 Coming up on DTNS should Apple pivot to advertising plus Twitter's new political advertising rules are spelled out and Robert Herron tells us the best TVs This is the Daily Tech news for Friday, November 15th 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from next to a beer top I'm Sarah Lane and I'm the show's producer Roger Chang We're very happy to welcome Robert Herron video calibration expert and host of AVXL back to the show Robert. How's it going? Hey, I'm doing great. Thank you Tom It's good to have you back We're gonna get some some good TV buying advice as always just good TV knowledge in general from Robert here in a minute Sarah you're not in your normal studio location. I am not at the studio Redwood No, I I realize anybody who's listening to the audio version next to a beer tap, but I actually am You know, hey, it's Friday after all, but yes I'm I'm I'm on location doing some work, but but happy to be on the show as usual We were talking about all kinds of good things on good day Internet just now Just yacking away about all kinds of cool stuff if you want to hang out with us and Talk about things sometimes tech related sometimes not you got to be part of good day internet become a member at patreon.com DTNS let's start with a few tech things you should know Huawei's foldable Mate X device went on sale in China over the morning of November 15th for 16,999 won roughly two $2,400 US dollars due to ongoing trade restrictions However, the device doesn't ship with the Google Play Store or any US made chips Huawei has also not stated if the Mate X will be available for sale outside of China in addition Huawei CEO Richard you made a YWO post teasing a mate pet event for November 25th Apple removed all 181 vaping related apps from the iOS app store in a statement to Axios Apple said it is updating its app store review Guidelines to forbid apps that encourage or facilitate the use of vaping products citing a report from the US CDC that found vaping devices a public health crisis and a youth epidemic Apple previously stopped accepting new apps related to vaping back in June and never allowed for direct sales of Vapar cartridges through apps in an interview with the Verge Microsoft's head of gaming Phil Spencer said that he expects to launch its xCloud game streaming service in 2020 in the US Spencer also said that the company plans to integrate xCloud with Xbox Game Pass in 2020 as well bringing game streaming to Windows 10 PCs while currently only confirmed to run on Android on mobile general manager of xCloud Catherine at Gluckstein Confirmed that the company is building prototype iOS apps and working with Apple to launch on the platform as well Microsoft also plans to expand xCloud preview to Canada India Japan and Western Europe next year Amazon will formally challenge the US Department of Defense's decision to award Microsoft the joint enterprise defense Infrastructure or Jedi contract Amazon will file a complaint with the US court of federal claims a spokesperson for AWS Said numerous aspects of the Jedi evaluation process contained clear deficiencies errors and unmistakable bias Strikes me that could also apply to Phantom Menace Google revealed that an experiment rolled out to the stable channel of Chrome has caused some browsers access through virtual machine environments to display white screens and leave the browser Unresponsive the experiment switched on a flag that enabled a new web content's Occlusion feature which suspends Chrome tabs when other apps are moved on top of those tabs The experiment had been in beta for about five months without reported issues Google has now rolled back the account All right Let's talk a little bit more about a brand new company in the chip space three former Apple semiconductor executives Gerald Gerrard Williams the third Manu Gulati and John Bruno have founded a company called new via and UVIA the company is developing a processor called Phoenix and wants to take what they learned designing low-power chips for mobile devices and Make a faster more power efficient more secure chip for data centers If that sounds familiar Qualcomm Marvel Ampere all have been aiming to do exactly the same thing and try to take a little business away from Intel and AMD But new via brings in a lot of experience not the Qualcomm doesn't have a ton of experience But we've got we've got some pretty smart people here William spent nine years at Apple as chief architect of Apple central processors and systems on a chip Gulati spent eight years at Apple working on mobile systems on a chip and Bruno spent five years at Apple in the platform architecture group plus gelati and Bruno also worked at Google after they left Apple before coming over to new via so It's you know, they're not a shoe in but it just shows how using Mobile processors power efficiency to provide secure platforms for data centers is Something that people think is going to be a bountiful place to make some money because a lot of people are trying to figure out how to crack that Yeah, and the fact that again, like you said, these are industry veterans They could have worked lots of places But they have come together to say we can do this better than what is already going on in other places if you're talking about Low power chips for mobile devices I mean, this is this is definitely not something that is a company that doesn't exist yet But but but I wonder what what what they might achieve that doesn't isn't already possible with with some of the big big guns Well, right now, it's usually can I get enough power out of this mobile chip to make it worth not buying Intel or AMD And and it's close. So new via must think they have some ideas Of how to how to engineer and how to architect that So that it that it's compelling because data centers No matter who you talk to data centers are the fertile ground For money, we've heard it in the earnings reports recently Samsung says well We're gonna sell a lot of semiconductors to data centers, you know, so things will look it up for us Data centers are gonna be buying a lot of chips Memory chips storage chips and the processors and if these processors are cheaper and more power efficient That's gonna be pretty compelling Robert. I don't know if you've followed this closely enough. Do you have any any thoughts on this? It's really about the cooling of these centers and if you can eliminate some of that heat dissipation and keep that confined and in a part that actually It has to at least match the current performance of the the server chips they use And server chips by and large are already Generally a lot cooler than you're gonna have on a desktop part. Anyway, they're not They're To say it's more like they're they're simply not stabler But they don't clock them as hard and they run better at those lower clock rates And that that comes back to the cooling side of it Which is probably the main expense in a lot of these centers short of just the electricity to run everything But if you can you can knock that down by even 15 percent and that's that's a lot That would go a long way toward that's interesting me something like an arm chip or lots of arm chips Or new via's latest design. I it's really Intel amd both have low power designs, but maybe they're not the ideal thing for server environments I If they really have some sort of black magic in terms of being able to create a capable server part that is Measurably more efficient in electricity. That's a huge deal. Definitely Apple's pivot to services, which is an ongoing pivot has led JP more can chase to estimate that the company's Advertising income could quintuple over the next six years to 11 billion dollars annually Apple TV the app store in safari are all seen as places where Apple could raise its revenue But will they Apple has marketed itself as a company that respects privacy and having an effective advertising program often conflicts with prioritizing user privacy Yeah, I mean they have ads in the app store right now. That's not terribly controversial It's it's a matter of placement saying like hey if somebody's looking for this kind of app or they're on this kind of page of app And you want to place your app on there? That's fine So they haven't run into problems where they're crossing the line there But if you start to place ads on the Apple TV interface, that doesn't look very apply If you start to put ads in safari somehow Can wait into privacy problems really quick when you're dealing with browsing data So I'm not sure what kind of assumptions JP Morgan Chase makes Other than to say well if Apple made the decision to sell the ads, this is how much they could sell It's different than them actually making the decision to sell the ads Which is then going to become an investor fight if they don't do it because they could be perceived as leaving money on the table Do you leave the ad settings at default on most of the devices you use? I personally I generally will turn off the The saving of specific information. So I end up getting very generic ads not necessarily I don't know what I'm looking at but I'm still fed ads But they mean less to me than they probably would if I just left all these settings And it's something that that iOS users generally don't think about because the ad settings are are Virtually, you know, the privacy settings are pretty tight already on iOS And those ad settings have to do with the individual applications more often If they're going over the line, that's something I've been absolutely thrilled about with android 10 And it's it has gone through every app in my phone And literally said hey, you know what this thing's tracking your location 24 7 Would you like to turn that completely off or just when the app is running or well ios 13 is doing that too In fact, it's it's it's knocking down my door more often than I like where I'm like, ah gosh fine Yes dark sky weather app. It's fine wherever I am just but uh, but yes It's better to be you know airing on the side of making sure that we're aware than the alternative Totally. I love this trend Twitter made its ban on political ads official I remember we said jack dorsi had tweeted about this but uh devils in the details and this sort of stuff The rules are now out. They define political content as content in an advertisement You can say whatever you want different, you know, those different rules for what you say on twitter But in a paid advertisement any content that references a candidate a political party Unelected or appointed government official an election a referendum a ballot measure legislation regulation directive or judicial outcome Is going to be considered a political ad and you're not allowed to put political ads on twitter It also bans Advertisements that contain references to political content. So in other words, the entire ad isn't about it But it refers to it including appeals for votes solicitations of financial support and advocacy for or against any of the above listed types of political content So that just further defines like here's you can't get around the rules by doing this If you're talking about voting for something and it's clearly political, we're gonna ban it candidates parties governments or officials political action committees and certain political nonprofit groups are banned from any Advertising altogether, even if they just you know want to sell their used bicycle. No, they're not doing it on twitter I'm not sure anyone sells bicycles on twitter, but an exemption will be given to news organizations To all of these rules if they have 200,000 monthly uniques or more Make their own content and focus on more than one issue So they're trying to draw a line that says, you know, we're talking about the washington post here We're not talking about, you know, joe blow pack that started a blog yesterday An exemption will also be given to cause-based content To this is and this is where it gets tricky to allow ads that educate raise awareness and or call for people to take action and connection with Civic engagement economic growth environmental stewardship or social equity causes This last exemption does not allow targeting by zip code or political preference And it can't reference or be run on behalf of the entity's ban from placing political ads like candidates and parties but That line between saying hey, I'm just you know trying to promote the economy of my hometown and This is really pushing for a political candidate is I think where twitter is going to run into any potential controversy Man, I mean this is first of all I would like to commend twitter the company has obviously put a lot of thought into this And perhaps that's why this was not rolled out sooner because there was there were some decisions that had to be made that said This reads as like at terms of service that like no one's going to read and they're not going to understand necessarily on the other side of it Because it's very complicated And i'm not sure, you know, I mean, I think it's it's a good thing But if you don't understand how things work Then it sort of works against twitter because twitter is full of a lot of users who Would not care to Understand what you just explained tom Yeah, I mean what's going to happen is somebody's going to put an ad That they're going to claim is an ad that is cause-based And it's going to be about climate change for a democratic candidate or it's going to be about economic growth for republican candidate Or it's going to be some other combination there And it's going to be uncovered that it was placed on behalf of pushing the agenda of someone and twitter's going to have a controversy That's going to happen There's just no way to get around this fuzzy line that they've drawn But I wonder if that isn't the point where twitter has said yeah, but we pushed the boundary out over there So if if they say the candidates name if they say the party's name if they talk about voting It's clearly going to get kicked So they have to be so circumspect that it might not be terribly beneficial for their candidate Even if they are trying to get around the rules Does this stuff bother you robert? a little bit John mccaffey who might not be the most stable genius in the world He had a twitter He had a tweet about a week ago where he said you shouldn't be allowed to use the word news in the title of your organization if at least 80 of that content is vetted or at least Verified to be relatively truthful And you do that for the majority of your broadcast day And he wasn't it was just an interesting idea where maybe it is time We take a look at who can call themselves a new news organization and have at least Something there to help Because the problem all goes back to it's just so easy to manipulate What you see and what you do and and to get a point out there that you know for for devious reasons even anybody has access to these networks and I hate to see it turning into an arms race of who can manipulate them the best And it's it's it's spooky, but at the same point You know it's easy enough for me to disconnect and walk away from it all But then I feel like i'm disengaging from you know discussions in the society, so It's a balance you can have in other places Without a doubt listening listening to this this morning's doings in congress Corruptions everywhere and and we can point the finger all we want but hell half of our elected Most of our elected officials are taking legal bribes from the from their so-called Big-pocketed constituents and it's it's in my opinion kind of tragic that it functions that way in this country It's not a great. That's a whole separate. That's a whole I hate talking politics, but there you go. Well, you know who isn't corrupt not necessarily anyway Is the modern cord cutter moffat. Nathanson estimates that hulu has 2.7 million subscribers for its live tv service Putting it at number one just ahead of sling tv is 2.69 million youtube tv is another Estimated to have 1.6 million customers hulu will raise the price of its live tv service by 10 dollars per month From 44.99 us dollars to 54.99 hulu offers more than 60 channels Including all four major in list language broadcast networks in the us along with the hulu on demand service In a blog post the company said it's exploring ways to provide additional more tailored live tv options as well Yeah, and uh since playstation view announced that it was Going away at the end of january. I've been looking at back at sling hulu and youtube tv and atn tv now As options and hulu seems to be the best option for me YouTube has the best interface right now and even has a couple more channels that I want But I love that hulu is tied in to hulu, right? I already I'm already in hulu watching Shows that are carried on just the regular on demand hulu side And if I can integrate into that to to watch my hockey and other live stuff. I think that's the way i'm going to go Uh 55 dollars a month. Well, it's not as great as 45 dollars a month But it's actually cheaper than what I was playing playstation view and way cheaper than what I'd end up paying spectrum Uh, so I I think this is uh, this is decent and it doesn't surprise me that hulu is leading the way right now Because of what I just said I agree They also oh hulu also happens to have the last three seasons of archer where Anywhere else you get the first something like that, isn't it or yeah Gated walls of my favorite content I've been watching cheers on hulu, which you can get on netflix and cbs all access But again because i'm already on hulu watching good place and handmaid's tale and all this other stuff I'm like, well, just I'll watch it over here. So they kind of They if they keep building on that, I think that's going to be I think that's going to be successful for hulu I hope that this price increase might bring in some more channels because that is my one complaint about hulu's a couple channels I'd like them to have uh, but as I always say if you want to go and uh decide Which of these over the top streaming services you might want to get to replace your cable the best place to go is suppose.tv You can just put in where you are What channels are important to you and it'll lay it all out including cable providers if this So you she can compare, you know apples to apples And and see which one will actually save you money More money for disney Yeah, it is hulu's definitely going to be a cash cow for disney. I think Wikipedia co-founder jimmy wales has been slowly launching an alternative to facebook It's a news oriented social network that you can sign up to for free But you're put on a wait list. So if you want to skip the line and not wait to be asked in You pay It doesn't take ads. You're not paying to get rid of ads or anything like that. They just say we're never going to take ads But you can pay 12 99 a month or 100 dollars a year To help support it. It's kind of like donation for wikipedia And it lets you into the social network faster Wt social has about 78 000 users right now. It's gained about 50 000 since november 6 So it's growing fairly fast, but doesn't have a lot of people in it yet It's topic oriented uses the community to enforce standards similar to how wikipedia works In fact, anyone can edit or delete content when you go in it asks you to pick a bunch of topics you want to follow And then you can go in and see those and engage and talk to people about them And if you pay to get in you can actually vote you can actually invite other people to to join for free as well you know The the concept of this is interesting my my first reaction was like anybody could delete my content This is insane. It would be horrible right because people are petty on social networks But if it's more news oriented and less Personal news oriented, then maybe that's less of an issue wikipedia. Sure. You can go in and wreak some havoc But for the most part it's it's pretty self-sufficient. The moderation community in there is really robust When things get weird they get fixed quickly and for the most part it is it is like an encyclopedia type thing It's you know well respected. So I you know if you have under a hundred thousand users Yes, as you mentioned, this is not an alternative to facebook. There's I mean, it's apples and oranges There's just no way but and everybody's always trying to be like this is the alternative to facebook because everybody complains about facebook But you're all on it I don't know. I mean it's It's uh, it's it's an interesting idea. I don't know robert I saw you on facebook recently saying that you hadn't been on facebook in a while So what what do you literally what do you make of wt social? Yeah, I I have no interest in this per se What I would like to see though is something where I could literally install it on my nasa device And it could connect to other folks's Set up social media networks, but it's a hundred percent private where I can just invite the family Or close friends to look at you know photos of the kids or the pets or whatever or make plans for the weekend And granted it's nice to have it in a fully open Environment where anybody can get in there and take a look or at least make that a little easier to do the connection but This sounds or it's rolling towards something where I personally would just rather have far more control over it myself And well, it's it's unfair to call this facebook. This is about news This is trying to take a part of facebook and say if facebook news bothers you try this This has got hacker news in it the the hacker news Feed comes into it And you could have it every day have comments about to people about it So the news feed part of facebook the sharing of birthdays and pictures from parties and all of that novice This is just one segment Of facebook the news segment and if it succeeds, it'll be amongst people who are like, yeah, I just I just want a cleaner Way to to follow what's going on that has a little bit of a social aspect to it Where I can discuss things with people in a respectful way. That's super cool I I look at things like Reddit for it used to be a lot more news or just wow, you'd see it there first before anywhere else Now it is if you follow enough stuff, you're gonna see a fire hose a variety of things It would be nice to have just a strong focus on actual news and current events and things like that in a In a relative hopefully a relatively vetted environment It's like setting setting your browser's homepage to the wikipedia page and it gives you that this day in history Right section and I love that kind of stuff. So it's very much You know, you say what you want about wikipedia. It's it's actually Usually more accurate than most actual encyclopedias And and so they're taking what they've learned there and applying it here We'll see if it works Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com All right, we had singles day just now we have black friday coming up in the u.s And kind of no matter where you are on the planet There's some kind of shopping going on and one of the things people are always looking for a deal on is tvs So we're always happy to have robert on to kind of help us figure out What are what are some good tvs? I should be looking for deals on there are models out there right now and black friday has now extended into being this month long event So you don't have to wait until black friday to get the best pricing at least as far as 2019 models at the lowest prices We've seen all year long and a couple that jump out to me would be the well If you're looking more for the high end It's something that just came out the tcl 8 series is one of the most interesting interesting new lcd tvs that i've seen In quite a while I believe this will be one of the very first tvs to incorporate a grid of 20 plus thousand leds as the backlighting system micro led technology that enables An amazing amount of light output from this tv in addition to having very granular control over that backlight for things like Improving contrast in scenes like where you have a space scene with little stars shining on it Where you want the highlights to be nice and bright, but you don't want the black turning gray or glowing in general tcl is eight series. It's in uh 65 and 75 inch panel sizes. It's not cheap I believe the eight series 75 inches about three grand. It hasn't gone on sale yet I'm really keeping an eye on that to see what might happen For an actual black friday sales event and currently I believe at least in the u.s It's only available through best buy currently and but that's one that is so high performance plus the roku interface Uh, and it's using quantum dot color which expands the color palette compared to using Phosphor enhanced leds or anything older than that at this point Quantum dot and lcd. That's currently the very best color You can get out of one of these screens from any manufacturer and most manufacturers who are producing decent screens are turning toward that In the same vein samsung's q90 r which is a not quite their most premium model But one step back terrific deals there for 65 75 and 82 inch screen sizes The 75 I was keeping an eye on that is at $2,300 right now, which is about 1700 bucks off the price Nice thing about samsung. They also use the quantum dot technology That perhaps is a more well known brand compared to maybe tcl It has a great set of integrated apps that integrates with all of your gear quite nicely It does lack Support for dolby vision. So if you're looking specifically at that one feature See samsung tv's do do hdr 10 and hdr 10 plus That's still an effective format that you'll find from every video distributor out there So that's not really such a downside on that one and I like it a lot and on the value side Just quickly going back to tcl in addition to that eight series. They have a six series for 2019 They made a big jump and switching from those phosphor leds Which caused an interesting image artifact that once you see it you'll you cannot Unsee it per se and that had to do with moving objects and say a bright object on the screen moving You would actually see colored trailed edges that weren't solid or a blurred effect in essence And by switching the new six series also to quantum dot it eliminates that issue altogether It improves the color performance, especially with your 4k hdr sources And that is just a terrific bargain. I believe the 55 is 600 bucks right now 65 800 bucks That's about as low end as I would go personally if you're looking for solid performance now as far as LG OLEDs go the c9 is out there it incorporates their latest generator a second gen processor from last year Performance wise in terms of the absolute picture quality The new LG c9 series is not that much different from the c8 series that preceded it last year Other than that they've incorporated a lot of future-looking tech into it including hdmi 2.1 And I'll get into this in a little bit, but they've also announced Some LG OLEDs at ces will feature incorporated htsc three tuners which for digital over-the-air broadcast This is moving from the digital 720p 1080i standard dynamic range standard color to up to foreign ak video streams with hdr And htsc three is also very much a You can almost think of it as ip distribution system It'll enable through connected tvs a back and forth So you can have a little two-way interaction for maybe services and apps and things like that But more importantly for me, it'll be just simply having improved color Almost triple the effective bit rate and it's still going to be free over the air with an appropriate tuner and antenna So that's just something to keep an eye on I imagine if LG is announcing this with their 2020 LG OLED TVs, it'll probably be showing up in other manufacturers as well And then finally I just want to remind everyone that projectors are freaking cool Especially if you can get pick up something that's affordable and you don't mind It's not so expensive that you're you're treating it like this fragile object constantly a good portable projector starts at Less than 500 for 1080p technology scales all the way on up to whatever you want to spend on these devices, but A thing to remember about every projector today. They all have hdmi input most have powered usb ports That makes them just perfect for plugging in a streaming stick of anybody's and having that is not only an upgrade on the cheap But it can make it very portable then in terms of hey I can just simply take this outside and with my internet connection Stream all my favorite shows and content and everything like that Right in the backyard So and if you are looking for a projector and you don't know what the hell to choose Projector central.com is a wonderful website. They have everything broken out by price and budget And terrific reviews and they've been around for a long time and they're just solid And if you need an antenna speaking of black friday sales the good folks over at channel master have a couple of antennas They have their ten dollar antenna. It might be five bucks for black friday. I don't know either way That's crazy the ten dollar flat antenna is like you should just have one of those just in case it works Just fine If you live somewhere with good reception otherwise they have their smart tenna plus Which is something I picked up when it first came out for about 90 bucks It's currently half price and that features an array of different antenna modules And when you first plug it in it spends about five minutes going through all of them to figure out Which of these configurations gives me the best reception and it generally works pretty well It's terrific in terms of a flat antenna You kind of just put it where you want and then it'll internally figure out the best optimization for it And for that, I think it's if you want something a step up from a ten dollar antenna That's a good way to go. Yeah, and it works really well. I use one of those too. Thanks so much, Robert This is good stuff for people to be looking out for and look at look for the price reductions Look for the deals on some of that stuff any major manufacturer if you've been eyeballing one of their TVs It likely is on sale right now and overall I've noticed that if Costco carries that same TV, it's going to be about 50 bucks less Well, my mom will be buying my next TV for me and I'll then mow her As a customer customer. Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our sub reddit You can submit stories and vote on other stories that you see at daily tech news show reddit.com You help us make our lineups every day. Thank you in advance join in the conversation in our discord as well Where you can join by linking it to a patreon account at patreon.com slash d t n s We also want to shout out our patrons at our master and grand master levels including Mike McLaughlin Phillip less and frederick hoobner Also, thanks to robert here and robert. It's been too long since we've seen you on the show So thanks so much for being with us giving us some really good tips on what to buy on black friday Where can people keep up with the rest of your work? Worse still actually we've fired up abxl again. We were on hiatus for about six months Yeah, and patrick norton and myself are grinding that away weekly. Actually, I think we're recording tomorrow a brand new episode So we'll get that done Excellent although Len wasn't able to be on today We do want to remind you that today is the last day to get your name on the annual dts commemorative poster There are only four slots left. In fact, there might only be three slots left To have your name written into the credits So act now head on over to lennperalta store.com And of course, you're also Got a chance to get some of the lens art mailed to you You have to give us your address obviously to have it mailed to you But sign up at patreon.com slash dts with that address by november 28th and get a holiday card with lennperalta's art on it We have that and other patreon rewards at patreon.com slash d t n s And if you have feedback for us our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com We're also live monday through friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 21 30 utc And you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back monday with an all new show talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com Hope you have enjoyed this brover