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.

Each post below is tagged with
  • Company/Division names
  • Topics
    • and
  • Narratives
    • as appropriate.
    Apple Criticized over Confusing iOS WiFi and Bluetooth Settings (Oct 6, 2017)

    This issue has been covered in various places over the past couple of weeks, but this is the first bit of real criticism I’ve seen of Apple’s approach here, and I thought it was worth diving into briefly. In iOS 11, the Control Center users reach by sliding up from the bottom of the screen on most iPhones has what appear to be on/off toggles for Bluetooth and WiFi, but in reality these toggles don’t actually turn those radios all the way off. Rather, they leave both radios in a more limited mode in which they still operate in certain ways and in fact will reactivate each morning at 5am. This is a change Apple hasn’t communicated proactively to users in any way, and represents a fairly big shift from how things have worked in the past.

    The EFF piece linked below suggests this presents security risks given past Bluetooth vulnerabilities, though it doesn’t actually suggest any specific vulnerabilities Apple might be exposing users to in iOS, which like most mobile operating systems handles Bluetooth pairing requests pretty carefully. Apple’s reasoning for the change is sound – leaving these radios in this in-between state enables key Apple functions like Handoff of activity between devices, the Instant Hotspot feature, and others – but the implementation of the change feels un-Apple-like, in that it’s unintuitive and overrides user preferences in a couple of different ways. Apple could have made similar changes in a more transparent and user-friendly way, and avoided some of the criticism it’s now getting.

    via Electronic Frontier Foundation


    DeepMind, Still Running Separate from Google in the UK, Lost $162m in 2016 (Oct 6, 2017)

    Quartz reports that Alphabet’s DeepMind subsidiary, which is still registered as a separate private company in the UK and therefore has to report its own financials, lost $162 million in 2016, on revenues of just $40 million, all of which came from Google. It’s a quirk of accounting that DeepMind is still reporting as a separate company, but it gives some insight into the cost of running such a business, which is focused on cutting-edge AI  work, much of which is not ready for direct monetization in revenue generating products. Given that Alphabet as a whole spent over $15 billion on Research and Development in the past year, this is a tiny fraction of the total, and an operation the company can easily afford to keep going along these lines. Much of the losses, incidentally, stem from the $137 million the company spent on staff and related costs, of which I would guess a big chunk is stock-based compensation, which runs at $2 billion per quarter for Alphabet as a whole and $100-150 million per quarter in the Other Bets segment. And of course there are big chunks of Google itself working on AI as it relates to specific products too, so this is far from the scale of Alphabet’s overall investment in AI, which is increasingly filtered into everything Google does.

    via Quartz


    Google Fiber Won’t Offer TV Service in Two Newest Markets (Oct 6, 2017)

    Google Fiber is rolling out in San Antonio and Louisville, two markets to which the company committed to before halting expansion, but won’t be offering pay TV service in those markets alongside its broadband service. That’s a first, as Google Fiber has always offered broadband and TV (though not always phone service) in its previous markets, in keeping with the most popular pairing of services taken from cable and telecoms operators. The reality is that Google Fiber TV wasn’t nearly as popular as its broadband offering, with just over 80,000 subscribers at the end of 2016, a small fraction of its broadband base, which is thought to be in the high hundreds of thousands at this point. Besides that, the economics associated with pay TV, especially for smaller providers, are not that attractive, with much of the revenue being passed straight through to channel owners and little opportunity for real differentiation. So, with all that as context, it makes perfect sense for Google to drop TV from its bundles and go purely for the broadband market, where its differentiation is far stronger, and where the economics should be quite a bit better. With the launch of YouTube TV in many markets, Google even has its own streaming TV service to offer now too.

    , via 9to5Google


    Daily Podcast Episode 71 – October 5, 2017 (Oct 5, 2017)

    The daily podcast episode for October 5 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:


    YouTube Licenses Red Originals to Third Parties to Generate Additional Revenue (Oct 5, 2017)

    YouTube has licensed nine of its original shows and movies, which were until now exclusive to its Red subscription service, to a third party in order to generate additional licensing revenue. Two of the great advantages of producing original content are exclusivity and licensing rights, though the two are often somewhat mutually exclusive, but YouTube appears to be playing both sides here, keeping the shows as exclusives for a period of time before broadening availability to develop a content licensing revenue stream too. That’s not a strategy I would ever see most of the other companies developing original content employ in such a windowing approach, but it likely suits YouTube reasonably well given its smaller subscription footprint and the increasing presence of aggregators and others who want to show YouTube content to fans on other platforms like traditional TV, somewhat ironically. But this will also allow YouTube to monetize its content in other geographies where the Red service hasn’t launched, whereas Netflix is now very focused on its near-global presence.

    via Variety


    Broadcast Live TV Viewing During Fall Premiere Week Drops Again (Oct 5, 2017)

    This LA Times piece has some good numbers on how this season’s broadcast fall TV premieres fared, and the answer is that they saw another drop year on year in live viewing. The ongoing drop in life NFL viewing was a big contributor to the overall drop, but there were broader drops for dramas and comedies as well, despite a fairly strong performance on the comedy side overall. None of this is new, nor should it be surprising at this point – the trend away from live viewing and towards DVR and streaming viewing of the same shows as well as digital-native streaming through services like Netflix is well established and unstoppable at this point, with significant implications for legacy TV companies. As measurement of non-live viewing – both DVR and streaming – both improves and increasingly gets counted in official figures used to calculate ad payouts, some of the effects on ad revenues will be mitigated, but certainly not all.

    via LA Times


    Facebook Tests Providing Additional Context for Articles in News Feed (Oct 5, 2017)

    Facebook is testing adding a new button (an “i” in a circle) on articles in the News Feed on the platform, which will bring up additional context relating to the article, including a brief summary description of the publication from Wikipedia (if its profile merits an entry), related articles, and where the piece is being read and shared. All of this is intended to serve as a set of subtle signals about the reputability of the publication and the content of the article, without explicitly rating it in the way the much more robust (but therefore also less frequently available) fact checking initiative Facebook announced earlier in the year. The main problem I see with this approach is that the button itself doesn’t highlight any particular articles – the reader has to proactively decide to find out whether there might be interesting information hidden behind it, something many readers won’t be inclined to do, especially if they’re the credulous type most likely to fall for fake news in the first place. As such, this is an interesting additional set of tools, but not one that’s likely to make a meaningful difference in combating fake news on Facebook.

    via Facebook


    Uber London Officially had Around $50m in Revenue in 2016, Uber Europe $1.6bn (Oct 5, 2017)

    Bloomberg has dug out official financial statements for Uber’s London and European operations for last year, and found that the London operation recorded revenue of around $50 million, while the broader European operation had $1.6 billion in revenues. That London figure is a little funny because it appears to be a sort of net revenue after commissions paid to drivers – something made clear in a fuller version of the financials I saw posted to Twitter, which showed gross profits as identical to revenues. That revenue figure, though, would be a tiny fraction of Uber’s global revenue, but the strategic value of a presence in a major city like London goes well beyond the direct financial benefits. Interestingly, the London revenue figure was up just 59% year on year, while the European figure more than tripled, reflecting the relative maturity of the London operation relative to operations in much of the rest of the continent.

    via Bloomberg


    Google Adds Filters for Site Owners to Block Racy, Spammy Ads (Oct 5, 2017)

    Google has created a pair of machine-learning-powered filters for website owners which will allow them to avoid hosting racy or seedy ads on their sites. Neither of these categories are banned by Google’s policies today, and anyone who’s visited many news sites online has seen the types of manipulative, low-class ads caught by the second set of filters, while the first set will use an algorithm for skin detection to weed out ads tending towards the racier side. This set of moves is on the flip side of the controversy around YouTube and Google’s broader ad platforms earlier this year, when it was the advertiser brands that didn’t want to be associated with undesirable content, while this deals with the opposite problem of undesirable ads showing up next to high-quality content. Both are part of the challenge for Google and other online ad platforms in a highly automated, entirely price-driven system for placing ads, and it’s good to see Google offering site owners some more quality controls, just as it improved controls for advertisers following the boycott earlier this year.

    via Axios


    Instagram Offers Cross-Posting of Stories to Facebook (Oct 5, 2017)

    Facebook seems determined to keep trying to make the Stories format a success in its core app, even as all the evidence shows that hardly anyone is using it. The latest push is a feature which enables users of Instagram’s Stories feature to cross-post a Story created in that app over to the Facebook equivalent as well. That will certainly provide a low-friction way to get people to create content for the Facebook Stories feature, and will therefore likely lead to at least a small increase in usage. But the big difference between Instagram and Facebook is often the size and nature of the audience. Yes, some people have big followings in both places and for them cross-posting will be natural and even useful, but for many others the appeal of Instagram is the smaller, more intimate audience they publish to there in contrast to the mishmash of people known well and not so well that clutter many people’s Facebook networks. As such, the appeal and usage of the feature is likely to be somewhat limited, for all the same reasons that Facebook’s Stories feature in general hasn’t taken off.

    via TechCrunch


    Microsoft Launches Mobile Edge Browser and Launcher for Android to Bridge Ecosystems (Oct 5, 2017)

    At its Build developer conference earlier this year, Microsoft laid out a vision for an ecosystem that would bridge its first party Windows operating system running on PCs and a variety of software experiences running on the two major mobile platforms, iOS and Android. At the time, it wasn’t entirely clear how that would work, and on iOS in particular there are major barriers to third parties providing deep integration. But it was a novel concept, and intended to offer an alternative to Apple’s hardware-based ecosystem lock-in and Google’s software-and-services-layer lockin by combining some of the best of both while offering more neutrality and flexibility.

    Today, Microsoft announced two new mobile products intended to further that vision: a version of its Edge browser for iOS and Android, and an Android launcher that builds on an earlier, subtler effort. The Edge browser offers integration with the PC version, in a manner very similar to what Chrome and Safari already offer when used across platforms. The launcher, meanwhile, takes advantage of Android’s flexibility to integrate third party experiences directly into the operating system and offers some clever integrations for hopping between Android and PC experiences. This is the closest Microsoft is going to come in the near term (or probably ever) to having its own platform on mobile again, though of course it’s absent on iOS. Although Apple obviously offers tight integration between Macs and iPhones, the vast majority of the iPhone base doesn’t own a Mac, and many use PCs for work, school, or in their personal lives, so there’s clearly a need here Apple itself hasn’t worked all that hard to meet. That opportunity is likely even larger on Android, where an even higher portion of the base uses a Windows PC. These are early steps, and they certainly don’t execute on the vision Microsoft laid out at Build in its entirety, but it’s a good start.

    via The Verge (Edge) and The Verge (Launcher)


    Harman Kardon’s Cortana Speaker Launches This Month at $200 (Oct 5, 2017)

    A listing for Harman Kardon’s Cortana-powered speaker, which has been teased for nearly a year by Microsoft and its partner, has shown up on the Microsoft online store, priced at $200 and listed as going on sale on October 22nd. The marketing materials emphasize quality audio, with 360° sound, smart home control, and the ability to make hands-free calls using Skype, though that feature will cost money after an initial 6-month trial of Skype’s outbound calling feature. At $200, the cost is the same as the speaker Sonos announced yesterday, but since neither has been formally reviewed yet we can’t know how the audio quality compares, while Sonos differentiates in a big way by being part of a multi-room system. The price point, though, is indicative of the challenges of competing in this market if you can’t monetize in ways other than through the hardware itself, something that certainly applies to both Harman and Sonos. Amazon, on the other hand, and to a lesser extent Google, can afford to sell devices at or below cost because their ecosystems will benefit in other ways and through other revenue streams such as e-commerce or advertising. HP also has a Cortana speaker coming out soon, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was priced similarly high.

    via The Verge


    Amazon is Moving Further up the Logistics Value Chain with Sellers (Oct 5, 2017)

    Bloomberg reports that Amazon is making yet another shift deeper into the logistics value chain, specifically with regard to third party sellers. It will now look to take control of the delivery process for items stored at sellers’ facilities as well as its own warehouses in a program it calls Seller Flex. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll make those deliveries itself – it may well still use UPS and FedEx – but sellers will no longer be responsible for making those decisions; Amazon will. Amazon has slowly been taking over more control of seller shipping in recent months, including changes that sellers haven’t liked, though this one seems likely to be somewhat more neutral in its impact. UPS and FedEx share prices have both taken a knock, since they might end up being squeezed out of some functions here, but the immediate impact seems likely to be fairly subtle, given that Amazon simply doesn’t have its own matching infrastructure yet for may of the deliveries those companies make.

    via Bloomberg


    ★ Netflix to Raise Prices For Two of Three Tiers of Service (Oct 5, 2017)

    Netflix has confirmed that it’s raising prices for two of its three tiers of service in the US, starting this month for new subscribers and in November for existing subs. Subscribers to the $8 bottom tier won’t see an increase, but the most popular middle tier will go from $10 to $11 per month, while the premium tier will see a $2 bump from $11.99 to $13.99. I’m a bit surprised by this increase coming so soon after the company finished implementing its last price increase last year. The company’s current average revenue per paid US streaming subscriber is right around $10, and went up $2 exactly in keeping with the last price increase, suggesting that the base is dominated by that middle tier and that subscribers to the other two plans largely balance each other out. With the bigger bump to the premium tier, it’ll be interesting if we see average revenue per user rise more this time around, especially as 4K adoption increases.

    I did some analysis for Variety in May last year on the last price increase and reached the conclusion that costs per subscriber were actually falling and price increases were largely about continuing to drive US margins up. That increase caused lower subscriber growth for a few quarters, though the impact was more closely tied to the timing of the announcement than the implementation for individual existing customers, which validates Netflix’s decision to push out the increase quickly this time rather than staggering it. Since I did that analysis, however, Netflix’s domestic streaming cost of revenue per subscriber has risen, which means this increase is more honestly about covering rising costs than the last one, though cost haven’t risen by nearly as much as prices will go up – monthly cost per sub has gone up by about 23 cents over the past year, so less than a quarter of the $1 price increase on the most popular tier. I wouldn’t expect as large an increase in churn this time around given that it’s a smaller increase in price, but it does mean that Q4 subscriber growth numbers in the US will take a hit and be a little lower than they would otherwise have been.

    via Mashable


    Daily Podcast Episode 70 – October 4, 2017 (Oct 4, 2017)

    The daily podcast episode for October 4 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:


    EU Takes Action Against Amazon and Ireland Over Taxes (Oct 4, 2017)

    It was reported earlier in the week that the EU would soon take action against both Amazon and Ireland (with regard to Apple) over the underpayment of taxes in the trading block, and both actions are now official. In the Amazon case, the company is being asked to pay 250 million euros to get the company up to the level of taxes the EU says it should have paid in Luxembourg over the last few years, while in the case of Ireland, the country is being taken to EU court by the European Commission over the fact that it has not yet collected and placed in escrow the 13 billion euros Apple owes it. I’ve covered both cases in the past, so I won’t add much here, but of course this is all part of the ongoing tension between the EU and the US tech industry on a variety of fronts, something that prompted me to create the first new narrative here on the site in a while and retroactively tag a number of past posts against it – you can see it here.

    via Recode


    Online Pay TV Streaming Services Have Few Subscribers (Oct 4, 2017)

    In a blog post I wrote in August about cord cutting in Q2 2017, I noted that there were likely around 3 million online pay TV streaming subscribers as of June, compared to around 4 million subscribers that had cut the traditional pay TV cord during the period those services had been available. The Information today reports that there are around 3.4 million of those online pay TV subscribers, including 2 million at Sling, half a million at AT&T’s DirecTV Now and slightly less than that at Sony’s PlayStation Vue, with just 200k at Hulu’s new live service, with a few more at YouTube. The Information uses this information to suggest that these services haven’t yet been all that popular, and that’s certainly one way to look at it, but given that until this year they mostly either came from unknown brands like Sling or were heavily limited in terms of their mainstream device support like PlayStation Vue, I’d bet we’ll see some faster growth going forward with the entry of Hulu and YouTube into the market, and I’d argue that AT&T’s rapid growth to the same scale as Sony in a much shorter period is evidence of that. With both Hulu and YouTube gearing up for big promotions in the coming weeks for their services, that growth will accelerate further. Meanwhile, cord cutting is also accelerating, and that acceleration is likely to be exacerbated by this growth in streaming options, leaving cable networks with fewer subscribers as users both cut and shave the cord. None of this is great news for the traditional TV industry.

    via The Information


    Apple Issues Software Update to Fix WiFi/LTE Bug in Apple Watch (Oct 4, 2017)

    Apple has issued watchOS 4.0.1 for Apple Watches, which fixes the WiFi/LTE bug that caused problems for some Apple Watch reviewers (and presumably some early regular users as well). That’s a pretty quick turnaround but a critical bug fix given how the issue impacted reviews from at least a couple of outlets. I’ve been using the Apple Watch with LTE for the past week and haven’t had the issues described, which I’d guess will be typical for many users, but the bad press Apple deservedly got over the issue was utterly avoidable and a big goof for a company which should have had one of its best launch periods in years. As I mentioned when the reviews first came out, it’ll likely take some new positive coverage of how the Watch works with the fix in place to change perceptions, but I’d hope that going forward the device works well and people can use it as intended.

    via Mac Rumors


    Amazon Launches Echo Devices and Alexa in India (Oct 4, 2017)

    On the same day as Google added to its Google Home hardware lineup and added new software features, Amazon announced a new market for its own devices and software: India. Throughout Google’s event today, it talked about the “seven Google Home markets”, whereas Amazon now has four: the US, the UK, Germany, and now India. India’s an interesting choice because Echo and Alexa aren’t even available in Canada or Australia yet even though those are likely far bigger markets and much easier to adapt to than India from an English language perspective. This is therefore just the latest sign that Amazon is taking a dramatically more aggressive approach to India over recent weeks and months and prioritizing it above other more obvious markets for some of its products. The addressable market in India is likely relatively small, limited to relatively wealthy English speakers (the Echo devices are going to cost quite a bit more than in the US, as do other western gadgets), but it will obviously help tie customers there into the Prime ecosystem, something Amazon is very keen on in general and recently in India in particular.

    via NDTV


    Facebook Watch Videos Have an Average Watch Time of 23 Seconds (Oct 4, 2017)

    Third party social media metrics company Delmondo says that across a selection of Facebook Watch videos it measured, average watch time was 23 seconds. That’s a little higher than the 17 second average for videos in the News Feed, but not much. It’s notable, too, that 20 seconds is the minimum amount of time a video must run before a mid-roll ad can be shown to the user, and I wouldn’t be surprised if those mid-roll ads are a big reason why average watch times are around that level. I continue to believe that Facebook’s mid-roll focus is going to harm viewing and ultimately ad revenue for its video platform, and it badly needs to re-think that approach. It’s still early for Watch in particular, and it’s clearly more of a destination for video rather than something users stumble across accidentally as with the News Feed, but it needs to grow well beyond 23 seconds if it’s going to be worthwhile either for Facebook or its content creators longer term.

    via Digiday