Important Note
Tech Narratives was a subscription website, which offered expert commentary on the day's top tech news from Jan Dawson, along with various other features, for $10/month. As of Monday October 16, 2017, it will no longer be updated. An archive of past content will remain available for the time being. I've written more about this change in the post immediately below, and also here.
Apple TV 4K Reviews Mostly Positive, Note High Price, Some Bemoan Details (Sep 21, 2017)
For the third day straight, reviews of one of the new products Apple announced last week are out, this time the Apple TV 4K. This is a far less significant launch than either the iPhone 8 or Apple Watch Series 3 given the relatively small numbers in which the box sells, but it’s still worth noting the tenor of the reviews. Once again I’m linking to Techmeme, which decided to lead with Nilay Patel’s Verge review, which based on my reading seems the most critical of the reviews out there. In general, all the reviewers seemed to like Apple’s familiar but somewhat revamped interface and the snappiness enabled by the new A10X chip (the same one which powers the iPad Pro). Where 4K HDR content was available, it was said to look fantastic, and the iTunes pricing for available 4K movies was also noted as a big plus. The biggest downside is predictable: the lack of content, something that also makes 4K TVs a marginal proposition today while the industry suffers from the same chicken/egg problem that plagued HD in its early years, but worse because of the lack of broadcast 4K content. Disney’s absence from iTunes 4K, the incompatibility between the Apple TV and YouTube’s 4K standards, and so on are the notable gaps. But Nilay Patel’s review is the only one I saw that grumbled in depth about other issues – perhaps because he’s a more discerning judge of these things as a high-end AV guy: he noted that the Apple TV doesn’t support Dolby’s Atmos sound configuration to go with the Dolby HDR picture support it does offer, and also pointed out that watching HDR content on the Apple TV 4K is a sub-par experience for now. Overall, it’s a decent set of reviews but for anyone who either doesn’t have a 4K TV or watch content sources with a lot of 4K content, it’s basically irrelevant for now.
On this topic, you might be interested in the piece I wrote for Techpinions subscribers earlier this week on the current market for smart TV boxes like the Apple TV 4K.
via Techmeme
★ Google and HTC Announce $1.1 Billion Acquihire and Patent Licensing Deal (Sep 21, 2017)
Google and HTC finally announced the deal that’s been rumored for a while and for which many details leaked yesterday. Google is in the end only acquiring 2000 employees and some non-exclusive intellectual property, for $1.1 billion, an amount over half of HTC’s market cap before the deal was announced. The 2000 are around half the research and design team at HTC (and a fifth of the total workforce), while the other half will remain and work on a streamlined portfolio of first-party HTC hardware including a new flagship already in the works. Google’s blog post about the deal is remarkably vague and unhelpful, and it’s equally remarkable that there’s no SEC filing or press release on Alphabet’s investor relations site about the deal given its magnitude. It’s almost as if Google doesn’t want to talk about the deal or its details, but HTC very much wants to, emphasizing both the financial boon – the money to be paid in cash once the deal closes in early 2018 – and its ongoing commitment to making smartphones and VR devices.
The deal has echoes of Microsoft’s bailout acquisition of Nokia a few years back – HTC is a far less important strategic partner to Google, but this very much feels like Google offering a financial lifeline to the very unprofitable and shrinking HTC in return for some assets it needs. Those assets are IP necessary to make Pixel phones without being sued by HTC or anyone else but also the research and design skills necessary to build those phones exactly to Google’s specifications and needs rather than having to work off HTC’s foundation and platform, originally built for other devices. That optimization and the integration with Android it should enable are going to be critical for Google to squeeze the most out of its hardware efforts, though it also needs to go deeper on the chips side, something it’s been reported to be doing separately.
One of the things I’ve been asked about by reporters over the last 24 hours or so is what effect this will have on other Android OEMs. The simple answer is that it clearly strengthens Google’s first party hardware capabilities, which for now aren’t much of a threat. But it’s not as if those OEMs can do anything about it – Android is the only viable open smartphone platform out there today, and if OEMs aren’t producing top-notch, differentiated hardware, Google’s efforts in the space are far from their only problem. One thing is notable: Android engineering head Dave Burke is apparently in Taipei – which is interesting because Google hardware has been said to run at arm’s length from Android team, like any other OEM, so there’s no real reason why Dave Burke would need to be involved in this transaction, and yet there he is in HTC’s home city as this deal is announced.
From HTC’s perspective, the cash infusion will give it breathing room to continue working on a strategy that can again provide sustainable profits in the long run, presumably with its Vive VR business at its core, given that even a shrunken smartphone team isn’t likely to be profitable at its current (or smaller, Pixel-less) scale. I do wonder why Google didn’t just buy the whole company – at under $2 billion market cap, Google could presumably have paid roughly double what it is and had the whole thing, taking what it needed, including manufacturing capability, VR hardware expertise, and other useful pieces, and shut the rest down. This deal is certainly simpler and less painful from an integration perspective, but I’m still not sure I see a viable future for HTC even with this investment and the attendant changes.
via HTC
Daily Podcast Episode 60 – September 20, 2017 (Sep 20, 2017)
The daily podcast episode for September 20 is up now on SoundCloud and should be syncing shortly to iTunes, Overcast, and other podcast apps. As usual, the podcast spends about one minute on each of the items covered on the site today, and also points to a few other items in the news today which I didn’t cover but which are nonetheless interesting. You can find today’s episode on SoundCloud and all episodes on iTunes, Overcast, and so on. The additional items covered are below:
Tesla Reportedly Using AMD Intellectual Property for Autonomous Driving Chips (Sep 20, 2017)
CNBC reports that Tesla is using AMD “intellectual property” in its work on chips to power the autonomous driving systems in its cars. Though investors seem to have taken that as a sign that AMD is supplying Tesla with chips, the CNBC report doesn’t explicitly say that, but does quote the CEO of AMD foundry spinoff GlobalFoundries as saying it’s working directly with Tesla on chips, which may suggest AMD isn’t totally in the loop. The CNBC and other coverage has noted that former AMD chip engineers are now abundant at Tesla, though the company has used Nvidia rather than AMD chips in the past. It’s also interesting to see Tesla contemplating such an architectural shift when it’s claimed that the innards of cars it’s selling today based on its existing architecture are capable of running full autonomy in future. The idea of Tesla increasingly designing its own chips would certainly be in keeping with the work led by Autopilot head Jim Keller when he spearheaded the A-series chip initiative at Apple – companies truly serious about software need to design their own hardware right down to the chip layer, an idea reinforced by this week’s iPhone 8 chip performance benchmarks. But the news also makes clear how unsettled the chip vendor picture still is in the automotive space, with Intel clearly finally gaining some traction alongside others who have done better in the early running.
via CNBC
Facebook Announces Further Changes to Ad Targeting Options (Sep 20, 2017)
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg posted to the site today to address the issue of offensive terms appearing in the targeting options for would-be advertisers, a problem that emerged last week and which Facebook issued a temporary fix for later in the week. As I said in commenting on Facebook’s initial tweaks, those didn’t feel like a permanent solution and I predicted that it would slowly dial the temporary limits back as it found more long-term answers. Sandberg’s post today both serves as a mea culpa for not detecting and fixing the issues more proactively, and as a confirmation of my prediction: Facebook has begun allowing some of the most common user-specified interests back into its ad targeting tool and will continue broadening those that can be used over time with more human curation. It will also be clamping down more (though in unspecified ways) on ensuring the actual content served up through ads is appropriate. I’ve felt since this all first came to light that the response to it was overblown, and that the criticism Facebook has faced over it was far too harsh, and we discussed this in some depth on the Beyond Devices Podcast last week, in which my co-host Aaron Miller took the opposite view. A piece in Slate today is particularly hard on the company on this front, arguing that the company’s pursuit of profits has somehow blinded it to these issues. The reality here is that at Facebook’s scale almost any potential misuse of its platform will squeeze through somehow simply because Facebook can’t possibly police it thoroughly enough to eliminate it entirely without also generating lots of false positives. The scale of the problem identified last week and its likely impact were so minimal as to be almost insignificant, and in general Facebook is making good progress on this front and on others in taking more responsibility for policing its platform and minimizing its potential for harm. I’m therefore more inclined than others to cut it a break.
via Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook)
BlackBerry to Provide Operating System for Delphi Autonomous Driving System (Sep 20, 2017)
BlackBerry and Delphi today announced a partnership which will see the latter use the former’s QNX operating system as a secure foundation for its autonomous driving system. What’s not clear from either the press release the companies issued or the CNBC report linked below is what operating system Delphi’s platform has been built on until this point, because it’s not brand new and the company has been talking about releasing it to car manufacturers in 2019. At any rate, as far as I can tell QNX will join Intel and its Mobileye subsidiary as partners around the system, which focuses mostly on pulling in sensor data and making sense of it, rather than complete control of the car. QNX is already a widely used operating system within the car industry and BlackBerry has spent a lot of time hardening it and demonstrating its ultra-secure credentials since its acquisition several years ago, something that’s likely to become increasingly important as cars become more and more like connected computers. Investors clearly see the partnership as a boon for BlackBerry, whose shares rose quite a bit after hours today, but Delphi is only one of a number of manufacturers building similar systems for smaller car manufacturers, while larger automakers will likely mostly build their own. Further competition in this space will come from companies like Waymo, who will develop their own sensor and sensor fusion technology to go with their autonomous driving software and therefore offer something more like a complete package in time.
via CNBC
Fox and Twitter Partner Around New and Returning Shows (Sep 20, 2017)
Fox Television and Twitter have announced a partnership around new and returning shows, which will see some episodes as well as new content broadcast through Twitter’s live video platform. Empire, one of the most popular shows on broadcast TV, will have a live pre-show featuring interviews and other material broadcast live on Twitter, while another returning show, The Mick, will have a mini-marathon broadcast on Twitter, and new show Ghosted will have its premiere episode broadcast live on Twitter four nights running this week. It’s an interesting attempt to create buzz and additional audiences on Twitter around shows which are currently watched almost entirely through traditional channels and more established streaming services, and will serve as a good experiment for both companies. In a world where much of viewing is moving on-demand, forcing live streaming feels a little contrived, and I’m curious to see how viewers respond to that. The Mick marathon will be shown fairly late in the evening, while Ghosted will debut in an early evening slot on Twitter, presumably to avoid conflicting with Fox’s own primetime lineup, though the Ghosted premiere it precedes the network premiere by a week and a half. We’re going to see lots more of this kind of experimentation over the next little while, and I’m guessing much of it will fall flat, but no doubt some useful concepts will come out of it, and the fan-type shows like the one Fox and Twitter are building around Empire seem the likeliest to take off, both because they’re exclusive to the platform and because other networks have already run these successfully – notably AMC’s Talking Dead.
via Fox
RIAA Says US Music Industry Grew Rapidly in H1 2017, Driven by Subscriptions (Sep 20, 2017)
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) today issued its report for the industry’s performance in the first half of this year, and it showed a by now familiar trend: stronger growth driven by rapid growth in streaming. That growth far more than offset the decline in both physical and download sales, with physical sales now just 16% of total revenues compared to 31% back in the first half of 2013. More importantly, downloads have dropped from 44% of industry revenue to just 18%, barely ahead of physical sales, while streaming is now 58% of total revenue. As always, though, it’s worth noting that it’s really subscription streaming that’s driving numbers up, with 61% year on year growth in that category and 74% of total streaming revenues, with just 12% coming from ad-based streaming despite the much larger user numbers. The RIAA says there were an average of 30 million paid subscribers in the US in the first six months of the year, up from 20 million in the same period last year. In its report (linked below) there’s the usual griping about that ad-based revenue stream, a stream the industry continues to go along with but moan about at the same time because it knows it can’t really live without it, even though paid streaming is far more lucrative. In the paid streaming department, the US continues to be quite some distance ahead of most of the rest of the world. A recent survey I ran showed that Spotify and Apple Music alone had captured 23% of online adults as customers between them.
via RIAA (PDF)
Moto X4 Brings Android One to the US and Google’s Project Fi (Sep 20, 2017)
I noted a couple of weeks back with the launch of Xiaomi’s first Android One device that the project appeared to have morphed from a low-tier emerging markets play to one focused more on the mid market, and today’s news reinforces that perception. Motorola is launching its Moto X4 device into the US market as part of the Android One project, and this $400 phone will be available on Google’s own Project Fi service as an alternative to the Nexus and Pixel phones it’s offered until now. (The Nexus phones Google has offered are, by the way, currently showing as out of stock on the Project Fi site, suggesting they’re likely to get phased out with the launch of new Pixel devices in a couple of weeks.) The Android One version isn’t the only one Motorola offers – as I noted when it was announced, the main version actually comes with Alexa baked in, something the Google version certainly won’t do. All of this is indicative of Motorola’s falling leverage with carriers, and its need to do deals with other market players to parcel up its phones in different ways to find attractive niches.
via 9to5Google
★ Amazon is Reportedly Working on Voice Glasses and Home Security Cameras (Sep 20, 2017)
The Financial Times reports that Amazon is working on two new hardware categories: Alexa voice assistant-enabled glasses, and home security cameras which would integrate with Alexa hardware in various ways. The home security camera seems by far the less surprising of the two, given that it’s one of the bigger existing smart home market segments and a logical extension of what Amazon is doing with its Echo line (including the Echo Look, which already incorporates a camera). But it’s the voice-enabled glasses that are both surprising and somewhat baffling as a concept, especially because there’s no ostensible connection between glasses – a primarily vision-oriented product – and Alexa, a product centered on the ears. It sounds like the glasses are a way to hide bone-conduction audio in a less nerdy way than a bluetooth headset would, but for those who don’t normally wear glasses, aren’t they at least as nerdy, not to mention conspicuous? There’s arguably some logic to using bone conduction as a technology because it doesn’t block the ear in the same way as earbuds and headphones, but I’m really not convinced that glasses are the best way to deliver that experience. It’s also worth noting by way of context that Amazon has arguably never had a successful personal consumer device. Its one earlier attempt – the Fire Phone – was a huge failure, and all of its other devices are arguably less personal and more shared devices, often with fairly uninspiring industrial design which makes me skeptical that Amazon knows how to create appealing personal products. Given that the FT says both of these products could launch by the end of the year, I guess we’ll see the details soon enough, but I’m enormously skeptical on the glasses though the cameras seem like they’ll sell well, albeit now with stronger competition from Nest.
via Financial Times
★ Google Reportedly About to Announce Partial HTC Acquisition (Sep 20, 2017)
HTC has formally announced that its shares will halt trading for a material announcement tomorrow, and Bloomberg is reporting that it will be that Google is acquiring at least part of the company’s smartphone operations. Other sources – including Taiwanese site Apple Daily and as I understand it shortly also the Wall Street Journal – are saying that it’s the smartphone design operations specifically that Google will acquire, for a relatively small sum in the hundreds of millions of dollars. As I’ve said before, there’s a strong logic to this acquisition despite the history with Motorola. The biggest change since that earlier acquisition is that Google is now far more clearly serious about hardware, with a consolidated division about to announce a second generation of major products at an October 4th launch event. In addition, acquiring a very focused slice of HTC would be a very different proposition from buying what was at the time a much larger and more diverse Motorola business, which was subsequently run largely at arm’s length inside Google. I would expect Google to bring the HTC assets deeply into its own hardware division and to use the new capabilities to drive much more optimized and integrated hardware design relative to the ODM approach used for Pixel hardware, which likely relied heavily on existing designs and platforms from HTC.
All of this is, of course, further validation along with Microsoft’s Surface push of the approach Apple has long taken to tightly integrating hardware and software. It’s increasingly clear that the best results in hardware are achieved by those who can combine hardware and software in such a way, preferably with tight control of the whole process, and Google would get a lot closer to that goal through this acquisition. The big question still remains what happens to whatever’s left of HTC, which presumably will abandon making smartphones and focus on its Vive VR efforts, something that’s going to be a tough proposition in an increasingly competitive market. I’m still surprised that Google isn’t taking over the whole thing, because it could clearly benefit from the Vive assets as it seeks to deepen its own Daydream VR capabilities.
via Bloomberg
★ Nest Introduces First New Hardware Categories in Years, Enters Security Market (Sep 20, 2017)
Nest held a press conference in San Francisco today and introduced three new products including its first really new product categories since its 2014 acquisition of Dropcam (this chart I put together a while ago presents the picture prior to today). The theme of the event was progress towards Nest’s ultimate goal – creating “a home that takes care of the people inside it and the world around it.” That mission combines Apple’s tendency to reinvent familiar products in ways that makes them vastly easier and more pleasant to use (unsurprising given the Nest founders’ Apple heritage) with more of an environmental message, largely tied to the smart thermostats. The first product announced today was a new outdoor version of the Nest Cam IQ indoor camera announced recently which added smarts including facial recognition to reduce false alarms among other things. The second was the Nest Hello, a smart doorbell very much along the lines of others already in the market but again with some clever technology borrowed from the camera line, and is the only product announced today that won’t be available until next year. The third was Nest’s big new category, home security, in the form of the Nest Secure system, which combines a hub and sensors to monitor movement inside a home as well as doors and windows.
The Nest product line now feels a lot more comprehensive than it did a couple of years ago, with smart thermostats, smoke/CO detectors, and indoor cameras for inside the home, outdoor cameras and the doorbell for outside it, and a security system to keep it all secure, plus integrations with various third parties for lighting and other device categories. But it’s very much still an off-the-shelf, DIY, pay-upfront approach to the smart home, which continues to limit the addressable market to people willing to tinker, take risks, and self-manage with their home gear. When new CEO Marwan Fawaz came on board, I had thought he might lead the company through a transformation to more of a services company, which would put it much more in line with the telcos, cable companies, and others already offering that model and thereby reaching a much broader market. But there’s little sign of that yet – the only service component announced today is provided through a partnership with a third party monitoring company, and the prices for the new gear remain high: Nest Cam IQ outdoor is $349 for one, the starter pack for Nest Secure is $499 but only comes with two sensors, with most homes likely requiring several more, with pricing for Hello yet to be announced.
As such, Nest continues to largely target people with higher disposable incomes and a willingness to self-install and self-manage. My Nest thermostats frequently disconnect randomly from the strong WiFi signal in my home and suffer from other glitches, so unless Nest has improved things dramatically in these new products they’re likely to require quite a bit of management. It’s also worth noting that there continues to be minimal integration with the rest of Alphabet – I’d hope that some of the clever detection stuff has leant on Alphabet’s broader AI and machine learning capabilities, and Google Assistant integration is coming to the Nest Cam IQ devices in a software update. But Nest feels like it’s still being run very much at arm’s length from Google, for better or worse.
via Nest
★ Apple Watch LTE Reviews Mostly Positive But Some Note LTE/WiFi Issues (Sep 20, 2017)
Following on the heels of yesterday’s iPhone 8 reviews, today the reviews for the Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE came out, and they were rather different in tone, in at least some cases. Whereas yesterday’s reviews were largely positive with some misgivings around the edges, today’s Watch reviews were bifurcated between those that were almost entirely positive and those that noted significant connectivity issues, notably those at the Wall Street Journal and The Verge (once again, I’m linking to the Techmeme roundup here). All seemed to agree that the faster processors and watchOS 4 combine for significantly better performance across multiple areas including fitness and heart rate tracking, app use, and music, but the differences occurred around LTE/WiFI connectivity.
It appears (there’s a good explainer here) that the Watch tends to try to hop onto so-called captive WiFi networks – those that allow devices to connect without a password but require going through an interstitial or popup before allowing internet access – but can’t progress beyond the interstitial, putting the Watch in an awkward in-between state where it’s connected to WiFi but can’t actually reach the internet. That, in turn, stops the Watch from trying to connect to LTE, which is what you really want it to do in that situation. That should be a relatively easy software fix for Apple, and it’s suggested that’s the case, but it’s baffling that this issue didn’t come up during all the testing that must have gone on over recent months, and as such is an embarrassing slip-up for Apple when the new connectivity options are the key selling point for this device.
It is notable that not all reviewers experienced the problem, which may be indicative of either their differing use during the review period or their differing earlier use, with some perhaps more prone to hop onto captive WiFi networks with their iPhones (and thereby inadvertently setting up their Watches for failure) than others. At any rate, many regular users likely won’t see those issues either, especially if using the Watch out in the wild rather than in busy urban areas, while those who do will hopefully see the problem fixed very quickly in a software update. Regardless, this clearly wasn’t what Apple was hoping for from these reviews, and it’s likely that the glitches will color perceptions of the Watch at least until Apple does issue a fix and that gets some decent coverage.
via Techmeme
Daily Podcast Episode 59 – September 19, 2017 (Sep 19, 2017)
The daily podcast episode for September 19 is up now on SoundCloud and should be syncing shortly to iTunes, Overcast, and other podcast apps. As usual, the podcast spends about one minute on each of the items covered on the site today, and also points to a few other items in the news today which I didn’t cover but which are nonetheless interesting. You can find today’s episode on SoundCloud and all episodes on iTunes, Overcast, and so on. The additional items covered are below:
- Live Sports Audiences Getting Older
- Best Buy’s Success Against Amazon
- European Official Talking to US Tech
- Data on Emmy Nominee Show Awareness (PDF)
Details on Google’s Home Mini, Pixel 2 XL, and Pixelbook Leak Ahead of Event (Sep 19, 2017)
Droid Life appears to have obtained images and pricing for three of the hardware products Google is expected to unveil at its October 4th hardware event. It has four separate posts on the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL, a Chromebook called the Pixelbook, and the Google Home Mini, which is exactly what it sounds like. The Pixel 2 models seem to lean heavily on the design of the first versions from a hardware design perspective, with some minor changes and some new color options, with the smaller one being made again by HTC and the larger one by LG, as reported earlier. It looks like Google will embrace this year’s super premium pricing for larger flagships, too, with an $849 starting price on the XL, although it’ll offer monthly financing (whether directly or through a partner is not clear) as well. The Pixelbook is the predicted successor to the original Pixel, a high-end Chromebook, though this time with a screen that folds over the keyboard to become a clunky tablet, and an optional pen, while it retains the premium pricing. So that’s more or less in the Surface ballpark and a more expensive and laptop-like alternative to Apple’s iPad Pro line. Lastly, the Google Home Mini is exactly what you’d expect, borrowing from the Google Home’s slightly softer design relative to Amazon’s fairly industrial looking speakers in a smaller and cheaper form factor.
We’ll have to wait for the event itself to see all the software and feature details – these leaks are pretty much exclusively about external features and pricing – but I half wonder whether Google has allowed some of these details to leak out ahead of Friday’s iPhone 8 launch to give at least some potential buyers pause before jumping into a new iPhone. Given the breadth of the leaks, though, I suspect it’s more likely a rogue employee looking for some attention and/or notoriety. As with the iPhone leaks, I think this kind of thing benefits all of us very little while trampling on the hard work of many who’ve been prepping these devices for launch.
via Droid Life: Pixel 2 XL, Pixel 2, Pixelbook, Google Home Mini
T-Mobile Ups Monthly Threshold for Congestion-Based Throttling to 50GB (Sep 19, 2017)
T-Mobile has announced that it’s raising the monthly usage threshold for de-prioritization during times of congestion from 32GB to 50 GB. By way of background, this threshold comes into play when customers have exceeded that amount of data consumed in a given month and then try to use the T-Mobile network in a congested area, at which point their access to the network gets prioritized below that of other users who haven’t likewise exceeded the threshold. T-Mobile had previously said that only around 3% of its customers used over the 32GB threshold, and now says just 1% of its customers use 50GB or more in a month, and of course not all of those will actually end up using the network at a congested time and place. As such, like unlimited plans in general, this announcement is solely about peace of mind for the vast majority of customers, rather than something that’s actually going to impact them in any meaningful way. It does put T-Mobile’s threshold well above those of the other carriers, so this is a useful marketing point that will cost the company essentially nothing. More broadly, of course, T-Mobile continues to have far fewer customers than either of its two larger rivals, which means it has excess capacity on its network which makes offering free and discounted services much more economically viable than it is for AT&T and Verizon, which tend to have to be more conservative in their offers.
via T-Mobile
Microsoft Promotes Xbox Head to Senior Leadership Team (Sep 19, 2017)
Satya Nadella has appointed Phil Spencer, who runs the Xbox team at Microsoft, to the company’s Senior Leadership Team, which now comprises 16 individuals. I just spent some time breaking down that SLT and there are 10 individuals in functional roles, from the CEO to the CMO and heads of HR, Legal, Finance, etc.; plus six individuals who run product or customer segment organizations, now including Spencer. Looked at that way, Spencer has been an odd omission from this team, given that gaming has generated 9-12% of Microsoft’s revenue annually for the past ten years, certainly up there with other groups like Windows and Devices (15% this past year), and LinkedIn (3%). But the Xbox has always been a bit of an oddity at Microsoft, a company which has always been much more geared towards business than consumer markets – indeed, Spencer is the first explicitly consumer-focused executive on the current SLT. More broadly, gaming is one of the bigger individual chunks of revenue, and as Mary Jo Foley points out in the piece linked below, even beyond Xbox hardware gaming is an increasingly important part of Microsoft’s strategy to monetize its consumer efforts, many of which today are free to the user. Arguably the next logical person to add to the SLT would be whoever is running Bing today, since advertising contributed 8% of Microsoft’s revenues last year and it’s another important chunk of its consumer business, albeit with a much lower executive profile (despite spending some time searching, I can’t actually figure out who that is, which tells you something).
via ZDNet
Twitter Removed Nearly 1m Terrorist Accounts From 2015 to 2017 (Sep 19, 2017)
Twitter has published its latest Transparency Report, which covers the first half of 2017 and mostly relates to requests for intervention in content posted on Twitter by government entities. Amongst the other data in there, though, Twitter has also reported specific numbers on the accounts removed from the service over promotion of terrorism, a total that has reached over 900,000 accounts since August 2015. Importantly, the vast majority of those accounts were taken down not because of any report by a government agency but because Twitter’s own in-house tools flagged the accounts, often before they even began tweeting. That represents good progress over the last couple of years in this particular area, but Twitter remains poor in policing abuse in general on its site, as several reports from BuzzFeed and other news outlets have shown. In relation to that issue, it’s notable that “abusive behavior” is the category of government-reported content with by far the lowest action rate from Twitter of all those it reports at just 12% of reports acted on, versus 40% for copyright issues, 63% for trademark infringement, and 92% for promotion of terrorism. That may in part be because government representatives often have thin skins and those opposing them may be considered by Twitter to be in need of special free speech protections, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that 12% was representative of the proportion of overall abuse reports that get acted on by Twitter.
via Twitter
Uber Sues Ad Agency for Fraud Over Alleged Fake Clicks and Downloads (Sep 19, 2017)
Uber is suing ad agency Fetch over what it says is fraudulent reporting of ads placed and clicked on, and resulting downloads of its apps by those who never actually saw ads placed by Fetch. Uber is withholding some of the money it owes Fetch while pursuing the lawsuit for a rather larger sum of $40 million, a little over half of what it’s paid Fetch in total over the last three years. Presumably Uber feels it has decent evidence to support its claims, given that – as Bloomberg points out in the article linked below – it’s not a particularly litigious company despite being a target of others’ lawsuits frequently. Fetch, meanwhile, has spoken in the past about the issue of ad fraud and the challenge of identifying and reducing it, something that’s by no means unique to the company in the broader world of online advertising. Ad fraud continues to be one of several big issues facing ad-based companies and complicating their relationships with brands and buyers.
Update: On September 27, 2017, Phunware, one of the mobile ad firms Fetch used to place ads, is now suing Uber over non-payment, as the latter is withholding payment from Fetch during the lawsuit. Uber says it feels Phunware is one of the parties which engaged in the fraud and will present evidence of this in court.
via Bloomberg
Pandora Users Can Now Watch Video Ads In Exchange for Skips and Playbacks (Sep 19, 2017)
Pandora has been testing a new ad model for some time and is now launching it broadly. The model offers users an opportunity to trade watching a video ad for extra skips and playbacks, both of which are normally limited under its ad-based option. That’s a familiar model from the mobile gaming market, where games often offer users additional lives or other in-game features in return for watching video ads, although anecdotal evidence from my own family suggests that those ads aren’t really being “watched” in any meaningful way – they basically insert a 30-second delay in game play during which the player does something else. Pandora says a high percentage – 42% – of its active user base has signed up for this program, which is called Video Plus, so that’s a good start, but the key metrics here aren’t the number of signups or even the number of times people agree to trade an ad view for in-app functionality, but brand recall and other more traditional ad metrics which would demonstrate that users are actually watching and taking in the content of video ads. There’s no mention of any of that in the Adweek article linked below, and whether this new model ultimately succeeds or fails will depend entirely on whether brands actually see a decent return on the investment.
via Adweek