Gadgetory

welcome to the 359 I'm Alfred a I'm Johnny salesman the cheapest live TV streaming service Philo is trying to catch up with its big lead competitors Philo streams live TV from a very skinny bundle of cable channels for about 16 dollars a month without any major sports TV or you know around-the-clock news you know compared to rivals like sling TV and PlayStation View Philo's the smallest streamer but it's taking two steps forward Joanie solve Salzmann scoop that the surface is going to be adding support for streaming on Apple TV and fire TV by this summer so how important are these moves well they're also adding a feature where if you're a subscriber you can authenticate into any of those cable network apps so you can go to the Comedy Central app and log in there and together what it means is file is just more competitive you know before it wasn't it you weren't able to stream it on anything other than a roku device basically and they only have an app for iOS they don't have one for Android so by slowly having more devices like Apple TV and Amazon fire TV as something you can stream on that gives them a broader base of people that could potentially be subscribers so if it doesn't have sports or you know around-the-clock news networks I'm assuming you know big baseball fans aren't gonna be really wanting so who would want in on this right so the person that makes this makes sense for they've found that their sweet spot customer is somebody who is a major fan of one of their networks so they do cover so if you're a huge fan of like discovery that channel or a huge fan of Comedy Central then this is a great option for you because you can get the live TV and now with this expanded TV off TV Everywhere authentication you can also sign into those channels apps and get all the extras that you would want the kind of super fan would want those kind of things so house is different from like say Netflix or Hulu right so they like to say that it's a great companion to Netflix Netflix it's all obviously like all on-demand content and Efrain says like you know crossed themselves millions of times and said they're never going to have live TV and so if you want live TV without having to pay for a really expensive digital package or very expensive cable subscription and this is a way to get you some live TV for like lifestyle sort of content without having to pay a whole lot yeah so next up the Commerce Department announced that it was banning US exports the Chinese phone company ZTE this is over violating sanctions et agreed to in March 2017 after the company pled guilty to providing American technology to phone makers in Iran and North Korea z-t said they would reprimand 35 employees involved with it as part of the settlement but they didn't in fact they actually gave them annual bonuses for it US officials said that alleged lie led to a ban announced today which means companies like Qualcomm and Dolby won't be able to export 2zt this is kind of a massive hit considering that their phones pretty much like run on Qualcomm chips you know and so what does this all mean really right well it definitely is a bat it's definitely a hurdle for ZTE you know Chinese handset makers have had a lot of trouble lately with the u.s. you know wall way the government says like there are security concerns with Huawei and because of that all these people that sell that could sell their phones said sorry we're not gonna carry them anymore the difference is that while we doesn't really have a lot of people that use it yes he's often reviewed on our website a lot it's it's popular within the prepaid market so it could actually have more impact on consumers yeah so Facebook also has a major problem with fake news and it's a address with fact checkers for news stories and changing how it except ads over the last two years but you know experts find that the majority of disinformation on Facebook is coming from memes which might sound a little crazy but I mean have you ever seen a meme on Facebook sending you know basically that was like completely false information I mean everyone I know you have yes yeah so one of them that I'd seen that was really popular was something about Barack Obama giving a medal to like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby which is obviously fake right but it was like distributed like crazy over Facebook on that so that's all the time that we have for today's show if you like what you heard check us out on CNET i'm out for ding I'm Joni sauceman thanks for listening and that concludes the recording of the audio podcast it's time for me to go and earn my pay check by delving through all of your fantastic questions and comments to keep the conversation going we appreciate you tuning in I'm shocked and stunned memes aren't real well the thing is is like memes are like meant to like not be believed right like it's supposed to be so absurd that like obviously it's fake like one of the examples I pointed out in my story was like it's a very like favorite meme of mine that's just like the Italian warfare kind of thing words like they they take like Italian stuff like pizza and then they say there was like a picture of like pizza floating on the water and they were like Italian World War two Navy like that's like the the joke is like the thing with memes like they're not meant to be believed and yet like we've come to a point where so many people look at them and like basically think right yeah this is this is definitely information I mean like you even look at Donald Trump's Twitter account from when he was running for president he then posted something about like the the rate of black-on-black like crime right which was completely wrong and it was like some like really like racist like meme post right but yeah that spread for a while until the account was deleted that he retweeted it from yeah the idea though is that you know there's way more fake news like spreading like via memes and like actual like fake news articles that which is what Facebook is tackling and and your reporting did you people you talked to you and did you discuss how that can be I imagine it's a really tricky thing because they're pictures yeah with yeah in misinformation in there it's not like it's taxed yeah so Facebook has actually been ramping up its tools for this they actually only rolled it out late March and they're only testing out in France right now yeah so they used it originally for picture their fact-checking pictures and videos now they the first pilot program was during the Alabama special election where there was a lot of fake images about Roy Moore and you know just just leading up to that and they actually banned like thousands of accounts from Macedonia that was spamming it with like fake memes and things like that so what they're looking at is essentially like post like there was one a fake one of like an NFL player burning the American flag which is also fake photos like taking like an image of like a conflict in like Syria or something like that and claiming that was like an anti like gun rights protest in like the US right so they're looking at issues like that but like a bulk of it is also like divisive memes that like tend to go viral a lot right yeah and it's such as stuff but like it's like there's there's liberal memes that are yeah yes yes yeah yeah so you're showing your cards a little bit Alfred I when are we going to actually see punishment brought forth on trolls is there going to be some kind of oh they get their kind I mean it's activating what we do yeah we gonna actually see fines there's no law against relying on yeah we should somebody should consider that yeah I mean extreme degree it's one thing to crack a joke it's one thing when somebody posts something that like you should know better that's obviously fake and then there's the active people there yeah that yeah that comes into a serious issue of like why why are we policing memes and things like that and it brings up a serious issue of like censorship for Facebook so when does it become hate crime though it it's that's a problem it's anything more thing it's tough but like there you have to consider this during the Senate hearing last week Mark Zuckerberg dict did talk about how it's like a very thin line between like censorship and you know making sure that you know hate speech doesn't get out there or anything like that I believe during one of the testimonies in November with Facebook's like legal counsel Colin stretch he had mentioned that all of the posts that were like paid for from like Russian trolls would have been perfectly fine on Facebook if they were actually done by like the groups that were pretending to be sure it wasn't the you know inauthenticity of the content more so that the the source like if it was just like a normal person saying like an American person yeah yeah and this person's like the devil or something like that and you know we should get him out of our country that would have been fine for Facebook it was that it was a Russian troll pretending to be an American that was the problem for them so would you say that that is a good border line to cross for when as Josh boy two points at what point does a mean go from satire to misinformation that's yeah that's like the big question now that's like the big reason why Facebook has has not really been addressing this because there's there's such nuance to it there's way more nuance than you know is this a joke you know who's really behind this versus like when you see a news story that's this is clearly fake we have you know evidence showing that this never happened kind of thing so it's it's like a very like gray area especially for something that like all these you know a lot of people like a look at memes like they are jokes which they should be but you know we're in a sad state of affairs where we can't do that okay that's enough on the trolls we've had enough Facebook for a little bit let's move over into streaming something that does affect everybody well damn near everybody at this point for us cord cutters Jonathan Wilk is asking is Philo going to be available in Germany and I'd like to go ahead and extend that to see when and where we're gonna see this in other international markets yeah so I don't think that it's gonna that's definitely not imminent I feel like Philo I haven't heard this from them myself but you know they're a snitch small product in the US and so they're gonna be focusing just on the US for the foreseeable future I mean they don't even think don't even have an Android app like they have to get an Android app for the u.s. the other thing is that because they these channels are basically u.s. channels and so for them to expand internationally they have to go to the programmers many of whom are backers of the service but they have to go to the programmers and say hey and you want to make your service available to stream anywhere in the entire world and so it's up to those programmers people that own the network's to decide whether or not that's the stuff they want to take so it's not even in really Philo's hands and even if it were it's they're a long way away from having like an international rollout just by virtue of being a small company got it that makes a lot of sense I mean we saw any amount of other of these Oroku took a while to really get their wheels spin and yeah I mean that's just growing pains I'm actually really interested it only because you know my our viewers know exactly how cheap I am why yeah if I weren't already on my parents like cable plan we're like I know their login so I can find out the TV Everywhere thing check I would probably like pay for this it's like 15 bucks a month that's you know cheaper than what I'd pay for Spotify or Hulu or Netflix like together yeah I mean it's not like there's music channels on this but like yeah yeah yeah yeah actually no no but like this like you know how am like cable there's like those like straight-up radio station channels yeah I you I actually use that yeah that's the lease millennial thing I've ever heard just like it's like stuff I put in the background and then I read a book or something subscribe Spotify yeah that's why I don't use it anymore that's why don't have cable saying like if I did have TV yeah right alright so we've got it coming to Apple TV we've got it coming to amazon firetv right what about chromecast we got people asking about chromecast right so right now what you can do you can stream with a coke a scuse me you can stream with a chromecast in the sense that you can cast from a Chrome browser sure which isn't the ideal way and to be fair as a regular chromecast yeah it's a little rough it's it's a little janky for sure so you can use Chrome cast with a via that method there's no right now on the roadmap so by the summer they're gonna have Android fire I'm sorry fire TV from Amazon that whole family so if it's the stick or the set-top box either one Apple TV and then from there because Amazon fire TV is run on a version of Android from that they're gonna kind of understand what it means to program for Android and then have an Android mobile app roll out after that so presumably chromecast is one of the most popular ways to stream presumably that they started with Roku which is the single most popular way to stream content to a TV and I imagine that chromecast because that's their strategy to go after the way people like to stream most may imagine it's gonna be pretty soon on the room that but chromecast is the most like popular way to stream like when you're like I usually cast from my phone I don't know how other people like cast their stuff but for in this specific example you'd have to go on like a desktop or a laptop computer with Chrome to chromecast right because you can't do it because I'm an Android version they don't have a chromecast app yeah they don't have like a channel yeah yeah yeah but presumably believe that that would be pretty high on their priority list yeah as we have said with everything regarding this its forthcoming but we don't have an ETA I wonder how long it's gonna take before Roku becomes like the kleenex of set-top boxes is it just like there's a I'm gonna watch it on my Roku but you have a fire I don't care it's a broker would love that they would they would go crazy for that I think it's easily the best marketed um maybe it's definitely the one that people use the most they and it's a company unlike any of the other streamers all the other streaming set-top boxes are made by giant companies it's the only one that's like a pure play all they really concentrate on is having their set-top box work well and so by virtue of that some people say like cats Meyer our reviewer says that it's his favorite and that might be part of the reason why is because all they're focused on is on getting their set-top box right maybe a few more could benefit from that work ethic let's take some questions from the chat from Matthew data this is more of a statement that's after my own heart as per usual sir so many sources of video when will we get to the point when I can pay a few cents on the dollar per episode for shows I really want to watch rather than pay for an entire service that may that means one show I want to watch one for every single 100 that I don't watch and that's the ala carte thing that we've always dreamed of and as we are starting to get it we would to any extent iTunes kind of epitomizes that right but everybody's got their own app now and Disney's gonna launch an app you have to pay an extra four bucks a month on top of Netflix on top of Hulu on top of Amazon on top of this and that in lifetime and you kind of pay like per episode on Amazon right now you can do it on Amazon iTunes it's not a couple cents like that good thing like you're never gonna have an all the cart world where you can you know pay a nickel and watch an episode of no cuz when they're all done with this instead of paying $180 a month for a cable service you're going to pay fifty five different installments of 399 a month for the different networks you want because only single shows exist on those networks and I'm going to give you they're not gonna give you the Mythbusters app you're gonna have to buy the Discovery Channel Science Channel package right so that's the kind of irony or tension about the idea of like the dream of Alucard like in theory Alucard is what people say they want but the programming in order to pay a la carte you cable as much as people hate it is a really good value you may hate the fact that you're paying for ESPN and you're never watching it but you're getting every single channel for that amount if you had to break everything up and pay ala carte only for what you want it's kind of approximate it's concerning you also have to pay for internet service in order to stream if you're paying all the card for just what you want you're still gonna be paying pretty much about the same amount and there's something to be said for the improvement on where cables come from where is now back in the day the actual formula for cable was just like it's just programmed it's you miss it you miss it you're screwed now with all of the they what do they call TiVo's and like that makes it more work they call it like stacking season on demand stuff where if you decide you start one want to start watching Walking Dead at the 12th episode of a 13-episode season you can watch from season 1 that's that's viewership suicide well it's not because they're watching if you're watching on a cable programmer you can insert ads into it and they've also already you know programmers are starting to learn that they can't just ignore the fact that people want to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it they're learning that the only reason they resisted that is because it's really lucrative to only have it on a live feed with ads but they're learning and they're changing it's just we haven't reached that promise Leon that gotcha yeah I'm with you - always in forever here's a terrifying thought from Abdulle well Disney make their own set-top box how terrifying and how close are we to these proprietary streaming networks to them making their own hardware I would be shocked if Disney made a streaming box partly because Disney has a really good relationship with Apple or a close relationship with Apple and that's not their you know that's not their sweet spot they're gonna be going through this giant takeover of Fox this assuming that it gets regulatory approval that's gonna be taking up a lot of their attention first yeah you make more sense for them to start their own streaming service what they're doing yeah yeah the service is one thing but are we gonna have to start carrying around bandoliers of USB sticks like HDMI stick I don't swap outlets or some ship mp3 players except terrible like cyberpunk future thank God I don't worry about that there's plenty of dystopia is to worry about that's not one TV start coming with the USB HDMI dongles fanning out all the way around the monitor you have to tap one every end of that 90 inputs on there and it just looks like a sunflower of shame I don't think from Alex Cutler Direct TV now is the best streaming TV app I have used I tried sling PS view they were okay but not as good also Zack Ali likes Hulu TV what's everyone's favorite right now who do you think you're getting the best bang for your buck out of right quality to selection I don't have my parents account I don't I don't have any favorite um and actually I don't know you know I think even cats are reviewer who's you know it's his job to make this sort of like determinations I haven't talked with him lately if he has a favorite I think that you know PlayStation I think the you know kind of like with streaming music services it just kind of depends on what you're looking for which one suit your needs best yeah I mean I really just have an antenna like at the moment like Leif kind of thing that just gets the local channels and if I need to watch something that I want to watch I'll ask my friends for their password yeah and then I watch that like one episode or something where I find it on YouTube you got to pay that forward though man you got to like yeah I'm brown eyes or someone or I sure my Spotify with them alright yeah we're all part of yeah I'm a digital communist digital media communist communist the coop that is accurate for me it depends on the day I want to say the most frequent I probably appreciate a lot of what netflix carries as far as the content goes because they're appealing right now with all the Marvel stuff that I'm obviously into as a comic book geek but we're gonna lose that soon with the Disney app so who knows where I'm gonna be however Netflix has put a lot of value into their original content but at the same time you know tomorrow I could say like Hulu keep me up-to-date with actual network stuff that I don't get as a cord cutter Bob's Burgers so on and so forth but then last night I was poking around in Amazon Prime and it floored me anybody who's got Amazon Prime go out there and look now they decided to do a supercut of the old sex IDI videos you saw in like the 50s and 60s in the middle in high school and I'm not saying that like that is a some bizarre perversion for me so go go ahead and mean that up I don't care but the fact that that exists and there's also like old PSA collections of content you never thought whatever surface ever again the fact that Amazon TV excuse me provides that platform is fascinating to me but like they're deep cut they're they're rabbit hole is deeper than you could even begin to imagine but you know um yeah you know you mentioned Hulu one of the kind of criticisms of Philo is that you get a lot hulu has a lot of the same programmers involved with them and you can get most of Philo's content on Hulu for like $4 $10 less half the cost you just can't watch it live you know and how much does it matter it's that's a personal thing for you know each each individual but you know how much is how much doesn't matter if you watch like Deadliest Catch live or you know yeah I think the last time I needed to watch something like on live TV on cable was Zuckerberg interview of CNN and yeah I use my parents account for that but like that was like nearly a month ago yeah most really most of stuff you want to watch live or news or sports and it doesn't have any of that yeah and that's does not going anywhere anytime soon yeah that's always gonna be around but as far as the original content we're seeing that migrated to the digital and yeah that's no redundant statement on my behalf let's pivot real quick before we wrap it up for the day from Josh Boyd our ZTE phones now band to be sold in the US or is it just harder for them to get the Qualcomm chips yeah they're they're not band to be sold in the US though you would have a very hard time finding any like store or carrier that would want to you know sell their phones yeah that too so yeah it's the second point it's all US exports to ZTE so like like I said Qualcomm can't like send their their chips to them anymore so for the next like 7 years so I don't know if it's gonna be harder more so that's going to be like impossible for them to do it like just like a quick look at a CTE phone that I looked up on see Knights website you know they also use like Gorilla Glass which is also from the u.s. USA for their screens and also Dolby like speakers so mm-hm you know they're gonna have to get all our chips from somewhere else and their screen from somewhere else and their speakers from somewhere else which is you know that that's gonna be like a pretty big deal for that yeah it's gonna be time-consuming it also might hurt quality yeah I mean it's probably even gonna spike the price if they're gonna have to start importing from somewhere else who knows maybe it could they find makers in China that do it cheaper then maybe it won't cost as much but the point is the way that they wanted to make their phone without any of those restrictions they wanted to make it this way Gorilla Glass and with Qualcomm chips so it's definitely gonna cause them to go for a plan B do you think there's a snowball's chance in hell that they bring that manufacturing under their own hood and they start no no no like the only the only like a few companies that do their own manufacturing is like Apple and even they yeah and like Samsung and they don't make their chips yeah sir it's right they don't Sam some makes well they use Qualcomm chips Apple No yeah they don't they they it's like also made in China yeah but like it's like their technologies right right all right that pretty much does it for today well great way to kick off the week fascinating subject and we had to minimize our exposure to Facebook sorry is lucky Macca's ah Christine that's gonna do it for today thanks everybody for joining us in the chat we'll wrap it up here and we'll see you again tomorrow Joan Alfred who wants to take us out yeah I guess I can do it you know thanks for listening again the 359 podcast is available on iTunes tune in stitcher feedburner at Google Play Music the Amazon echo and of course cnet.com tune in tomorrow and we'll see a same bat-time same bat-channel take care everybody hi