 Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Paley Glendale, Dr. X-17, and Dustin Campbell. Coming up on DTNS, is this the end for DSLR cameras, textbook publishers toy with NFTs, and the future of gaming seems to be subscriptions? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, July 3rd, 2022, it's not July, it's August. August 3rd, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. Death is hard, Tom. In Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. It's in Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yes. Shall we start with a few tech things you should know? Yes. We should. Yes. Thank you. Twitter is sending out subpoenas to Elon Musk's financial partners as part of its suit against Musk for backing out of the $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter. The company was granted a fast-track five-day trial set to begin on October, October 17th, to be exact. Musk's team had sought to put off the trial until early next year, but Chancellor Kathleen McCormick, the head judge of Delaware's Court of Chanceries said, quote, delay threatens for irreparable harm the longer the delay, the greater the risk, end quote. Musk maintains that Twitter failed to provide enough information about bots on the platform, and the company breached obligations by firing managers and laying off workers. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that, according to people with knowledge of the matter, Apple expects to delay its next major iPadOS software update, but just by about a month. So that would mean not releasing it at the same time as a new iPhone update, as the company has done in years past. In Google's Stadia News, 9 to 5 Google confirmed that the company removed the Stadia room from the company's New York retail store. Google's first retail store for in-person purchases, advice, demos, and repairs. It was an Apple store for Google things. The Stadia room was replaced by a new room called the Pixel Buds Pro Experience. Where's my Stadia room? Just listen to these earbuds. They're great. Buy them. AppleCare Plus theft and loss coverage is now available if you live near the Mediterranean. France, Italy, and Spain used to only get accidental damage coverage, but now they get theft and loss as well. Both versions of AppleCare Plus have deductibles they have to pay before making a claim. Claims are limited to per year. Standard AppleCare Plus costs depend on the phone version. Costs range from four euros, 99 a month to 11 euros, 49 a month. And AppleCare Plus with theft and loss is more expensive, as you might expect. Seven euros, 49 a month, up to 14 euros, 49 a month max. OnePlus announced its newest device, the OnePlus 10T, only four months after launching the OnePlus 10. Now, the 10T goes for $649. That's $250 cheaper than the $899 OnePlus 10 Pro. However, and Gadget notes that the 10T is slightly faster than OnePlus 10 Pro because it has a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 system on a chip. OnePlus's latest offering starts at 8 gigs of RAM, 128 gigs of storage with a new 16 gig, 256 gig tier for $100 more. So you have some options there. Other specs include an in-screen fingerprint reader, the USB-C port, but also a smaller battery and no wireless charging option, which will make some people not thrilled. All right, Scott Johnson loves to talk about NFTs. We can't stop him. Scott, what are you talking about today? Well, in my effort to never stop spewing information about NFTs, I'd like to tell you the following. Book publisher Pearson's CEO, Andy Bird, told reporters that he believes NFTs could help the company add revenue from the resale of digital textbooks. As you know now, if you have a textbook in school, you sell to somebody, they don't get any of that. Theoretically, a textbook sold as an NFT would allow for the electronic version of the textbook to be resold after a student is done using it, something that isn't allowed now for electronic textbooks. The NFT could also be configured to detect a portion of the or excuse me, direct a portion of the sale price back to Pearson, the publisher, something that cannot be done with the resale of physical textbooks or current PDFs. The Verge argues that Pearson is likely to still use DRM on all of its eBooks, which would make the use of NFT almost unnecessary since a resale system could be used with existing DRM. And it's worth remembering that Bird is not only speculating on the idea of floating it in public, if you will. He didn't announce any kind of NFT plan for Pearson. So this is an official, but they are talking about it. Listen, I so when I was thinking about this earlier because I'm I'm unlike Scott, who loves everything NFT, you know, most NFT things. I'm like, I don't want to buy a boardy today. But when it comes to something like, OK, let's say I buy a math textbook. It's required for my class. It cost me forty five dollars or whatever. And yeah, I can resell that for a loss. Maybe I bought it already already used. So that person that sold it to me was at a loss, you know, and so on and so forth. That has been how student textbooks have gone for some time. If you're a starving student, you might say, well, why are we, you know, giving money back to Pearson? That sucks for them. But I think it's genius. I really do. Pearson's like, we made the book. If the book if the book is going to live, you know, with many people over a period of years after we made the book for you to make you a smarter person, I don't blame them for trying to get a kickback for it because they can follow who bought the book. Also, this this sort of represents a use case for the technology that's that's apart from all of the freak out. I noticed today when I first heard this story on Twitter, in particular, people were freaking out because the word NFT inspires a lot of anger and pushback and everything. But but to me, this is one of those legitimate use cases, not that there are others that aren't legitimate. But my point is like, this is a technicality that fits well within this need. Right. And if you're a publisher of content, no matter what it is, I think these are just, you know, these are just one example, but other publishers might take note of this. The idea that you could create that revenue stream longer term and maybe even I'm not sure they'll do this, but make the initial purchase less because, you know, in the long tail, you're going to get more money. These these all seem like good machinations to me. They don't this doesn't feel like the crypto bros are back and they're trying to figure out another way into your wallet. I don't think that's what this is. I don't either. I feel like it's like this is like a very, you know, making textbooks for college or, you know, for education in general. We've been doing this a long time. Why have they done it before now? Well, you don't need enough to do this. You have a digital rights management platform. You've even got a subscription platform for textbooks. Why not just offer this? Why go out in your earnings call and float the language of NFT without a plan? That's my question. That's a fair point. I'm not saying either one of you are wrong and anything you've said. I'm just a little suspicious if they're really into doing this. Why they haven't done it? Do you think it would be like if you're trying to build? I was thinking about this comparison today. If you were trying to build, let's say an audience support system and you had to build everything in the back end for people to support something you're doing, a show or a podcast even, or do you do the thing that's already got a lot of automation triggers built into it? Is it cheaper to roll around is basically what you're saying. Kind of what I'm saying and manage it in the long haul. Like, is it going to be a thing where because it's the ledger and because it's the all knowing blockchain forever and always, that there'll be systems in line that will just always be there for you to track your stuff, whereas any other thing you'd have to do at all. You'd have to manage that whole. I think there could be a world where Pearson's Andy Bird came out and said all those things and said, we are partnering with these platforms that are very experienced in doing this and take advantage of the efficiencies of a blockchain and NFTs. And we're going to provide the ability for you to resell your textbooks, but also get constant updates. So your textbook will always be the latest addition. No matter when you bought it, it's it's going to do all these great things. And here's the benefit of the NFT, but that's not what he did. He went on the earnings column, man, NFTs, huh? Those are cool. You know, maybe we should do that with textbooks. Well, that'd be fun, right? Yeah, we did do it a bit. We gave it a better description than you did for sure. That's where the conversation like we're all having a conversation about like, well, is this good? Is this bad? It's certainly advantageous for a company like Pearson. But as you're saying, Tom, it's like it was a bit of a throwaway. Like, you know, NFTs might be a future for us. Might be real good for us. We don't know. Let's see what people who read Bloomberg think. Yeah, I a smart person told me recently, I can make more money from NFTs. So, you know, it always comes out of the guy who's got it's always comes out of the guy who's got multiple couches in his office. And I'm telling you, when you've gotten that kind of when you're the CEO and you've got couches and extra computers and you're the fancy man upstairs, you tend to just go, we were talking about this the other day. And he's not really thinking about describing it. So I'm with you, I'm with you, Tom, on this, that entirely, by the way. And I agree, he could have messages so much better, especially given the climate or NFTs, this would have been the time to be very verbose about what your plan was or wasn't and he missed it. Well, camera people out there, you know who you are. It's not all about smartphone cameras, but you may have heard DSLRs could be on the way out. Is that true? Not exactly true. But there is a big change going on in the camera industry and Rich Truffilino and our own Amos are here with the low down. Well, Amos, if you heard a wailing and gnashing of teeth from a photographer friend of yours, there is good reason. Kind of big news in the world of photography over the last couple of weeks here. It's it's pretty big. Nikkei Asia reported that Nikon will stop developing single lens reflex cameras all together DSLRs as they're known in the biz. Nikon had previously said they would not develop another flagship after their D6 cameras, their big professional body. This is the things you would shoot the Super Bowl with or something like that. But this announcement now means no new DSLRs seem to be coming at all. If you thought Nikon might have already been out of that market, you'd have good reason the D6 came out in June 2020, which in tech terms is like a thousand years old in camera terms. It's not that bad, but it's it's been a while. Now, the important thing to note here, Nikon has not confirmed this report. They've not said they're stopping it, but they didn't deny it either. And they did say they will continue to produce, distribute and support existing DSLR models, but I've already told investors they plan to wind down the business by 2025 anyway. So, you know, we may be debating about angels on the head of a pin here. Don't worry, though, you can still go to target and find your entry level. Nikon DSLR does not disappear from store shelves as of yet. For some context, though, Nikon first started producing film SLRs back in 1959. I think it's important to set this up if you're if you haven't been following the camera market recently, since the early 2010s, there has been an increasing number of so-called mirrorless cameras. I'm old enough to remember when we didn't even know what the term we were going to do, we were like ILCs interchangeable lens cameras. We didn't kind of quite know. Basically, the difference is with the DSLR, you have a mirror kind of in the middle of your camera. You're looking through the lens, but it's going. It's hitting a mirror, bouncing up to a prism and then heading into your eye. A mirrorless camera is just reading the sensor directly through the lens. You're still viewing through the lens, but there's no intermediary there. Right. And one of the big things that you have to understand about that is that if you have a mirror that is redirecting light from the lens into a prism to go into your eye so you can frame it and find your focus, all that kind of stuff. When you actually go to hit the shutter, that mirror has to flip up out of the way. So you have a physical action that has to take place in order for the light to go through the lens and hit the sensor, which is hiding behind the mirror. So it's more physically complicated, but for a long time, they didn't have necessarily the hardware capability to not only have the sensor watching what's coming through the mirror, but also feed it to you in your eye in a way that was useful without so much lag that you couldn't properly frame a shot. Yeah, because basically a mirrorless camera, like what you're viewing, a lot of them have viewfinders that look like, you know, DSLR you're holding them up to your eye, but that is just a really tiny display that they're magnifying on. And so for, especially in the early days, I had an early Olympus EPL one camera. So it's all screen based, right? So you're dependent on not just resolution, very important for determining the critical focus and that kind of stuff, but also input lag, right? So you were dealing with, you know, 2010's display technology, slower refresh rates, not great resolution, especially when you're magnifying that on like a one inch display. And then lots of potential input lag, especially if you're not necessarily that bad if you're shooting a portrait, if you're shooting sports or that kind of stuff can get to be a big problem. So for a long time, these were kind of relegated to more enthusiast cameras just out of technical limitations. Yeah. In fact, the first time Canon dipped its toe into the mirrorless market was with the, I believe the M50 just about 10 years ago in July. So that was their first dip into it. And that was with the smaller sensor. It was with a camera that was designed with fewer features. So they could concentrate on providing that lower latency display for you to frame and take your shots. Sony had already been in that waters, Nikon hadn't quite got there yet. But that was kind of like the big impetus into, hey, let's let's try this out. So it's only taken 10 years. And I got to say within 10 years, mirrorless has basically killed the DSLR market. Well, and for me, really, it's video, right? Like the emergence of like every photographer now is basically a hybrid video shooter and the issue with a DSLR is like you said, you have that mirror that's literally in front of the sensor. You're never at any point when you're using a DSLR, if you're looking through the viewfinder, you're not seeing what's on the sensor. To do that, you actually have to flip up the mirror. You lose one of the primary benefits of a DSLR so that you can use live view mode to do a, to read off of the back screen. And it, and that requires also, then you need two different ways of focusing, the two different focusing systems on the camera. You need two different exposure systems on the camera. So if you're doing video for any appreciable amount of time on one of these cameras, it provided you have good displays, which we now have an abundance. It's a lot easier to just go with a mirrorless camera. And hence why we're seeing everyone but Pentax kind of going mirrorless. This is my first DSLR. It is a EOS Rebel T1i. And I could either look through the viewfinder or see the image on the back screen and I never used it for video because I had to use the image on the back screen and the lag was awful. The capability of the camera itself was awful. So going to a mirrorless format for me seemed like a no-brainer. And I almost went with the M50, M60, one of those lines, but they use a different lens set. So I wasn't ready to make that jump quite yet. But now that the R series has come out, I jumped immediately. I was hooked. I knew exactly what the capabilities were going to be. And not only do you not have the physical shutter or the physical mirror that has to flip up for the shutter to actuate in the sensor to gather the light, but you don't have that space commitment for the mirror. And that allows you to build everything in the camera, just a little bit more spaced out for heat dissipation or for putting more components in there. Adding buffer size, all that other stuff can all fit in there now because you have that space that you can now, you know, not only bring the sensor closer to the glass to just give you a better focal truth, you know, that consistency, but you can also rebuild the entire internals of the camera around that one system instead of having to have two different systems. You can still get DSLRs today. They are not like going off shelf today. Like I said, companies like Rico Pentax still committing to DSLRs. But it seems like mirrorless is the way of the future when it comes to, you know, your professional high end interchangeable lens cameras. Yep. Back to you guys. Thank you, Rich and Amos for that. That was a little bit of an experiment to have those guys talk about this in sort of an evergreen way. If you like experiments next week is your week. All next week is DTNS Experiment Week. We're swapping out normal DTNS shows and trying out some new ideas. Last year we launched shows like Barbecue and Tech and the Tech Jon. They started on Experiment Week and now are their own shows going strong. This year, Rob Dunwood and Rod Simmons are teaming up to give us a reaction show to Samsung's upcoming Fold announcements. Nicole Lee is going to have a tech culture show from an Asian American perspective. It all starts next week, Monday, August 8th on the DTNS feeds. NPD Group estimates that spending on video games fell one point seven eight billion dollars last quarter down 13 percent on the year. You all just aren't spending the money on video games like you used to. Mobile content suffered the most. The quarterly decline fell 20 12 percent on the year. Hardware and accessories declined one percent and 11 percent respectively. If you've been following the corporate earnings reports, you probably saw some of this coming, right, Sarah? And indeed, Sony reported sales of the PS5 rose four percent on the year, which is far from booming and game software sales fell 26 percent. Sony expects the market to continue to slow and revise its annual profit forecast down 16 percent. OK, so that's Sony. Microsoft did not fare any better. However, Xbox hardware revenue fell 11 percent on the year. Xbox content and service revenue fell six percent. An overall gaming revenue dropped seven percent. Nintendo also reported Wednesday that Switch sales fell 23 percent last quarter. Nintendo's software sales also fell eight point six percent. Why the drops? Yeah, so there were a few reasons that the company's game for the short fall Sony and Nintendo both cited supply chain issues. Both said they believe those supply chain issues will go away by autumn. Sony and Microsoft both cited reduced numbers of people playing games. In fact, Sony even went so far as to cite a three percent drop in monthly active users on the PlayStation Network. That's that's where people are getting in touch with each other to play games over the Internet. There was one bright spot, though, right, Scott? There was. MPD noted that one segment of the gaming industry rose during the last quarter. And that was non-mobile subscriptions. PlayStation Plus subscribers are up to forty seven point three million from forty six point three million at the same point last year, partly in due to their their big change, their tiered system they just put out. But down from the peak of forty eight million in fiscal quarter three twenty twenty one, Microsoft didn't update its cloud gaming or game pass numbers. It's worth noting that Amazon Lunar will be part of Samsung's Samsung's gaming hub on the twenty twenty two smart TVs that they're doing. But basically to sum it up, people are buying fewer games, spending less time playing them, but there are spending more on these subscriptions. And I don't as somebody who's followed this for a long time, I know this surprises me. I mean, you know, to sort of go like, well, this is pandemic, right? This is pandemic, you know, everyone's getting back to real life and people just aren't sitting around playing games on mobile or, you know, on some sort of other screen as much as they were before. Right. I think that's part of it. I think part of that is a pandemic or not. There was a real uptick during that time. And I think there's some burnout happening. I hear this a lot of anecdotally, anyway, from friends and others who cover the business and there's there is a sense that we've kind of flooded ourselves during that era and actually kind of championed the idea that video games were the great place to land comfortably when things go bad. You know, we can we can turn to them and and have that be our way to deal with trouble like the pandemic, for example. And while I think that that's true, I think too much of anything is is probably, you know, needs a little bit of a break. However, I don't think any of this is any sort of doom and gloom on any of these fronts, including mobile. I'm a little surprised by those numbers. But on the whole, I think we were headed toward a slowdown, which is a matter of when we're already at a slowdown right now with new games coming out. There's been a million delays as a result of the lockdown and its effect on development. And we're still not seeing some of those games come out yet. Many of those have been pushed to next year and beyond. So there's a drought there as well. And I'm a little surprised none of them brought that up as much because it is the summer is always this way. A little bit. No, they did. They did. We didn't write it in our article. But but Sony actually did say, you know, we didn't have a lot of big titles out. Microsoft said some of our bigger titles are coming out later this year. So that's certainly a part of what they're saying as well. Yeah. And they still have till, you know, they have till November to prove out whether what they what they still have to come out will will change any of this. But having been around since the big video game arcade crash of 20 or sorry, 1985 when I was 14 years old and my dad owned arcades and watch. I watched that just wreck your dad. Owned our kids. Oh, yeah. I should say I didn't know this. It was 84 85 where everything went to crap. But the point is I remember many, many, many talking heads then saying, well, that's it. The fads over. Nobody cares about these anymore. And they couldn't have been more wrong. In fact, they were wrong very quickly with the advent of the NES and other home console stuff and arcades made a comeback as well in the 90s. And like a lot of this stuff is cyclical, hard to predict, maybe, but I don't think we're anywhere near slowing down. The industry itself is gigantic. It still surpasses that of music and television and film in very substantial, large dollar sign ways. And we may see, you know, I don't want to call it a recession. You're going to see a little bit of pullback, but I don't think it's going to last very long. And when we get kind of caught up with both, we kind of have two things going on. Development got slowed down by the pandemic and supply chain got slowed down by the pandemic famously. And we talk about it here on that show or on the show all the time. Those two things have contributed to a weird desert period. And where I just think we're in that and they have to report the numbers as they see them. What year was that arcade fallout? 84 85 was when when it really took a big dive and it was 85. Were there recessions back in the 80s? There were. I wonder if that has anything to do with it? It might. I mean, sometimes it's descriptions would be doing OK, because people are like, I still want to play games. I just can't spend on games like I used to. So let me save some money and just get access to games on a continuing basis. I can budget for that. I know exactly how much I'm going to spend. I think that makes sense. I'm glad you brought that up because I don't want to spend much more time on this. But just a quick note about subscriptions. I think we are finally hitting a little bit of the rubber and road on the future of subscriptions. I think Microsoft's Game Pass has made their case and it's a strong one. And I think Sony's revamped here. System for Plus is also making that case for their customers. And we're already seeing that case made on lots of other fronts on PC. And otherwise, I think that this might be the time where we look back and go, oh, that's when subs really locked in as the preferred method moving forward. So we'll see. Yeah. Well, moving on from games to the world of the beautiful game, if you're not familiar, Dan Compos from NTX is going to tell you all about it and how you can watch it online going forward. Hello, the DNS crew. I come with some news about the sports streaming wars taking place down the border. Last Sunday, folks were happily watching the live stream of the Leon versus America soccer match on the Marca Claro YouTube channel. Claro Sports chairs broadcast rise with Fox Sports for the Leon and the Pachuca Games. However, Fox Sports send a takedown notice in the middle of the game. The director of strategic alliances and content for Claro's parent company, America Mobile, Arturo Elias Ayub posted on Twitter that Claro has a valid license for the transmissions and commercial exploitation of the Leon matches through the Internet, including the Claro platform and YouTube channel. Fox Sports responded that the contracts specified that these games cannot be broadcast for free. However, Claro Streams on the Claro Sports and Marca Claro were not interrumpet only on YouTube. Marca Claro and Claro Sports are considering taking legal action against Fox Sports. For this and more news, listen to Noticias de Tecnología Express, where we know that soccer is a real football. Back to you, amigos. Guys, Dan, you can get Spanish language tech news from Dan on the regular, just subscribe to Noticias de Tecnología Express at dailytechnewshow.com slash N-T-X. Well, Internet Explorer lives, my friends. You might say, but no, that's impossible. Didn't Microsoft prevent anyone from using Internet Explorer and Windows 11? Yes, but thanks to Twitter user Zeno Panther, who broke Internet Explorer's chains and set it free to run freely on Windows 11, we're in a new world, people, if you want it. Microsoft disabled IE in Windows 11. That was official. That's what the company did, making it the first version of Windows without IE for more than 20 years. Even if you try to launch IE in Windows 11, the OS forces you to use Microsoft Edge. That's their, you know, next gen browser. But if you search for Internet options in the start menu, then you launch the control panel applet, then you select the programs tab, then you hit the manage add-ons area, then you click on it, learn more about two bars and extensions. You can still launch Internet Explorer and bypass the commands that force you into Edge. Way to go, Zeno. Zeno Panther, mad respect for your investigative skills. But just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Yeah, but who said now you can't say there aren't such thing as zombies? I believe it. Zombie, spelled Z-O-M-B-I-E. IE. I feel like this is the sort of thing like Zeno Panther should get like a bug bounty for, like, hey, I'm able to do this in Microsoft being like, oh, no, no, no, we don't want people to do that. Let's give you some money. Yeah, this isn't a bug. This is a thing they left in on purpose for certain situations. Right, because this isn't even a hack. This is just a like, hey, if you click here and click there, you can still find it. So I don't know. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Marlin. Marlin says, per your discussion about phones and replacing batteries on yesterday's show. I don't know why this phone is being ignored by everyone in the tech media, but I've been using the Samsung X Cover Pro and I love it. Has a swappable battery, a micro SD card slot, costs less than $500 and is tough. Flew off the top of my car, landed face down on a highway on ramp and the screen is in perfect condition. I mean, could assume Marlin. Marlin says I've hung onto phones with swappable batteries ever since the notes. Sad that they don't have them anymore, but things got fairly sketchy for a while to keep a phone with a swappable battery. The LG V20 wasn't the best choice I ever made, but this phone has been a godsend. Yeah, so I did a little search around and at least my cursory search of a few reviews, Android authorities seems to be representative. The X Cover Pro doesn't get a lot of coverage because it's not considered to be very good in its class. It's not bad. It's not considered to be bad either. It's just considered to have a little bit of an underpowered processor, little laggy on things, and that there are other durable rugged phones out there that have better performance and at least as good a battery life in the swappable and rugged and all of that. So that would be why you probably don't hear about it as much, Marlin, but nice to hear from somebody who actually has been using it and living with it, saying like, hey, works great for me. It even survived the on ramp. That's amazing. 100%. Yeah, I mean, if it works for you, then it works. Well, thank you to Marlin and thank you to everybody who writes in with your feedback on things we talk about on the show. Keep that feedback coming. Always makes future shows better. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. And thank you to Scott Johnson as always for being with us today. Scott, what's going on? I love being on and especially when my monitor goes blank and I don't know why it did. I think I have a loose cable. Anyway, you can also see me and that's all that matters. Here's the deal. I do a bunch of shows on my network, but the one I want to point to in particular is one that will really tie into what we talked about today with subscription services and where gaming's headed. That's right. The show is called Core. It's over at frogpants.com. You'll find it and other shows. There's something there for everybody. So go to frogpants.com and check it out and let me know what you think of it all. Again, that's frogpants.com. Well, we're always happy to have frogpants himself here on the show. We're also happy to welcome a couple of brand new bosses. We got Charles and we got Paolo. Both just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Charles. Thank you, Paolo. You know, yesterday we said it could be you and today Charles and Paolo took us up on that and we're like, yeah, it's us. So tomorrow could be you. Yeah, it's good stuff. Patrons, you know who you are. Stick around for the extended show. Good day. Internet rolls in right after we finish up DTNS, but just a reminder, you can catch DTNS Live. Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 honey. 20 hundred UTC and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Marber Young. First time in three weeks. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.