 Coming up on D T N S live stream shopping may be the next big thing gaming sticks for video games streaming sticks for video games and what the heck is HDR anyway Patrick Norton explains this is the Daily Tech news for Friday, October 23 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from the top tech stories from Cleveland. I'm Len Peralta and I'm the show's producer Roger Chang joining us host of AV Excel. Patrick Norton is back in the house. How you doing Patrick? I'm in the parking lot of the city museum and I'm full of joy. That's amazing. You're on location at the city. Yes, breaking news from the city museum. Should it happen will be covered immediately by Patrick Norton. We just fixed streaming sports on good day internet. So if you'd like that solution, get that wider show at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. A California appeals court said Thursday that Uber and Lyft both must follow the AB five law and reclassify their drivers as employees confirming a lower court ruling from August. Once the ruling is formalized, both companies will have 30 days to comply, giving them each time to see how California votes on proposition 22, which would overturn AB five and make the whole ruling moot. Listen to our special with politics, politics, politics, also known as PX three and the latest episode of know a little more for more on AB five and prop 22. A group of companies including Microsoft, IBM, Nvidia, Airbus, Bosch and more along with nonprofit MITRE Corporation released the adversarial ML threat matrix. It's an open framework designed to help security teams detect, respond and remediate threats against machine learning systems. The matrix is available on GitHub and open for further contributions from the community. Huawei's revenue rose 10% in the first three quarters of 2020, slower than it had in 2019 when it rose 24%. Huawei said that COVID-19 and US trade policy have both put its supply chain under intense pressure and that the company will, quote, do its best to find solutions to survive and to fulfill its obligations to customers and suppliers. Google launched the Google Fi phone subscription program, which lets customers buy a Pixel 4a for $9 a month over 24 months. That's a total of $216. So it gives you a discount unless you pay it off early, in which case you have to pay the full $349 retail price. Also, even though it's called Google Fi phone subscription program, the Pixel 4a subscription does not include a Google Fi cell phone plan. But if you're a Google Fi subscriber, you can have that cost of the phone added to your bill every month. Nintendo reduced the price of a single replacement Joy-Con controllers for the Switch. The controllers have a history of failing and needed repair or replacement. So the price of a single Joy-Con, left or right, has dropped from $50 to $40. That's a bit. All right, let's talk a little more about Microsoft's little streaming stick. In an interview with Stratechery, Microsoft's Phil Spencer speculated on selling Xbox Game streaming sticks. Here's Spencer's quote. I think you're going to see lower priced hardware as part of our ecosystem when you think about streaming sticks and other things that somebody might want to just go plug into their TV and go play via X-Cloud. You could imagine us even having something that we just included in the game past subscription that gave you an ability to stream X-Cloud games to your television and buying the controller. That's what he said. On the other end of the scale, Spencer also mentioned the idea of Xbox Game Pass Platinum with guaranteed access to new Xbox hardware. It sounds like he means kind of a spin on Xbox All Access, which right now bundles in Xbox Game Pass with a payoff plan for an Xbox Series X. The Verge notes that Microsoft had a similar plan for an Xbox streaming device back in 2016, but it canceled that. Roger, I know you're an Xbox user and you were sort of interested in this idea of a video game streaming stick. The whole thing that Microsoft is, I mean, the very transparent about it is that they're shooting, and we've mentioned this before on the show, it's games as a service. So the whole idea is how do we lower the barrier for people who aren't part of our Xbox user base to play our games, use our service and earn that way? How do we do it? We already have a system in place. So why don't we roll out game streaming, which is basically what XCloud is? And then how do we take that and make it so someone doesn't necessarily have to buy for $500, $600 worth of hardware in order to access those same services? I mean, it's brilliant, honestly. I think it's a very shrewd move on Microsoft's part. Yeah, I mean, not knowing exactly what something like this would cost clearly would be much less than, you know, a console, one of the newest for someone like me who's like, OK, not much of a gamer. There's only so much space I have to put something, you know, the idea of kind of physical console stuff. I don't really like that. I don't really want that even if there was a great reason or a game that was drawing me in the whole streaming stick thing. In 2016, maybe Microsoft was like the world not yet totally ready for this. Today, people use them for all sorts of for all sorts of content. And I think it's I think it's a really good idea. And I do want to add like, you know, there's a point in time, think about how you get Netflix before when it was a DVD, you know, mail in service, you know, request your desk to come in the mail. And then they moved to streaming. There's only in a select platforms. At this point, you can pretty much get Netflix on anything. Get on your phone, you get on your smart TV, get a Roku or whatever. And it's there. It's it's second nature. And I think that's where Xbox wants to be where, you know, you're not thinking about how do I get it? Just like, OK, where when I sign up, I can play it on anything. And it's great because then I won't need to spend a boatload on on hardware, but I still get that, you know, ideally the game experience, same game experience. They get as Scott mentioned this past week, as long as they get the latency issues worked out. It's I think it's a winner. Patrick, what do you think? I know the the idea of streaming isn't is it new, like Sarah said, but it does seem like subscription services and streaming services are more and more viable. And don't forget, Microsoft has a partnership with Samsung, which is mostly right now around the S 20. But it could be putting a service like this into a Samsung TV to. It's it's been interesting because we've been watching these these cloud gaming streaming systems popping up for years. What feels like forever, but it's really only been like five or eight years now. I think the biggest challenge, even with somebody with it with the network. I mean, Google's probably got more money and more tools to throw at this problem. Anybody on the planet, including Microsoft and even Stadia still has some issues. I think it's the big challenge is like Roger said before, is if they can deal with latency issues and actually make the thing work the way we expect it to, which is much less of an issue with something like Netflix or another video streaming service where you're not sending, you know, commands and reactions and streaming where you're simply, you know, Netflix, you stream content into a bucket, the bucket gets kind of poured into your TV with gaming. It's much more interactive. And I often find myself kind of fascinated in the weird ways the internet behaves, even in places where I should have a really solid connection. So I, you know, I, yeah, I think that is a bigger issue for the kinds of people who are less likely to buy or get a free gaming stick, though. Right. And that into latency from what I can tell Luna and Stadia even and and X cloud have good enough latency that if you're a casual gamer and there's a frame dropped here and there may be occasional button press miss, it's not that big a deal. Right. But if it's the kind of people who are like, yeah, never buy a streaming stick anyway, I want to get an Xbox series. Having just played GeForce now, what, at least with GeForce now what happens is the latency is actually pretty good. It's just to deal with it, the quality dips. Right. So you'll go from super sharp to a little, you know, a little lower res image. But overall, the I was always, I'm always surprised at how well it works. I mean, I tried game on was the one that we got way back at revision three and that thing was like playing through, you know, a rubber band. You know, you move the stick and you wait a half second later, something happens, but GeForce now I am really impressed. So I have no doubt that Microsoft can make this work. And people were skeptical about Netflix back when it was on the Netflix Roku player and it was buggy and it didn't it buffered a lot. You know, so I don't know. I feel like I will I will back ashamed into my corner is just I think it's one of those things where it's been such an issue for so many years. Kind of like VR where we saw VR headsets literally for a decade and a half. It feels like before there was finally one where it was an experience that was interesting. So, you know, as soon as they release it, I'll buy one and hopefully we'll enjoy the snot out of it. We wait with bated breath for a product and a ship date and stuffy noses. Well, also of interest, at least to some of you who like to eat ride hailing company grabs as its revenues for Q3 are back to 95% of pre COVID-19 numbers, despite continuing lockdowns and several of the Southeast Asian cities that it operates in. And a newsletter obtained by Tech in Asia grab president Ming Ma said that food delivery now generates more than 50% of grabs total revenue. Tech in Asia also notes that successful travel startup Traveloka says that it anticipates breaking even by early 2021 at the latest. Yeah, I'm still trying to wrap my head around what travel is doing to get around the reduced travel that's happening even in Southeast Asia. But this is the first positive response that I've seen where a ride hailing company that isn't having as many rides happen everywhere in the world has said, Yeah, we thought we could shift to food delivery turns out that works. And we're actually close to having all of our revenue back for ride hailing companies. I mean, the the issue that I've always had it was always dependent on where I was at the time. If I'm in the city and let's say I'm in San Francisco, right? And I'm hailing an Uber, you know, it got so ubiquitous that there'd be an Uber at my house within three minutes, you know, where it would be sort of an issue. But not everywhere. And, you know, you just kind of deal with what you what you got. When it comes to food delivery, it's it's even more of that kind of an issue. For example, where I live now, food is not just right around the corner. And it depending on what I want, it's like, if it was five minutes away, great, they're going to do really well in certain markets. You know, sounds like grab is like, we're doing really well in a lot of our markets where people find the the wait time and the convenience to be totally worth it. And we're doing pretty good. But there are places where ride hailing companies have struggled where food delivery struggles, food delivery services would struggle that much more because you're talking about things getting cold and kind of getting stale. I'm not. Yeah, yeah. No, they're they're they're doing well in, you know, Saigon, they're not doing well in rural Vietnam, right? They're doing well in Singapore. Imagine. Yeah, because it's a small city. So that's that's a that's a really good point. This won't translate everywhere. But it does. It does show that, yes, even with low margin food delivery, you can make up for low margin ride hailing blossoms, right? Indeed. Indeed. Patrick, any more thoughts on that? I'm staying out of this one. How about live streaming shopping then? The Verges Ashley Carmen has an article about how live stream shopping has become huge in China and US companies are trying to catch it on here as well. Amazon launched live for influencers in July. Instagram and Facebook launched live shopping features in August. Google has their own that's kind of on demand. It's not live. The idea with these is to make a more modern shopping channel experience with influencers as the hosts. Hundreds of millions of people tuned into shopping live streams in June in China. It's just keeps going up and up and up. Kim Kardashian partnered with a Chinese influencer on one of these streams in China and sold 15,000 bottles of perfume like that during an appearance. The numbers are rising in the US now to 40,000 people watched YouTuber Nikita Dragoon's live shopping event on Instagram. 5,000 items were added to shopping carts during the segment. All her branded products. So she was selling her own stuff direct to you. The people hosting live shopping streams already have dedicated fan bases that see them as friends. So the difference with QVC is with QVC, you got to know the hosts on QVC. If you watched it a lot, you might kind of know the celebrity that shows up. But these are folks where you feel like if you're in the influencers audience, if you watch their YouTube channel, you subscribe to them on Instagram, you follow their TikToks, you feel like you know them. So when they show up, it's not a stranger or a celebrity. It's a friend telling you like, hey, this beauty product works great, check it out. Also interactivity is key. You can take calls on QVC and they do that. But this is like live chat, people who are savvy about talking to a chat room while they're doing the live stream. For instance, Facebook and their best practices encourages folks to reply to everyone who DMs or comments according to Ashley's article on The Verge. So this is one of those trends that I'd keep an eye on. You're probably going to see this happening more and more, and it is a different spin on the old shopping channel idea. And also it's a next step from what a lot of influencers are doing on their popular channels already. You know, I actually sometimes there are people that I follow that I like and I trust. I don't know that I would consider them friends, but I like their content. I would like to see something like this. In fact, I would like to experience this in a shopping stream type of way rather than be like, oh, is this an Instagram ad? Oh, yeah, they tagged it ad at the end. Okay, it's an ad. So I think that this is, it makes a lot of sense. Sure, there's going to be people who are shilling things that they don't necessarily care about. And that's just advertising in general. But yeah, that kind of fun. Let's hang out. Let's be interactive. To me, it's this is not that different than watching somebody play a video game. You're there and you're you're hanging out. Patrick on a scale of one to horrified. How do you feel about this? Okay, so disclosure, I actually was part of a set of a whole bunch of people who who did technology on YouTube were invited out to do a series of QVC type trials. When Amazon was considering doing some, well, basically some programming like that. And it was really fascinating because one of the people there had been a long term host with a certain high profile comedian on QVC. And one talking to her about some of this was one of the most fascinating conversations I've ever had because they have a huge amount of control. And it's all about kind of generating a certain amount of money per minute or second or however the metrics were running. So on one hand, this makes perfect sense to me. And it's it's if you're an influencer and you're looking for revenue streams. This makes perfect sense. I'm kind of curious at what point. They figure out how to generate more money per minute on this because at this point it seems like it's super experimental. And then Amazon will do what Amazon does. And they will figure out a way to turn it into this giant money generating beast of joy. But, you know, I think if you're an influencer and you can get involved with this and you can pick up commissions like why wouldn't you? Also, I'm curious why we're seeing Google's experimental arm put a on demand version out. And according to this Verge article, at least one person didn't find that it that it worked very well. Well, why aren't they doing live shopping on YouTube? Why isn't that like a product that they've launched? I'm a little surprised maybe it's in the works and it'll come out soon. I think YouTube's just a complicated beast to get anything up and running on in a in the way that they want it to. Well, we'll look for our live shopping channel soon. Don't forget, you can get masks, mugs and hats at daily tech news show dot com slash store. There you go. And Stoic Squirrel get in there and go do the shopping. Join in the conversation in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, we love having Patrick on because he can help us wrap our heads around the complex topics of technology, such as Dolby Atmos, HDR. You hear these things more and more, not even just on televisions and home entertainment stuff, but phones and all of that. So Patrick, let's start off with Dolby Atmos. What is it? Why do we care? We care because it's a really amazing experience. You know, Dolby Atmos or DTSX. And I also I need to do a caveat here earlier this summer this year. I did some writing for Dolby that actually involved at most. So let me disclose the fact I've also been shilling for at most out of because it's an incredible experience. So there's two things going on at the core of at most and DTSX is one is it's what they call object oriented audio. So instead of having like a front channel, a left channel, a right channel, the person who is putting the soundtrack together has like up to I want to say 128 sound objects and they can locate them anywhere in the listening room. And that gets really amazing because you can, you know, really have little tiny noises that have a really incredible impact because you have much more control over where they show up. You know, it's up above you. It's to the left. It's to the right. It's down. It's it's a really incredible experience. The opening of a certain movie about a certain pair of astronauts going through an asteroid storm and all hell breaks loose is one of the most incredible cinematic experience I've ever had because I heard that in a Dolby Atmos room. And literally, you know, meteor sounds are whooshing above your head and from behind you in front of you. It's incredible. So to do that, you need some stuff going on as one you need at most or DTS content. You need up basically height channels and that's going to be either two or four channels located in your ceiling or a couple of channels usually located on the top of your front speakers that bounce off the ceiling to you. And what it does is it adds a huge amount of sound above you. For me, it was really as somebody who was like, yeah, 5.1 is awesome. 7.1 is, you know, really a lot like 5.1 and nine dot whatever is really not doing a damn thing for me. At most I was in the room going, holy crap, I need this. And they're like, yes, this is years and years ago. They're like, great. As soon as it's available, you can buy it. So I've always had a question how much better it is in a theater versus in your house because in a theater, you actually have the speakers above you. Right? Yes. Well, it also depends on the house, right? If you can put four channels, like I literally in the process of moving my system to HDR and 4k, I chose to buy an AV receiver that would handle four at most channels. So and then I had to track down speakers. So I've been in the process of as when you've moved to the new house finally, there were lots of delays in me getting like my home theater equipment back from California to the new house, including fires and plagues and locus. But it is incredible because in this case, I actually have the ability to do four channels directly above or, you know, in the appropriately mathematically proven spots for at most above my head. It's pretty incredible. I think it does a better job to have them above you than to have them bouncing off the front. But you still get, even from a sound bar, you still get a much larger sort of sound experience, even if you only have a sound bar doing the most channels in front of you. Now you mentioned HDR. Let's talk about HDR. What is the actual definition of HDR? It gets thrown around. So HDR is high dynamic range. You know, it's, goodness. Technically, when you say high dynamic range, you're just talking about having more luminance or brightness in a traditional TV. So traditional TV is 100 nits. We're now getting to the point where they have like 1000 nit televisions being sold. The super fancy monitors that people, the colorists use or the editors and the colorists use when they are when they are putting HDR together are running at a maximum of 3000 to 4000 nits. But there's, there's with, you know, technically it's the brightness, but we also associate it with much larger color gamut or much larger palette of colors, which gets even bigger when you get into the latest versions of HDR, which is HDR 10 and Dolby vision. But, you know, because we, we talk a lot about 4K and it's like 4K doesn't really do a lot for me. But HDR coming along with 4K is actually to me a huge change because your blacks are blacker, your colors are better. And the way our eyeballs essentially evolve. You know, we've, we can kind of, you know, if you're close enough, you can see the difference between a 4K and a 1080p screen, like if it's right in front of you. But the difference in the colors and more importantly, the difference in the contrast and the amount of detail you can get in the brightest and darkest sections of a frame when you're running HDR is actually kind of incredible. I find the colors are particularly a big improvement. And again, those kind of details you get at the far end of the brightness and the darkness, the more amount of detail you can get in there is pretty incredible. It's the combination, right? You can have HDR in lower resolution content, but having 4K helps. Well, generally speaking, you're not going to get HDR unless you're buying a 4K screen. And, you know, I should also point out, you know, I wanted to get, you know, I wanted HDR in my, for my, in my living room, or I should say my home theater, right? Which meant getting a 4K HDR projector, which also meant upgrading my Apple TV to a 4K Apple TV that would handle HDR. Also, by the way, I needed a new AVR because I needed a 4K capable AVRs. And, you know, I also had to upgrade my HDMI cables because my HDMI cables weren't fast enough to handle 4K at the frame rate. I wanted to run it at. So this is also one of those things where you can get, you can get, you know, a television with a built-in app and get pretty amazing 4K streaming HDR if you're working with Netflix or Dolby Vision or Amazon Prime. To get the full experience, you know, you may start adding piles and piles of equipment onto your home theater stack. How important is it to get the right HDR? You know, there's different kinds out there and, and you mentioned Dolby, there's HDR. HDR, HLG, and so, you know, there's the basic is HDR, HLG I won't even get into. Let's just call it an important flavor, especially in Europe. The two really competing, the leading edge ones are HDR 10 and Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision shows up in Netflix and Disney Plus. And the challenge HDR, you know, allows you to create a higher dynamic range and it sets a set of values for an entire piece of programming. For example, you have these sort of presets that help you interpret what shows up on the screen for the entire length of a movie or a television show. With HDR 10 or Dolby Vision, you can actually change those settings to be perfect for every individual scene. You're not compromising on the dark scenes for the bright scenes or the bright scenes for the dark scenes. I think it's great, but this is also one of those areas where we're still waiting for content to kind of show up. When it's all there, it's a pretty impressive experience. If you're upgrading to HDR, I'd say like go all the way to HDR 10 and Dolby Vision. The big challenge right now is that Dolby Vision is kind of everywhere, because amongst other things it guarantees the HDR stream through all the different streaming environments and playback environments, which is incredibly complicated. But Samsung is all about HDR 10. So this is yet another format battle that consumers can enjoy and savor moving over. But I mean, to wrap this up, eventually will one win or will they just both be supported on most stuff? I hope one or the other. Both are possible. Let's finish up, Sarah, with some trash trucks. Yeah, let's. Scotland's Glasgow. Lovely city, perhaps you've heard of it, is ready in a fleet of 19 hydrogen powered refuse trucks after being awarded 6.3 million pounds. That's about 8 million US dollars in funding under the UK government's 23 million pound hydrogen for transport program. The money is also funding a new hydrogen refueling station, which is part of the government strategy to make more use of hydrogen infrastructure, as well as deployment of new vehicles. Glasgow was to host the COP 26 UN summit back in November, but it was postponed until November 2021 due to COVID-19. So the trash trucks are clean in Glasgow? I mean, it's all the jokes, right? But this is really cool. This is great. It's, yeah, you gotta, you gotta have these vehicles, they can't not be on the road, right? So if they got to be on the road, the cleaner, the better. As long as they're not making the hydrogen from coal or something like that, then yeah, this is, this is great. Good for you, Scotland. Well done. Wonderful, wonderful place. I was supposed to go there in June, but I didn't. Oh, well, you know, let's check out the mailbag and do it. He writes in and says, I'm really loving Noah a little more. That's Tom's show that he's been doing for some months now. So we're glad to hear that, Mohan. He says, got me thinking since Mozilla recently laid off 25% of its staff and the rays of blink powered browsers. I think it might be a good episode, a future episode where browser engines are explained with Triadent, Edge HTML, Presto retired. Mozilla's Gecko used by Firefox and K HTML forked Webkit used by Safari and Nome Web, formerly known as Epiphany, and Webkit fork blink, used by pretty much every other browser, Chrome, Opera, Edge, and Vivaldi. Yeah, that's a great one. I actually wrote him back and was like, this is this is a good idea. I'm putting it on the list. I don't know exactly when I'll get around to it. But if you're a patron, you already get know a little more whenever there's a new one out on Thursdays. It just goes right into your Patreon feed. But if you're not a patron, you can get it for free. Just go to your pod catcher of choice and look for know a little more. As we mentioned earlier in the show, we just had one on gig, the gig economy and AB five and the Borrello test and all of that. Yeah, good feedback. And speaking of feedback, if you want to send us an email, you got an idea, you got something on your mind. Got a question feedback at daily tech news show.com is where to send that email. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Martin James to Gratiae Daniels and Dustin Campbell. Shall we check in with Len Peralta, who has been drawing the show today? Len, what have you drawn for us today? You know, and let me just say before I start that last summer I upgraded my home theater to Dolby Atmos and also HDR 4k. And it is it's pretty phenomenal. But I that's not what I drew today. This week, Sarah, Tom and I shared a little moment watching Apple Music TV, and it brought back some good old memories of both the 80s and the 90s. And this is my little take on that, you know, it's I want my Apple Music TV, it's little drawing very gorillas inspired. And there's also like a little tiny bug in the corner of the song called is the 80s all over again with the director being Tim Cook. So if you want to check this out, you can go to my online store and LenPeraltaStore.com. Or if you're a Patreon member of mine, patreon.com forward slash Len, you get this right now. You can download it. It's right there for you for the taking. So go check it out and definitely watch Apple Music TV with friends. It makes it so much better. We really did have a good time. It was really fun chatting with you guys while we were all watching the same thing because we could be like, oh, we're seeing the same video at the same time. How many of you watched it again after that day? Me. Okay, I watched it for like about five minutes to show my daughter. We can talk in the post show a little bit more. I'm like, I'm starting to have a little bit of an addiction and maybe it's like nostalgia is getting to me. But yeah, yeah, Patrick Norton. I don't know how much MTV used to watch back in the day, but I know you're a very busy man these days. What's new with you? Oh my goodness. Well, the best place to find out is either follow me on Twitter at Patrick Norton or head over to avxl.com or Roger Roger. Robert Herron and I, sorry, Roger popped up in Skype. Robert Herron and I talk about home theater and audio and all the good head phony stuff. And if you have a question about home theater audio, do me a favor. Ask at avxl.com and I will email you back in answer. Hey patrons, did you know your ad free RSS feed can have just DTNS or just good day internet or both? Check your tier on Patreon to see if it says DTNS, GDI or all. And if you want to change, change your tier. And then the next episode you get, you don't even have to change your RSS feed will be whatever you changed it to. You can check that all out at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. We are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Thanks to everybody who joins us live. Always good to have you. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back on Monday with Brett Roundsville. Have a good weekend.