Spotify and Disney have everything-app dreams

23:38So which is almost the same as opening the separate app. So this is how we're trying to solve it with trying to program for you and then have a fault-tolerant solution if we're wrong or if your intent was super high. But we do statistically see that it works, that we actually managed to get people to listen to podcasts who didn't, and hopefully the same for audiobooks. So it seems to work, but I think it's a statistical question. I think you're right, but my hunch is it's like 80 % of the time or 90, people know what they want, but the other 10 % of the time are incredibly valuable because that's when you find this new podcast or book.

24:12And it's back to this, like why we need to be 90 % recall and 10 % discovery. And we went wrong with 90 % discovery. The upside of doing all those things together is you can do a sort of one and one makes three thing where it's like the podcasts I listened to probably do inform the kinds of books I might like. And the kinds of music that I listened to probably informs the kind of podcasts I like. So if you can actually having all of those things together in one place lets you do stuff, but that stuff is not shove stuff in front of me that I I don't want to listen to, I think. But I think you're increasingly getting away from that, which I think is very good.

24:45I'm glad to hear that. We're trying hard. But that also brings me to AI, which I think you're using kind of in both directions of that, right? Like, it seems like the AI stuff I'm seeing floating around both what's been released and what random people are finding in code on Spotify is that both you want to use AI to be smarter and more proactive about what people might want. Like the day list thing, I think is really fascinating. and the names are all deeply weird, but in really interesting ways. Yeah. And then on the other side, there's this idea of like, what if you could just make a playlist with a prompt?

25:17What if you could just sort of declare to Spotify what you want to listen to and it can do that? And that's the kind of thing that as far as I can tell, these large language models are relatively capable of. That's data that you have. Like that becomes a whole new sort of tool for finding stuff to listen to. Again, if your idea is like, get back into the pocket as quickly as you can, that's a pretty powerful one. Yeah, for sure. I think you're completely right. I'm very fascinated about both of those directions. So one way to sort of retell what you said is you could think one way is to, you know, everyone tries to reduce friction and get even better at predicting what you wanted to do.

25:51And certainly these LLMs help with that in many ways. You get larger embeddings that makes the content understanding better. So just the recommendations of songs get better and podcasts, you obviously have the whole safety thing. you can now have machines pre-listen to the podcast make sure that we can do safe explore exploit which can surface podcast to you that we couldn't have done before because we didn't feel literally safe exploring content that we didn't understand ourselves so there's just making the recommendations better and hopefully even better at this home page predicting the right thing the thing that you had in your head so we reduce friction and we're doing that and we're seeing benefits of that but to your point i think the other direction is really interesting as well sometimes you want more control like you don't want to be served everything and so can we build even more powerful tools for you where you can have a lot of fun with the podcast catalog the music catalog that is something i'm very fascinated about can't comment too much about things that aren't live but you're certainly right that's an area that i think is super interesting and having having a conversation around music with an entity that is very knowledgeable about the global music culture everything has been written on wikipedia every concert ever happened but then also super knowledgeable about you because it has your music taste i think it'd be a really cool experience that is cool and how has that changed the way that you think about the kind of human machine interaction that you've always talked about at spotify right i think like the the sort of human curated playlists with machine help is like a core tenant of what spotify has always been but if we're headed into this place of sort of mass personalization, both that you're bringing to me and that I can ask for myself.

27:30Does that change that dynamic? I think over time, it probably will. If you think that the systems are getting more and more intelligent, they can do more and more of that. But where we are right now, I think it's still the same world where you look at Twitter and you see these 100 % automatic things. They're very cool demos, you don't see a lot of applications of them. And then when you do some, when you apply something, it's actually almost always including humans in the loop. It's just that they get much more leverage. That's fair. Yeah. So for example, if we look at something we did recently with the dubbing, for example, it's quite straight, I wouldn't say straightforward, but it's getting quite easy to use a service to get like a pretty good translation and generation of a voice in another language.

28:19But if you put that to a native speaker or that language, they're going to drop off because the translation is not going to sound like a podcaster. It's going to be like correct grammatically, but very formal. The intonations are off. And so what we find is that you need to use these technologies and they're amazing, but you still need people in the loop to make it truly great. So we keep applying that recipe and we think of it more as getting more and more leverage of those people on those people rather than replacing more and more of those people, if that makes sense. You have the same amount of people, but they can do more and more and more.

28:52If you think about Steve Jobs' old notion of the computer is a bicycle for the mind, I think the LLM is like, it's like, I don't know, like a motorcycle for the mind or a mountain bike or something. It's just that on steroids. Yeah. So that's how I tend to think about it like that for any type of creation. If you're an artist, if you... I think the big benefit of this will be it's an incredibly powerful bicycle for the mind. And sure, you can automate some things. You can do elevator music and so forth. That's not the interesting part. I think the interesting part is that's augmentation to people.

29:24No, I think that's right. And actually, I'm glad you brought up the dubbing because that and kind of on the flip side, the automated transcription stuff, I think is really interesting because like you said, it opens up sort of new avenues, both for people to reach people and for like new ways of consuming this kind of stuff to me like automated transcription and making podcasts searchable is like incredible yeah and we're finally getting to the point where the llms are good enough at speech to text that it's actually pretty plausible which i think is very exciting but i am curious from a from a creator standpoint like i make a podcast and i've been trying to figure out how i feel at just like a very personal level about the idea of my voice being translated into tons of different languages all over the world.

30:07And most of me thinks it's very cool. Part of me is sort of horrified by it. In a way, I can't even totally describe. It just feels odd. It's like, it's me, but it's not me in some way that I can't totally wrap my head around. And it feels like in so many ways with AI, we're headed down that road of feelings in a lot of ways. But what are you hearing from creators and people who are using this tech already? Like, what do they make of all this new leverage you're giving them? Yeah. So as you say, our focus is really on helping creators, giving them tools rather than trying to replace them. Other people may have that as a strategy, but our tool is really to try to empower creators, giving them more and more tools.

30:45And dubbing is one of those. And we're working on other tools as well that we think are very interesting for creators. But if we look at dubbing, your notion like it's weird in a way, there's a lot of these things I think we're going to get into that feels weird the next few years. But from another point of view, if you look at non-podcasters, book authors and TV movies, they've been dubbed for tens of years. That's true. And with completely different voices and sometimes in certain markets, we're just ducking the original audio. It's really crappy in a sense. So from that point of view, this is just the same, but it's much more authentic.

31:18think it's really you instead of someone else trying to pretend to be you so I my hunch is podcasters are gonna are sort of gonna get over that feeling certainly will be heard from the podcasters we worked with is their fear was the opposite that when we contacted them they're like I don't think it's gonna really sound like me well I have like a an accent where I sound like instead of a good Spanish speakers I sound like a slow American but you have a heavy American accent that just sound dumb somehow. They're really very predictably very concerned about what they appear like in that language.

31:51So that's what we put a ton of effort on details. Like, is the translation not just grammatically correct, but is this what this person would sound like? Is this a relaxed podcast conversation or a formal lecture in that other language? Does, you know, Lex Friedman or Stephen Bartlett, do they sound like they should probably sound in Spanish or do they sound like someone who doesn't speak Spanish that well? But if it's too Spanish, it doesn't sound like them anymore. That's the balance we spent a lot of time on. And I think we found a good balance. At least they are very happy. And maybe even more importantly, when you look at the Twitter feeds, what I take a lot of joy from is almost without a fault, the feedback are like, I'm a native speaker and this is amazing, which you don't see that much.

32:33I see people saying this is amazing. And then you see native speakers saying, actually, it's not that good as a native speaker because it's wrong. And we really try to put effort in was like sort of just quality of production. And so I look a lot at, if the creator happy, do they feel like what they should sound like? But then I also look at the feedback from the native speakers. And then obviously I look at the episode and when do people drop off? If it's not good enough, if it's cool, but not interesting, people are going to drop off after five minutes. So that's kind of how we evaluate quality.

33:01And so far, we're very encouraged by what we're seeing. Yeah. What are you telling the creators who are trying to figure out how to navigate this stuff? I mean, I just think about, we've talked a ton about like the writer's strike on the Hollywood side. And one of the things they're worried about is like, if you're an actor, they can just take your voice and never need you anymore. And then I listened to like, I was listening to Bill Simmons and he's like, Oh, great. My voice can read our ads and I don't ever have to. And so I'm like, well, there's the two sides of the coin right there. What are you telling folks who are trying to figure out kind of how to navigate that?

33:31Like, what, what does it mean that my voice is now part of kind of an AI machine? Yeah, I think it's very much about creator control. I think why you hear Bill Simmons say this is because he feels like he's in control sure that's obviously when we do these um dubbing things we we get no rights to that creator's voice for any other purpose right it's only for that purpose exactly for that translation so it's their voice i think that's the key i think people will be fair would feel very uncomfortable but giving away rights to their likeness for like unknown purposes so for us back to like you know we try to structure it as narrowly as possible around like your voice for exactly this purpose and, you know, it's your episode.

34:12So that's how we've solved it. And I think that's the fear that creates. I would feel equally concerned if someone had the rights to say whatever they wanted with my voice. Sure. Yeah. And that's also why we've been quite careful. I think that's why OpenAI, who we have worked with, has been quite careful because there is that potential for abuse. And I think that's why this was a good use case to start with, where it's very clear that this is something those creators want is voluntary and it's it's i think unambiguously good yeah no i think that's that's fair and i think i i definitely agree that the right way to think about it is like these are these are tools you can give people to use not sort of things you're foisting on top of what they're already doing i think that that feels right to me yeah so come back to the ai playlists thing for a second because i've been thinking a lot about dj and i've been thinking a lot about day lists recently and i think dj which seems to have done really well everybody i talked to about DJ thinks it's the coolest thing ever, but it's this very human thing, right?

35:11Like it's an AI generated thing that is still meant to be sort of a character in my life. But then on the flip side, Daylist is just like a super curated list of songs, right? There are two sort of very different ways of thinking about it. Should both be in there? Do you have a thesis about one or the other that we land on over time? What do you think? It's a great question. And the truth is, we don't know yet, which is going to be the future play mode. And I think people have different listening modes. I still think there's always going to be a mode where you want exactly your playlist that you curated, you know, without our recommendations in it or anyone commenting or anything like that.

35:45And then I think you're going to want these music sessions, sort of like a daily mix or something where you're asking for like a specific genre. You kind of know exactly what you're going to get on the genre and style, but not exactly which track, but you don't want anyone talking in between the songs the whole thing it's like a lean back session where it's what we call it like mind busy versus mind free i like that and you know when the mind is busy music fits mind busy because you can think about something else but then when someone starts talking you have to stop thinking about someone else and pay attention something else pay attention again and this was one of the tricky things with the dj we've done some other experiments where we've had like these sessions we can talk for a while and then play some music any theory people love it in practice the problem is like it's partially a podcast and you have to pay attention then the music comes in you so now start thinking about something else and then it's like oh back now i have to pay attention again you're switching between like mind free and mind busy and so what we saw in that data was people kind of chose either they listened to the podcast and skipped past the music or they kind of did the opposite so i definitely think we're going to have these music only sessions and the notion for the dj was actually taking that learning and saying like this is a music session first and foremost the dj needs to be quick brief and get out of the way.

36:59So it's not a podcast about music. It's a playlist with some introduction to it. We may at some point do the opposite and have a generated podcast about a track where it's like 90 % talk and 10 % music, but then it's a different hypothesis, right? But this is the DJ. What's the point of this DJ? Like, why does it even need to talk? Well, what we found was that even for the exact same playlist, if you say like, Hey, David, here's a playlist, these five tracks are going to come up. And when you look at that playlist, you're sitting there thinking like, maybe I do, maybe I don't like that. Maybe it's going to feel like this and so forth.

37:33And there was a lot of like choice paralysis. And the kind of weird thing is when we had the DJ say like, hey, David, I'm going to take you back to when you were like a teenager, I'm going to play this track. And it's the exact same track that you would have seen in the playlist. You stick around and listen. So there's something about removing choice and paralysis, saying like, okay, just take me somewhere where you seem to get inspired and enjoy sort of the exact same tracks you might have skipped if we showed you a list of what's going to happen in the future. And we're still not exactly sure what that is, but it's very clear that it's happening.

38:07So I think of this now as the, we have lots of choices if you know what you want or you sort of know what you want. we have genres and hundreds of playlists for every type of genre and you have your own playlist we didn't have a good solution for like hey spotify i have no idea so this is the solution for like i know ideas but i want music and then this is this is a really good tool and so i don't think it's going to switch to 100 i have no idea i think you're going to have different moments yeah no that makes sense and that actually brings me to uh i'm going to just i'm going to throw a thesis at you and i want you to agree or disagree and tell me why i'm right or wrong go for it it seems to me that we've gone through this phase in this space where there were a lot of bets in a lot of different directions right everybody went towards trying to figure out how to do exclusive content in really cool ways everybody tried to build radically different kinds of listening experiences people tried to do live audio and it seems like we're coming back to the idea that actually there is this incredibly cool interesting library of content out there and the job of an app like Spotify or any of your competitors is to find ways for me to find that content and that content to find me just sort of watching Spotify over the last, I don't know, 24 months.

39:22It feels like to some extent you've kind of wound all the way back to like the core competency, which is like, we're very good at telling you what to listen to. And it just feels like you've pushed back into that in new ways over the last year or so. Is that fair? Am I totally wrong? What do you think? I think it is fair. I would say that we try to get more distinct about separating the modes. So the DJ is still in this class of like, it's mostly going to play things that we are quite certain that you like. Back to like, it's probably going to be right nine out of 10 things. And then we need a different solution for when you want to be exploratory, when we're only right one out of 10 instead of nine out of 10, which is the feeds, right?

40:01So we try to separate the two instead of having a bad average of both. If the DJ was right, one out of 10, you would churn out, right? Or if they're both five out of 10, I'm going to churn out. Exactly. That's a better point. If they're both five out of 10, both are bad, right? So that is true. I think we got more confident that like, let's build this product for this purpose and this other product for that other purpose. I also do think that back to your questions on AI and generative AI, I have this obsession with as artificial intelligence or machine intelligence or whatever you call it is getting more and more capable i've always had this obsession about everyone should be able to really have a dj that sounds very natural but that gets more and more intelligent over time so it understands so the dj we have now it understands quite a lot about your music taste but with a lens it will also start understanding a lot about music culture and the world and what happens it can get more skilled at things like mixing and like i really want to build this perfect session where you feel like a larger percentage of the time you feel like Spotify is almost like a friend a person a DJ I'm just going to trust them then maybe instead of 80 percent of the time you go and choose your playlist maybe we get down to like 20 10 20 percent of the time you're going to have your playlist because this party or something but most of the time you're going to say like hey Spotify my friend just play something and I'll feedback I think that isn't entirely possible given the insane development of intelligence.

41:27So that's something I'm very passionate about. So I think we're going to keep investing in that. So in that sense, I think your thesis is right. We're getting more confident in the ability to recommend and try to program to you, but we still need to find this balance of being fault tolerant and give you super easy ways to like, say, no, you're wrong. Give me control back. Yeah, that's totally fair. What playlist do you listen to most? I actually listen to, statistically, it's the DJ by far that I listen to the most. And then I have a set of my own curated holders and goldies. I like it. I really appreciate you doing this.

42:02It's really fun to do this. I'm glad we got to make it happen, even though we couldn't do it in person. Likewise. Always fun. Happy to do it again. All right, we got to take a break and then we're going to talk about streaming because there is always something happening in streaming. We'll be right back.

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44:27Eligible port in a new line,$100 plus a month plan with auto pay plus taxes and fees required. Check out in 15 minutes or less per line. Visit T-Mobile.com. All right, we're back. We have kind of a grab bag of streaming news this week from Disney to Verizon, to Max, to Marvel, to Netflix. It's a lot. And it feels like there's a bigger story tying all of it together, or maybe a couple of them. So I grabbed Alex Kranz to talk it through. Hi, Alex. Hello. Whenever we have streaming things to yell about, it feels important that you and I do it on The Verge cast together. So I'm very happy to do this.

45:01The first thing we need to do is we need to explain the truth to some people about what is going on with Disney. The shortest bit of the history that I need to give in order to get into this is what a week ago now two weeks ago now Disney and Comcast enacted their agreement for Disney to buy the rest of Hulu from Comcast which we've kind of always known is going to happen that's the history explain to me these weird things that have been happening around the Disney internet in the last few days so Disney was doing its earnings call the other day and Bob Iger said that they're going to experiment with a beta in December, combining the content of Hulu and Disney+.

45:39And that's, I think, something we've talked about on the Vergecast was probably going to be the outcome of all of this. So that was not a surprise to us. Yeah, Disney has not hid that fact, that ultimately what it was going to do was probably combine them all into one streaming service. He's been talking about this, I think, since May, very openly, that that was his plan. But a lot of outlets, a lot of people have gotten confused by that and assume that one or both of those streaming services is going to go away. And I think a name is probably going to go away. I think Hulu or Disney Plus is probably going to get retired, but all the content is still going to be there.

46:13It's just going to be one app, which in the United States is kind of tricky because the Disney Plus app in the United States is for babies and the Hulu app is for adults. I say that subscribing to both. I am baby here. But that one is very much for kids. Your kids are less likely to go find two people going at it on Disney Plus? Hulu, the one for sex. The one for sex. Yeah. I mean, honestly, in the United States, that's the big differentiation. Sure. One is Bone Town, the other population, none. One of the things that Bob Iger said was he was like, we're going to wait and take a minute because people are going to need to prepare and think about child protection and stuff so their kids don't go to Bone Town.

46:54He didn't say Bone Town, but - It's essentially what it means. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that got people kind of scared, thinking that Disney Plus is going away? And it's like, no, it is going to be there so much. Yeah. You're just going to have to think a little harder about the accounts you set up and make sure that one of them, if you don't want your kids seeing Handmaid's Tale, that you block that. Everything you just said is true and correct, except for one thing. Okay. There is no question about which brand is going to go away. It's going to be Hulu. Like, I don't know how to be clearer about this.

47:27like disney plus is going to be the name of the service hulu is going to be a section of the service that has some of that more adult stuff maybe it'll be everything on hulu maybe it'll just be that more like adult subset of it right now there's like fx on hulu which is like yeah kind of the way that that works this is going to be fx on hulu on disney plus like it's going to be insane but that's what it's going to be like let's not pretend that there is a possibility that hulu is like the main disney brand forever that's ridiculous i've got to cling to it not Not only is this just like an objectively moral truth of the universe, I just want to read you the thing that Bob Iger said.

48:02Okay. From the earnings call. We expect that Hulu on Disney Plus will result in increased engagement, greater advertising opportunities, lower churn, and reduced customer acquisition costs, thereby increasing our overall margins. The beginning of that sentence is we expect that Hulu on Disney Plus. I don't know how to be clear. Like, he said it. It's right there, Alex. It's right there. I'm so tired of all of these people being like, what if the Disney Plus brand dies? It's not going to die. It's not going to die. It's fun to think it will. The way I see it, and I went through, I wound up reading and listening to this entire earnings call, which I like super don't recommend as a lifestyle choice.

48:39Don't do that, folks. But what's super interesting to me is Bob Iger, at least, feels very strongly that Disney has two really good brands. And it's Disney and it's ESPN. Those are the flagships. Those are the monoliths. Those are like the things he believes in as brands. Everything else is like subservient to those two things. And in an interesting way, he even kind of intimated that ESPN might roll into Disney Plus. Like Disney Plus is the thing. It just is. Good idea, bad idea. It is the answer. Which is a better name, Disney Plus or Max for your giant everything app? You know what sucks is I think Hulu is a better name.

49:15There we go. See? Hulu more captures the what the hell of it all. And I think that's one of the things that I'm a little questioning myself is Disney Plus has a very firm brand in the United States of population zero for Bontown. And that's not the case in the rest of the world, but it is very much the case in the United States. And I think that's going to be a real challenge for them branding wise, but they probably will call it all Disney Plus and be like, Now you can get ESPN and Hulu there. And then in a year, everybody's gonna be like, why? Hulu? Yeah. Hulu for me has like Google energy in that it's like not a word, but it's kind of a word.

49:55And it's like fun to say. And it's a very good brand. I've always just really liked it as a word. Like even not knowing what it means. It's just a good word. It's a good word. You're like hula hooping, hula what? You just don't know. But you know, that's where you could get your TV legally for a long time. I've come to think this strategy sort of makes sense for Disney because like even if what you're talking about like Hulu equals bone town, right? It's going to be like a checkbox in the Disney app that it's like when you set it up for your family, you're like my app has bone town, the kids apps, no bone town.

50:28And it's going to be a pretty easy toggle. Like I think where content goes over time is going to be kind of tricky. And we've already seen some kind of bleeding between the two over time, right? Right. Where like some things are on both services. Sometimes they move between like it's already kind of complicated. Right. There's like a whole bunch of Fox films that really shouldn't be on Disney Plus as we think of it today that are currently on Disney Plus. And you're like, oh, no, like kids are going to see something. They might see like the top of a boob and like this travesty, travesty for the children.

51:01So, yeah, yeah, they've already been dealing with this problem. And that was why he wanted to bridge the two. Right. He doesn't want to have to think about that. And I suspect it's going to be less Bone Town versus No Bone Town and more, do you want your kids to be able to watch mature ratings stuff? And do you want your kids to be able to watch TV 14? And so I think they're going to really cling to those TV ratings that they've kind of informally adopted that they don't actually have to have at this point. Nobody's telling them. These aren't broadcast on television. They can do whatever ratings they want.

51:31And they're still out there being like, we thought of a good rating for this one at Disney, which is hysterical. But I do think like, even in that case, having Hulu as the kind of shorthand for like, here's all of our sort of adult originals is probably pretty useful. It's like, I know what Disney gets me and I know what Hulu gets me. And even though they're in the same app, being able to kind of split them as I want to make some sense. I think what we're really going to start seeing as we get these more super apps, right, which is Max, Disney +, whatever Paramount and Peacock end up joining together to make in order to compete.

52:04As we start to get these super apps, I think we're going to start seeing kind of the replica of TV that we had before where you had your different channels and stuff. That's something that Zaslav's talked about. That's something that Iger kind of hints at. I think that idea, that concept of channels is going to come roaring back and some brand execs somewhere are going to be working their butt off coming up with a whole bunch of new channels or trying to resurrect old ones. Oh, that's interesting. So in the like Disney cable bundle universe, Hulu becomes like the HBO prestige adult television channel.

52:38Right. You've got FX over still hanging out over there or whatever. And then like Disney XD for the kids. I think that's what it was called. That's interesting. I'm an old, so I think it's Disney XD. And so I think we're going to see that sort of thing. You know, Freeform. Well, Freeform's toast. Freeform is not going to survive the next couple of years. Correct. But they might still keep that for like that YA audience. Keep that young adult audience there with Freeform. You're making me realize now that if you take what Disney is already planning on doing, like the way you describe and then you add espn's on-demand stuff and even the linear channel which disney has talked about adding to streaming and then you do the same with abc news you've just basically recreated 60 of the cable bundle like you're one nbc and cbs broadcast channel away from just the full cable bundle which is really really compelling wait and hulu has hulu with live tv yeah we're just back this is just i'm just paying disney for my cable bundle now instead of comcast Oh, I guess this is where we should disclose.

53:36Comcast is an investor in Vox Media through its subsidiary NBC Universal. Neelai's not here, so I don't have to tell you about the Netflix show that he humble brags about all the time. Alex has Paramount Plus. I don't know. We have a bunch of complicated disclosures to do here, but that's that about covers it. We both spend a lot of money on streaming already. We do. We watch a lot of streaming. Yeah, which actually is a good segue to the next thing, which is the other thing that Bob Iger talked about in the earnings call bunch that also there was some Verizon, Netflix, Max news on this is that the advertising tier of streaming continues to boom.

54:15Yes. In a way that like kind of surprises me. Like I think Bob Iger said over half of new Disney Plus subscribers in this last quarter were ad supported, which is huge. I don't think that's like, that's not surprising to me at all. People want things and they want things cheap. And TikTok and YouTube and everything else has totally prepared people to be able to sit through it. And broadcast TV has prepared people to sit through an ad in order to get the content they want. So that's not surprising to me. And I think the most surprising part of it is that advertisers are so eager for it when they do have the ability to micro target on platforms like TikTok and stuff.

54:53So that's the part that's surprising, But I guess it's easy. You've got good partners with Disney. You know there's going to be brand safety. You're not going to have to worry about some weird thing. Unlike TikTok and some of the other platforms they're talking about. Yeah. You have a lot more safety on something like Disney or Netflix or Macs than you do on social media platforms. So I get it. Makes sense. Yeah. It's also very funny. Part of me wonders if part of the appeal of that is just all of these ad agencies have been making one specific kind of ad to go next to one specific kind of thing for decades.

55:28And for a long time, it was like, well, where do we put that thing now? And now Netflix is just like, well, instead of putting it next to, I don't know, like Chicago Fire on television, put it next to Chicago Fire on streaming. And the ad agencies are like, oh, I know how to do that. That works for me. I think that's a big part of it. I think it's just like, this is a thing they already, all the advertisers already know how to do. They know how to sell it. Disney, all of these companies, know how to how to buy this stuff and and how to sell it so everybody's just like okay we figured it out and now also instead of broadcast and cable and dealing with that we can have it all internal we can control everything and that makes everything a lot easier and cheaper but also now disney is going to own all the entertainment you want to watch yeah like in a really real way Like Bob Iger is going to be deciding what scripted TV you watch.

56:21And that's a little, that has me a little concerned. I'm not crazy about one company having that much power over what I watch, but I do like how convenient it would be. Yeah. Well, one of the things I was reading was basically theorizing that Disney is going to win because it did all of its acquisitions before it became hard to do acquisitions, both, I guess, for like interest rate reasons, just the way the economy has gone. And also, like, there's more scrutiny over these mergers and acquisitions than there used to be. If you think about it, the fact that they were able to acquire Marvel, they were able to acquire ESPN.

56:59ESPN led to the acquisition of Marvel, right? Yeah. And then Lucasfilm and Pixar, like the list is crazy. It's insane. And it really shouldn't have happened. But it was also it is Bob Iger's legacy. It was the thing he did really, really well. He's very proud of. I think every when he was retired for that year and a half or whatever, he spent all of his time going around being like, I did this. I built this, this whole stable of assets for us. And now we can just go mint money. And Disney has. It worked out super well for a minute. He saw the writing on the wall and was really, really smart about it.

57:32Whether or not he should be able to do that, the whole copyright situation, the fact that he's going to own all of these copyrights and aggressively goes and has laws to stop this stuff from entering the public domain, that's less cool. But the thing about that that's weird then is the flip side of that is like Disney has lost just an essentially infinite amount of money on streaming now. It's betting on this future of like all of this is going to come together. And like I think with the Hulu thing, I see it more than ever. Like the bundle, the way you describe it is like, oh, that that might work and it might make Disney an awful lot of money pretty quickly.

58:07But also it makes me wonder, can anyone come after Disney? One of the things in the news this week was that Verizon is going to start selling a combination of Netflix and Macs, both ad-supported, for$10 instead of, I think, what would be$17. And one of the theories I saw about that is basically, ordinarily, what would happen is these two companies would merge, or two companies like them would merge, or they'd find some way to kind of be one and compete in a real way head-on. but they can't because you know gestures broadly the world is what it is and so they're having to find all these ways to kind of put their pieces together in order to be harder to turn away from do you buy that logic like is everybody else going to sort of sneaky bundle because they can't do what disney is doing yeah i think they have to right peacock and paramount have to bundle or they're going to be toast because you've got the three or four big players there's disney plus with now 160, 200 million subscribers at this point, just astronomical number.

59:09Amazon with a similarly astronomical number. But that one's going to be really curious because how much of that is just people who bought Amazon Prime and how much of it's actually users. Which Amazon has never really talked about. They've never disclosed. So there's always like a little asterisk when you see them at the top of the list. Then you've got Macs and you've got Netflix. So those are the big four. Those are effectively your ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox of 2023. And I think everybody's going to probably need to subscribe to most of those if they want to be able to have intelligent conversations with their friends about cultural moments.

59:43And then there's everybody else. Paramount and Peacock and all these other ones are all sitting at the bottom underneath them. They're the WB and the UPN of this analogy. I mean, you're not wrong, but brutal. What a move for these guys. And I I think the only way they're going to be able to compete is to start bundling and start offering that. Because right now they're really hedging their bets on being better at programming. And to their credit, they are much better at programming than Netflix. Much, much better at it. But I don't think just being really talented at one thing is going to pull their butts out of the fire on this.

1:00:21Yeah. And also the thing we seem to have learned over the last year or so is that Netflix can just spend its way out of any problem that it has. It just has so much more money that it's like, oh, we can't make a good original. We'll go get suits and make it a gigantic hit. Like, it just works. Peacock's out there furious. I think Peacock was the owner of that. Well, that's the other thing we're seeing is we're seeing a lot of these companies. You know, Zaslav said this last year. He said, we're open for business. We're going to start selling a lot of our properties. We don't want to hold everything.

1:00:49It's not just for us. Like, Disney is very much in the business of this is our IP. This is our brand. And you come to us for this IP and this brand. Yeah. Max and Peacock and Paramount, not Netflix, but Max and Peacock and Paramount, those kind of competitors are like, no, we want our brand to go everywhere in the hopes that eventually you say, I like this brand enough, I'm going to come back and pay you. And we'll see how that works. I don't know if it's going to work, but it definitely means there's more stuff being purchased and moved around, which is actually crucial to a good, interesting slate of content coming out because if all the content is being made by four companies who run by four white guys who all have very similar tastes and stuff you're not going to get a lot of diversity of content you're not going to get a lot of different fun and exciting things happening and so needing to sell to these smaller ones needing to keep the rest of that industry moving is going to be important for that diversity because otherwise it's just going to be suits gray's anatomy riverdale i don't know what are the like the most boring like fast talking dramatic white people is essentially what I would call all those shows.

1:01:54With just a little huh moments in there. Just a few huh moments. Yeah, swelling violins at the end of every episode. That's how you know. Or chasing cars. That's actually a good segue to the last thing we should talk about, which is two things happen sort of simultaneously. One was Bob Iger also said on this Disney earnings call that one of his big focuses is to go back to the film studio. Like the core Disney thing has always been, they develop, like you were saying, characters and movies that people love right and that that feeds movies that feeds the theme parks it feeds the merchandising stuff they do it feeds everything and that in recent years especially with pixar and especially with marvel has started to wane and so what he said is i'm gonna go back and really dig into that space and on the one hand it's like okay you're like an old rich white guy like we we kind of know how that goes but on the other hand the marvels opened this past weekend Horrible opening.

1:02:50To the lowest in Marvel history, right? It's the worst performing box office for a Marvel movie ever. Ton of asterisks next to it, by the way. Yeah, list them for me. Tell me the asterisks. There was the SAG strike, so they couldn't have Oscar-winning Brie Larson out there having fun with Samuel L. Jackson getting you excited for it, which they totally were going to do. And so you had the SAG strike. Like there was there's a large group of people that are fans of the MCU that are very upset with the direction of like the more diverse direction that the franchise has taken over the last few years.

1:03:24And so they're all upset that this is starring ladies and not dudes. There are some dudes in it. They're great. And then you have you have the real challenge of just Marvel fatigue. There are so many Marvel movies that came out before Ant-Man and Quantumania is another one that got short shrifted because it came out for they had four months to like finish. a whole bunch of effects that they were supposed to have like a year to finish. So they had to like rush their finish. And that's why it looks like hot garbage. And you're like, oh, this is an ugly movie because nobody has spent the time. So they've poisoned their brand, which is a shame because I think everybody who's going to see it really likes it.

1:04:02I wouldn't be surprised if the scores coming out of the film are pretty high for it. Like not astronomically high, but Disney historically has been really good at making a movie that even if critics don't like it, audiences really like it. And the last few, they really didn't have that success, particularly with Ant-Man and Doctor Strange. They really, really struggled with the cinema scores. And so I think Marvel has probably got much better cinema scores, but it's got to carry so much water that I think it's going to have that horrible asterisk next to it forever. Do you think it has a chance?

1:04:36It feels increasingly with every one of these, like, the Marvel fatigue is just irreversible. Even the stuff that people mostly seem to agree is good, like, Loki season two, people seem to mostly, like, doesn't have that, like, cultural force that it once did. Do you think we're just done with that phase and it's time to figure out what's next for Disney and everybody? I don't think so, because I think what people need to remember is that the original MCU, with the exception of maybe the first Iron Man movie, was just as calculated, was just as well planned out. Like, the reason Captain Marvel as a character exists today was because they rewrote her back in 2011 to make her a better character to make it produced in movies.

1:05:17Ms. Marvel herself, that was one of the reasons Ms. Marvel, that character was created, was for that same reason. These characters have always been manufactured to sell tickets. Guardians of the Galaxy was that first big surprise where they made that film, and it did really, really well. And they're like, oh shit, we can make people care about a sentient raccoon. We can do anything. And that's still true. But if you don't have the marketing behind it, and if you're not making films that are entertaining, because there was a lot of struggles. Early on, Marvel struggled with Incredible Hulk and the first Thor movie, did not have the strongest cinema scores.

1:05:50And even at the time, it was like, oh, are we going to get it? And then they knocked it out of the park with the Avengers, and everybody's like, okay, never mind. And so they were able to kind of weather those bad times before, but they've just had a string of horrible films that nobody cares about and they're so focused on that crossover concept and that who are you going to see next that it's it's just exhausting when it's like no just do what you did at the beginning tell really good stories and then have samuel jackson show up in the last five minutes to be like also this guy's showing up next week well and that's one of the that's one of the things that i i haven't seen the marvels yet but by all accounts it did very well is like it's just a good movie but also if you're a super fan who has seen everything it has extra rewards for you and that was the thing for me that like the original movies did so well was like i i've probably seen 60 of the marvel movies and it felt like the longer i went the more i was being penalized for not having seen them whereas at the beginning it was like if i had seen them i got 10 more references that i didn't get before but it wasn't a huge problem that I missed a bunch of them.

1:06:54Now it's like, if I start watching one of these movies and I haven't seen 65 other things, none of it is going to make any sense to me. And that's too much. We've lost the plot when we've gotten to there, like literally lost the plot. I think Ant-Man and the Wasp into Quantumania or whatever the hell it's called is probably like, that's the turning point because the original Ant-Man franchise exemplified this better than anything. It was just like, hey, look, we're doing a really cool thing. And oh, also like... It's Paul Rudd. He's so small. Yeah, and it's loosely attached to this larger franchise, but you didn't have to care about it.

1:07:26And then this third one, they were like, you must care about this entire franchise. And also this little man named King. And you're like, what? I don't. Why? Stop it. And it looks like shit. But you think we're forever like one or two good Marvel movies from it being back on top of the world? I think so. Disney is very good at making hits. Disney is better than just about anybody on the planet at making you care about something and selling it. So as long as Marvel's invested, they're going to do well. I think what's going to be curious to see is what lessons they take from their recent failures.

1:07:59It's not lost on me that the two biggest recent failures were also led by women, the big primary parts of the cast. And I live in constant terror that they're going to do what they were always doing in the 2000s of being like, the woman-led show bombed, so we got to kill all things where women lead. That kind of groupthink is really popular in Hollywood, and I'm terrified of that happening again. But Disney knows how to make hits. It's Marvel is not going away until Bob Iger or whoever decides it needs to. Fair enough. Thank you. All right, we got to take a break. Go see the Marvels. Apparently, it's great.

1:08:36Charles really liked it. Everybody who sees it seems to really like it. We got to take a break. We're going to come back and do the hotline.

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1:11:13All right, welcome back. Let's get to the VergeCast hotline. We take questions every week and we try to answer them as sometimes helpfully as we can. This week, Chris Welch is here to help me. Hi, Chris. Hello. Good to be back. We got a question about something that I honestly thought we would never ever in our lives get a question about again on the VergeCast hotline, which is MP3 players. But first, let me just play the question. It comes from Patrick. Hi, Verge team. This is Patrick from Tucson, Arizona. I'm trying to reduce my reliance on my phone so that when I go to replace it, I can get a dumb phone and replace all of its functions with standalone dumb or semi-smart products.

1:11:51The one feature that's giving me the most difficulty replacing is the ability to listen to my music from Spotify, my podcasts, and my audio books in my car in an easy and automatically updating fashion. It seems that all of the MP3 players that remain on the market are either over$600 at least, like the Sony Walkman, or under$100 and limited to playing manually populated offline files. Is it true that there's just no more mid-market for MP3 players? Thanks. I look forward to your insight as always. Okay. I have like an immediate visceral reaction to this question, but I'm curious what your instant thoughts are.

1:12:29I think the main hang-up and problem challenge here is that podcasts part. Finding an MP3 player that'll automatically update podcasts is not really what the ones that are out there these days are for. Like you mentioned, you can buy a Sony Walkman for$300,$400, but that's all hi-fi listening gear. It's not really intended for casual podcast listening. I don't know. What are your vibes on the question? What are your feels? I kind of have come to the point where I think the only reason to buy a dedicated MP3 player is if you really care about hi-fi lossless audio. And I think that's a perfectly valid thing and reason to buy an MP3 player.

1:13:07If you're worrying about Spotify and podcasts, that is not you. And so I kind of think the market for those people for an MP3 player is dead. To me, the answer here is buy a cheap second phone, only download the two apps that you need. Like, I don't know, have somebody change your Google Play password so you can't do anything else or whatever. And then just treat that like your device. Basically try to like iPod Touchify a phone that you have. That's the only answer I can think of that makes sense to me. So you still can buy like a used iPod Touch. That's an option. But it's stuck on iOS 15, I think.

1:13:42So there will come a day where like Spotify no longer supports iOS 15. and like same for Apple Music, which is very strange to think about. So at some point, the iPod Touch will be left behind. I've got one that feels so small these days that it like no longer feels like a phone. I know, it's really true. It's like so tiny. So, you know, it's got some charm. But yeah, software days are probably numbered. There's also, I don't know if you remember the Mighty Player. It's like that iPod Shuffle device that can sync. That can sync Spotify and like tracks and podcasts. So that's an option. But you would need a smartphone to sync it to.

1:14:13So if you want a dumb phone, therein lies the problem. But yeah, that's still out there. I think they cost like$130, so nowhere near the cost of like a Sony Walkman, which again is silly. And for nerds like me who like have like lossless audio libraries of fully legally, you know, downloaded music. No question about that. Don't worry about it. Yeah. But yeah, for this question, I would either like pursue an old iPod Touch for a few years, at least it should be good for one, two, three more years. Or like you said, buy a secondary phone that's, you know, does the job. The only other thing I could think of, and I did some research on this, like, I kind of wish we lived in the world where Spotify's like car thing had been super successful.

1:14:51And it went down this road of building sort of niche music gadgets, because I agree, we should have more music gadgets. Like, I think the idea that my phone is my source of music makes some sense, because it's the device I have with me, whatever. But I kind of wish there were more. And the thing I wish most of all is that some kind of wearable was the answer. And there's little bits of stuff. Fitbit makes some stuff that has some pretty good integrations with Spotify and Deezer and some of these things. A lot obviously depends on which apps you use. Like if you use Apple podcasts, all of this is moot by an iPod touch.

1:15:24But for some of these things, there are like bits and pieces of it you can get. But like you said, all of these are just phone accessories. They require so much else to do on your smartphone before you can get it onto your actual dedicated device. Right. Like it feels like the Apple Watch should be able to sync with a Mac at this point in time. And, you know, it's gotten us it's almost 2024, but you still need an iPhone there. So that would solve the problem immediately. Like, you know, buy an Apple Watch that could talk to a Mac, it'd be all good. But that does not exist. But I would look at the Mighty, honestly.

1:15:52You know, it looks like an iPod shuffle. It's got some charm. You can wear it if you want a dumb phone. It kind of fits that vibe, but you just got to figure out like what device will it sync with. And I think I'm sure he's got some kind of phone lying around that can still, you know, run Spotify. Yeah. And the good news is I would think on the phone front, if all you really want is like Spotify and Pocket Casts or whatever, I'll plug Pocket Casts because it's my favorite podcast app. Same. You don't need much phone to do that, right? Like you can buy a pretty small, pretty low end, pretty low powered phone.

1:16:21I would say as long as it's relatively modern in its software capabilities, so it'll last a long time. Like to almost no one would I recommend most of the like$100 to$200 smartphones out there. But in that range, you can get something that's going to serve you perfectly fine for these particular cases. If all you want is like a thing to plug headphones into to listen to music, right? Yeah, that or like check out like a Pixel 7a during the holiday sales and see if you can get a good discount on that. Yeah, Google gives those things away like six times a year. You can probably find one. Are there any other interesting music gadgets out there in the world right now?

1:16:58I feel like there's like, is Neil Young still doing the Pono thing? Pono. God, what a time that was to be alive. That's not around anymore. I mean, I'm sure some of my readers are going to have some very super niche solutions that are out there. But yeah, off the top of my head, I can think of like Sony makes cheap walk bins that aren't that pricey, but those are the manual loading on music and stuff. And so those don't run Android at all. And so that would not be a good solution. But yeah, I would buy an old iPod Touch, secondary phone, check out the Mighty for like$130 and see if that'll solve your dilemma.

1:17:29But yeah, that's a big challenge to find a device that can sync your podcasts with a dumb phone. it's a strange one and i really i do support the overall theory of trying to take all the things that your phone does and sort of split them out so that it's like instead of having everything with me all at once in this one device i can just have the tools that i need and not worry about the rest like single purpose devices you know the ipod yeah honestly like i wish the answer was the new ipod classic right like integrates with apple music and apple podcasts and you can just live your life in that.

1:18:02Like that's the device I want to exist. Seriously, part of me will always miss the heyday of the iPod, I think, to some degree. But this is the world we're in now. So you gotta work with what we got. I hope that helps. Chris, thank you as always. Absolutely. Always a pleasure. All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everyone on the show and thank you for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from our Spotify coverage to all the stuff going on in streaming at theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but also, you know, read The Verge. It's a great website.

1:18:32As always, if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, weird Spotify playlists you want to tell me about, you can always email us at vergecastattheverge.com or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. It's my favorite thing to do on this show. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about the PlayStation Portal, more from Epic v. Google, and all the other news of the week. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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