 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Paul Teeson, Ally Sanjabi, and Andrew Bradley. Coming up on DTNS, the modular laptop is having a moment, is ad supported free TV, the future of TV on the internet, and we have a theory that connects Amazon's Tomb Raider game to Middle Earth and orcs. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 15th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. The boss of Decks is Justin Robert Young. And on the show's producer, Roger Cheney. Today, exactly today, 22 years ago, I went on the first date with Eileen Rivera. Hey, happy at party. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Sarah Lane has the day off, but the quick hits do not. So let's start with those. Google finished rolling out the matter smart home standard support to Google Nest products and Android. Nest devices on the latest firmware and Android devices running Android 8.1 as well as an updated Google Play services all now support matter. The Nest Wi-Fi Pro, Nest Hub Max, and second gen Nest Hub are now thread border routers as well. The Nest Wi-Fi and thermostat will receive upgrades to act as matter controllers in 2023. For now, you can only use an Android device to pair matter devices to Google Home, but Google will update its iOS app to support pairing in early 2023. The Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Overture Maps Foundation with founding members, Amazon Web Services, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom. The foundation will work to create reliable, easy to use, and interoperable open map data. This will integrate with existing open map data from OpenStreetMap and member contributed map data. The foundation expects to release its first data set in the first half of 2023. That sounds like a very busy time between our first two quick hits. Yeah, yeah, no kidding. Where's Google and Apple in that list? Oh, great. The Montrose California Search and Rescue team reports they received a call from Apple's Emergency SOS service after a car went over an embankment and down 300 feet on a mountain side in Angeles National Forest. The occupants of the car had no cell coverage, but used the new service introduced in September for iPhone 14 models. Apple's emergency service relayed the call to the LA County Fire Department, which looped in sheriffs and the search and rescue team in Montrose. Accurate latitude and longitude led rescue copter five to the two people who had mild to moderate injuries. They were transported to a local hospital. Hey, tech done good. Yeah. Drone delivery companies ZipLine expanded its partnership with the government of Rwanda to add delivery sites in rural and urban locations throughout the country. ZipLine expects the move will triple delivery volume and includes medicine, medical supplies, nutrition, and animal health products. ZipLine says it completed over 215,000 deliveries in 2022. The deal will also provide any government agency with access to ZipLine services. And the tech story in China is about to change the Wall Street Journal sources say Chinese government officials are reexamining its policies over the past couple of years toward the tech sector. They are preparing to wind up all those long running investigations into internet companies. You know, the ones that have caused companies to pull IPOs, the ones that have caused companies to get out of certain businesses. This could potentially see apps for DD Global's ride hailing service finally restored to app stores. And it's part of a larger effort to achieve economic growth goals for China in 2023. So winds are changing to not be headwinds on tech anymore. Don't know if their tailwinds quite yet. Somewhat related to those goals is the fact that Foxconn has ended its point to point closed loop production system at its iPhone plant in Zhengzhou, which restricted employee movements to dormitories and work sites. Remember they had a full on shutdown because of COVID that they've been in this closed loop system both before and after that that has caused delays in iPhone shipments. But it looks like all of that is winding up and local authorities have lifted the high-risk COVID status on the entire area earlier this week. I wonder what economic projections could have led to such decisions by the Chinese companies? It would seem like maybe they were not very good economic projections and they thought, huh, maybe what we're doing isn't good for these economic, I don't know, I'm not an economist or a Marxist. All right, let's talk a little more about Amazon. Big news today. Amazon Games is publishing the next Tomb Raider title. The game is being developed by Crystal Dynamics using the Unreal Engine 5. It will continue Lara Croft's story. It's not gonna reboot. We're gonna pick up where we left off. It'll be coming out in a few years. They're just beginning development. That's all very interesting. It's not gonna impact your daily gaming life for a while for a couple of years, right? But there's another interesting aspect of this announcement. Crystal Dynamics was recently bought by Embracer Group. If that rings a bell, that's because you may have heard in October that Embracer Group bought Middle Earth Enterprises, formerly Tolkien Enterprises. Middle Earth Enterprises is therefore giving Embracer Group ownership of the worldwide exclusive rights to elements of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, including things like names of characters, names of places, objects and events, phrases and sayings from the books. Licenses are complex. So, you know, look at what Sony has with Spider-Man, even though Marvel owned Spider-Man for an example. It's kind of hard to tell what's available and what's not to whom. But here's the interesting part of this. Amazon is making a very expensive Lord of the Rings TV series. It apparently got its rights for those directly from the Tolkien family and Miramax, not from Middle Earth Enterprises. However, Amazon is now working closely with the company that owns other rights it didn't get when it began making that TV show. So, Justin, let's do something we don't always do on this show. Wildly speculate. What could this mean? Well, obviously, if we're gonna draw a line from A to B, much in the same way that when Amy Pascal left Sony after the Hacks situation, you thought that, oh, okay, well, now there is possibly a situation where her as an independent producer could work with Sony and Marvel and make an intermediary deal. The obvious thing here is that either we start getting spin-off shows or Rings of Power is now all of a sudden able to introduce Gandalf's here. Or there's a various other, now we're gonna go to Hobbiton or Mount Doom or blah, blah, blah, right? The question is, who exactly owns the rights? And if there's no clear answer to that, the question then becomes, who's gonna sue if we start using these people's names and locations? Yeah, I guess that's the other way to come at this. I was looking at it as it's incredibly complex. If you don't know, the general consensus is that Amazon probably only has rights to use things that are in the appendix of Lord of the Rings. And that's because it didn't get some of the rights that are owned by Middle-Earth Enterprises. Middle-Earth Enterprises owns the rights that Miramax used to make Lord of the Rings movies. But again, see Spider-Man for how sometimes those license deals can lock up rights in ways that even the owner can't change for a long time. So it may be that what Amazon's doing is like, hey, let's get to work on Tomb Raider. And while we're at it, I see you have all of these other Lord of the Rings rights, sure would make it easier for us to do things with Rings of Power, other TV shows. We could cut you in on the action. Cause if you go back and you read all of Embracer, co-founder and CEO Lars Wingafor's announcements when they took Over Middle-Earth Enterprises, he's saying all the things you would say when somebody asked him about TV shows and movies, which is like, you know, we're taking a long-term view. It's a very valuable property. We're having some very interesting conversations. But if you plug into your head, those conversations were with Amazon, none of it doesn't make sense. It could very well be that Amazon has been talking to Middle-Earth Enterprises since October. Tomb Raider was the easier deal to do first. We know Amazon wants to make a lot of video game movies. They can sweeten the deal by saying, hey, you've got other video game properties there. Embracer owns a lot of things. We can give you a sweet deal and sell in your board games on amazon.com. You know, what else can we do to give us as many of those rights as we can? The larger question here is from Embracer's perspective is, what's the price here? Hey, Jassy, how much are you willing to write, check and how many zeros are going to be on the end of it? Because you went to the Tolkien family and, boy, you wrote a lot of zeroes. You wrote a lot of zeros. And you want to know what? Maybe you called our bluff. I'm sure that they had conversations before that deal got signed. And I'm sure Amazon initially wanted to buy everything so they could make something that referred to everything that you remember from the books and the movies. However, they didn't. And one would assume that that came about because they couldn't come to a monetary deal. Now Rings of Power has been made. Amazon remains an extraordinarily wealthy company that can cut deals. So maybe there is something here. And this is kind of a get-to-know-you experience. And when Middle-Earth Enterprises, when they didn't get the deal from Middle-Earth Enterprises, assuming they tried, which they probably did, it was under different management. You got different owners now and different incentives because of that. Middle-Earth Enterprises, selling keychains and board games, not nearly as much, Amazon can't have as nearly as much leverage as they can when they're making video games. And Amazon can say like, hey, we'll write you a sweet deal to publish Tomb Raider. Let's do this. What else can we do to work together to make us all a big pot of whatever currency is in Middle-Earth? I can't remember what it's called. And that's something where, if you're Middle-Earth Enterprises, you are effectively monetizing rights that have existed for a long time and will exist for a long time and is fractured, right? As we saw with the Tolkien family. So they're doing their best to maximize their return on a finite resource that they eventually wound up selling out to another company because they were going to be the biggest money maker that they could have. Now that Embracer has spent the money to Middle-Earth, they're gonna have to recoup it. And you gotta imagine going to Amazon and figuring out a gigantic deal is probably the fastest way that they can do it. Yeah. I'm pretty positive. I'm like 71% sure. We're gonna see something come out of this. But they were all of them deceived. One license deal to rule them all. That's what we're looking for. All right, folks. Are you someone who regularly has wished for modular laptops? Well, my friend, this is your time. First and foremost, there is success of the framework laptop, a modular laptop you can buy right now. It lets you swap out ports, add more storage, swap out RAM, upgrade the processor. It's not Lego modular. Sometimes you have to use a screwdriver, but it's very well documented, the parts are very well sourced. And we have a lot of folks in the audience who are framework users and like it. Framework has been selling two versions of its Windows laptop for about a year now and recently introduced a Chromebook for $999. Now, yeah, that's a couple of hundred dollars more than a Chromebook of this kind would normally cost, but in gadgets, Nathan Ingram reviewed it positively, arguing that that higher initial price was worth it for some people when you balance it out against the excellent upgrade ability and repair ability that you get in that laptop. The framework is not alone, at least in talking about the concept. You're right, Tom. Dell keeps teasing that it would like to provide you another option. Last year it showed off Concept Luna. It's take on a modular laptop and back then it wasn't really modular, but Dell has improved it a lot and no longer use the screws, you stick a pin in the hole of the security lock, pop off the keyboard. That gives you immediate access to the speakers, fan, motherboard and battery, which are now modules. There are no cables, adhesives, or other types of connectors. And if you put a pin in the hole under the screen, you can pop off the LCD and replace that too. Dell is not talking about releasing this though and it may never release this. It may stay in the concept stage. However, Dell says it is looking into automation techniques that scale a lot of the things it's learning by developing this concept to let it scavenge parts from used laptops and reuse them. They say like, we'd like to use a part as many as four times over its life. And yes, some parts have wear and tear and that doesn't make them useful for this, but there's a lot of parts that you can get a lot more life out of than the laptop they were originally in. It's also researching recycling parts that are no longer useful into materials for new devices. So when you get to the end of life of that part, you don't just throw it in the bin. You're actually melting it down, pulling out pieces, maybe getting some rare earth metals out of it, stuff like that. In other words, concept Luna is the hook to get people to talk about Dell's wider efforts to conserve materials and improve repairability across its lines. That includes things like using robots to do automated disassembly, automated part evaluation and reassembly to bring down the cost of doing this kind of reusability and recovery as much as possible. Dell has been doing some things like this. Let's bring in our producer, Roger Chang, who follows this sort of thing. First of all, you've got a good example of what Dell has done already that's out in the marketplace. And I want to get your thoughts when framework is doing well, should Dell just kind of go into this modular laptop? Yeah, so if you're not familiar, a lot of workstation laptops are built on a very common chassis and it's actually one quanta out of Taiwan that builds a majority of these. But if you look at a lot of the features on that notebook are swappable. So if you go to Dell's precision workstation line, you can actually go through and pick up a manual and you can remove and replace the keyboard. You can remove and replace the drives, the GPU in some cases, the screen, and it's all documented. Now it's designed for your I company's IT department to handle, it's not necessarily, I've never done this before, let me pull out my jeweler screwdriver and try it for the first time. But it is really flexible. I bought my data, used one of these, and I've managed to swap out the drive, I swapped out a bum track pad on it, and it works great. The thing I think, and what's fascinating is that framework is doing something that a lot of other companies have tried over the years without too much success. And that is to make a modular laptop that's successful enough for them to keep doing it as a business. Once in a while you'll see one or two, but they don't go very far because there isn't enough uptake. And I think framework's approach of putting that front and center appeals to those types of people who are very open to selecting those types of products. I think what Dell would need to do is to not just do one, but to support it. In other words, just don't have it as an afterthought. It's like, hey, if you want to, you might be able to do swap out the drive. One of the things that bug me about the precision work line is they don't actually make enough of the drives or whatever, like the swappable CD, DVD drives they used to make. They only made a limited set. So if you wanted to get a new one, you would have to go to eBay and find one from a used person. So they really need to support it like sincerely support it. And I think they also need to work with companies like framework and develop a common set of standards. So you could maybe buy a framework laptop and then fill it with Dell parts or the reverse have a Dell laptop and hey, I want to swap out my ports. I can use these framework parts as well. It makes it so much more appealing. Yeah, I think you're onto something there. Framework is probably a unicorn in a lot of ways. It's really hard to make this work and what framework has done is work really hard to make it work. They have provided quality parts. They have done the work to get it out there. They've done the work to get the press to get people on board and they've created a sustainable business. I think what Dell's looking at is like, yeah, that's not a great idea for a company as big as us who's trying to make a bigger profit. That seems like a lot of work but if we scaled it somehow across our entire line and that's where when you bring up the Dell precision and say, let's keep what we've got going with repairable enterprise laptops already and make that even more repairable then suddenly we're selling to businesses and the scale makes it worth all of the hard work. Exactly. So yeah, I like what you're throwing out there. I think phase two is like, okay, then maybe we talk about a standard that goes across different brands but that's kind of, you gotta have more than one successful brand for that to happen, obviously. Well, folks, if you have a thought on that, if you're a framework user and you wanna like wave your flag, let us know on the social networks. Get in touch with the DTNS audience at DTNS show on Twitter, at Daily Tech News show on TikTok and DTNS pics, DTNSPIX on Instagram. Five ad agency executives told DigiDay that Netflix is delivering about 80% of the audience that expected for its ad supported service. That means Netflix is having to grant refunds since it did not include make goods in their contracts. Most advertisers believe the service will continue to grow and suspect the shortfall is down to the rushed launch. Netflix's ad supported platform are available at a discount but it may want to consider an entry into the world of free. Indeed, friends, the fast world as seen in the high growth area of streaming TV. Would you say fast and free, E.S.? Yes, get in the fast lane, life in the fast lane. I live life 30 second spot at a time. Fast stands for free ad supported television. Examples, Pluto, Tubi, Roku channel, Free V, Zumo, Local Now. The thing that comes up on your Samsung TV or your Vizio TV. It's the thing where you don't have to pay and they run ads and then you go watch shows. The promise of fast is that it provides an easy familiar landing space for U.S. households that are cutting the cord. 6% of U.S. households are cutting the cord every year and that percentage is probably gonna rise. Fast services often include a cable TV like grid so that you've got a very familiar interface. Hundreds of channels, so you got lots to choose from. Familiar brands, even if it's not the actual channel that's on cable, it's stuff from that kind of channel. And the only cost to try out a fast service is your internet and watching ads. And it's bringing in money, baby. S&P global market intelligence estimates that the U.S. fast business will bring in around 4 billion this year and that should increase to almost 9 billion by 2026. Deloitte notes that all major subscription services will have cheaper ad supported tiers by the end of next year and about half of those will either have or roll out fast services. Yeah, so one example is Paramount Plus. You've got Showtime on the top end. You have Paramount Plus, which you can get with or without ads. And then there's Pluto, which is owned by the same company. Paramount's chief of streaming business development, Jeff Schultz, says to be a successful fast channel on something like Pluto. You need content that people know. They have to recognize it when they see it and want to watch it. And it should probably be episodic, like a procedural or a sitcom, something that you recognize and you can just drop in and start watching. For example, the CSI channel on Pluto became number one the day they added it to Pluto and it has stayed there ever since. Unlike so-called SVODs like Netflix, streaming video on demand that you have to pay for, you're not looking to avoid churn if you're doing a fast service. You're not looking to keep people from canceling a subscription because there's no subscription. You're looking for engagement. You want to keep them there. You want to get them in and keep them watching. So there's a lot of excitement around this, Justin, Robert Young. What do you think? Is this the future of TV on the internet? Well, to say it's the future would ignore the fact that it's the past too. On linear television, cable television, but also throughout many other services, including like Hulu, you know, Hulu for a very long time was a service that you could watch some stuff for free on. Here's my thought. I don't doubt that there is a ton of content that a lot of these stakeholders are willing to put on these services, name content like CSI, that they would also like to license out for various other streaming on demand services. And I do think that there's enough of a delineation you're not only from a customer base, but also from a proposal of, hey, watch this stuff ad free, that you can not damage your licensing of a valuable property by putting it on a fast service. I don't doubt that there is a customer base for this because subscription fatigue means that there's a lot of folks who just want to kill time and watch something that they know they're going to like to veg out to and don't want to necessarily have to pay for it. My thought here is not on those two, but the third element of this that needs to be there for it to work. And that is, are there display advertisers who want to spend the kind of money at scale that would make these truly revolutionary services? We have seen a decline in buyers for these kinds of ads in the past, specifically on linear television and on cable. Is this a place where people are just waiting for the platform to pour the money, turn the gigantic spigot back on? Is there a new class of advertisers that really want to do this? I don't know. And at this point, I am hesitant to say that that absolutely exists. Yeah, so you went right to the heart of this, which is the money, right? I think it's great at customer acquisition because it's free and Nick with a C was asking a pertinent question. It's both linear channels and on demand. So whichever one you want, all these services usually have at least the on demand part, but also a lot of them have the grid. So it's both. It's really easy to just start watching. I think the programming is pretty cheap because they're usually doing reruns of stuff. They're using back catalog of stuff. They need things with, this is syndication. This is replacing syndication of the old broadcast model, which is like, we need lots of episodes. We can't afford to do a lot of originals. Roku is doing some originals, but they're kind of doing them to get you to sample. And then the bulk of the programming is stuff that's cheap to carry and show you. So the cost is low. The question is, can you bring in enough of the money? The theory in the industry is that what, and this is what Netflix said when they just said, when they revealed why they got into ad supported versions of their service, there was so much money coming from cable television as subscriptions decline that didn't have a place to go on Meta and Alphabet or on Google specifically, Google and Facebook specifically, right? And that was video ads. And so these places are now gripping a windfall. There's money to be spent advertising on cable TV that now wants to be spent on the internet because that's where the people are. I think what you rightly point out is, sure, there's a lot of money coming over right now and it will keep coming over for a while. And so there's a windfall here, but cable had carrier fees. They were locked in and that was a big part of what made a channel successful was that you got that carrier fee. Even if you weren't ESPN, you got a carrier fee. There's no carrier fee in a fast service. So at what point do you reach that limit of growth where you don't want more users because you can't fill the ad inventory anymore? It's probably a few years down the road, but that is a fair question. Here's, I generally am a skeptic on them, but I will give you one ray of hope and something that is built in and baked into the proposition here to advertisers that Facebook and Google cannot match, which is at their biggest in their video ad division, which would be Facebook itself and YouTube, you cannot guarantee brand safety in the way that you can on a fast channel where you know that you are running against something that cleared standards and practices and it's not a random video, even if it's something syndicated from television or something like that. You know exactly what you are getting. You're not gonna accidentally show up to something that you are not into based on your brand. So I think that in that case, it is a safe place to advertise the likes of which that no user generated platform will ever be as safe as. Yeah, no, it's got a big advantage over something like YouTube in that respect. I think that's a fair point too. I do think that we're, I'm shifting where I used to think, oh, the future world will be a Disney Plus, a Peacock, a Paramount Plus, you know, there'll be three or four of those and they'll all have a fast service and a premium service like a Showtime or an HBO. I'm starting to shift my emphasis to like, I actually think, I think the fast services are going to be the interface. Those are going to be what the majority of people experience and it will be used to try to upsell you to one of those two other tiers and it won't be the entry point the way I was thinking. It will be the entry point instead of the premium services. I'm gonna press X to doubt on that. I think that your initial projection is more correct, but only time will tell. Indeed, all right, speaking of time, it's time for the mailbag. Indeed, Bodhi writes, I like Paul's idea of using AI to help users understand complicated terms of service. Even though this doesn't currently exist, I think we should start the process of branding this AI. Please consider terms of service as a service. I wanna say the acronym, but it seems fraught with peril to try to pronounce T-O-S-A-S out loud. So I don't know, Bodhi, we may need to workshop this. I like this though. I like this as a starting point. There's no bad ideas in frame starting. No, but I do think that it shows, one of the things that I really appreciate about what OpenAI has done with chat GPT is showing what natural language chat back and forth can be as an entry point. And I do think that if you look at a very complicated terms of service and you are immediately able to generate what people want to know, the most popular questions that were asked and then putting those answers in plain language with sourcing throughout the gigantic eulahs that people have to scroll a million pages down and then just click agree to anyway. I think that that is something that could be very valuable and I would not be shocked if in the next few years we see that just become a standard. I mean, we have had eulahizer was something that did this. There's click wrapped and tossback and there's some Chrome extensions out there, getterms.io, terms of service didn't read. These are all manually done. There's a little bit of automation, but I feel like we're halfway there. We have services that do this. So the question is, do people not use them more often because they don't know about them because they aren't as effective as they should be because they have to be done manually and maybe they lag behind a little. Or what I suspect is people say they care more than they actually care and they don't wanna install. And I think that that's probably the case as well. There's that in general as much as TOS situations are annoying and you are worried about a worst case scenario. We don't hear about them all that often and so therefore people just understand them to be a random thing they click yes on so they can get to their program. You know, I'm glad I randomly clicked yes on Justin Robert Young all those years ago and got to know him and bring him into my podcast. Here's the service. Justin, what have you got going on these days? Well, Tom, I got a program called We're Not Wrong. It stars myself, Jen Briney and Andrew Heaton. And on said program, we discussed this week the defection of Kirsten Sinema from the Democratic Party. We break down what a quality candidate is, especially in light of the midterms. And one of my favorite things is our male section, which we do a little bit differently compared to other shows. And mostly because I ruthlessly edit everybody's email. But there's one email this week for which I had to print the entire thing. Come, be a part of the story, the beginning, the dawning of the masked ombudsman on this week's edition of We're Not Wrong. Yeah, and a topic dear to my own heart there. You got to go check it out, folks. We're not wrong. I cannot wait for you to hear it. Thanks to our brand new boss, Brian, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Brian. You know what Brian gets? What's that? He gets rewarded for loyalty. Yeah, every three months you stay as a patron. At every level above the opening level, there's the production assistant level, which basically just gets rid of the ads. But if you're at any level above that, you get some extra perks, including every three months, we're just gonna send you a thank you gift. Might be a sticker or a mug or even a hoodie at one of the upper levels. And Brian, start the clock ticking on that. Thank you, Brian. Be like Brian if you aren't already at patreon.com slash DTNS. Patrons, stick around. The show goes on for you in good day internet. I have an update on my top hat. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow, speaking of We're Not Wrong, talking about how to live as a digital nomad with congressional dishes, Jennifer Briney and Len Peralta will be here too. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.