I did. You didn't even know all these things. Yeah. All right, let's finish up with a supercomputer. Europe awarded Hewlett Packard Enterprise or HPE. That's the one that doesn't make printers. Remember when they split HPE up? HPE is getting $160 million to build a supercomputer called Lumie in Finland. Maybe Patrick Beja can go visit it. It is expected to have peak performance of more than 550 petaflops. I wanna know what a petaflop is. There's an episode of Know a Little More at knowaittlemore.com. 550 petaflops would top the current number one supercomputer, the Fugaku Petascale Computer in Kobe, Japan. That one reached 415.5 petaflops in June of this year. Lumie will be hosted at the Finnish IT Center for Science in Kajani, Finland. It will be made up of HPE Cray EX servers with AMD Epic processors and AMD Instinct high performance graphics cards. It will also use HPE's Cray cluster store E1000 storage system and HPE Slingshot technology for networking. Power will be generated by a Swedish hydroelectric electric company called Vaterfall and heat from Lumie will be used to heat homes in Finland. HPE is also making supercomputers for the Czech Republic and Western Australia. Nice. That's pretty cool. Yeah, so soon, soon, soon, we will have a new number one supercomputer in Finland. I'm ready. The chess world is shaking in their boots. Let's see what happens. Yeah, I was gonna say, if you wanna go on a tour of supercomputers, you can end up with number one right now in Kobe and get yourself some delicious beef. But in the future, you'll be able to go to Finland and get thin-ish food. So weird fish and like rotting tentacles from things. It's fine. Delicious. Patrick can correct all this on Tuesday. I'm not worried about what I say. It's fine. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Cezar answered our call for firsthand experience with selecting a search provider other than Google on phones in Europe. He writes, since you asked, I am a European citizen, Romanian, to be precise. And I have noticed the pop-up select my search provider when setting up my phone. Thank you, we finally got one. I own a Galaxy S10e and did not have this as part of the initial setup when I bought my phone, but rather when I at one point reset my phone. Probably from recent updates, my phone did give me the option to choose my preferred search provider as promised by Google. My guess is that most users won't see this because of one or all of the following. One, old phones with old software. Two, even if the phone has received updates and now has the browser ballot, people tend to not reset their phones. As such, they won't be seeing the setup screen more than once or twice in the device's lifetime. Or three, people just click next, next, next in a hurry and get to the shiny-do toy, don't even realize they did it. There you go. You now have a larger sample size. Thank you, Cezar. He says, PS, I stayed with Google, but use multiple browsers and search engines on my own depending on the use case. Interesting. I do that too. That sounds a lot. I bet there's more and more people that are doing that. I use DuckDuckGo in some cases. I use different browsers. DuckDuckGo as my default mobile search engine. Same, same. I like their image search a lot better too and I'm trying to find references for art and stuff. It's so much better than Google's now and I don't know why that is. Probably because Google has to be so much more careful about copyright given their spotlight. I did wanna say one quick thing about this and that is that I noticed Windows getting a little pesky the other day. It's been a long time since we've talked about Windows being a problem with favoring Explorer, now Edge and that sort of thing. But I went and changed my default from Edge to Firefox and it kept bugging me and saying, are you sure, let me tell you why Edge is so great, like a little dialogue. That's because they just bundled in Edge with the new October update. Yeah, which I don't know, that just feels like old stuff and maybe you're nervous. There's one more email here that we got from David who says, no one is really from here, Charlotte, North Carolina, that's where he's from. He chimed in about photos not being real life. He emailed this listening to your discussion on Tuesday in regards to photos being touched up. This made me think of an old picture that was in my house when I was growing up of my great-great grandparents. The photo always looked odd to me and I found out that this was because the photo was taken when they were out working in the field when the traveler photographer came through after the picture developed, he would watch, sorry, he would draw nice clothes onto them and bring the nice photo back later after putting the clothes on them. This just goes to show that nothing is really new just done differently. Love the show, thanks for all you do. Yeah, that reminded me of this picture of my great-grandfather, John. I never once wondered if those are really his clothes. Yeah, maybe they're not. Or were they drawn on later? I have no idea. Maybe they're not, I never know. Yeah, anyway, shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels including Justin Zellers, Miss Music Teacher and Mike McLaughlin. Scott Johnson, thank you so much for being here. This is the part where Sarah usually thanks you. Sorry for almost forgetting it. What do you got going on these days? All tons of stuff, but I will mention the thing that you and I are dusting off our first season of Current Geek Chronicles, sort of an evolution of Current Geek. If you haven't heard it yet, great news. We have a little ninth episode that just went out that is like an appendix of sorts to the other episodes. So go check it out, that's at currentgeek.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey patrons, did you know your ad-free RSSV can have just DTNS or just GDI or both? Check your tier on Patreon to see if it says DTNS, GDI or all and if you want to change it, you just change your tiers at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. We're live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20, 30 UTC at least until Daylight Savings comes. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow without me but with Rich Strafilino who's here along with Justin and Robert Young. They will talk to you then. This show is part of the broadband's network. Get more at frogpants.com. Time and club, hope you've enjoyed this program. He he he he he he he.