Qui-bye and Plutocracism👋🗳️
Sony invigorates🕹️, Quibi dissuades😩, The rich get influential💸💪 and Tennis🎾
Hi again! Burning Man is going digital this year and we can all attend and see why how everyone in Silicon Valley gets a personality after they go. Nevertheless, tech must go on…
I’d consider it a capital sin not to start this week’s letter with Sony’s new DualSense™ controller, minor as it might seem. Going beyond the futuristic industrial design and color scheme and the fact that the shape is growing increasingly similar to XBOX controllers sans the weird left joystick placement, this new iteration boasts some interesting features. A built-in microphone will allow players to voice chat without plugging in the flimsy headset that came with the PS4 while the adaptive triggers will allow developers to program different levels of resistance based on usage. The ‘Sense’ part in the name presumably comes from the shift to more precise haptic feedback actuators.
Admittedly the description above is far from the Ready Player One rig but compared to the state of affairs, this will prove to be a decent-size step in the right direction. The issue with making a giant leap here is without a doubt the competitive environment of game consoles and its aggressive pricing strategies. As Microsoft’s new controller for the upcoming Xbox Series X is practically a re-skinned version of the old controller, its cost will be similar to the old one, if not cheaper due to the optimization of the production process and the saving that come with economies of scale. With more components going into Sony’s controller plus the added cost that comes with re-tooling the factory to make a new design, the DualSense is bound to be more expensive when it hits the shelves.
The Japanese company has two options here, either list the controller for consumers to buy at a price that sums up the cost of materials, labor, marketing, and transport —one that’s bound to be more expensive than Xbox’s version—, or eat the price difference and sell at a loss and hope to recoup the cost somewhere else in the pipeline. With the PS5 being, at least in theory, cheaper to build from a components point of view when compared to the Series X, Sony could go either way on the controller or a combination of the two.
The more important question now is: Will the PS5 be at least predominantely white, if not completely?👀
Quibi, the long-awaited media service for the youth, launched last week in the middle of the pandemic and the reviews appear to be less than stellar. The short format videos targeting millennials and Gen X-ers attracted almost $2B in funding and the portrait-to-landscape functionality seen above was a sexy proposal in today’s reality where mobile viewership is only going up. While the tech looks great in itself, the content itself appears to be bland, at best.
A media platform without a hit show cannot stand, not now, not ever, and the fact that even the ad-supported version costs $5/month doesn’t help as business models go in a time when unemployment is expected to reach a record high. Apple’s TV+ service proved that point even when it invested hundreds of millions in the effort of creating a hit and failed. Disney+ is also testimony as they announced to have surpassed 50 million subscribers last week, less than five months after launching the service that contains the entire Disney and Marvel catalogs and after accelerating the release of some cinematic blockbusters like Frozen 2. Bear in mind that the service is only available in eight European countries as of yet, and only in India out of all the Asian countries.
An extra additional negative factor for Quibi and their short format ready to be consumed on-the-go is that nobody is on the go right now. With the service only available on mobile platforms —not even screencasting is available— if you’re in front of the TV at home, even if you’re living alone, you’d rather watch Netflix or any of the others than stare at your phone. Add to this the limited library of fifty or so shows that are struggling to stand out above sketch comedy above, say, YoutubeTV-made products and we’ve got ourselves a loser.
However, the company is trying to do something different in the distribution area and unlike the mobile-only strategy, this one is different in a good way. The n-th reanimation of PUNK’D hosted by Chance The Rapper and exclusive to Quibi premiered its first episode inside videogame Fortnite, showing that the platform developers are both willing and smart enough to see where their target audience is and follow them wherever they go. I suspect this strategy will be adopted by many parties we currently don’t associate with gaming per se going forward.
Targeting young, mobile-first people is also a smart move and one you’d expect from two entertainment industry veterans, having that one of the most famous studies in our space showed that whatever media variety we consume as 17-year olds will continue to be the medium we consume the most for the rest of our lives. The PR boom the company’s been experiencing at launch is not due only to the names in its leadership, but also to the truism that culture follows youth and the fact that the youth these days generates crazy amounts of word-of-mouth via social platforms. Put all these factors together and you can easily see why a company that’s sure to fail if it continues with its existing strategy was so in-your-face over the past week.
Today’s algorithms are only good enough to serve fifteen-second, home-made videos to teenagers and boost whatever is trending on social media at any given moment, they have no competence in creating quality entertainment products for the masses…yet. When this will change and some AI evolves far enough to the point where it will be able to create viral content from existing material and without human intervention, I have no doubt Quibi 2.0 will be a successful venture.
Photo by NASA
@Jack announced that he is donating $1B, or almost 30% of his net worth, to COVID-19 release and there’s a lot to unpack here. Granted Jack was known for his philanthropy before the current situation but this was a good opportunity to put his name down in history with the likes of Bill Gates but also a possible way to buy some good faith with some governments for when this thing is all over. While all these donations undoubtedly provide great help in times of need, they also serve as a means of consolidating the power and influence going into the future for the people and companies making them.
The current stay-at-home environment benefits tech giants greatly, social media is used a lot more, food delivery figures are higher than ever, the nature of digital content allows it to be delivered virtually from a distance and customers gained in times of need are likely to keep using these products and services in the long term. On top of that, their vast war chests allow them to weather the storm better than anyone and ensure they get out of the eye of it better off than the competitors who’ve been hanging on up until before the crisis.
At the beginning of this year, it looked like this was going to be the year when regulators on both sides of the Atlantic would finally put the hammer down on monopolistic technology giants, but now that feeling has faded and the breeze is blowing in the opposite way. Will regulators be able/willing to treat the likes of Tesla or Apple and their executives with the same amount of scrutiny after their donations of masks and ventilator manufacturing and risk not having this help in during the next crisis?
At the moment there’s no way of knowing if the powers at be will be able to maintain an impartial view in the future when looking at these individuals and their companies but the fact of the matter is that many states have put themselves in a position where they can’t decline these gifts. For as long as the government is made up of us flawed humans there will always be doubt in their motivations, whether warranted or not depends on a case-by-case basis. If you have the time —and let’s be honest, it’s not like you’re rushing anywhere— check out the article of my with a 20-year forecast.
I can’t pretend I’ve been a huge tennis fan in the past couple of years —well, I could, but what’s the point?—, my viewing habits are restricted to the four Grand Slam events and even then I only tune in around the men’s semifinals.
I don’t know what it is about the Wimbledon event that instantly wins people over as soon as they see it unfold for the first time. Maybe it’s the long history of the place hosting epic battles on the court, maybe it’s the royalty, the seamless organizing or maybe people just like the mandatory all-white outfits. Understandably, with such a cult following many, myself included, found themselves in various states of that involved disappointment when we found out that the tournament has become the latest victim of the coronavirus pandemic. Making it the first time the event was canceled since WWII.
That feeling didn’t last long, as a few days later it was announced —of course it was made through backchannels, royalty doesn’t speak on money problems, you know that— that over the past seventeen years they’ve been taking out 'pandemic insurance’, paying to the effect of $2 million per year. The policy is expected to pay out $141 million to make up for the millions in revenue the tournament generated last year but considering the costs of organizing are zero this time around, the bottom line should look very attractive.
Being the only major sports competition to have taken out such a policy, you can say anything about the All England Lawn Tennis Association can be accused of many things, but lacking foresight is not one of them.
Nintendo’s ‘SuperMario LEGO Starter Kit’ can be pre-ordered now for $60 and ships on August 1st. Other videogames companies have tried to bridge the digital-physical gap before with limited success but, as I said a month ago when the initial announcement came, this looks like a match made in heaven. Nintendo and LEGO both enjoy cult-like followings and their fans will spare no expense to get their hands on these kits. The toys themselves look well made and well thought out for the modern-day, with a battery-powered, smartphone-connected, LCD-donning, sound-emitting Mario character that can detect and interact with other bricks in the set due to several sensors embedded inside. Players —read, ‘adults’— can build levels and fight bosses while the mobile APP will keep track of scores and possibly allow for socialization in the future. Brilliant!💡💡
Stadia is continuing their purchase of good faith with potential customers by offering two free months of the Pro version of the service to everyone stuck at home, as long as you’re based in one of the supported countries. The thing that will convince the masses to adopt game streaming might prove to not be a well-crafted, million-dollar marketing push but boredom by way of forced isolation. We’ll take it!! 🆓🕹️
Wondering how each generation of people consumes entertainment content during isolation? Wonder no more. Gen Z is all about online video and streaming, Gen X is going surprisingly deep into Broadcast TV in a boomer-ish move and Millennials are consuming a bit of everything. Also interesting is how much ground Disney+ has covered in only five months since its launch, with the service being the second-most desired for people looking for a new VOD subscription after Netflix 👪📻📺🖥️
With individual creators taking over the output of entertainment content during the quarantine increasingly more A-list celebrities are struggling to stay relevant. After John Krasinski’s ‘SomeGoodNews’ outlet, Will Smith —perhaps most famous for never acting in a supporting role— announced he was doing a bi-weekly series on Snapchat that will also feature other celebrities in isolation at home. Despite being made by a professional media production company, the direction appears to be good, leveraging celebrity, their most valuable quality right now, is bound to pay dividends and bring viewers since, especially in times like these, the mob turns to the lives of the rich and famous to make them feel better about their situation. We’ll have to wait and see if the window donning the face of the once-Fresh Prince will be the biggest on the screen at all times (my guess is yes) 🎥🤳
Since right now a lot of relationships are long-distance relationships, Facebook decided to launch an APP specifically for couples to stay in touch. Advertised as a ‘private space’ for sharing moods, music and creating a common scrapbook and doesn’t require a FB account to use. It does, however, require you to agree that your data will be used for ad targeting. At the same time, the company went full circle after launching another product, a social network called Campus, destined exclusively for college students. This ‘Facebook of Facebook’ thing looks like the company’s stuck-at-home engineers have a lot of time to experiment with things, too bad they’re only riffing inside a very small bubble 📧💌
With food safety becoming ever harder to control as the bulk of consumption moves to deliveries done by third parties, deliveries by drone have almost doubled in Virginia and Australia over the past weeks. I long for the day when all (apartment) buildings are constructed with a rooftop suitable for delivery drone landing🛫📦🛫
Those who can adapt, survive…
And ofc The Simpsons predicted ‘Fs in chat’
Liked what you read? Sign Up Now⤵️⤵️ for FREE and check out our Medium& Twitter