 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Larry Bailey, Michelle Serju, and Miss Music Teacher. Coming up on DTNS, Netflix and Warner take different tactics to survive the coming streaming wars. Reddit figures out how to sell NFTs and don't call them NFTs. And the chip shortage is now a chip glut. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, November 4th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunlwood. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, my friends, you're not going to want to miss this show. Pass it around, send it to your friends. Let's start with the quick hits. Apple tapped to pay let's a merchant use their iPhone. That would be a 10S or newer, like a cash register. So a customer just taps the seller's phone with whatever they have, contactless credit card, or maybe their own phone. To use it, though, a merchant needs to use a compatible sale system. Up until now, that has meant square. PayPal, though, just announced it will add support for Apple's tap to pay for PayPal and also Venmo. That means that a merchant who uses either of those can turn their phone into the only payment terminal that they need. In addition to supporting tap to pay, PayPal will also add Apple Pay to PayPal's payment options. So if you're checking out on a website that uses PayPal, you could pay with Apple Pay. Next year, you'll be able to add PayPal and Venmo branded credit cards to Apple Wallet as well. Rob experienced this tap to pay in person. We'll talk to him a little bit about that on the extended show. If you're a patron, stick around for that. Twitter closed its offices and notified employees that they would receive an email letting them know if they were laid off or not. A group of employees then filed a class action lawsuit claiming that the layoffs violated the WARN Act, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, which requires a company with more than 100 employees laying off more than 50 of them at once from a single site of employment to give 60 days notice. The Verge has seen an internal fac and emails indicating approximately half of Twitter's employees have been laid off and will receive pay and benefits in compliance with the WARN Act. And if they sign a release, get a further one month of base pay as severance. Now, that may still be less than Twitter previously promised to employees. And if so, that could violate a term of Musk's acquisition agreement. So there's still some questions around that. Multiple advertisers have also paused campaigns on the platform and CEO Elon Musk posted on Twitter that the company has seen a massive revenue drop. However, many of the advertisers express concerns about possible changes to Twitter's moderation policies. Twitter has not yet changed any of those policies and has retained its head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth. AMD announced the RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT GPUs, the first based on its RDNA3 architecture, which uses a chiplet architecture similar to its latest Ryzen CPUs. AMD claims the XTX will be up to 1.7 times faster than the RX 6950 XT, both cards support DisplayPort 2.1, meaning higher refresh rate support on 4K and 8K, compared to DisplayPort 1.4. The 7900 XTX uses a 350 watts of board power compared to Nvidia's 450 watts for the RTX 4090. The 7900 XT, hope you're keeping score here, a lot of products being thrown out here, has a board power of 300 watts. Both use two 8-pin connectors, so no need for adapters. And both launch, September 13th, the XTX costing $999 and the XT costing $899. December 13th, you said September by accident, but I'm sure people could have figured that out. No, we're going back in time, Tom. Are we? Oh my gosh, I didn't realize that. I'm sorry, I meant December. I don't know what day it is. And yeah, the upshot of all those numbers is you've got better power efficiency from these. And lots of benchmarks yet to come. During AMD's RDNA 3 card announcement, it teased the first DisplayPort 2.1 capable 8K ultra-wide gaming monitor from Samsung, the Odyssey Neo G9. A full announcement is expected at CES, but AMD built it offering 8K as horizontal only, so it's unclear how many vertical pixels it has. High-res DisplayPort 2.1 monitors will also be coming from Acer, Asus, Dell and LG in early 2023. Well, folks, the streaming TV landscape is about to change. The rush to launch new services seems to be over. We've talked about the fact that there really haven't been any this year and none planned for next year. So the fight to survive the culling from you, the subscriber, has begun. People are still subscribing to streaming services, but they're subscribing to fewer of them. One of Netflix's methods to keep you subscribed is to launch Netflix Basic with Ads, a $6.99 a month service. It's the cheapest service Netflix offers, and it is supported by commercials. The Verges Jay Peters took the new service for a spin. He says some shows are not available on the ad-supported tier. We knew that, but they show up in the interface with a red padlock button. And if you click on it, it tries to upsell you to one of the services that doesn't have ads. Peters was most impressed, though, by the unpredictability of the ad load. He said he got four to five minutes of ads per hour, which is what Netflix estimated it would deliver, but he was never certain where they'd show up. Here's also what he said he found. So ads were between 15 and 30 seconds, pretty standard. You can pause ads, but you can't skip over them on this free tier. Netflix branded shows always had a pre-roll ad, but varied the mid-roll ad, sometimes not having any in the middle at all, sometimes having as many as three. And then certain shows, such as Community and Seinfeld, didn't have any ads at all. Okay, so we're gonna talk about Warner Brothers' discovery take on surviving these wars, but let's get your impression, Rob, of this idea of a little bit of ads. If you were to go for this, would this bug you? I don't think so. If you're conditioned to not have ads, you'll just get the higher service, which many people already have. I think what Netflix is really trying to do is all those folks who are sharing passwords, and they know that that's going to come to an end, but they don't necessarily want to pay for the full account, they're going to give them something in the middle. Plus, I think they're going to sign up a gaggle of people who just didn't have Netflix, and it's like, ah, seven bucks, that's something I could go for. So I think this is actually going to do quite well. There is an enormous amount of very good content on Netflix, and I think this is just going to be a way to open it up to more and more people. You know, that red padlock button of like, oh, yeah, you're on the free tier. You want to watch this though, right? You and your friends are talking about it. I mean, we've got an option for you. I think it's probably going to work well for Netflix. This works well in many other places where you get upsold on things that are on a premium tier that are not free. It doesn't mean you have to. I can think of a variety of free video services where I'm like, I don't have to pay, and I don't want you that much. But maybe I do want you that much. And Netflix might get some money in response. The only thing about it, they're turning lemons into lemonade here. The reason these are padlocked is not because they didn't want them on the tier. It's because they have preexisting agreements they signed when they never thought they'd do ad supported streaming that prevent them from putting there. So it's not strategic. I'm not sure how much that works for them, especially if it's like Rob saying, somebody's like, oh, I want to watch the new Stranger Things season. If you were to show up and Stranger Things was behind the padlock, it wouldn't work. That's not what they're doing. But then it's the less compelling stuff that's behind the padlocks. I don't know. Meanwhile, Warner Brothers Discovery is taking the consolidation route to try to survive. It has long planned a combination of HBO Max and Discovery Plus and now says it's going to do it faster. They had previously planned to do it in the summer. Now they're going to do it in the spring. The two services right now have 94.9 million subscribers combined, though some of the people might have both. So you wouldn't necessarily convert directly to 94.9 million if you combine it, but you'll get close. It's not clear what the combined service of HBO Max and Discovery Plus will look like, what it'll be called, or what it will cost. But it's going to cost more. Warner's head of streaming, J.B. Peretz, said during their earnings call, prices will head quote unquote north. And I don't think that means you'll have to pay in Canadian dollars. HBO Max is now $14.99 a month or $9.99 with ads. Discovery Plus is $6.99 a month or $4.99 with ads. And by comparison, Netflix's top tier is $15.49 a month. So HBO Max is right now not the most extreme expensive you could get, but it's going to become the most expensive you can get. Warner also plans to launch a free ad supported streaming service separate. So while they combine Discovery Plus and HBO Max, they're going to give you a fast service, free ad supported streaming television service next year as well. Rob, what do you think about this plan? I think they've got to be careful with this because this just may be me in my circles, but I don't know that there's a lot of crossover between people who are into HBO Max and those who are into Discovery. I'm certain that there are some, but I don't know that that's going to be the masses. So for me, if you do this merger and then my price goes up just because there's more content than I wasn't interested in anyway, that probably would make me more apt to drop one or the other. So I just think they got to be careful with this and look and see how much are they going to increase these prices because they can see some churn if people just aren't filling out. It's just not worth it too many longer. Now, I want to point out that during the earnings call, they noted that they have taken some Discovery content and put it on HBO Max already and that Fixer Upper the Castle is now a top five show on HBO Max. And that was a Discovery Plus show, right? That's a Discovery Plus show. Now, Rob, you said don't know how much of the Venn diagram of people who watch both, Discovery Plus has quite a few reality shows that I'm very into. I'm also into a lot of HBO shows. So I am interested in the combined version of this bundle. What I'm not interested in is just overpaying beyond my budget for content in general. I actually just paused my YouTube TV subscription. Yeah, you know, I'll read about the basketball game later type thing, you know, a lot of people and I know I'm not the only one to say this is you kind of have to pick and choose what you're paying for. And if you've got some good shows on HBO Max and Discovery that you feel like makes a lot of sense, great bundle. Otherwise, yeah, it's going to upset some folks. Yeah, you're always going to upset folks when you raise a price. My guess, they're going to make the combined thing be $20 or $15 with ads. Everybody's going to complain and then everybody's going to hit that one show because HBO Max has some really good and popular shows that they're going to be like, but that's worth $20. And they're going to do what I've heard Rob talk about doing all the time, which is like sign up for something, watch the show and then cancel it. Yeah, I was just going to say, I am religious with that. If I don't watch your service for 30 days, I get rid of it. And then when there's something I want to watch, I just get it again. They're easy to sign up and get rid of. They make it pretty easy to do that, which is nice. Yeah. Yeah. Although they really should have done this idea while House of the Dragon was still in its first season. That's all I'm going to say. But they'll be doing it for the second season. Yeah. Well, already be in place. All right. Let's talk about this Reddit thing. So Fortune has an article up by Leo Schwartz and Marco Kieris Gutierrez called how Reddit defied crypto winner and created 10 million market for customizable avatars. Just don't call it NFTs. That's a very long title. Well, NFT trading volumes have fallen 99% this year. Reddit started selling artist design versions of its new SNOO avatar in July, minute on the polygon blockchain for users to use as profile pictures. One of the secrets, don't call them NFTs. In a post announcing the avatars, Reddit never once used the term NFT. Yeah, they did a few other things that were kind of different and interesting as well. Purchasers got the right to use the art on and off Reddit with ownership and portability from the Ethereum based polygon blockchain, meaning that as a user you could resell this in another marketplace like OpenSea. But Reddit also made it easy to start collecting. So all avatar purchases can be made with fiat currency. So if you're a buyer, you don't need to learn a new crypto system because that doesn't always appeal to everybody. It depends on who you are. And Reddit created what it calls vaults. Those are crypto wallets that were integrated into Reddit to make them easy to use. It's the same thing, but it's called something different and it might appeal more to you. A buyer can use their normal method of payment and then the avatar is stored in a vault. You don't need to know anything about crypto to get started or at least that's what Reddit hopes. So the first generation of avatars sold out by October 3rd with sales passing $1 million. The second generation of avatars was launched on October 20th and sales passed $10 million mark on October 31st. Around 3 million avatars are now in circulation and they're being traded. OpenSea said it saw a 75% increase in new users on the polygon blockchain since the October 20th Reddit launch of the second gen avatars. And the R avatar trading subreddit jumped from around 5,000 members on October 23rd to more than 11,000 on October 31st just over a week later. This sounds like it's successful on some level. They cracked it. They called it something that people understand and they didn't talk about all the ridiculous math underneath on how this stuff works. I love the idea of, you know, there was a marketing meeting at Reddit and they're like, okay, we all know what's going on here. Why don't we just spin it as something that's like easy for a Reddit user to use, but it is crypto, but we don't have to say NFTs. And it's not going to put people off that go, NFTs, not for me. And it actually worked. Yeah, I mean, focus on the benefits, not the buzz, is what they did. They said, look, NFTs get some people excited, but to turn other people off, let's just avoid that. What do people like about this stuff? The collectability of it. And that's what this Fortune article goes into with a particular person that they talked to. And it's worth reading that article to get a sense of this person who was like, I was not into NFTs at all. I wasn't really into collectibles, but they sucked me in because they made it appealing and they made it easy. That was the key. What Sarah was talking about, where you didn't have to know anything about crypto, you just bought it with your credit card, and then you had it and you got to use it. If you did know about crypto, then you knew the vault was a wallet and that you could trade on open seas. So crypto folks weren't turned off by, oh, it's too limited. Like, I don't know. It seems like they went along the check mark and they said, look, what people get upset at is ideas. So let's not bring those ideas into the conversation. Instead, let's talk about what it is and what people like about NFTs have been the collectability have been that, that sort of baseball card trade with your friends experience. And let's just focus on that and not worry about bringing in the other baggage. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. This is like, you know, the example of trading baseball cards back in the day, you just bought them and you traded them and you traded them again and maybe you sold them if you decided you don't want your collection anymore. But you didn't think about how the organization underneath who you sold and bought them from works, you just trade it with your friends and it was kind of cool thing to do. And I think that Reddit has cracked it with this. Let's do what we've been doing. Just call it something different. And I think what it does show is that this collectability aspect of it is real. Like, forget if you take literally what Reddit did, take away the buzz and you still have a product that is just getting more and more popular. And I mean the buzz around crypto stuff, right? Remove that kind of stuff. Well, folks, it's time to get our holiday gift card list in order. Each year we hand every Patreon. Well, we don't hand, we send it through the mail. I guess your mail person hands it to you. A holiday gift card with exclusive art from Len Peralta. I think this year might be his most beautiful yet, but you can decide when you get one. If you'd like to get one, make sure you're a patron, patreon.com slash DTS. And then go to patreon.com slash pledges and make sure you have given us your proper mailing address. If you do that by November 15th, you'll get the exclusive DTS holiday card mailed right to you from us. Thank you. WCCF tech sources say that since the Nvidia RTX 4090 went on sale last month, Nvidia has shipped around 100,000 GPUs to partners in order to get them ready for RTX 4090 designs. A worry about shortages of those chips has proved to be unwarranted. 100,000 is a good, healthy number. In fact, we may actually be facing a chip glut. The Wall Street Journal reports that chip execs are pausing hiring. They're cutting costs because of high inventory levels. Yeah, Tom, Wednesday, Qualcomm noted that making further reductions operating expenses as needed. You know that it is doing that actually. Qualcomm CFO said we went from a period of supply shortages to demand declines. Last week, Intel said it was preparing layoffs, slowing down production at some plants, and deferring purchases of the most costly chip making equipment until demand wanted it. And this week, AMD said it was slowing down hiring in the face of slumping demand. Yeah, electronics manufacturers were stockpiling chips during the shortages. We talked about that, the toilet paper effect. They wanted to make sure they had plenty on hand to meet demand. But now many chip makers report that those manufacturers are not stocking up on chips in advance of the holiday sales, which they usually do, because they're burning through all that built up inventory. During the shortage, companies planned big capacity increases. Now those plans are being curtailed. Mycon reduced its current fiscal year capital expenditure plans by 30% until Lordist projections by $2 billion and TSMC cut its capital spending forecast for the year by 10%. Government subsidies are keeping new construction going, though, leaving some no wonder of new factories built with those subsidies will stand idle. And that's a big concern here in Columbus, Ohio, where I'm from, where Intel has already started construction on their super foundry that they're building. I think they're working on phases one and two. So that's a big thing that they're thinking about right now. Yeah. And one way to justify those would say, oh, well, the economics will turn around, but economic uncertainty is remaining until next year. Nobody knows if the economy is going to turn around. Companies, however, are anticipating new demand. And that new demand would come from rising sales of EVs, Internet of Things, and AR glasses. Those are chips that need to be built on new processes. So if those projections hold true, then those new plants might still get some use. So that's what you're going to tell your friends in Columbus, Rob, go out and buy an EV and some AR glasses and a bunch of smart plugs. Keep those chips in demand. It's kind of amazing, though, to where it literally just seems like weeks ago. Maybe months ago, you were talking about you can't get chips for anything. It's like my car is going to come without heated seats. My rear windshield wiper won't work. That seems like that was just a conversation of just a little bit of time ago. And now we're talking about, oh, we got to slow things down. There's way too much capacity that we could put into the system. Yeah. And I think there still are chip shortages. That's what complicates this is it's not as simple as like, oh, it all turned on a dime. You're still having chip shortages for automotive. You're still having chip shortages for some of the older chips. But what you aren't seeing is the capacity lead times for the consumer electronics, for the more advanced chips as they dig into those inventories. So in some ways, you've got a little bit of a chip shortage and a chip glut at the same time. I mean, so many of these things, and I only took one economics class in college, but so many of these things have to do with the company saying, well, hold on, you know, we got a chip shortage and the demand is high. We can benefit from this, even though in the short term, everyone's sort of suffering. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, then consumer behavior gets used to there being a chip shortage. And so fewer people have decided that they really need that chip and maybe just have figured out some sort of other option. And then the companies go, huh, all right, now we have too many chips. We'll get rid of them somehow and prices go down and so it goes. Yeah, it's the volatility of the economy right now. That's the problem. We had so many years of relative stability where demand would fluctuate, but within certain parameters, and you could plan for that. 2020 just tore up everything. And then the war in Ukraine and widespread inflation and energy shortages and food shortages and the logistic supply chain that still hasn't really smoothed out yet is all contributing to the kind of volatility that just makes it hard for companies to plan for that. I wonder if it is good that we have these government subsidies, not just in the United States, they're happening in Europe and elsewhere as well, because it's meaning that they're not shutting down that plant they're building in Columbus and elsewhere. But are they going to end up finishing it with the subsidy and not need it? I think eventually they're going to need it. I think one of the reasons for the slowdown is because of the R word. Are we in a recession? Are we moving into one? That's a big question because people are making decisions. It's like today, people don't buy new TVs because their old TVs broke. They buy new TVs because they want new TVs. And people are now saying, huh, you know, I don't think I need to get a new TV. I can hold off on that purchase maybe until next year. So I think that's part of some of it. It's just that people's buying habits are changing because of where the economy may be going. So because they're not buying as many of these high end devices, you know, they're saying, well, we don't need to make as many chips for those high end devices. Yeah. And the good news is if there is a chip glut, that should put some downward pressure on prices. So keep an eye out for evidence of that. Well, switching gears a little bit. I'll do my best Sophia Petrilo voice. Any Golden Girls fans out there will understand what I'm doing. Picture it Sicily where robot fish may clean up microplastics from various waterways all over the world. Dorothy. Yeah. I don't know. The prototype design, this is real, that a woman named Eleanor Macintosh created one, the University of Surrey's public competition, the natural robotics contest, which took place earlier this year in the summer of 2022. The robotics panelists and researchers took Macintosh's design, they liked it, and then said, let's take it a step further. So they made it into a 3D printed prototype. This is a robot fish named Gilbert. Could be named anything, but Gilbert's the name. Who's about the size of a salmon? If you're familiar with salmon, I mean, this is a decent size fish. It's not like a tiny thing. The device has a flooded head unit and a watertight tail unit also has fine mesh between its gills that can filter out, or is at least designed to filter out, tiny two millimeter particles and then keeps those microplastics inside its container as it swims until it gets dumped out at some later date. The team is hoping for autonomy for Gilbert. Right now the robot fish is remote controlled, but he does glow in the dark. This is cool. And yeah, autonomy would make this super effective. Yeah, just like get the robot fish out there and just clean up things. But even remote controlled, you could probably do a good amount of cleanup and then compact that plastic and recycle it and reuse it. Love it. Yeah, it's kind of cool, actually. The only thing, I was trying to be like, hmm, what's bad about this? I mean, if you're confusing actual fish, right, in some sort of waterway, whether it be lake or river or other ways, you know, that could change behavior. But humans have been doing that for years. If we can make this stuff cleaner for the fish that actually live there, I'm all for it. The other one would be cost. Is this cost effective? How much are these things going to end up being to make in the amount that you would need to do actual cleanup? And I wonder, you know, could they, you know, come up with an algae they could eat the, you know, eat the microplastics? Yeah, they have come up with stuff like that. There seems like there may be things that will be more cost effective potentially for this. These could be maybe not ocean going, but for like cleanup in lakes and ponds and rivers, feels like they're they could be useful for something like that. Or you don't want to be seeding algae, because then people might not want to swim in the pond, but you can clean up all the microplastics. Yeah, I like it. All right, let's check out the mailbag. So we always like to remind folks that there are lots of ways you can get a hold of us. Obviously feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is one of those ways, but we also have a subreddit and it's really active. So recently on our subreddit, Tom asked some folks what they thought of the amount of our Twitter coverage was as, you know, we're obviously trying to balance keeping everybody in the loop with also not getting sucked into some vortex of too much reporting on one thing and not reporting on tech as a whole, which is what we actually like to do. And it seems like some of you, hopefully all of you have been pretty okay with how we have addressed this so far. Franz games wrote quote, the issue is that no matter the topic, somebody will think it is covered too much, whether it's Twitter, Elon, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. Right now, Twitter is the focus because there are a lot of changes that are coming or possibly coming. It affects a lot of people and people are fearful of what Elon will do. So I think your coverage is dead on. Thank you, friends. Also, Kyle McGuire wrote quote, I think it's fine. This is the hot tech story right now. And while I'm tired of it, that's not on TNS. It's tech news. I'd kind of be more annoyed if y'all didn't cover it. As long as it doesn't become focused on the rumors, which I doubt that would happen with you all, more official tweets from Musk or Twitter blog posts, although who knows if he's serious half the time, he could change his mind at any time. Then I think it's fine. Kyle wraps up with you're all doing a great job. I love the show and we'll listen no matter what. Thank you to friends, games and Kyle McGuire. And thanks to everybody who gives us helpful feedback like this all the time because sometimes we do want a gut check. Yeah, I was all nervous when I opened that up, but I really wanted to know what the feelings were. So I, you know, I was, I steeled myself for the reactions and they were all along these lines of like, no, I think you guys are getting it pretty right. So we appreciate that, appreciate the honest feedback and we'll endeavor to keep writing that line. We absolutely will. We will also have Rob Dunwood on the show early and often. Rob, it was a pleasure. Yeah, done it. Let folks know what you've been up to lately. As always, it is a pleasure hanging out with you guys over here on DTNS and folks can find me on Twitter. I'm still there at Rob Dunwood on Twitter. And of course, you can find me on my other shows, the SMR podcast and The Tech John. Excellent. Also excellent is that we have a brand new boss to thank. And that boss's name is Chad. Chad just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Chad. In fact, it was midday. I didn't think we were going to get a new patron today, but we did. Thank you, Chad. And Chad is the first to get our new new patron. It just makes me want to put on like a wizard hat and yeah, just say yay. Thank you, Chad. Speaking of patrons, do stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet, which we roll right into after DTNS wraps up. But just a reminder, you can catch the show live Monday through Friday. That's when we do it. 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at Daily Tech news show dot com slash live. We hope you have a wonderful weekend, everyone. We're back on Monday with Aya's actor joining us. This week's episodes of Daily Tech news show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Strafolino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coontz, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer Jen Cutter. Science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding. Our mods, beatmaster W. Scottis Juan, bio-cow, Captain Kipper, Steve Godorama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, Acast and Len Peralta. Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's show included Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young, Chris Christensen and Rob Dunwood. Guests on this week's show included Tim Stevens and Jerry Ellsworth. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible.