The founders of cryptocurrency exchanges face a mountain of regulatory challenges and billions in personal losses. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao personally lost $12 billion this year as trading volumes on Binance declined, according to a Bloomberg report Friday. Meanwhile, the Winklevoss twins’ Gemini sued their former…
Yes, we’re already talking about the successor to the Galaxy S23 Ultra, or what is bound to be Samsung’s next big flagship smartphone in the coming year.
Vice president Prabhakar Raghavan testified Friday that Google paid $26.3 billion in 2021 for the purpose of maintaining default search engine status and acquiring traffic, Bloomberg reports. It’s likely the lion’s share of that sum went to Apple, which it has showered with exorbitant sums for many years in order to remain the default search option on iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Raghavan, who was testifying as part of the DOJ’s ongoing antitrust suit against the company, said Google’s search advertising made $146.4 billion in revenue in 2021, which puts the $26 billion it paid for default status in perspective. The executive clarified that default status was the most costly part of what it pays to acquire traffic.
Raghavan didn’t mention how much of the $26.3 billion went to Apple. But CNBC reports that an estimate from private wealth management firm Bernstein ballparked that Google could pay Apple up to $19 billion this year for the default privilege.
A slide shown in court revealed that, in 2014, Google brought in $47 billion in search revenue while paying $7.1 billion for default status. Raghavan testified that Google’s overall default search engine payments nearly quadrupled from 2014 to 2021, while its search advertising revenue (roughly) tripled.
Google objected to making the figures public, arguing it would hurt its ability to negotiate future contracts. Judge Amit Mehta, overseeing the case, disagreed.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-paid-26-billion-in-2021-for-default-search-engine-status-203129384.html?src=rss
Cruel joke for trick-or-treaters or coveted seasonal delight? You make the call!
Robotics and artificial intelligence: they’ll spell the end of humanity, but scientists and engineers just keep racing forward with the technologies whether we like it or not. And now Boston Dynamics has harnessed the power of ChatGPT to turn one of its Spot quadruped robots into a talking tour guide. But can it speak in the style of a 1920s archaeologist? What good would it be if it couldn’t?
The robotic tour guide can lead visitors around the facility and describe objects in the environment using a visual question answering (VQA) model and go into more detail if prompted using a large language model (LLM). It can also answer questions, make decisions about what to discuss or do next, and speak in any variety of different personalities.
In the video, Spot demonstrates its 1920s archeologist personality, as well as a British butler, a teenage robot, and “Josh,” a gloomy, sarcastic robot. That one was probably my favorite because it reminded me a lot of myself. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t mind hanging out with Josh. And that’s precisely how Skynet is going to get us.
[via TechEBlog and Laughing Squid]
Feast your eyes on Uranus’ glowing edges. We’re serious—a team of astronomers has spotted a new aurora on the seventh planet from the Sun, glowing at infrared wavelengths.
Shady stem cell clinics are still peddling false hope to people dealing with covid-19, new research this week suggests. The study found dozens of clinics selling stem cell treatments for covid-related issues, especially long covid. These therapies often cost thousands of dollars, but there’s no good evidence that they…
X is adding two new tiers to its subscription offering, previously known as Twitter Blue. The company is adding a new, $16 per month “Premium+ tier” that eliminates ads in users’ following and “for you” timelines, in addition to the blue checkmark and other existing perks for subscribers. X is also adding a new, lower-cost “basic” tier that costs $3 a month.
The new subscription plans come as X’s advertising business has continued to decline, and the company is increasingly reliant on subscription revenue. X has also recently begun testing a program that requires all new users in some countries to pay $1 per year in order to post and reply to tweets.
introducing Premium+
– no ads in For You or Following
– largest boost for your replies (vs other Premium tiers or unverified users)
– access to our full suite of creator toolsnow available on Web ✌️
subscribe here → https://t.co/Ywvyijo9CQ
— Premium (@premium) October 27, 2023
In addition to removing ads from users’ timeline, X said in a tweet that Premium+ subscribers would get an even bigger algorithmic boost in replies compared with subscribers paying for the cheaper premium level. Of note, it appears that both new tiers are only available via the web, at least for now, which is likely meant to help the company avoid additional fees associated with Apple and Google’s app stores.
The $3 basic tier appears to be a much more limited set of features compared with Premium and Premium+ and, notably, doesn’t include the blue checkmark or revenue-sharing. Instead, it offers extras like tweets editing, longer posts, the ability to download videos. It also offers a “small reply boost” and encrypted direct messages.
The new tiers come amid new reports about Elon Musk’s ambitious plans for X, one year after his takeover of the social media company. Musk, who has often talked about wanting to create an “everything app” reportedly wants to directly challenge YouTube and LinkedIn, according to a new report in Bloomberg. His exact plans aren’t yet clear, but the company has recently teased new video streaming and job posting features on X.
Offering additional subscription services could also tie into Musk’s plans to offer banking and other financial services. (Musk has noted that obtaining users’ credit card information is a key first step.) “In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world,” Musk tweeted in July. And, according to reporting from The Verge, Musk told employees this week that he wants X to be able to completely replace bank accounts by the end of 2024.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/x-introduces-an-ad-free-premium-tier-for-16-a-month-191523132.html?src=rss
When Netflix first unveiled its streaming video service in 2007, it felt like a miracle. Netflix’s DVD customers in the US, who were paying between $5.99 to $17.99 a month, instantly had access to 1,000 movies over a web browser. No more waiting for DVDs in the mail, no ads like TV – just hit a button and watch. Instantly! Now that seems like ages ago. Netflix’s most premium 4K streaming plan now costs $23 a month, while its standard subscription without ads costs $15.49 a month. (There is a standard plan with ads for $6.99 a month, but that doesn’t support offline downloads and also doesn’t include some content.)
Netflix has also been cracking down on account sharing recently, which is great for its overall earnings and subscriber count, but bad for anyone trying to save a buck. You’ll have to pay an extra $7.99 a month to add more member slots to the standard and premium plans.
And it’s not just Netflix. Over the past year, just about every major streaming service has raised its prices considerably. Apple TV+ is doubling its original price to $10 a month ($99 annually). Disney+ saw a hefty increase as well to $14 a month for its ad-free premium tier. For those who subscribe to multiple services, it’s easy to think we’re back in the bad old days of cable TV, where we ended up spending gobs of money for hundreds of channels.
But let’s not get dramatic. Subscribing to the streaming services you use the most is still far cheaper than going for a typical cable plan. In my area, Comcast’s most popular plan with over 125 channels is listed at $60 a month, but the company hides the additional $27.80 broadcast network fee and $13.40 regional sport licensing fee. My actual monthly cost starts at $101.20, and that doesn’t include taxes, equipment rental fees (at least $10 a month) and other additions Comcast may coax you into. (Want 300 hours of Cloud DVR? That’s another $20 monthly!)
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average urban consumer spends an eye-watering $575 a month on cable, satellite or live streaming TV service. To be clear, those numbers reflect some customers spending a ton more on sports and other packages compared to others. But still, even the prospect of spending $370 a month on cable (the BLS’s consumer average from 2010) feels unfathomable. All of a sudden, Netflix creeping toward $25 doesn’t seem so bad — especially since cable customers also have to subscribe to streaming services to see their original shows.
While some have argued that streaming price hikes signal the end of the cord-cutting dream, that’s far from true. Cable prices were already high a decade ago, and they’ve risen considerably since then. (Broadcast fees alone were estimated to jump between 8 to 10 percent between 2016 and 2019.) If anything, the case for cord-cutting is even stronger now. With the wealth of content available on streaming services, do you really need to pay hundreds to sit through another HGTV marathon? Especially when you can find some HGTV content on Max, and similar shows on other streamers?
Nobody likes to see their favorite services getting more expensive. You could easily argue that streaming prices hikes fall firmly within Corey Doctorow’s concept of internet enshittification, wherein companies provide cheap and useful services to grow their userbase, but inevitably make the experience worse to squeeze out more money and appease their investors. Unless an online service is being run as a non-profit or completely free side project, enshittification seems inevitable.
But it’s worth acknowledging why streaming services were so cheap to begin with. Netflix’s streaming service was practically an experiment early on — it was rolled into existing subscription plans, and you could only watch up to 18 hours a month. When Netflix launched its standalone streaming subscription in 2010, it was only $7.99 a month — a price that held true until its basic plan jumped a whole dollar in 2019. While the company introduced more expensive standard and premium plans along the way, the entry plan always seemed like a tremendous deal. Who wouldn’t want instant access to thousands of movies and TV shows for the price of two coffees?
Like many startups during the 2010s, Netflix continually raised tons of money (around $5 billion) without making enormous profit — or at least, not profit in line with the tens of billions the company has spent on original content over the last decade. Enticing new subscribers and keeping them was far more important to Netflix than actually being a sustainable business. So it wasn’t too surprising when other services like HBO Max, Disney+ and Apple TV+ launched with low prices competitive with Netflix.
According to Janko Roettgers, author of the newsletter Lowpass, and a former media and technology reporter at Variety, Netflix had an advantage over the competition because its legacy DVD business could fund its streaming ambitions. Other companies like Disney and Warner Bros. had to decide how streaming fit within their existing TV channels and movie studios.
“Now [Netflix is] making money with streaming across the world, and they’re starting to get into gaming,” Roettgers noted on the Engadget Podcast this week. “So they’re pretty quick at following up. And if you look at some of these legacy media companies, well, they still have linear networks. And those are declining slowly and slowly, and it’s taking them a long time to figure out […] Should we get out of this? How many can we keep running? How many of those do we need to shut down?”
When Netflix announced that it was actually losing subscribers in 2022 — 200,000 in the first quarter, followed by a whopping one million users in the second quarter — it was like a nuclear bomb exploded in the streaming industry. It immediately led to belt tightening across every service: Widespread Layoffs, canceled shows, and more strategies to make money. Netflix’s ad-supported tier launched later that year, while its account sharing lockdown began in earnest this May.
With interest rates on the rise and investors worried about the economy, raising prices was the inevitable next step for every streaming provider. And unfortunately, that trend won’t be reversed anytime soon. At best, we can only hope that the threat of losing users and pressure from competition will keep Netflix and others from reaching the dreaded highs of cable.
But don’t forget, there’s one thing you can do with streaming services that’s far more difficult with cable companies: You can cancel and subscribe easily online. You don’t need to set aside time and emotional energy to deal with a customer service rep on the phone, or block out a morning for a technician to visit. That potential for churn hangs over every streaming provider. So if their prices get too high, or they’re not actually providing enough valuable content to watch, just leave.
Still, it’s worth remembering that access to media is cheaper than ever. You don’t have to worry about spending a ton to rent movies from Blockbuster or your local video store. There aren’t any late fees to worry about. And while I miss the heyday of DVDs, buying just one of those discs could cover a month of service across two streaming services today (sometimes three!).
So sure, it stinks that Netflix is getting more expensive. But, personally, I’d easily take these higher prices over life before the streaming era.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/is-streaming-video-even-still-worth-it-192651141.html?src=rss
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
