Theaters vs Studios - FIGHT!!!

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Theaters vs Studios - FIGHT!!!
Number 3772
Broadcast Date APRIL 30, 2020
Episode Length 33:46
Hosts Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Roger Chang
Guests Justin Robert Young

As movie theaters remain empty due to COVID-19, a fights a brewing between studios who want to release their feature films as on demand content and theater owners who want to retain exclusivity windows for new releases.

Guest

Quick Hits

The Raspberry Pi Foundation released the High Quality Camera, a module for the Raspberry Pi SoC with a 12.3-megapixel backside-illuminated Sony IMX477 sensor. The board supports interchangeable C- and CS-mount lenses and offers adjustable back focus, and initial resellers will bundle the High Quality Camera with either a $25 6mm CS-mount lens or a $50 16mm C-mount lens. The High Quality Camera module itself is available for $50.
The app analytics firm Sensor Tower reports that ByteDance's TikTok and the Chinese version Douyin surpassed 2 billion downloads combined. Since Sensor Tower started collecting analytics in 2014, only Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger have surpassed that milestone, excluding pre-installed apps. In Q1, Sensor Tower estimates the app was downloaded 315 million times, the highest number of downloads for any app in a quarter.
Facebook began rolling out its image transfer tool in the US and Canada, letting users transfer images to Google Photos. The tool originally launched in Ireland in December last year as part of Facebook's work with the Data Transfer Project. Facebook says that once the tool rolls out globally, Facebook will work to enable transferring images to "Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, and other companies that join the Data Transfer Program.”
Analysts at Trendforce found that global smartphone production in Q1 fell 10% on the year to roughly 280 million units. The firm predicts a 16.5% drop on the year for Q2, which would be the largest decline in a quarter. Of the top six global smartphone manufacturers, only Vivo increased production volume in the quarter, up 5.5% on the year to 23 million units. In its earnings call, Qualcomm says it expects a 30% reduction in handset shipments for the quarter ending in June but does not forecast a change in demand for 5G handset equipment.
Facebook has started allowing some contract content reviewers to return to work in its content review centers in San Francisco and Austin. Returning to work is voluntary and offices will have reduced capacity. Returning contractors will also be given personal protective equipment and have their temperature checked at the beginning of their shift. Offices will be deep cleaned at the end of shifts.
The Video Electronics Standards Association, or VESA issued the spec for DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.0 that lets USB 4 offer the DisplayPort 2.0 functions which include 4K displays at 144 Hz with HDR, 8K displays at 60Hz with HDR, and 16K displays at 60Hz with compression. Devices that support DisplayPort AltMode 2.0 should start arriving next year.
Intel announced its new 10th generation desktop processors, code named Comet Lake, the 5th iteration of the company's Skylake microarchitecture, and built on a 14nm process. AMD's chips are made on a 7nm process, so Intel is emphasizing its clockspeed advantage over AMD's cores and efficiency. Intel announced 32 processors, with the top line i9-10900K including 10-cores, 20 threads, a base clock of 3.7GHz with a Thermal Velocity Boost clock up to 5.3GHz.
In its earnings call Wednesday, Microsoft noted it has seen “two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” Microsoft also said its Microsoft Teams users have grown from 44 million last month to 75 million daily active users this month. Teams also has had 200 million meeting participants in a single day, compared to Zoom's 300 million meeting participants. Zoom has not announced an active user count.
Gaming revenue for Microsoft rose 2% but Xbox Live users rose 90 million and Xbox Game Pass reached 10 million subscribers. Microsoft also announced it will stream an announcement and demo of Xbox Series X gameplay May 7 at 11 AM eastern.
Apple announced Q2 earnings. Revenue of $58.3 billion, up slightly over last year.
Amazon released their Q2 operating income and it was below estimates. The company forecasts operating income in the range of a loss of $1.5 billion and profit of $1.5 billion. Analysts were expecting operating income of $3.8 billion.

Top Stories

Twitter beat expectations in Q1 as revenue rose 3% on the year and it lost a penny a share. Twitter's monetizable daily users grew 24% to an all-time high of 166 million, beating estimates by about 2 million. Twitter said ad revenue declined 27% year over year between March 11 and March 31, and CFO Ned Segal said that is a sign of what the company has seen in April. Twitter says ad sales rebounded in Asia and Twitter plans to release tools earlier than planned for direct response ads which are attractive to game and app makers who are continuing to advertise. Twitter will limit hiring to product development, research and user support.
A new survey conducted by the University of Maryland and The Washington Post finds that nearly 3 in 5 Americans are either unable or unwilling to use Google and Apple's new COVID-19 infection-alert system currently in development, which may impact the app's effectiveness. Of the 82% of surveyed Americans who have smartphones, around 50% say they definitely or probably would use such an app. Willingness among those reporting they are worried about getting sick is obviously higher. 59% of survey respondents said they would “be comfortable” using the app to broadcast to others if they did test positive for COVID-19. A recent study by epidemiologists at Oxford University estimated that 60% of an area's general population would need to use a contact-tracing app that notifies users of exposure along with other tactics such as broader testing and the quarantining of the most vulnerable people, in order for the app to effectively contain the virus.
Tech entrepreneur Zach Edwards wrote a Medium post showing several sites send email addresses to third-party advertising and analytics companies during user signup. Google, Facebook and Twitter's advertising units are among those who have received emails through this mechanism. Javascript loaded on many pages collected information like browser type, device etc for analytics and ad targeting purposes. A referrer field often gives these third parties the URL prior to the page the script is loaded on. In situations where a user is clicking an email confirmation link, the user's email address may be included in the URL and then subsequently shared with the grid party in the referring URL. Edwards says Wish.com, Mailchimp and The Washington Post took action to remedy the problem quickly. Quibi says it has fixed the problem but Edwards could not verify this. JetBlue has not acknowledged the problem exists. Growing Child magazine, Democratic Data Broker NGPVAn.com / EveryAction.com are also identified as having the problem.
Reddit introduced a new chat tool called "Start Chatting," which will randomly match up to seven users in a given subreddit into a chat. The feature will roll out to Safe for Work subreddits and will be expanding in the coming weeks. Users can exchange messages, share posts or send GIFs in the chat. Users can report chats to Reddit within a conversation, or block other users so they won't be paired up with them in chats going forward.

Discussion

Mailbag

Regarding who should get the patents for designs created by an AI, David in Sunny and Cool Minnesota says,

If you were to buy an A.I. and have absolutely no interaction with it (first: why did you buy it?) and it makes a bunch of patentable designs, those designs should belong to the person who created the A.I. Now if you buy an A.I. and provide input and interact with it and use it for whatever and there are patentable designs that come from it, then even though someone else created it, you provided the input that was essential to creating the design so you would get the patent, not the A.I.

Think of it like this, if an artist paints a painting, who owns it, the artist or the brush? What if the artist uses a simple machine to make the painting such as a paint can with a hole or holes punched in the bottom that drips and drizzles paint onto a canvas as it swings back and forth from a rope tied to a hook in the ceiling? Does the artist get credit or the paint can?

But for me, if we continue to anthropomorphize A.I. or other machines I think it will lead to a lot of troubles and problems as we, as a society, expect A.I. to act in a human way but are constantly disappointed and scared by the alien way it will likely act.

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