Gadgetory

welcome to the 359 I'm Ben Fox Raven I'm Joanie salesman Amazon on Monday experienced a rough start to this year's prime day with outages plaguing the website and app right as the company was kicking off its big annual sale the situation was obviously embarrassing for the world's biggest e-commerce company but it doesn't appear to have significantly harmed sales the company said Tuesday that Us sales so far were quote bigger than ever which I guess doesn't like surprised me that much like we didn't really know how big this outage was or how long it lasted in Amazon wasn't gonna tell us so I don't know do you think this is gonna be a big hit to them reputationally or not I think that's probably where the hits gonna come is that Amazon banks itself on being this flawless effortless effortless making it easy for you to buy and get whatever you need as easily as possible and it was not easy to access their site but find what you needed things that you knew were there you couldn't get to that hurts yeah yeah they even like the search at one point was broken for me but at the same time I spoke with one analyst yesterday who said that look if they're able to fix a flaw fairly quickly then sales should be able to recover fairly easily which it looks like that actually happened but either way did you spend any time buying stuff I spent so much money wait what kind of stuff did you get I've had a lot of like big-ticket things I bought luggage and very expensive vacuum cleaners and a robot vacuum cleaner and impressive fancy headphones I spent a lot of money but you your bail against all things prime yeah because I cover Amazon I almost feel like I shouldn't buy things on prime day I mean like I shop around a lot but I never actually decide on anything one thing one theory that I do have about this this whole failure is is it possible that they might actually benefit from it there was so much news around the failure that maybe more people started shopping I don't know I don't know I think any time they say no press is bad press but when the press is we can't go to your site and buy your things that's not going to helped them sell stuff really yeah that's true if you can't actually go there to buy it I don't know they threw so much marketing behind primed a and it makes sense that those sales would be up considering the reason that it was failing it's cuz so many people are trying to buy things but after the end of the day you don't want this to be the experience people have and Bezos cares a lot about the consumer experience totally agreed also Netflix on Monday missed its own estimates for subscriber growth by 1 million customers in its second quarter results causing its stock to tumble Joan is this a big issue for the company do you think it's just going to be a short-term bump I think it's gonna be a short-term bump you got to keep in mind that this is a Netflix stock people that invest in Netflix stock they are very trigger-happy they love these 14% ups and downs is not unusual after an earnings report and this was a significant miss for them but you got to keep in mind for average people they gained four million customers just not the 5 million they had told people and there's some lumpiness that's the term there's some lumpiness and their results sometimes they beat by significant amounts and sometimes they miss they don't miss often but they do miss sometimes generally speaking Netflix isn't sweating it for one and it seems like this is just a road bump talk to me a bit about how much they spend on content the last I checked it was something like 8 billion dollars which is significantly more than competitors like HBO or Amazon yeah so this year they're spending a billion dollars are expected to spend as much as a billion dollars on their originals and other content and spend another 2 billion dollars just on marketing their original so all in all their content budget is like 10 billion dollars that's far out swell yeah that far outstrips any other you know like if you look at HBO they only really create I think don't quote me on this but I think they only make like 40 series they only make 40 original pieces of content a year Netflix got Emmy nominations just Emmy nominations for 40 pieces of content yeah yeah which is interesting we're talking about how much money they're spending and the other thing I wanted to ask you about was it looks like it's actually benefiting them right I mean like the Emmy nods came in and they actually broke HBO's 17-year streak of the most Emmy nods yeah yeah so the executives are happy to talk about that yesterday too as everyone was selling off all their sockets like wait wait wait Emmys loved us this year Danny's always loved Netflix and that's what happens when you are spending ten billion dollars on content you can create so much that you also and when you let creators have mostly a hands-free experience they don't have executives giving them notes so they're getting really sophisticated creators producers and directors to make content there because they're just like shoveling money at them so they are creating good stuff and it works in their favor they've been growing like crazy even though they haven't grown in the last quarter quite as much as was expected cool Last Comic Con is coming up in a few days our own Aaron Carson plans on attending the show for the first time and wrote about how to prepare for all the geekdom so check out this story if you want to read more about these stories check us out on CNN I'm Ben Fox Ruben I'm Jonas Osmond thanks for listening okay thanks everybody for joining us as always that's a conclusion of the recording of the audio podcast but now it's time to take questions and comments and keep the whole shebang going let's find out what other people's horror stories have been so far on the Amazon experience I'm sure we've got a lot of people see in the 404 pages and freezing up Ben you said the search locked up for you yeah not only that but like I was stuck in an infinite loop for the shop all deals so if you clicked on the shop all deals button it just takes you back to a page that says shop all deals and that happened for more than an hour my initial impression when this was happening was okay they just loaded up the new primed a page because it has its own like curated customized page this is gonna have a little bit of hiccups while they're actually getting like a flood of traffic coming in but they'll probably resolve it within like 10 or 15 minutes this thing lasted for well over an hour and had multiple failures associated with I was having hiccups till in the evening like hours later I was still having problems yes it wasn't nearly as bad but I definitely noticed that as well where you would still get a 404 dog every now and then when you were trying to like find a deal or look for the search and eventually they were able to recover and fix certain things I noticed that they took off some features that may have been breaking the site oh really which ones they like there was there was one that I noticed earlier on where it was shot by categories it was this nice new feature where you could shop for like toys and games and whatever when they reloaded the page that disappeared and it didn't come back so it's possible that that may have just been broken and I heard from them if I remember correctly that that was a new feature that they were trying to announce they were trying to roll out this year and and the problem is is that the company is so secretive they won't really say what happened what the cause of the problem was everybody assumes and everybody figures that it's this huge flood of traffic I mean right that's when the site started failing was right when they right when they started primed a but at the same time Amazon being Amazon right they just won't knowledge the problem but then they just kind of want to move on and don't want to provide details right I mean even them saying that sales were better than ever that's like classic Amazon way of categorizing how they perform they just say better than ever hundreds of millions or whatever they use these super generalized ways to say things are great yeah and when they clearly weren't yes yeah yeah they're intentionally vague with that they use percentage changes they do a lot of those like little tricks to try to avoid actually giving hard figures but you know it's not it wasn't a good situation for them obviously and I think that they started prime day in the middle of the day this year as opposed to like I think it was at night last year to make sure that there would be all hands on deck to avoid a situation like this so you know this company tends to execute extremely effectively they've had a bunch of acquisitions a lot of new areas and that's typically how they're known they're known for like being sometimes the smartest guys in the room and this is this is an unfortunate situation for them where when all eyes are on them this is a big day for them they had a pretty significant failure on their yeah it's too bad but it's they'll probably still do a big rah-rah thing tomorrow about how much money they made I'm sure they will so let's talk a little bit about what kind of Domino effects might have been in play here bombs a bomb was asking if Amazon Prime video went down bill harried says Amazon streaming video was down on his Roku that they had thought that it was connected to the Roku restructuring their apps but it must have been completely on the Amazon side because he said that the Roku device was functioning fine otherwise do we think that the traffic ative impacted that those gotta be absolutely really I believe so actually I spoke to my wife yesterday and she told me that one of the echo speakers was malfunctioning so this is all based off of Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing business so it's possible that the flood of traffic may have also been impacting some of its other features or its other services and she was trying to do something really simple where she was just trying to set a timer which she does every day and for whatever reason it wasn't functioning properly no for not for whatever reason it was because Amazon even though it's in it's profit all comes from Amazon Web Services like they're giant gigantic server we will serve up all of your stuff they couldn't even rely on their own what alone yeah yeah it's this is the company that this shouldn't have happened to they have so many redundant systems for a situation like this to not happen especially on prime day and it probably is as significant it probably points to the enormous amount of demand especially when like they just opened the sale so to a certain extent that's like a good problem to have but if any company was gonna be prepared for something like this it should have been them Netflix actually they run all their content through AWS right I think yeah yeah yeah they are all in that's that's the term that they use really Netflix is all in I think that just goes to show that nobody is completely impervious to the end to the mercy of the Internet and the miracle that is the traffic miracle all that sound it's so weird Commerce what's the bit what's a better term that makes it sound less weighty toidy what's helped me I can't think of another word than miracle now you've put miracle in my head I'm thinking about you know what I'm trying to say yeah of course of course we've seen Netflix go down time and time again Amazon can go down we've seen Google down remember when Gmail went down what was that like two years ago or something like that it happens it obviously happens and sometimes you sit back and you wonder like geez how does it not a train wreck more often yeah because they do have so many services they're really complex companies and at the end of the day Amazon is still gonna make a boatload of money that's that's like the big thing here is how much our customers really gonna remember this are they really gonna drop Prime because of it I find that hard to believe I think that they'll they'll take the hit on it it's it's embarrassing but ultimately I think it may and they're we're like well we'll talk about how it really was kind of a faceplant but beyond that I don't know that it's really going to harm them much yeah Matthew datcha reports that the he had his entire shopping cart deleted yesterday about that Joan what was your experience he said you had you bought a bunch of stuff but you had more than a few bumps in the road yeah so I logged on right when it started and I was able to get I wanted to get some headphones some nice headphones wireless headphones and I was able to get the headphones that I wanted into my cart but then when I tried to check out my cart I couldn't it just gave me these there's heavy traffic right now try again in 30 seconds and so I did that a couple times and I managed to check that out but after that point I just couldn't I couldn't search deals I couldn't search other things I couldn't get to the deals I'd already watched my mo I'd set some mobile alerts for other deals through the Amazon mobile app to be alerted when some other things are gonna be coming on sale those mobile alerts didn't arrive until like 40 minutes too late and then when I clicked on them I couldn't even get to the deal page anyways I just got an Amazon dogs of Amazon page so and that continued I mean I was able to get some other things but like throughout the afternoon I wasn't able to at least when I was able to get something and put it in my cart I could check out but it took a while before it started working like it felt like the way it should that is that is a lot of problems in 2016 they had an issue where a number of customers were complaining that they weren't able to properly check out but that was and and that seemed to have lasted a while but that was fairly limited this one this is they're in their fourth year of prime day granted it's bigger every single year but you would expect something like this not to happen I mean like I'm not trying to be too hard on them but at the same time they hype the hell out this thing and then the websites not working so it's it's hard not to you know kind of take this stance for for something like this right yeah did we actually see any solid deals I know there's always been a lot of hemming haw over Amazon Prime being like they're just kind of clearing out their house I haven't participated yet been a little tied down the last 24 hours Alex Mitchell says that the Nintendo switch deal kind of sucked in the long run hmm which kind of makes me feel a little better cuz that was a one thing I was looking forward to is anything I think my game library of course I'd be I think he's probably talking about that $300 console package in which is fine that's not a great price but it's not a terrible any highlights from the sales so far that we can objectively highlight our reviewers have been all over this all over like crazy what are some of the things that are our colleagues and reviews have pointed out the thing to like if you're on in the market for an Amazon device whether it's an echo or a fire TV or whatever you're probably gonna get the best possible deal during prime day or also Black Friday Cyber Monday so if you don't want to pay for it now you can wait until later the year during the holiday season you'll probably get a very very similar price but Amazon is doing as much as it can to promote its own products and services so if you're looking for things like signing up for like Amazon Prime music or devices like Kindle unlimited also like they do a lot more of their own like home decor and clothing now so I would say shopping for that stuff you'll probably find some of the better deals because they control the pricing on that a little bit more than for the other guys so that's the stuff that I would point you to probably the most I think on CNET we've got by category I think for like home for television for PC for audio-visual you know speakers and headphones and Lynette we've got pages that'll explain some of the best deals there are people slavishly monitoring all the deals that are coming up sorry yeah they're doing a lot of content related to that so definitely check out the website if you are interested in checking out deals in specific categories for sure there's a lot of coverage from the reviews team on that in before shameless self-promotion Matthew dogger asks what was with the dogs in the error pages so I know this was earned I think this was genius like I don't I don't care and i love that the our headline pretty much everybody's headline who was covering the story was like well Amazon's broken but Elise's cute dogs yeah so the cute dogs aren't new those cute dogs are just like what they populate 404 pages with and those are dogs of Amazon's so it only was my favor I just want to highlight cannoli for the relevant movie convinced lots to love about canal so these these specifically are Amazon employees and Amazon is very dog-friendly when I was there in Seattle last year there they like make a point of having like doggy treats around and like water bowls and they they let employees like bring their dogs to their office so to kind of up that even more they have the the 404 pages or now the dogs of Amazon so it's possible or it's very very likely that people just didn't notice that before but they were always there so if you just punched in amazon.com slash a bunch of gobbledygook that doesn't make any sense you will probably find a dogs on Amazon page and it wasn't new for prime day or anything like that it was just knew that people were seeing it when they were new because that doesn't usually happen it was it was a nice bomb for a Ozzie situation because the dogs are really cute and it was just it was a cute idea but they it's not that they did it specifically for prime day so but yeah I think you mentioned you kind of miss the fail wail it's a fail we'll gone I think I think so I think it's gone not only do they have less failure in that respect but respect only have less failure failure on other counts but not that kind of failure but I think they got rid of that I think they did get rid of fail well it's too bad there 404 is it's different how soon until we see things like nostalgic memes come around full circle like we've got the Nokia 3310 like the nostalgia Tech has come full circle how long until we start seeing like uh well I wish I wish as much as I'd like to believe that Jack Dorsey is watching the show he's not but if you are watching bring back the fail whale jack alright we got enough time for a couple more quick questions over or at least comments from our buddy Michael Brown he says the best thing about prime day was the competing sales on Best Buy Google etc I think that is kind of a good thing you know you could say money is the root of all evil and commercialism is the devil but jobs and business that mean it is kind of nice to see like this is a nice shot in the arm to the economy in a time where there's rarely any major commerce going on its opposite like almost polar opposite of Black Friday so props to Amazon for you know kind of revving the engines a little bit I mean Christmas in July is something that happens happen to retail jomeyer I have learned that that is not as commonplace as we once thought I am very familiar with Christmas in July but I have talked to a lot of people are like what the hell are you talking about yeah it's definitely not the same as actual Christmas but it's something that you know I think real sellers have tried this tactic before where you know it's it's pre back-to-school it's a slow time of year it's after spring when a lot of you know like gardening and home improvement places have a lot of have a lot of business so I think like it's something that like the people retailers artificially drum up and have done for a long time but never on the scale of it was like something's ever been on the scale of Amazon yeah one of the things also related to Michael Browns comment one of the things that I appreciate it was apparently Macy's had had a specific promotion where they were like look at all the stuff that you can buy for a hundred and nineteen dollars or less so that was like a direct dig at Amazon Prime membership fee which is one hundred and $19 like look at all the stuff that you can buy if you just don't pay that membership fee which is their heart which is great I mean like and granted all of those other retailers are really trying to do a dig on Amazon's membership fee because it was they raised it by $20 this year it's now one hundred and nineteen dollars and so a lot of these other retailers are specifically saying here are these deals and you do not have to pay a membership fee for them so they are trying to find different ways of competing against Amazon even though Amazon it is still very much their big day and they're the juggernaut like they're the ones that made prime day they're the ones that are making the most sales for this particular time all right let's take one from Channing che they ask why is it the Amazon keeps you from viewing prime day deals if you're not already a prime customer I'm not gonna sign up for a service if I'm not allowed to see the benefits is this an element of exclusivity then you say it's not true I know customer for years so on this computer specifically I'm not signed in to my account I am able to shop on the prime day deals and I makes more sense oh yeah they don't they don't hide it from you because specifically this is a big opportunity for them to drum up new prime customers exactly and to guys say and to get people to sign up for the 30-day free membership so they want you to see the deals they want you to get enticed by it maybe you've never gone on Amazon before you've never considered being an Amazon member before this is a big opportunity for them to do something like that so yes if you are interested in looking for the deals you're not a Prime member you can go on Amazon and absolutely shop around before deciding whether you do or you don't want to pay that money or get the trial membership from Bom Bom it's kind of an off topic question but Joe and you may be able to floor this one if AT&T merged with Warner bruh or with Time Warner Warner Brothers do you think Netflix would be pushed out of business no because a it's pretty sure that's happening and B Netflix doesn't rely on Time Warner for very much of its content that's part of the reason why it's spending eight billion dollars ten million dollars total on on content and almost the majority of that is on originals it's so they don't have to rely on other people's content the the terms that other people want to set in order to have a robust catalogue of stuff to watch so one of the things that might be a little bit more threatening is if Fox and Disney merge Disney is already planning to have what people refer to as Disney flicks next year it's their subscription service that will basically package in all the movies from Disney that you love for a Netflix like low low monthly fee that's more threatening to Netflix because Netflix has had those Disney movies like Pixar movies the Marvel movies they had a specific deal with just need to get those so that's Disney said we're not going to renew that deal it's gonna end and they're gonna launch their direct Netflix competitor that's going to be more threatening to it but 18 t buying Time Warner isn't gonna have much no effect in terms of the content you get it'll be another competitor as they launch subscribing streaming subscriptions services because they have that new stuff but it's kind of Netflix's I mean it's hard to underestimate how much they lead this space they've got you know a hundred and hundred plus million members worldwide that's a really long runway ahead of anybody else yeah and they saw this coming that's why they spent so much money on their own even with Disney flex there they're well ahead of the game and honestly from a consumer perspective most consumers would rather spend just the money on one service like Netflix which they already are customers of then you know all these other players going out on their own and getting you to you know not just buy Netflix but everything else all right yeah but that seems to be the future that we're moving toward yep excellent answer to close it out let's take one more from bill harried any estimates on the number of users who actually logged in yesterday what is Amazon's breaking point god that's a good question but like Amazon everybody Jeff let's find this Amazon never gets that close to actually providing like real specific numbers I did get some hour-by-hour comparative information from like a third-party company called feed visor which specifically mentioned that there was a five percent decrease in total sales from like you know the marketplace sellers during the four pm hour so other than that everything was up and by 7:00 p.m. it was actually more than double but as far as specific numbers that's that's harder to say but it was there was an obvious hit during the early hours and then after that like it was all systems go and like people were spending way more than they were last year as we saw with Joan yeah well that's lame I thought you would actually be able to give us a little more information sorry about the kind of fake toss over blame Amazon they're the ones that never give specifics about anything that seems unnecessary to play that kind of information so close to the truth I understand is I mean that's hot tech gears right now it's I feel like it's a pendulum like and that's I mean I'm gonna extrapolate this really far but that's part of the problem that we're seeing with like Facebook and like the that all these tech companies are so Chloe stirred and hold everything so tight to the best that people are like hey you need to tell me what you're doing with my private information we're not talking about privacy here obviously it's different but it's definitely just a cultural thing that may be stirring to start swinging in the other direction now there's been so much scandal one would hope so but as a good example Jeff Bezos announced just this year how many Prime members there were worldwide prime has existed for god I should know this offices top of my head but it's something like 15 no 20 20 plus years right because yeah yeah because Brent a started four years ago for the 20th anniversary of prime or the twentieth anniversary of the company but either way wait a minute I might be getting some of those numbers wrong but needless to say and 100 and around over 20 be been around like maybe seven or eight okay either way they avoided specifically mentioning how many Prime members there were up until this year and it was a huge number for the company so just so you get a good idea of how much they keep things close to the vest that's a good example whoops all right well we of course what we are out of time for everybody still prime dang out there we just want to say happy hunting keep us posted if you find anything good if you break it again or you know tweet at us let us know what the hell is wrong with the experience overall or how disappointed you are and how bad this Christmas really was who wants to take us out today I'll do it anyway sorry prime was founded 13 years ago February 25th 2005 it's something that I feel like I really should have known so my apologies for not having that off the top well in Price is Right rules I still won yes technically Bryan is way ahead with his six or seven year rule but anyway the 359 is available on iTunes tune in stitcher feedburner google play music google podcasts the amazon echo am i missing one CNET calm down the prompter seen it you know it's not there oh it's fine anyway but we'll be back tomorrow and thanks everybody for your questions and we'll see you again soon take care everyone see you tomorrow you