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How Apple, Disney and Others Aim To Keep Streaming Subscribers

Charlotte Henry ·

The streaming wars are getting ever more intense. Reuters published a good look at how all the various services, including Apple, aim to keep subscribers.

Besides spending millions of dollars on library content, media companies are using programming, promotions and other strategies to avoid cancellations, or “churn” in industry parlance, and retain subscribers who are costly to acquire and easy to lose. “Churning off of a service once meant finding the phone number of your cable operator, navigating an automated menu and waiting on hold,” said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners. “We now live in a world where with a couple of clicks of your finger on your phone, all of the friction from cancellation is gone.” Disney is the only streaming provider that has used a multi-year promotion to lock in subscribers. In August, the company offered new and existing members of its D23 fan club an annual rate of $47 for a three-year commitment to Disney+ – 33% off the standard price.

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Google's OpenTitan aims to Create an Open Source Secure Enclave

Andrew Orr ·

Google wants Android phones to have a Secure Enclave chip like iPhones. Its OpenTitan project aims to help design an open source one.

OpenTitan is loosely based on a proprietary root-of-trust chip that Google uses in its Pixel 3 and 4 phones. But OpenTitan is its own chip architecture and extensive set of schematics developed by engineers at lowRISC, along with partners at ETH Zurich, G+D Mobile Security, Nuvoton Technology, Western Digital, and, of course, Google.

The consortium will use community feedback and contributions to develop and improve the industry-grade chip design, while lowRISC will manage the project and keep suggestions and proposed changes from going live haphazardly.

You can view the OpenTitan Github repo here, but it’s not fully fleshed out yet.

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App Sale: Right Now Affinity Photo is just $9.99

Andrew Orr ·

Adobe recently released Photoshop on the iPad. If you’re not happy with it you might like to look at an alternative called Affinity Photo. Right now it’s 50% off at US$9.99, whereas after a 30-day trial Photoshop is US$9.99/mo.

Photo for iPad offers an incredibly fast, powerful and immersive experience whether you are at home, in the studio, or on the move. With meticulous attention to detail each tool, panel and control has been completely reimagined for touch. All rendering, adjustments, brushes and filters have been fully hardware accelerated using Metal. The result is an all-new way to interact with your images, with performance you will find hard to believe.

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A Closer Look at Xiaomi's Apple Watch-like Wearable

Charlotte Henry ·

Xiaomi has unveiled a wearable called the Mi Watch that is eerily similar to the Apple Watch. Cult of Mac broke down some of its rather impressive features. However, it is currently only available in China.

The device, which starts at $185, runs a skinned version of Google Wear OS. This is packaged into a form factor with the familiar rectangular display, digital crown and pill-shaped button of the Apple Watch. In terms of tech spec, the Mi Watch reportedly boasts a 1.78-inch AMOLED display and 36-hour 570mAh battery. There’s also 1 GB of RAM, 8 GB of internal storage, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 processor. In addition, users get NFC tech, Bluetooth, WiFi, eSim support, and a heart rate monitoring feature. Other health-tracking tech will include blood oxygen sensor, sleep and exercise tracking, “body energy monitoring” (whatever that is), and waterproofing for measuring your swims.

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Jack Dorsey from TWITTER Mocks FACEBOOK New Branding

Charlotte Henry ·

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey does not seem to be that impressed by Facebook’s new branding. He sent a rather mocking tweet, Bloomberg News noticed.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey poked a bit of fun at Facebook Tuesday morning by seemingly imitating the new “Instagram from Facebook” and “WhatsApp from Facebook” branding.

Facebook unveiled the new branding Monday that aims to make the Facebook brand recognizable in the products it owns.

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How Apple's Success Changed an OS Myth

Charlotte Henry ·

A great feature on AppleInsider tracked Apple’s dramatic rise. It also showed how that rise helped counter the myth that the OS platform was the only important factor in picking who won the tech wars.

Apple somehow regained market power and began selling new volumes of Macs, assisted by the support of new sales of mobile devices. That dramatic shift, which resulted in Apple completely turning the tables on Microsoft, began in less than a decade after Windows 95. In the early 2000s, Apple’s iPod made an appearance that many discounted as irrelevant. Just as Windows 95 couldn’t immediately compete in Apple’s core markets, iPod similarly wasn’t competing with Microsoft’s bread and butter Windows PCs; instead, it was opening up a new market for very personal mobile devices, with media features and prices Microsoft and its licensees were unprepared to match. By 2004 iPod had trampled Microsoft’s Windows Media Player and PlaysForSure “Portable Media Player” platforms. Three years later iPhone similarly crushed global Windows Mobile handsets almost immediately out of the gate. Three years after that, the iPad not only crushed the emergence of Windows Tablet PCs and netbooks but also destroyed any future growth of PC sales.

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Like an Addict Facebook is Chasing Even More of Our Data, Now With Facial Scans

Andrew Orr ·

Researcher Jane Manchun Wong found that Facebook is working on facial scans called “facial recognition-based identity verification.” It would ask users to upload a selfie of them looking in different directions before they can access their account.

On that same screen and later in the actual video selfie process, Facebook notes that “no one else will see” the video selfie you submit to them and says the video will be “deleted 30 days after your identity is confirmed.”

Deleted after 30 days. Based on Facebook’s past actions we can safely assume it will do the exact opposite. There’s not much room for giving them the benefit of the doubt.

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How the Internet Archive Makes Wikipedia More Reliable

Andrew Orr ·

Many of Wikipedia’s citations are from books, and to check the book citation against the article requires that you hunt down the book. But now the Internet Archive is making the process easier.

Now, thanks to a new initiative by the Internet Archive, you can click the name of the book and see a two-page preview of the cited work, so long as the citation specifies a page number. You can also borrow a digital copy of the book, so long as no else has checked it out, for two weeks—much the same way you’d borrow a book from your local library.

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TMO Contributor Kelly Guimont (#8) - TMO Background Mode Interview

John Martellaro · · Add Comment

Kelly Guimont is a long-time podcaster, Contributing Editor for The Mac Observer, the host of the Mac Observer’s Daily Observations podcast, a tech support guru, and a Founding Volunteer of App Camp for Girls.

Kelly first appeared here in December, 2015 to tell her career story and has returned many times for interesting discussions. In her 8th appearance, we chat about our favorite TV shows of late. Kelly: Fleabag (Amazon), The Politician (Netflix), and Billions (Showtime). John: Madam Secretary (CBS), Toy Story 4 (Pixar) and Victoria S3 (PBS). Join us as we explore together what’s great about these shows.

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Facebook Profits on Manipulating Us, an Insider Reveals

Andrew Orr ·

Writing for The Washington Post, Yaël Eisenstat writes about paid political advertising at Facebook and how the company profits off of manipulation.

The “culture of fear,” nasty political campaigns and amplified extreme voices are not new in American society. But the scale to which these platforms have fueled and exacerbated this by using our emotional biases to keep our eyeballs on their screens, to vacuum up our data and sell their targeting tools to advertisers, has tilted the playing field toward the most salacious and fanatical voices.