Dispatch 031: YouTube TV Makes a Costly Mistake
I'm still annoyed about the YouTube TV price increase. So much so that I wrote about it this weekend after linking to it last week (and after writing about it four years ago). To me, it's less about the price itself – though it is way too large of an increase to do in one jump – but more so because it points to Google clearly not understanding what people grew to hate about cable.
Part of it was price, sure, but just as big of a problem was the lack of choice. That's great that you added more content and channels, Google. I don't want those. Can I keep paying what I was paying and you keep those channels? No? Why not? Oh, because that's not how bundle economics work. But that's the argument Comcast would have made in 2004 – in 2024, there are too many other streaming options to waste time with services that pull such nonsense.
M.G. Siegler
I Think...
📵 TikTok Loses Bid for Halt to Looming US ‘Divest or Ban’ Law – No emergency stay on the execution of TikTok (since it feels too late in the game for a divestment before the ban goes into effect on January 19). While it does seem like the Supreme Court may take up the case, there's no precedent for halting an Act of Congress from going into place while they wait – undoubtedly some time well into 2025. The Supreme Court itself could seemingly do something ahead of hearing the case at some point next year, but again, there's no precedent for that. So it may come down to President Trump issuing some sort of first-day executive order to put a pause on the ban while things are sorted – which may mean trying to facilitate a sale. If they try to push for a sale while it's banned, it may feel too much like a full-on shakedown? While the Trump administration would undoubtedly be fine with that – hard ball negotiations! – it seems just as likely they use this whole thing as some point of leverage in other talks with China. Regardless, it seems like TikTok will be banned from US app stores for at least a day? [FT 🔒]
🗡️ ‘Kraven the Hunter’ Bombing With $10M-$12M Debut – Not hugely surprising given how many times the release date was moved, and the trailers, but ouch. It might be time for Sony to fully sell the Spider-Man rights back to Disney/Marvel. The problem there is that Spider-Man himself keeps doing well, with a new one coming, thanks to, yes, Disney/Marvel. But all the tangential projects have become various degrees of disasters. This. Madame Web. Venom still does fine financially, but the results are dwindling, and those movies are not good. Hopefully this doesn't hurt Aaron Taylor-Johnson's chances at landing James Bond. But this big belly flop certainly will not help. [THR]
☄️ OpenAI Fires Back at Elon Musk’s Lawsuit – Either OpenAI is truly confident that Musk won't retaliate against attacks (to be fair, counter-attacks) now being made in public, or they're entirely not confident that he won't – more on this below. The new OpenAI post, not technically a part of 'Shipmas' is full of so much spice and holiday spirit that one has to wonder if Shipmas didn't actually arrive early. OpenAI not only lays out a nicely organized timeline of seeming Musk double-speak, but publishes the receipts, quite literally. Many of these emails and messages have been published before (either by OpenAI or via court documents), but OpenAI lays them out and formats them so nicely – going so far as to recreate the style of iMessage – that it's easy to follow. The result is a great look-back into the history of the company. One that seemingly makes it clear how we got to this point (TL;DR: Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman were clearly in over their heads against two experienced entrepreneurs in Altman and Musk – Musk overplayed his hand, while Altman seemed to read the room better). Granted, it's perhaps a bit one-sided, so maybe Musk will publish his own. More likely, legal discovery will surface more of those going forward. [NYT]
🥷 Sam Altman Reckons with a Growing Threat to OpenAI: Elon Musk – Related to the above, I'm not sure why we're still so focused on Musk "targeting" Altman/OpenAI directly. From the Techmeme headline on down to the "people close" to the matter sources that FT goes with, to Altman and Jeff Bezos directly, everyone seems to be fixated on the idea that Musk would just tell Donald Trump to shut down OpenAI or Blue Origin or something like that. Obviously – obviously – that won't happen. And one of the main reasons it won't happen it because it doesn't need to happen. As Maurice "Snoopy" Miller tells Jack Foley in Out of Sight, "Well, uh, the man don't just have to die, Foley. I mean, he could accidentally hurt himself falling down on something real hard, you know..." I'm not saying it will happen, but I am saying that the "best" way to hurt OpenAI or any other company in this circumstance would be indirectly. Like, say, the sin of omission. Or perhaps even better, by actually helping OpenAI in ways, just not as much as, say, xAI. And again, anything overt will be obvious, but there are about a million ways to obfuscate such actions through government and regulation. At least until DOGE streamlines it <snicker>. [FT 🔒]
🤑 Meta Urges California Attorney General to Stop OpenAI From Becoming For-Profit – I would say "mind your own business, Meta" – except that's exactly what they're clearly doing here: minding their own business. Does anyone really believe that Meta would write a letter to the AG if the move they oppose wouldn't directly benefit their main competitor? They could have at least been transparent about it, rather than arguing about the bad precedent it would set for such transitions. And trying to do what's best for the people of California or whatever 🙄. Given what a nightmare it has been for OpenAI and their investors because of the for-profit element of the business, I'm guessing we're not going to see that again for a long while. B-corps? Sure. But not non-profits, even if they can change to for-profit over time. This is such a ridiculous political maneuver that it doesn't feel too cynical to wonder if it's Mark Zuckerberg's attempt to curry favor with Elon Musk – who, of course, is suing the startup he co-founded over this very transition and is now pals with a certain incoming President who once called on Zuck to be jailed. We feel a long way from that cage match... [WSJ 🔒]
I Wrote...
I'm still not sure how I feel about a 19" or 20" foldable iPad. But a foldable iPhone? All-in like Kenny Rogers at the table...
M.G. Siegler
I Link...
- Fresh off his trip to London, which was fresh off his trip to China, Tim Cook had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Donald Trump. On a scale of 100 to 100, how pissed do you think he was that Elon Musk decided to chaperone? (Strange this keeps happening...) They have things to discuss! Maybe if Apple had paid the clearly now standard $1M, he could have gotten a private dinner... [NYT]
- Grok got both 3x faster and 3x more shoved in the face of every Xitter user with a new Grok button. What is really needs is a new name. [TechCrunch]
- Following the insane run-up over the past couple of years, NVIDIA's stock is actually only up 3% in the past six months. That's well behind the 11% for the S&P500 as a whole. Are investors looking elsewhere for their AI narrative? (Broadcom? AI services?) Or just giving NVIDIA a breather? [FT 🔒]
- The BBC is not happy with the way Apple Intelligence summarized a headline given that it made it incorrect and yet still looked like it was coming from the BBC (and not Apple). Expect to hear/see a lot more of this... [BBC]
- Apple continues to get more granular in a push to "own the whole stack" within their devices. Now they're closing in on their own Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips – first coming to a new Apple TV and HomePod mini next year before going broader to iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Bad news for Broadcom, but don't feel too badly for them, bigger things are afoot... [Bloomberg 🔒]
- Let the streaming bidding war begin for Sesame Street. Though, reading between the lines of why Warner Bros Discovery/HBO let them walk, it seems, sadly, the programming wasn't being watched as much as was hoped. Still, have to imagine this content (and library, assuming any bidder gets full access despite HBO's separate deal there), brand, and demographic would interest Netflix, Amazon, or Apple... [THR]
- Yet another new head-strap promising to make wearing the Vision Pro actually comfortable. This one is by an actual medical solutions company which creates products to help with sleep apnea. At some point, the proliferation of these solutions just means Apple needs to do whatever it takes to make the device lighter. Obviously. [9to5Mac]
- While YouTube TV may be dropping the ball (per above), YouTube itself increasingly dominates on TVs. Shouldn't these merge at some point given the increasing overlap, maybe a YouTube Premium account can get you a discount on YouTube TV? That would be a powerful bundle... [Verge]
- One of Cleveland's best baseball players ever was also one of their worst trades. Like that other "Rocky", Rocky Colavito has his own statue and recently passed away at age 91. [NYT]
- Congrats to Lina Khan on successfully killing the Big Grocery mafia on her way out the door. Unfortunately, she and the FTC once again seemingly failed to see the forest through the trees as this helps the top player, Walmart (and increasingly, Amazon) on the online and ads side of the equation. [WSJ 🔒]
- Microsoft's Recall feature for Windows, now finally rolling out after those recalls, sounds either promising yet "creepy" or still actually worrisome from a safety perspective, depending on what you read. Should Microsoft just reboot this whole effort? Feels like consumer trust is going to be an issue going forward. [Tom's Hardware]
- A profile of Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, who has been there for 22 years, joining as employee "007" to leading day to day all the way through the recent $350B valuation. [FT 🔒]
I Quote...
"Imagine you were a tobacco company and you built a big business and then people started to get worried because people were getting sick and dying because of the addiction of cigarettes and carcinogens. If you bought a tobacco company after the surgeon general's warning, then you were putting a target on your back because you were buying it with the awareness that your product kills people."
-- Frank McCourt, telling Alex Heath one of the reasons why he doesn't think any of the Big Tech companies will ultimately buy TikTok.
Naturally, he feels the bid he has put together to buy the product from ByteDance is the best one. But there are also a lot of questions with his bid, which he says is currently in the $20B-range. Notably, he has not yet had any discussions with ByteDance about the bid. Let alone China. But his group is "starting" to talk to the incoming Trump administration about the offer, and believes they're going to be receptive to a sale versus an outright ban.
And McCourt's pitch of not needing/wanting any sort of algorithm, just the product and user base, could be a compelling one for some of the parties involved. Less compelling may be the whole nebulous decentralized/crypto angle they want to squeeze TikTok into.
Also, there's almost no way ByteDance parts with TikTok for that price. Maybe if it was banned for an elongated period of time and was simply a decaying asset. Otherwise, I suspect the price is going to need to be closer to $100B. Very few entities could pay that amount, obviously. But Microsoft is one...
I Quote Again...
“Would be worth way more than $50M not to seem like Microsoft’s marketing bitch.”
-- Elon Musk, in a message to Sam Altman back in 2016, when OpenAI was hammering out an early deal with Microsoft.
That deal would have given the startup $50M in compute – oh to be young again – in exchange for using and giving feedback on Microsoft's cloud for AI. But the part that made Musk "feel nauseous" (grammar aside) was the evangelizing element that Microsoft wanted OpenAI to do for them in exchange. Altman took this feedback back to Microsoft and they relented...