RIP DVDs

25:50And one doesn't cannibalize the other. In fact, a lot of people like to watch it in all those different forms. It's adjusting to that and changing who's in charge in these studios is really, really taking the time. Because when you really get right down to it, this is just a fight between different parts of the same company as to when they're going to do things. How long going to put it in the theaters? Where's it going to go next? Is it TVOD? Is it, you know, you got a different guy who runs TVOD than a guy who runs the DVD business. Right. And they hate each other. Yeah. Right. And then there's another guy who's licensing this stuff.

26:23You know, this is like a free for all trying to figure out whose turn is it? You know, every studio is going to go through this in their own way. And then there's just Redbox kind of kicking it increasingly on its own. I mean, does it, does it feel like this is a competitive space at the moment? Like what, No, we're at. We're all that's left. Do you think that's going to change anytime soon if we get kind of a push back towards some of the stuff you're talking about? Are you going to get new competition? No, I don't think so because the physical presence that you have to create to be in our business is so vast.

26:55And we have 30 ,000 kiosks spread out across the entire United States. You've got leases with people. You've got to be able to service these things. We're not going to have any real competition. What is interesting is the growth of kiosks in general in the country is amazing to me. I mean, there's kiosks popping up all over the place. That's good for our service business because that's lots of customers for us there. And I think that's going to be one of our great businesses. All right. Thank you. This was really great and really fun. I really appreciate you taking the time. It is my pleasure.

27:25Nice talking to you. We got to take a break and then we're going to talk about numbers. Big, ubiquitous, meaningless numbers. We'll be right back.

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30:03Welcome back. We talk a lot on this show about numbers, what it means to go viral and how creators use numbers and metrics to understand their business and just what it means to be a person when everything you do and post and see has a million numbers attached to it. And all of these numbers seem so, if not meaningless, then at least really hard to make sense of. Like, can you compare a YouTube view to a TikTok view to an Instagram view? Is doing that even useful? And how do you make sense of any of it when everyone knows at this point that so much of it can just be gamed in one way or another?

30:42Well, our friend John Herman over at New York Magazine recently wrote a column that basically made the case that all of these numbers are nonsense. It really resonated with me and it kind of made me wonder what we do now. So I asked him to come on the show and talk about what it means that the internet is just swimming with numbers, most of which have nothing to do with anything. I also grabbed Alex Kranz because we can't talk streaming numbers without Alex Kranz. Let's get into it. John Herman, welcome to the Vergecast. Thanks for having me. Alex is here too. Hi, Alex. What's up, David? John, can you just like sort of run down the thesis of your piece for somebody who hasn't read it?

31:16Like, why did you write about why Twitter views don't make any sense? I mean, I'll take any chance to write about weird metrics. I feel like this is this is like a trick that I use at like a few times a year for a decade now where it's like, hey, there's a number out there that doesn't really make any sense. If you explain that number to people, everyone else will be like, oh, wait, that's what that means. The thing is that way of like measuring everything in ways that are kind of off and manipulative and misleading and serve all these different purposes is becoming more and more a part of just like the fabric of daily life online.

31:54like everything that people use in any social network in a lot of non-social contexts just in their software is sort of counting what they're doing and returning it to them with higher and higher numbers that are meant to sort of suggest that you or they're sort of meant to inform your behavior or make you feel good or make you feel bad like you need to do something else you're just surrounded by these numbers all the time and it's just this background part of your online life but there's a lot of stories start these days there was a ridiculous tweet and was it the The Tucker Carlson thing? Yeah.

32:26So Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson kind of counter-programmed the Republican primary debate with an interview on Tucker Carlson's show, which, if you haven't been following this, is now, I guess you would say, hosted on X. Like exclusively? Yeah. He's just blogging and posting it straight to X. And the interview happens. The debate happens. The debate gets like 12, 13, 14 million views, according to Nielsen, which is its own can of worms. Fox comes out and says like, yeah, I don't know, 15 million people watch this if you count the streaming and stuff like that. No one really cares. Donald Trump comes out and says, hey, actually, we got like 230 million views on my interview, which is nearly as many people as live in the entire the entire United States.

33:14That number kept going up and up and up. Eventually, it's like 300 million people. And, you know, he's pretty loose with numbers. You sort of, you want to revise down a lot of Trump numbers. That's, we're kind of used to that. But in this case, he was just actually citing a metric attached to the tweet under Tucker Carlson's video. And it really did say that the time I wrote the article, it was like 265 million views for what was like, you know, Donald Trump has given a lot of interviews and he's given interviews to Tucker Carlson. This was like, I'm sure very interesting to quite a few people in a variety of different ways.

33:51It is not something that everyone in the world, or everyone, more than every voter in the United States will watch. It's just like completely implausible. Everyone knows that's ridiculous. But it's not just, you know, kind of like a notoriously misleading public figure doing this. It is the platform saying that's what happened. Views, a word that we're supposed to interpret like in some sort of way. 265 million, a big number that, you know, exists, exists in the world. So I don't know you, that doesn't make any sense. That's the kind of thing that you would expect to hear from like tabula or outbrain talking about how their chum box videos are performing.

34:27And instead it is like being cited by the former president directly on still very influential social media platform. So just kind of walk, want to walk back from there. Like that can't be real. Of course it's not Twitter Twitter internally tracks video views. And if you use the Twitter for Mac client, you can still see those views, which Elon Musk had removed. The real number of views on that was like 12 million or 15 million, about the same as the Republican debate Nielsen ratings, which again, a big number. However, that number is tracked after, I believe, two seconds of video playtime anywhere on the screen, which if you ask someone what it means to watch something, no one's going to on their, unless they work in advertising or something, no one's going to be like, Oh yeah, well, if you look at it for two seconds and then scroll past it, you watched it.

35:16Like that's the opposite of watching it. However, that is the Twitter video metric. Somehow Twitter is now measuring something that is like, that is like 50 times less rigorous than that. And telling everybody that that's how many people are seeing something. And you know, it's funny, it's silly, it's a specific example, it is also how the entire internet works right now. There are just these bullshit numbers absolutely everywhere. They're all bullshit in slightly different ways. They're all kind of like, you know, fundamentally bullshit in the same way, but they're all these like different stacks of invented measurements.

35:51They're frequently compared to each other. They're frequently touted for marketing. They're used to just sort of like contextualize conversations about something. I mean, is that true? Or are they mainly used to sell ads or like convince people to buy ads, right? Like saying, oh yeah, we got 300 million views. Don't look into the numbers, but we got 300 million. You're going to get 300 million impressions if you advertise on this Tucker Carlson show. That's absolutely the logic of the gradual number inflation. But I think what's weird about it now is that that sort of on its face absurd, but everyone just goes along with it.

36:28Number inflation is bleeding out of just, you know, the sales teams at websites and social platforms. It's now just like something that everyone talks about. And fandoms talk about metrics all the time. They try to manipulate metrics, even if the metrics are sort of fake to like get their people, you know, seen or in some cases paid more. You've got Elon Musk kind of making the case for his entire, the existence of his entire platform and the relevance of his entire platform, going on to like double down on this after a bunch of people pointed out that, yeah, this, for example, Trump tweet is kind of ridiculous.

37:01The other day, he was suggesting that 3 billion people a month see long tweets. Like, okay, just the Twitter blue long form content is viewed by 3 billion people, which I'm sure in some extremely narrow way is true. Like that content somehow produced in a combination of people scrolling, kind of like loading or, you know, internal API calls calling upon these posts. I'm sure that number of impressions, to borrow the ad world term here, was somehow kind of generated and logged. But that just has no relationship to the reality of how many people are engaging with something or seeing something or like taking something in.

37:47Well, and I think there are like two sides of this to me. One is this sort of nonsense advertiser metrics we've always had, right? And every company has their own special metrics that don't make any sense to anyone and essentially mean nothing. You know, Elon Musk has been doing this loudly with Twitter, like he talks a lot about like regretted user minutes, which like what on earth does that mean? But that has nothing to do with sort of my life. It's just like a thing they say to seem big and everybody has numbers that they want to make big or small when it's useful to be small. And that's all fine and good.

38:18But I think your point about the word views to me is is like what makes this specific thing so interesting because one of the very few comparable things across all of these platforms that we have all the way down to like linear television on your tv in your living room is we call them all views and the content is different the way that they're delivered is different the way that they're measured is different but we call them all views and so we compare this like it's this apples to apples thing and they just honestly have nothing to do with each other. Like what Netflix thinks is a view is so diametrically different than what YouTube thinks is a view and what TikTok thinks is a view and what Twitter thinks is a view that we're not talking about remotely the same thing.

39:01But because we use the same word, we like obsessively pit these things against each other all the time. And it's kind of weird because nowadays, you know, 30 years ago, these metrics were actually difficult to measure, right? Like you had to sit, you had to have a little box on your TV in your house. That was it. Maybe the cookies could sometimes get it. But nowadays, everybody is logging into these services. They're logging into YouTube. They're logging into Twitter. They're logging into Netflix. It is very, very easy to get actual super valuable, super like get into the nitty gritty on these metrics.

39:33And they're still going for the broadest, most useless metrics they can announce. That's sort of like the central funny thing about this to me, which is that, yeah, I guess we're talking on a 30 year time scale now. But if you think about, you know, linear TV or print publications, you had some data about how many people were seeing your things you had like, you know, your circulation number or your subscription numbers, then you estimate your circulation numbers, you have the number of people in a certain market, you have all this, but you don't have this direct access to like how people are interacting with your stuff.

40:08So the people making media had this need to like figure out what was going on. And so you end up with things like Nielsen, where people sit in their houses and log what they're doing. And then you do some statistical work on that and come up with an estimate for how many people are watching things. And then advertisers use that number. And you end up with like a flawed but transactable standard that people work with. Yeah, at least it's like more or less apples to apples, right? I feel like everyone with Nielsen always agreed like it's not perfect, but it's at least sort of directly applicable from thing to thing and it's close enough.

40:41Yeah, but that world had all kinds of problems. But the rise of like, you know, digital media brought along with it this promise that, of course, everything is going to be tracked down to the second. We're going to know so much about what people are doing. Anyone who's written online for a long time knows that like your publication knows how far people scroll in every article that you write. And it's the numbers aren't good. Like you just sort of ignore that. You just pretend that people actually finish your articles, but no one does. Like this, the amount of information that you can collect directly now is huge.

41:09So people making media have incredible amounts of information. There's total audience surveillance. Nothing that you do or consume digitally is not tracked down to this like microscopic level. And yet we somehow collectively know less about what's going on. Everyone treats this information that they have as like a trade secret, which has the weird effect of making it basically useless. if it's like all right we're all gonna agree on tracking standards we're gonna do this in a transparent way if there was some totally alternate history where everyone is surveilling their audiences very closely which is you know can of worms too but then sharing and comparing and auditing that data in a transparent way then you end up with like a very different kind of world where there is like there were just it would just change the media landscape a lot people would know more about what people are doing and that would create all kinds of different incentives and demands and some would be worse and some would be better however now you've just got nothing we've got everyone has so much data terapetabytes of audience data that is just like closely guarded and shared in the most misleading way possible in tiny little fragments when netflix is ready to be like we actually tracked you know three billion watch minutes for squid game which is the most we've ever tracked and we started tracking this last year and it's just like what is that for i mean it's obviously it's for marketing and it's it's a sort of like flex in a particular way to say that, yeah, we are not just doing bullshit impressions.

42:30We're tracking time and we wouldn't do that if it wasn't a lot, but it still doesn't mean anything. So we just sort of like somehow managed to take more and do less with it collectively, which is kind of a nice common story online these days. Why do you think they treat it like these trade secrets? Because I totally agree. Is it because they think that, you know, the numbers used to be bigger, the media that was like a much more, a smaller landscape. And so a show could have 20 million viewers. That was a really big deal. And now the biggest shows have like 10 million. And so they don't want to be like, oh yeah, Wednesday is the biggest show on the platform right now.

43:06And actually it's got like 5 million viewers or something. I think that's a really interesting question. And some of it probably just comes down to like instincts. Like, oh my gosh, we have this thing. It's proprietary, it's ours. There is a real tendency, I feel, across large corporations, but one that I've observed more directly in tech companies that I report on to just sort of treat everything like a trade secret. Like you might as well. And you end up with these interesting collective problems when you do that, that show up further down the road. But also, like you said, with the streamers in particular, they've got kind of a different problem from, let's say, Facebook, which is routinely racking up just absurdly high numbers whenever they attack a metric to something like, oh, 100 million people watched a viral video yesterday and the day before and the day before.

43:51That works for them. They can be like, yeah, that's amazing. Look at these big numbers. It turns out there's 20 billion people in the world, and we found a bunch more of them, and they all use Facebook. But Netflix, like you said, is tracking this stuff from a very early stage, very data-focused company. They use it to inform all their decisions. And they're also, I'm sure, seeing like, okay, we've licensed a beloved old sitcom that, you know, when in its heyday was getting like 20 million primetime viewers every week, according to Nielsen. And we just put it on here and like, it's doing okay, but it's not doing that.

44:24Or our new sitcom that we just released that everyone's talking about that's getting a lot of great coverage. Actually, not that many people watch it. And that's kind of flipped over time. Like there are genuine huge streaming hits. It's not just like a media illusion that, I mean, everyone watches streaming now. That is how people watch TV. But the precedent was set a long time ago. Just like, well, we're not going to right out of the gates, like rush into some sort of mutual surveillance with tons of disclosures. And we're not going to do that if we don't have to. We don't have that need that people used to have when they worked with Nielsen and depended on Nielsen for selling advertisements and getting their ratings to know how many people are watching our stuff.

45:03We know. We would love to know how many people watch other people's stuff, but they have their ways of guessing. They seem fine with not knowing how many people are watching this HBO Max reality show or whatever. Netflix is fine with that. Well, this is where we come back to my kind of like number nihilism. And like, Kranz, you and I have talked about this a bunch, right? The case against forcing all of these streaming companies in particular to share a lot of really understandable apples to apples numbers is that one thing it will do is make very obvious how many shows don't work, right? And it's great for the people who are making shows that are bigger than you think.

45:37And it's actually bad for the people making shows that are worse than you think, and not doing well. And it can like that stuff can have real effects on people's careers. And it is anyway, because like Netflix knows the shows that don't work and it cancels those shows. So that's obviously bad for people's careers. But like, if it starts to be out there, like people used to be petrified of ratings every day, because if the ratings decided your career, and part of me wonders whether what we need is better, more understandable metrics, or if part of what we need is like many, many, many fewer metrics.

46:09and maybe this place we've come to where really nothing means anything, if we all can acknowledge that nothing means anything, maybe we're actually in a better place. Well, I think the metrics don't mean anything, even for the companies themselves, because I can think of at least two different shows in the last year who did successfully, were said to be successes on their networks, showed like one of them was in the top 10 for Netflix for the week it premiered, and then they immediately got canceled. They got canceled pretty quickly. One of them was A League of Their Own, which was like a very successful show for Amazon, but a very expensive show for Amazon and not nearly the hit they had hoped it to be.

46:44And it had this long, slow cancellation death. That other one was Warrior Nun, which was like another show did seemingly did very well and then was canceled the same week it like premiered. And so it left all those fans who, you know, that was something John, you mentioned, fans are like the most meticulous. They're better than Nielsen when it comes to figuring out ratings. like they are so good at figuring this stuff out and they were just saying well numbers don't mean anything because you published all your numbers which say this and we have all the stuff we tracked it says this and you still went did it so what is numbers and it came down to it was expensive and they didn't want to make it right like they didn't want to do a third season because third season would increase the cost of the entire staff and the contract and everything that how Netflix does it and that was the real reason and it was like okay numbers are to blame well this is something where I'm really kind of torn because I work in an industry where people watch your numbers at work and see how many people read what you do.

47:40It matters and, you know, it determines all kinds of things about your job and also your sense of like what you're doing and why. But there isn't a world where streaming companies aren't like collecting and using this data or rather data in general to like figure out what to do. And at streaming companies more than at, you know, social media companies, which have to depend on really direct relationships between like viewership metrics and advertising and all this stuff. But that's all very, like, very, very direct as streaming companies, viewership metrics, and, and their sort of internal ratings, they serve as like a weird proxy, a sensible proxy for success in a way if you're making TV, but what they actually survive on mostly for now, and I guess this is, this is changing is subscription numbers.

48:24That's the actual metric that matters. And so Netflix is like, all right, Well, we can't tell that precisely. This is their version of the old measurement problem. What is driving subscriptions? Like we have good ideas. We notice that people stick around after they watch this or they sign up and then watch that. Like they have some stuff. But what the ratings do for them instead is just serve as like a way to value things that don't actually that aren't actually assigned a value in a very, very direct way. And if they're going to do that, I tend to think that like more visibility is better and more transparency about what the numbers mean.

48:57because the people making the shows, the people watching the shows, if they don't have that information and Netflix does, they're at some sort of disadvantage. If you're a viewer, that's sort of fuzzy. You're like talking about fandom stuff again. If you're creating shows, you have less leverage to like ask for more money or you have less warning about when you're going to get canceled or you are missing part of the story. If your show does get canceled and you suspect that it was viewed by a lot of people, but maybe there's something else going on. Like it's just being withheld. And in the context of the strikes in Hollywood, generally writers and other people who work in entertainment, they generally just want more information because the information exists and it might be kind of bullshit and it might be collected in a way that isn't super transparent.

49:40But if it's going to be used to make decisions, it's better that people who are trying to make this stuff know it. It's not ideal that they have to obsess about it. Like that's a problem too. If there's a world where Netflix becomes hyper metrics focused in a public way and becomes in that sense more like YouTube, you have a different set of problems. But you've also got a system that is somewhat more accountable where in some small way, people who are doing creative work have a little bit more of a sense of where they stand. And that's not worth nothing, especially when you're arguing about pay that is determined by basically metrics, which again, to sort of back way, way up, are all fundamentally made up.

50:22You have to come up with a standard for measuring things you have to apply it with some level of rigor like there is every time you see a number that purports to measure something down to like the most fundamental measurements you should wonder like how it works apply that a thousand times over when you're looking at something attached to like a piece of social media content but still if they're used they matter and if they matter then i think people creative people should probably have more access to them all right john before we let you go can we talk about your phone situation for a minute here because the the the first cast audience needs to know uh you wrote about the iphone 15 okay which i thought was very smart we've discovered in the course of doing this that you have an iphone 12 mini that is literally in the middle of exploding as we are recording this tell us about your phone life and why you're getting a new phone this year so listen i've been a gadget blogger for coming up on 15 years here i don't i don't really have an excuse but i love the mini it's small it was never very good like the battery never lasted very long all this i have i have little beautiful children i want to take pictures they're not it's not great but i don't know i i stuck i stuck it out i didn't want to give up this little thing it did overheat while we were recording it's on an ice pack right now we should say yeah it could yeah it's on it's on a little pink ice pack from my daughter's lunchbox to kind of make it make it to the end of the episode here it couldn't couldn't handle wireless charging and talking on a video at the same time so in that sense i am so excited about the iPhone 15 for work purposes, for the purposes of content creation.

51:56I've got numerous critiques and thoughts and complications about this. However, I can't wait to pre-order the phone. I don't care how big it is, as long as it doesn't become like dangerously hot while I attempt to do my job, I'll be, I'll be happy. So, you know, fair enough. All right, John, thank you so much for being on. This is really fun. Alex, thank you. We, we all, we're going to need to do this again. The numbers are not going to stop being weird and you're going to keep doing stuff we like. So keep coming back on, John. Anytime. Really a pleasure to join you. All right. We got to take one more break and then we're going to get to the VergeCast hotline.

52:32We'll be right back.

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54:15originally produced a robotic toy. Or that Bolt went from an Estonian transportation company to one of the largest rideshare and food delivery platforms in the world. That's what Crucible Moments is all about. Deep diving into make or break moments that set the course for some of the most important tech companies of our time. With interviews from some of the key players that made these companies a success. Hosted by Sequoia Capital's managing partner, Rule Off Botha, Crucible Moments is back for a new season with stories of companies as they navigated the most consequential crossroads in their journeys.

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55:16All right, before we get out of here, let's answer a question from the hotline. As a reminder, the hotline number is 866-VERGE-11. We want all of your best and weirdest tech questions. And if you don't want to call, you can email vergecast at theverge.com. That works great too, but it's always fun hearing the hotline. I'm not going to lie. Anyway, this week's question sent me on kind of a tailspin. So let's just hear it. Hey guys, this is Mark from Tampa. I got a question for you, and you guys seem like the right ones to answer it. It's a bit of a streaming and a hardware question. So a few months back, during the reveal of the Apple Vision Pro, Bob Iger came onto the stage and mentioned that he was developing a Disney Plus app for that$3 ,500 monstrosity of a system.

56:01However, I did notice that I have a couple of kids. We have Nintendo Switches. there's over 125 million of those already sold and in hands everywhere. Do you guys have any possible reason why Disney wouldn't have a Disney Plus app already on a platform that big? They've already have a Hulu app for it. So it just seemed like a slam dunk why they wouldn't have it in hands of all the kids around. Seems silly to carry around an iPad and a Switch whenever we travel. So just curious if you guys have any thoughts on it. All right. Have a great day. Take care. Okay. I should say up front here that I am totally fascinated by this question and I'm still trying to report it out so hopefully I will have a firm pat hundred percent answer really soon but in the meantime I've been talking to people and like putting yarn on a board with people's photos to try and make sense of this situation and here's where I've gotten so far I think there are three separate things going on here and I'll rank them kind of in order of importance the first thing is that with the Switch, Nintendo wanted to make a game console, first and foremost.

57:06We've had companies in the past, Microsoft with the Xbox One, probably most famously, try to do the game console and entertainment system thing really well simultaneously. And it just really doesn't work. And one of the things that Nintendo has done really well over time is just make great games. It has had streaming services in the past, but the reason people buy Nintendo products is for great games. and Nintendo knows that better than just about anybody else. Just to name one example, here is Reggie Filzame, who was formerly the Nintendo of America president and COO, talking in 2018 about how he was thinking about streaming services.

57:43The question was essentially, when are people going to be able to watch Netflix on the Switch? And here's what he said. For those types of questions, we have to refer you to the folks at Netflix. What we said when we launched Nintendo Switch was that we wanted to have a gaming-first platform, and that's what we've created. and that's what enabled us in the first 12 months in the United States to be the best-selling home console in the history of video games. Right now, we enable Hulu on the platform. We've said that other services will come in due time. For us, we want to make sure that we continue driving the install base for Nintendo Switch, continue to have great games for the platform.

58:19In terms of, you know, what's next on the streaming side, you're going to have to talk to those individual providers in terms of where they stand and what they're working on. That's a little bit of a cop-out, but I think it's also true that Nintendo knows that entertainment doesn't really move the needle. People might watch stuff on their consoles, but nobody's buying a console as a way to watch stuff, if that makes sense. And so I think if you're Nintendo and you're a company that does basically one thing very well and you want to keep doing it, that kind of focus really makes sense. The second thing is that I think Disney would really like to have Disney Plus on the Switch.

58:55when it launched Disney Plus in 2019, it did a big show in front of investors about what was going on. And it actually had a slide of all the places that it wanted Disney Plus to be. And it included a picture of the Switch, like right there on the slide, big red Nintendo Switch. And as he was showing this slide, here is what Michael Paul, who's Disney's president of streaming services, said at the time. Right now, we are securing distribution for Disney Plus across mobile devices and connected TV devices, including game consoles, streaming media players, and smart TVs. With these device partnerships, not only do we optimize our product for consumer experience, we ensure that our service will be prominently featured and merchandised on our partner platforms.

59:43Great. Okay. So Disney wanted this. I don't think that was smoke. That is Disney saying, we want to be on all the platforms. I think if it were easy and straightforward, Disney Plus would probably be on the Switch. But that thing that Michael Paul said about being prominently featured and merchandised, that's kind of the third thing. We think of these streaming platforms and the systems that they run on as just sort of app stores, right? Build a thing, put it on the platform, everybody wins. But that's not actually how it works. This business is really messy. And when ads get involved and when subscriptions get involved.

1:00:19Everybody wants a cut. Everybody wants access to user data. Everybody wants to be the first one featured in the store and get prominent placement. And there are questions about who's in the search and what happens when you search for streaming. Every part of this is like relentlessly negotiated and there's a ton of money in it. It's how TV makers make a lot of their money. It's how streaming platforms make a lot of their money. This is a big and complicated business. And the thing about Nintendo is Nintendo just doesn't need to care about any of this. If you remember, there was that email that Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, sent about wanting to buy Nintendo.

1:00:53He basically said that the bad news for Microsoft at the time was that Nintendo, and I'm quoting here, is sitting on a big pile of cash and they have a board of directors that until recently has not pushed for further increases in market growth or stock appreciation. If you were, in theory, super interested in market growth or stock appreciation, one thing you might do is hire a bunch of people and get really into the weeds of negotiating these deals with streaming services such that maybe you become a streaming platform. But Nintendo's good. I don't think Nintendo needs the hassle. It's very happy making these smash hit games, making a console every once in a while.

1:01:31It seems to be a good business. It seems to be working for Nintendo. And my guess is it just doesn't need the nonsense that comes with being a really successful streaming platform. Put all of that together. And I think that might be it. I think Nintendo just doesn't want this that badly. And so here we are. I think, frankly, it might be a miracle that we got Hulu and YouTube and Crunchyroll rather than a problem that we don't have the rest of the services. But that said, if there is a smoking gun here, I'm going to find it. And if you know the answer and you want to tell me why Netflix and Disney Plus and Macs and all these other services are not on the Nintendo Switch, call the hotline 866-VERGE11 or email us vergecastatheverge.com.

1:02:13Tell me all your answers. All right, for now, that is it for the Vergecast. Thanks to everyone who came on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on all of this stuff, especially the shutdown of DVD.com. Yonko Rutgers wrote a great piece for us about how that service worked, which is very cool. We'll put a bunch of links in the show notes, but as always, readtheverge.com. It's a cool website. The last thing, this is probably the last call for this, but if you have questions about The Verge or The Verge Cast that you want us to answer on our meta Verge Cast episode, get them in now.

1:02:44We're recording that episode really soon. We have a ton of fun stuff. It's gonna be a really fun episode. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James, Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nilay, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about MetaConnect, the Code Conference, and whatever else happens this week, because everything just keeps happening. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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