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Welcome to the verge cast the flagship pod test of the laser disc resurgence. I'm a friend to peers, and I am at a red box key OK near my house outside of the cbs. I confess I had never done this before.

I ve been watching DVD since, like, I had one of those DVD V C R combo things. And back then the only DVD we had was clue this. So I watched IT like sixty five thousand times.

Then my family was a pretty early netflix house. So we have those red envoy, pes, coming and going all the time. And then somewhere along the way, I gave away away my DVD collection and just went all in on streaming.

There was a piracy phase in there too, but we don't have to talk about that. But now here I am at the red box, because this kind of feels like the last bastion of the old DVD era, like looking at this. And I can get dvds of asteroids, city and the super mario brother's movie, and chaz, which I definitely want to, and cocaine bear, which I might do.

And this just feels like an era that's ending DVD. That com, which is the name of netflix x is all DVD delivery service shutting down for good this week. Oh, and quick p sa on that front.

Actually, if you're still a DVD subscribe, put all your favorite movies at the top of the queue right now because you get to keep everything you have when the service goes down. So do that as fast as you can. But with that gone and streaming still really ascending, even though it's kind of a mess right now, I just wonder what's going to happen.

Is physical media just dead? Is he going to have a huge come back like vinal did, where everybody suddenly buying albums again? I really don't know, but i'm very curious about IT. So in the first part of the show today, I am actually going to talk to the person responsible for this key osc i'm standing in front of that's bill rehana, the C E. O of chicken soup for the sole entertainment, which now owns red box as of a year ago, he has IT turns out some surprisingly strong thoughts on the subject.

After that, we're going to switch gears a bit and talk about matrix, the numbers we see everywhere online, especially around video of views and what that means that everyone reports those numbers and none of IT really seems to have anything to do with anything. All that is coming in just a sec. But first I got got to pick a movie here, right? We've got a bunch of spider, means john wk.

Three plan, which I don't think I knew was a movie until this second. Oh, they have ve done in dragons. Okay, din dragons.

Honor ong theeves rent D, V, D, two dollars and two twenty five cents. Or I can buy IT for three ninety nine and buy on A D V D. Let's do this.

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Welcome back. alright. I got a movie I made at home, and then I realized I don't own A D V D player anymore, which was problem for second.

But then I realized that's why game councils exist. Someday I will earn one of those little small discuss ones. But for now I have an old x box one and A P S.

For both of which have this drives. So I am wired up and ready for movie time. But for now, let's talk about the future of those desks.

Red box is probably the biggest brand left in physical movies. DVD at 点 com， obviously dying this week. Black bosch is long gone.

I don't think anybody goes to best buy or warmer to buy movies anymore, right? And red box just kind of seems like the last game in town. And red box actually got a new owner last year.

It's called chicken soup for the soul entertainment, which also owns the streaming service crackle and popcorn flix plus IT has film production and distribution companies. The company paid three hundred and seventy five million dollars for red box last year, which a lot of people thought was totally bonkers at the time, and still do, Frankly. But bill rehana, the CEO of chicken suit for the soul entertainment, is that physical media is not dead, or at least is not dead yet, and won't be dead anytime soon.

So I call him up to talk about why he thinks this is a good business and why he's betting on desk even when his own company is in the stream business, and maybe most of all, why he tried to buy D, V, D that come from netflix before IT shut down. One thing you should know before we get into the interview, bill uses the terms avoid and s void a bunch and avoid means add supportive video on demand and s void means subscription video on demand a vod pay with ads as fast pay with money religion able. Just wanted to clear that up in case you hadn't heard that before. Anyway, let's get IT to IT. What was interesting to you about red box in the first place?

Oh, really many things. Let's start with the brand and the very loyal customer base spread out across the country that had probably hasn't fully migrated to the digital world for a variety reasons. Not the least of which is some places they don't have band with its enough to be able to download movies and watch them without a circle of death.

No, to make the experience miserable. In some cases, they're just later doctors and other cases, they can afford the internet. I can't afford the kind of internet that's required to be able to do digital downloads.

Their movie lovers, their their entertainment lovers. So they they are highly motivated to to consume the stuff that we have. I I can go out not not about this.

There were many things yeah that at the starting point was the brand, the forty two million people in the customer loyalty program, the beginning of the foray into the digital world, the ownership of a very large transactional video business, which is very hard to start. And then the key asks, which in my mind, someday I hope to prove this would be generators of significant cash flow. If handled correctly, that could be the cash flow machine that allowed us to build our digital business out over .

the next decade. The audience, one that i'm particularly interested in because we've been talking a lot about who physical media is for in twenty twenty three, right? And I think a lot of people look at that audience and say that audience is dwindling really fast.

It's much smaller than I used to be. Most of those people are going to one way or another find a way to get into the streaming era. So we're just gonna kind of leave that audience behind and trust that they will eventually catch up. You win a different way or maybe you think that's true, but there's money to be made on the way. Like how do you think about sort of who that audience is right now?

Well, I I think it's the people I just describe, people who are not trigger to have access to band with, who can afford IT is another category is smaller, but it's likely to grow of people who say, wait a minute, i'm not getting the same quality out of a digital download that I would have if I had the physical desk and I had all the additional capability to see things more.

Possibly, I know some people who won't watch a bad movie unless it's on A D V D that has been trained me the top nuh, because they want to feel every bit of IT. This is early for this this conversation. But at some point this probably takes the turn that e books took back to physical books, that downloads and music took back to actual albums, where people started to deferential a little bit.

And you had this growing cohort of people who, so that, you know, quality is important too. And I get a much higher quality picture, a much higher quality experiences if I actually have the physical media, which is so much more richly packed with information. Oh, and then there's all this other stuff that comes with these dvds that, you know you might want to actually seen, you know, so extra little downside very often for really giving you access to first class top note current content from any studio at the lowest possible Price, the earliest, the ego system, the theatre that you can do IT. And so there's something where we're meeting in need is a little different than that collectable need that for sure.

right? yeah. And I think that piece of the kind of windowing that you you're into is part of the thing about your strategy that I think is so interesting is that seems to me that you know, you have crackled.

You have chicken into the soil, you have red box. Everyone else is kind of out in the streaming industry fighting about content. Everybody's making shows, spending more and more money, throwing IT into their own platforms. IT seems to me that what your building is this sort of every step of the way distribution pipeline and rather than saying we're going to throw bunch money at David vinter, you're trying to get insert of every step of where content is. Is that a fair description of how you think .

about this is? And I mean, look, we thought and have always thought that understanding what consumers want is most easily achieved by watching what they do. And if you want to watch what they do, you have to be in that first line of consumption so that you see what they do.

And one of things I loved about and still love bead box as forty two million people in the customer loyalty program, give us a group of people who we know, we know who they are, we know when, when their places, and we can learn what they like. And eventually, artificial intelligence can help us, I think, figure out how to serve them, stuff on the home screens of our of our networks that are tailor to them by the word. I will repeat the word eventually, because we cannot do that today, nor can anyone else know. Yeah.

yeah. Everybody doing a lot of video that I think doesn't add up too much in a lot of cases.

Now, not yet.

So what was that part of the thinking with red box that you can get this very early sense of what people like and what's successful in? And that informs like what ends up on, you know, crackle month or years later.

yes. So from one perspective, that's what IT was about. And you know if you think about IT, the key asks transactional video, the fast business, the a bad business.

We have some subscription stuff, but it's not really our focus. I don't think that's a particularly good business right now. But having so many different places that people interact this as they consume IT is very valuable.

IT is A A great bit of information that other people don't have IT. And actually, other than amazon, there really isn't another company with as many connecting points with consumers in the media space. us.

We are a very unique beast, and that's all intentional. That was really what I was looking for. I as I put in these pieces together, we haven't taken an adventure, David.

We haven't yet integrated all this of a way that know how to smartly take advantage what we can do, but we've certainly stage for that to happen so that because we have the early access over across a wide number of things. So that was the plan. There's a flip side to this too.

By the way, if you're thinking about creating content and you want to make sure that as you created, you're doing IT in the let the least risk y way, having all the information about what is consumed in these various ways, like what works at the K S, what works in teva, works in a, what works on fast, that informs you are thinking about how you will commit to content creation. And a lot of times, because you're the first dollar and a lot of these places, you have superior economics to people who otherwise were creating content and would have to go through your system and you get a piece of their revenue. So if you believe, as I do, that ultimately contain in distribution are ira, vulkan, ly and completely tied to each other.

IT is the kind of ecosystem that allows you to actually lower risk and create content over time and get the most money back from IT. And IT completely blows away the theory that in as fight, standing by itself is a good idea, because IT isn't everybodies. Now figured that out. We have this. I have been told about this for since two thousand and seventeen, that the s 5 business was a disaster waiting to happen。

To think physical media keeps being part of that equation over time. I mean, if you if you play IT out of ways more people have broadband, the window system may be changes so that there are fewer ways to get stuff, but its still kind of you get the twenty dollars wng ads instead of the DVD rentals and select that. Do you think there's a place for physical media in this long term?

I do um if only because experience tells us that inner ship is is the most powerful force of all, and changing people's habits is really hard to do. Now covet broke a lot of things, right IT IT forced people to change their habits. One thing that is accelerated the digital transformation, matic ally.

But if you looked at our at our business and understood the assumption we made about what would be successful in the physical space, we said we expected the red box. Kyo asks, with a full, full of the content that I used to have prior to cove, IT would do thirty percent of the business that I didn't two thousand and nineteen before covered with that very low expectation. We were highly.

OK, well, which was why I thought this was a good idea that even if two thirds or more of the people had changed their mind about consumption, and that's a pretty aggressive assumption that two thirds of the people change their habits, that would be amazing, then we would still be profitable at thirty percent. And and that is further enhance all Better word by the fact that we have a couple of other businesses that make the kiosks profitable at a lower level than that from things other than just rentals. We putting screens on top of them and selling digital out of home advertising.

We have a business that's built around the service company that services are red box. Kaz does break fix of them and does the traditional ing of them. We now do that service for other big key as downers.

And every time we add one of those customers, we bring our costs down to service our own key, asks ks, to the point that I think by the end next year will be close to zero net costs to actually run our own kassem service in point of view. And that changes the business entirely. So if you took a one dimensional view of this question and said, hey, dvds are gonna go away over the next ten years.

How going to hand? I would say, okay, great. Let's start with the fact that I believe it's at least ten years because of the way people's habits are.

But let's also be smart and think about the ways we can make that less relevant to our success. Let's use these k asking more diversified ways. Let's bring down the cost through the service business. Let's figure out what the right Price increases might be over the course of a decade to help make up for some of the lost you know, customers. And W, E, T, look at IT on an that kind of a altimeter basis. You start to realize, hey, it's relevant that physical media is going away, but perhaps less relevant than people thought when we bought the company, which is why we are crazy, but not for the reasons people .

thought that's fair. So if that's the time when you're thinking about do you think netflix is nuts to shut down its D, V D program now I mean, if weren't at ten years time horizon, they are really jump and they gone here.

I think if your exam is a holy different analysis, this is such a tiny little thing in a garan business that is not strategic. It's more like a pain. It's it's not like that has any in any way affects your core business.

Not at all. So the kind of that mean the Better questions. Why keep IT know? The bigger question is, why did you sell to me when I tried to buy IT? Because I could have created a whole bunch of energy out of that business 点亮。

So why why didn't they sell to you?

I don't know. They just didn't even return our folks asking about, but they just I think they just want IT gone. You know, it's a distraction for them. sure. What would you .

would ve done with that?

Well, I don't know that I would have bought IT IT.

But you know if they if they returned my calls, what I would have looked that was, can I create Operational energies and keep the cost lower and drive additional revenue into this portion of our business? There's a whole other question lurking here, which is who else is in the retail and media business? Can you think of any companies like amazon, for example, that might be in the retail and media business? And IT found ways to make those two businesses work incredibly well together.

People tend to have sort of a very single minded view of almost everything. And if if you kind of chAllenge that single minded view, you know they go off the rails so they kind of lose IT. But you know, there are examples of the retail business and the media business working very well together.

There are examples of them not working at all. Walmart and vuu was not a good example of IT. No, no, insult the walmart.

They just they're not a media company. They are retail. That's what they are.

Amazon, god knows what they are. They are just awesome and everything they do, which scares everybody to death. But you know, they're really good at what they do. So I look, I don't think anything inherently contradictory of about being in the two businesses.

If you know if you had to be in them there, couple of other companies i've learned of that are similar as the company go digital, at which company I like very much, is in both sides, both in retAiling, media. We make IT work. So I think I can work. So yeah, I think part of .

the reason I am curious about kind of the hypothetical of what you would have done is that seems like no, come back to what you said about red box at the very beginning, right? It's it's a really good brand. People know that there are a lot of people in the program.

And IT seems me that if you take the idea of this is a very accessible brand that gets new stuff, there are a lot of ways you can go with that. You could just do red box by mail. And I don't know if the economics work for a lot of the reasons you're describing, but IT, that's a thing you could do.

Or there are no you could start selling movies to people through red bug IT. Just there are so many sort of splinters off of this thing, that is red box, this good brands that people know when are used to interacting with, especially if you're betting the physical media as a thing is going to be around for a long time. That's an increasingly not competitive space. And IT feels like if you wanted to sort of branch out from red box into we just want to own all of the ways that you get, acquire and watch physical media. You could have pretty big ambitions there without a lot in your way, right?

Ah angry. But that was part of the reason to look at the at the netflix DVD business, too. I mean, you know the world, if we had gotten the opportunity, if we gotten the opportunity, have a conversation about IT, we would have analyze whether IT made sense we've ever got to that point. I just thought there were a lot of inherent possibilities in that.

You know yeah what do you think about dvds and blue rays in particular? Like I great. This is getting pretty far in the weeds al media here. But I think I was thinking a lot about the final thing yeah today in prepping for this because it's telling to me that we didn't go back to cities and we didn't go back to sets.

We went to final because that is the object IT feels Better, like if you're going to buy the musical thing that is the best version of that, that sounds the best that looks the cool est IT has the most kind of cultural history, like that's the one. And I wonder if if we're going to get some of that same stuff for movies and TV shows, are we are we going to get a new format or we're going to go back to like like A V H S canna come back? What's your sense of blue ray and dv kind of staying power .

over the next year? And I think it's that gives you when I .

get laser disks back, this is all a way of winding up to say, can you please bring laser desks back?

That's not think so, but part leaps because you know you've got an embedded base of equipment that's quite extensive where the DVD can be used and the blue ray can be used. And of course, there were a lot of turn tables even though they weren't really running that much. People had them, and they were dying to turn them back. God, you know, to get back and get the the quality and I get the feeling of so yeah.

do you think there are ways we can make physical and digital stuff interact Better over time? Like I remember years ago talking to people who said, no, if you buy A D V D, you should also get the digital downloads to that. You can watch IT on the devices that don't have D V D players.

And especially now, I mean, people watch a lot of stuff on devices that don't or can't connect to D, V, D players. true. Are there ways to kind of put these pieces together?

Yes, there are. But I don't know if if that a game changer, but I think it's you know an incremental Better world you who can use. If you can put those two things together, I think it's good.

But I I the things that drive to drive our business is that you asking me a generic question. So know what do you think about? This is a general principle.

I always think about IT wasn't me to my business. I can help that. That's what I do. And h, you know, so when I think a bit from our our business point of you, what drives our business is the fact that were the the least expensive way to get first run movies. That's what drives our business and get him right very early and get him from every studio.

If you look at only any other streamers, not a single one of them can deliver you first run movies early from every studio. They can deliver theirs. Sometimes they can deliver one other guys, but nobody can deliver everybody's except we can or you can get a through transaction, al video, but that is so much more expensive that for a large chunk of people is prohibitively expensive.

So I guess the question then would be if that's the thing, right? If you bow that all the way down and say that the thing that we have is cheap with watch first run movies, what do you press on customer experience? Is to make that Better?

Is the answer more key Oscars so that it's quicker to get to? Is the and find ways to make IT even cheaper? Is IT find ways to convince netflix to put its stuff on dvds so people can get IT like what's what's the next turn if there is one in, in how to do that even Better?

I think that the thing that drives the business is always content. Try make me and getting the most content as quickly as possible as the key. And here's we're the window word, which you've used a few times already and I ignored becomes an important word, sure, you know, because getting an organized window strategy from the studios so that consumers know what to expect would be a very good thing for everybody.

You want to make this experience Better, make IT cleared to people when they can expect to see these things mean. Right now, the media business has destroyed itself between taking television and breaking IT into five thousand pieces and making the impossible for people to figure out where to watch things. And and going through layer after layer search to try and find the between that and the fact the window in strategy of the various studios are completely, they look at hook to me, look like strategies.

They look like IT. Or just let's see what that happens. You know that is not good for the consumer. We have not made life Better for consumers in either of those ways.

And good, solid, understandable windows, which are you know you to be slavishly adhered to them, which generally are followed, is a huge service to the consumer. In terms of understanding when do expect to see something, it's nine boggling to me that this is not returned faster. So the best thing I think we could do for services come up with the window strategy that actually everybody have bides by so they know when to look for things.

Otherwise they're just kind of like wonder granger, I don't know when does this come out. Why is Barbie up this week and open hybrid this week? Where are they in the theatres at the same time? Why are they six weeks apart? I don't know.

Universal and and wanna, okay, great to do you as a consumer care. Which studio made the move? You want to say that? I think so, which you care about is what is IT available and do you know what how to find that?

I know, I agree. And I actually love that example because I think the barbon harmer thing was such a phenomenon. There are going to be a lot of people who want to get both of those movies and watch them in the same day. And that is going to be so stupidly difficult for so long.

IT is a security decades. So so we've got barb be coming to the K S. Within the next few weeks, which were excited about what happened.

I was not come to the K. S. Till november or maybe even later.

I don't even know at this point. You know IT doesn't make a tiny sense. It's it's not smart. But this is part of the covet recovery of the media business, trying to come back to a new a new approach with covered having driven so much digital, you know take up IT changed everybodies you know kind of focus in the media business to digital, digital, digital.

And now as we start to realize the way in them, and it's really not that smart, only have one way to monitor ze your movie when you should. You could have seven, six. So whatever IT is and one doesn't capabilities the other, in fact, a lot of people like to watch IT in all those different forms. It's adJusting to that and changing who's in charge in these studios is really, really taking the time because when you really get right down with this is just a fight between different parts of the same company as to when they're going to do things, how long going to put IT in the theatres, where's a going to go to x? Is A T, V is, you know got a different guy runs t about that.

A guy runs the D, V, D business.

and I hate each other, right? And there's another guy who is licensing this stuff. This is like a free for all, trying to figure out who's tarn is IT. You know, every studio is going to go through this .

in their own way. And then there's just red box kind of kicking IT increasingly on its own. I mean, does IT feel like this is a competitive space at the moment, like going to .

change anytime soon? If if we get .

of a push back towards something you're talking about, you gonna now.

I know things now because the physical presence slow you have to create to be in our business is so fast, and we have thirty thousand K S spread out across the entire united states, give guide leases with people, you've got ta be able to service these things. We're not onna have any real competition. What is this thing is the growth of chaos general in the country is is amazing to me.

I mean, there's chaos pop up all over the place. That's good for our service business because that's lots of customers for us there. And I think that's good. You want of our great businesses.

right? Thank you. This this was really great and really fun. I appreciate you taking time.

IT is my pleasure. Nice talking to you.

We got to take a break. And then we're going to talk about numbers, big, ubiquitous, meaningless numbers, all right back.

Hey, its' from decoder with the lip top. We spent a lot of time talking about some of the most important people in taking business about what they're putting resources to and why do they think it's so critical for the future. That's why we're doing the special series diving into summer, the most unique ways companies are spending money today.

For instance, what does that mean to start buying and using A I at work? How much is that costing companies? What products are they buying? And most importantly, what are they doing with IT and of course, podcasts? Yes, the thing you're listening to right now, well, it's increasingly being produced directly by companies like venture capital firms, investment funds and a new crop of creators who one day want to be investors themselves.

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Welcome back. We talk a lot on this show about numbers, what that means to go viral and how creators use numbers and metric to understand their business and just what that means to be a person when everything you do and post and see has a million numbers attached to IT. And all of these numbers seem so, if not meaningless, than at least really hard to make sense of.

Like, can you compare a youtube view to a tiktok view to an instagram view? Is doing that even useful? And how do you make sense of any of IT when everyone knows at this point that so much of IT can just be gamed in one way or another? Well, our friend john herman over york magazine recently wrote a column that basically made the case that all of these numbers are nonsense.

IT really resonated with me, and I can made me wonder what we do now. So I asked him to come on the show and talk about what IT means, that the internet is just swimming with numbers, most of which have nothing to do with anything. I also grab b alex grants because we can talk streaming numbers without alex grants. Let's get into IT. John harman.

welcome to the verge cast.

Alex is here too high. Alex, stop. David joon.

can you just like sort of run down the theses of your piece for somebody who hasn't read IT? Like why did you write about why twitter views don't make any sense?

I mean, i'll take any chance to write about weird metrics. I feel like this is this is like a trick that I used at like a few times a year for a decade now where it's like hate. There's a number there that doesn't really make any sense if you explain that number of people. Everyone also also be like, oh way that without me the thing is that way of like measuring everything in ways that are kind of often manipulative and misleading and and serve these different purposes, is becoming more and more a part of just like the fabric of daily life online.

Like everything that people use in any social network, in a lot of non social context, just in their software, is so of counting what they're doing and returning IT to them with higher and higher numbers that are meant to sort of suggest that you there sort of meant to inform your behavior or make you feel good or make you feel bad, but you need to do something else. You're just surrounded by these numbers all the time. It's just the background part of your online life. But there's a lot of story start these days. There was ridiculous tweet and was .

that the tucker carles?

Yeah yeah. So Donald trump talk carles and kind of counter programs the republic and primary debate with an interview on toker carson show, which if you been following this is now, I guess you would say.

hosted on X, X.

yeah, he's just blogging and posting IT straight to straight to x. And the interview happens, the debate happens. The debate gets like twelve, thirteen, fourteen million views, according to Nelson, which is its own kind of worms.

Fox comes out and says, like, yeah, I don't know, fifteen million people watch this if you can't streaming and something like that, no one really cares no trump comes out and says, hey, actually we got like two hundred and thirty million views on my interview, which is nearly as many people living the entire the entire united states. That number keep going up and up and up eventually. It's like three hundred million people.

And you know, he played he's pretty loose with numbers. He sort of you want to revise down a lot of trump numbers that we're kind of used to that. But in this case, he was just actually citing a metric attached to the tweet under talker carlson's video.

And I really did say that the time I wrote article IT was like two hundred and sixty five million views for what was like, you know, tomtom has given a lot of interviews and he's given interviews to talk or croson. This was like, i'm sure very interesting to quite a few people in a variety of different ways. IT is not something that everyone in the world or everyone more than every voter and this is like completely impressible.

Everyone knows that ridiculous. But it's not just you know kind of like a notoriously misleading public figure doing this. IT is the platform saying that's what happened.

Views a word that we're supposed to interpret like in some sort of way, two hundred and sixty five million, a big number that you know exist in the world. So I don't know you that doesn't make any sense. That's the kind of thing that you would expect to hear from like tubular or outside in talking about how the champ box videos are performing.

And instead, IT is like being cited by the former president directly on still very influential social media. M, so just walk to walk back from there. Like that can be real.

Of course it's not. Twitter internally tracks video reviews, and if you use the twitter for mac client, you can still see those views, which elan musk had removed. The real number views on that was like twelve million or fifteen million, about the same as the republican debate, Nelson ratings, which again, a big number.

However, that number is tracked after, I believe, two seconds of video playtime anywhere on the screen, which, if you ask someone what that means to watch something no one's going to on unless they work in advertising, or something no one's gonna be like, o yeah. Well, if you look at IT for two seconds and then roll past that you watched IT, like that's the opposite of watching IT. However, that is the twitter video measure.

Somehow twitter is now measuring something that is make that is like fifty times less rigorous than that, and telling everybody that that how many people are seeing something. And you know, it's funny. It's silly.

It's a specific example. IT is also how the entire internet works. Right now. There are just these bulshed numbers absolutely everywhere. They're all bullshit in slightly different ways.

They're all kind of like, you know, fundamental bullshit in the same way, but they're all these like different stacks of invented measurements. They're frequently compared to each other. They're frequently touted for marketing. They're used to just sort of like contextualized conversations about something.

I mean, is that true? They mainly used to sell ads or like convince people to buy ads right IT like sing, yeah we got three hundred million views, don't look into the numbers, but we ve got three hundred million. You're going to get three hundred million impressions if you advertise on this take since. So that's .

absolutely the logic of the like gradual number insulation. But I think what's weird about IT now is that that sort of on its face, absurd, but everyone just goes along with a number inflation is bleeding out of. Just know the sales teams at websites and social platforms. It's now just like something that everyone talks about and fan dams talk about metrix all the time. They try to manipulate metrics, even if the metro ort of fake to I get there, people know, seen, or in some cases paid more.

You've got elan must kind of making the case for his entire existence of his entire platform and the relevance of his entire platform going on to like double down on this after a bunch of people pointed out that yeah, this, for example, trump tweet is kind of ridiculous. The other day he was suggesting that three billion people a months to see long tweet like, okay, think the just the twitter blue long form content is is viewed by three billion people, which i'm sure in some extremely narrow way is true like that content somehow produced in a combination of people scrolling, kind of like loading arena internal A P I calls, calling upon these post. I'm sure, i'm sure that number of impressions, to borrow the ed world's term here, was somehow kind of generated and logged. But that just has no relationship to the reality of how many people are engaging with something, or seeing something, or or like taking .

something in the two sides of this. Me one is of nonsense advertising metro. We've always, and every company has their own special metrics that don't make any sense to anyone and essentially mean nothing. You know, you know, mask has been doing this loudly with twitter like he talked a lot about like regreted user minutes, which like what on earth does that mean? But that has nothing to do with sort of my life is just like a thing, they say to seem big, and everybody has numbers that they want to make, big or small.

And as you really small and that's all finding good, but I think you're point about the word views to me is, is like what makes this specific things so interesting because one of the very few comparable things across all of these platforms that we have all the way down to like linear television on your T, V, in your living room, is we call them all views. And the content is different, the way that their delivered is different, the way that their measured is different, but we call them all views. And so we compare this like it's this apples to apple's s thing and they just honestly have nothing to do with each other. Like what netflix thinks is of you is so diametrically different than what youtube thinks is of you and what tiktok thinks is of you and what twitter thinks of you that we're not talking about remotely the same thing. But because we use the same word, we like obsessively these things against each other all the time.

And it's kind of weird because nowaday, you know, thirty years ago, these metrics were actually difficult to measure, right? Like you had to t get to have a little box on your T V in your house that was IT. Maybe the cookies could sometimes get IT, but now these everybody's logging into these services are logging into youtube, they logging into twitter, they're logging into netflix. IT is very, very easy to get actual super valuable, super like get into the nativity on these metrics s and they're still going for the broadest, most useless metrics they can announce.

That sort of like the central funny thing about this to me, which is that I yeah I was talking him on a thirty or if you think about A T, V or print publications, you had some data about how many people were seeing your things. You have like you know your circulation number or your subscription numbers, then estimate circulation numbers. You have the number of people in a certain market.

You have all the but you don't have this direct access to like how people are interacting with yourself. So the people making media had this need to like figure out what was going on. So you end up with things like melson, where people sit in their houses in the log what they're doing and then you do some statistical work on that and come up with an estimate for how many people are watching things and then advertisers use that number and you end up with like a flood. But transactional standard that the people work with yeah .

at least it's like more or less. Apples to apples, right? Like everyone in the news always agreed like it's not perfect, but it's at least sort of directly applicable from .

thing to thing and it's close enough but kinds of problems. The bw, along with that this promise that of course, everything is going to be tracked down to the second, going going to know so much about what people are doing. Anyone who's written online for a long time knows that, like your publication knows how far people scroll in every article that you write.

And if the numbers are good, like you just to ignore that, you just pretend that people actually finish your articles. But no, like this, the in amount of information you can collect directly now is huge. So people making media have incredible amount of of information.

There's total audience surveilLance. Nothing that you do or consume digital is not tracked down to them is like scope c level. And yet you somehow collectively know less about what's going on. Everyone treats this information that they have is like a trade secret, which has the weird effect of making IT basically useless if it's like we're all gone to agree on tracking standards, we're going to do this in a transparent way.

If there was some totally alternate history where everyone is surveilling, their audiences is very closely, which is, you know, cannot warms too, but then sharing and comparing and out of thing that data in a transparent way, then you end up with, like a very different kind of world where there is like, there just IT would just change the media landscape of people, no more about what people are doing. And that would create all kinds of different incentives and demands. And someone be worse than someone be Better.

However, now you just got nothing. We've got everyone has so much data, terror divides of audience data that is just like closely guarded and shared in the most misleading way possible in tiny little fragments. When that flex is ready to be lag, we actually track you know three billion watch minutes for squid game, which is the most we have ever attracted.

And we started attracting this last year. And it's just like what is that? I mean, it's obviously it's for marketing and it's it's the sort of make flex in a particular way to say that yeah, we are not just doing bullshit impressions. We're tracking time and we wouldn't do that if IT wasn't a lot, but I still doesn't mean anything. So we just sort of like somehow managed to take more and do less with IT collectively, which is no good of a nice common story online these days.

Why do you think they treat IT like this trade secrets? And because, I totally agree, is IT. Because they think that you know, the numbers used to be bigger.

The media was like a much more a smaller landscape and so a show could have twenty million views. That was a very big deal. And now the bigger shows have like ten million. And so they don't want to be like, oh yeah, western is the biggest show on the platform right now. And actually it's got like five million viewers or something.

I think that's a really interesting question in some of IT probably just comes down til like instincts like oh my god, s we have this thing is preparatory. It's ours. There is a real tendency, I feel, across large things, but one that i've observed more directly in tech companies that I record on to just sort of treat everything like a trade secret, like you might as well, and you would end up with these interesting collective problems when you do that, that show up further down the road.

But also, like you said, with the streamers in particular, they've got kind of a different problem from, let's say, facebook, which is routinely racking up just absolutely high numbers when I really tack metric to something like, oh, one hundred million people watch the viral video yesterday and the day before and the day before that works for them. They can be like yet. That's amazing.

Look at these big numbers there. There is turns out there's twenty billion people in the world, and we found a bunch more of them, and they all use. But neth lix, like you said, is tracking the stuff from a very early stage, very data focus company to use to inform all their decisions.

And they're also, i'm sure seeing like OK we've licensed to beloved IT old sit com that you know when in its heyday was getting like twenty million prime time viewers every week according to meals. And we just put IT on here and like it's doing okay, but it's not doing that. Or our new ism that we just released that everyone's talking about is getting a lot of great coverage.

Actually not that many people watch IT and kind of flipped over time like there are genuine huge streaming hits. It's not just like a media illusion. I mean, everyone watch a streaming now that is how people watch T, V.

But the president was said a long time ago, I just like, well, we're not going to write out of the gates like rush into some sort of mutual surveilLance with tons of disclosures, and we're not onna do that. If we don't have to, we don't have that need that people used to have when they worked with Nelson and depended on Nelson for selling advertisements and giving their ratings to know how many people are washing our stuff. We know we would love to know how many people watch other people stuff, but know they have their ways of guessing. They seem fine with not known how many people are watching like this H B O max reality show or whatever. Like not like to flying with that.

Well, this is very come back to my kind of like number naled m and like crying I talked about this is a bunch.

The case against forcing all of these streaming companies are particular to share a lot of really understandable apples to apple's numbers is that one thing that will do is make very obvious how many shows don't work, right? And it's great for the people who are making shows that are bigger than you think, and it's actually bad for the people making shows that are worse than you think and not doing well. And I can like that stuff can have real effects on people's careers.

And IT is anyway because like netflix knows, the shows that don't work in IT cancelled those shows. So that's obviously bad for people's. But like if IT starts to be out there, like people used to be petrified of ratings every day, because if if the the ratings decided your career. And part of me wonders whether what we need is Better, more understandable metrics s or if part of what we need is like many, many, many fewer metrics. And maybe this place to come to where really nothing means anything, if we all can acknowledge that nothing means anything, maybe we're actually in a Better place.

I think the Better don't mean anything, even for the company is themselves because, say, I can think like at least two different shows in the last year who did successfully, we're said to be success as other networks showed. Like you know like one of them was in the top ten for netflix ks for the week up period. And then they immediately got cancer.

They got cancelled prety quickly. One of them was a league their own, which was like a very successful show for amazon, but very expensive show for amazon, and not nearly the hit they had hoped to be. And that had this long, slow cancellation death.

That other one was weird. None, which was like another show did seemingly did very well and that was cancelled the same week like premiere. So they left all those fans who, you know, that was something john human. And fans are like the most meticulous.

They're Better than Nelson when IT comes great out ratings like they're so good at figuring this stuff out and they were just saying, well, numbers don't mean anything because you publish all the your numbers which say this and we have all the stuff we tracked and says this and you still went did IT so what is numbers and came down to is expensive and they didn't want to make IT, right? Like they didn't want to do a third season because third season would increase the cost of the entire staff in the contract. And everything that hold conflict does IT. And that was the real reason and it's like, okay, numbers are to blame. Well.

this is something where i'm really kind of a torn because I work in industry where people watch your numbers at work and to see how many people are read what you do that matters. And IT determines all kinds of things about your job and also you're sensible like what you're doing and why. But there isn't a world where streaming companies aren't like collecting and using this data or rather data in general to like figure out what to do.

And extreamly companies more than at you know social media companies, which have to depend on really direct relationships tween like viewer ship metrics and advertising. Now the stuff and that's all very like very, very direct, extremely companies, viewer ship metrics and and their sort of internal ratings, they serve as like a weird proxy, a sensible proxy for a success in a way if you're making TV. But what they actually survive on, mostly for now, and I guess this is this is changing, is substitution numbers.

That's the actual metric that matters. And so that flix is like a well, we can tell that precisely, this is their version of the old measurement problem. What is deriving subscriptions like? We have good ideas. We noticed that people stick around after they watched this, or they sign up and then watched that like they have some stuff. But what the ratings do for them instead is just serves like a way to value things that don't that aren't actually a sign of value in a very, very direct way.

And if we're gona do that, I tend to think that like more visibility is Better and more transparently about what the numbers mean because the people making the shows, the people watching the shows, if they don't have any information and netflix does, they're at some sort of disadvantage. If you're a viewer that sort of fuzzy, you're like talking about find them stuff again. If you are creating shows, you have less leverage to like ask for more money or you have less warning about when you're gonna cancelled or you our missing part of the story, if your show does get cancelled and you suspect that I was used by a lot of people, but maybe there's something else going like it's just being withheld.

And in the context of the strikes and hollywood generally, writers and other people who work in entertainment IT generally just want more information because the information exists. And IT might be comble shit and I might be collected in a way that isn't super transparent. But if it's gonna used to make decisions, it's Better that people who are trying to make this stuff know IT.

It's not ideal that they have to obsess about IT like that. That's a problem too. If there's a world where. Netflix becomes hyper matrix focus in a public way and becomes, in that sense, more like youtube. You have a different set of problems.

But you know you've also got a system that is somewhat more accountable and where in some small way, people who are doing creative work have a little bit more of a sense of like where they stand. And that's not worth nothing, especially when you are doing about like pay that is determined by basically metrix, which again, to sort of like back weight up are all fundamental made up. You have to like come up with a standard for measuring things.

You have to apply IT with some level of rigger like there is every time you see a number that reports to measure something down to like the most funding measures, you should wonder like how IT works applied that a thousand times over when you're looking at something attached to like a piece of a social media content. But still, if they're used, they matter. And if they matter than I think people, creative people, should probably have more .

access to them. John, before that you go, can we talk about your phone situation for a minute? Because the word cast audience needs to know, uh, you wrote about the iphone fifteen OK, which I thought was very mart. We've discovered in the course of doing this that you have an iphone twelve mini that is literally in the middle of exploding as we are recording this. Tell us about your phone life and why you're getting a new phone this year.

So listen, i've going to get a bloggers for coming up on fifteen years here. I don't really have an excuse, but I love the mini at small IT was never very good, like the battery and relax very long. All this have little beautiful children.

I want to take pictures or not. It's not great, but I don't know. I I stock IT out. I didn't want to give up this little thing IT overheat while we were recording.

It's on an ice pack right now. We should say.

yeah and it's on a little pink ice pack from my daughter's lunch box to kind of make make IT to the into the episode here. I couldn't couldn't hand the wireless charging and talking on the video at the same time. So in that sense, I am so excited about the iphone fifteen for work purposes, for the purposes of content creation. I've got critics and dots and and uh complications about this. However, I can't wait to prior financer how big IT is as long as IT doesn't become like dangerous ly hot while I attempt do my job, i'll, i'll be happy so you know very enough.

All right, john, thank you. Is not treating on this really fun, alex, thank you. We all, we're going to need to do this again. The numbers are not going to stop being weird and you're going to keep doing stuff fly like so keep coming back on anytime.

Really pleasure to join you, right?

We're going to take one more break and then we're going to get to the verge test outline. Look right back.

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Right before we get out of here, let's answer a question from the hot line. As a reminder, the hot line number is eight, six, six, verge, one, one. We want all of your best and we are the tech questions.

And if you don't want to call, you can email verge cast at the verge dot com. That works great too. But I always fun here in the hot line, not going alive. Anyway, this week's question sent me on kind of a tail spin. So let's just hear IT guys.

This is mark from tampa. I got a question for you. You guys seem like the right ones to answer IT. It's a bit of a streaming and a hardware question.

So a few months back, during the reveal of the apple vision pro, bob iger came onto the stage and mentioned that he was developing a busy class APP for that thirty five hundred or must just be of the system. However, I didn't notice that I have a couple of kids. We have intend of switches.

There's over one hundred and twenty five million of those already sold in in hands everywhere. Do you guys have any possible reason why does he wouldn't have a didn y plus APP already on a platform that big? They've already have A A hooo APP for IT, so just seem like a slam dunk.

Why they wouldn't have IT in hands of all the kids seems silly to Carry around an ipad and a switch whenever ver, which travels some. Just curious if you guys have any thought on IT. Alright, every great day. Take here. okay.

I should say up front here that I am totally fascinated by this question, and i'm still trying to report IT out. So hopefully I will have a firm pat hundred percent answer really soon. But in the meantime, i've been talking to people and like putting yarn on a board with people's photos to try and make sense of the situation.

And here's where i've gotten ten so far. I think there are three separate things going on here, and i'll rank them kind of in order of importance. The first thing is that with the switch, nintendo wanted to make a game council, first and foremost.

S we've had companies in the past, microsoft, the x box, one probably most famously try to do the game console and entertainment system thing really well, simple tane ously. And I just really doesn't work. And one of the things that nintendo has done really well over time is just made great games.

IT has had streaming services in the past, but the reason people buying the tender products is four great games. And denton o knows that Better than just about anybody else. Just a more example here is regi fills M.

A, who was formally the intendo of amErica president and co, talking in twenty eighteen about how he was thinking about streaming services. The question was essentially, when are people going to be able to watch netflix on the switch? And here's what he said .

for those subs questions. We have to refer you to the folks at netflix. What we said when we launched in tender switch was that we wanted to have a gaming first platform, and that's what we've created and that's what enabled us, us in the first twelve month in the united states to be the best selling home console in the history of video games.

Right now, we enable who look on the platform. We've said that other services will come in due time for us. We want to make sure that we continue driving the install base for nintendo switch to have great games for the platform. In terms of you know what's next on the streaming side, you going to have to talk to those individual providers in terms of where they stand and and what they're working on.

That's a little bit of a cop out, but I think it's also true that nintendo knows that entertain ment doesn't really move the needle. People might watch stuff on their councils, but nobody y's buying a console as a way to watch stuff, if that makes sense. So I think if you're in nintendo and your a company that does basically one thing very well and you, anna, keep doing IT, that kind of focus really makes sense.

The second thing is that I think disney would really like to have disney plus on the switch. When he launched disney person 20， IT did a big show in investors about what was going on. And that actually had a slide for all the places that I wanted to any plus to be. And IT included a picture of the switch, like right there on the slide, big red nintendo switch. And as he was showing this lide, here is what Michael paul, whose disney's president streaming services set a time right now.

we are securing distribution for disney plus across mobile devices and connected TV devices, including game councils, streaming media players and smart tvs. With these device partnerships, not only do we optimize our product for consumer experience, we ensure that our service will be prominently featured and merchandizes on our partner platforms.

great. okay. So disney wanted this. I don't think that was smoke. That is disney saying we want to be on all the platforms. I think if they were easy and straightforward, disney plus would probably be on the switch.

But that thing that Michael Powell said about being prominently featured and dazed, that kind of the third thing we think of these streaming platforms and the systems that they run on as just sort of APP sortes, right, build a thing put on the platform, everybody went. But that's not actually how IT works. This business is really messy.

And when ads get involved, and when subway pants get involved, everybody wants a cut, everybody wants access to user data, everybody wants to be the first one featured in the store and get prominent placement. And there are questions about who's in the search and what happens when you search for streaming. Every part of this is like relentlessly negotiated, and there's a ton of money in IT.

It's how TV makers make a lot of their money is how streaming platforms make a lot of their money. This is a big and complicated business. And the thing about to do is an intendo just doesn't need to care about any of this. If you remember, there was that email that fills Spencer, the head of x box sent about wanting to buy in in tandem.

He basically said that the bad news for microsoft at the time was that non tando and i'm quoting here is sitting on a big pile of cash and they have a board of directors that until recently has not pushed for further increases in market growth or stock appreciation. If you were, in theory, super interested in market growth or the appreciation, one thing you might do is higher bunch of people and get really into the weeds of negotiating these deals with streaming services such that maybe you become a streaming platform. But nintendo good.

I don't think nintendo needs the hassle. It's very happy making the smash hit games, making a consol every once in a while. IT seems to be a good business.

IT seems to be working for intendo. And my guess is IT just doesn't need the nonsense that comes with being a really successful streaming platform. Put all of that together.

And I I think that might be IT. I think the intent do just doesn't want this that badly. And so here we are. I think Frankly, there might be a miracle that we got hou and youtube and chunchuse role rather than a problem that we don't have the rest of the services. But that said, if there is a smoking gun here, i'm going to find IT.

And if you know the answer and you want to tell me why netflix and disney plus and max and all these other services are not on the intended switch, call the hotline eight, six, six one or email us verge cast the verge I com. Tell me all your answers right for now. That is IT for the verge cast.

Thanks to everyone who came on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on all of this stuff, especially the shutdown of D, B. D.

That calm Young le rockers are a great piece for us about how that service worked, which is very cool. We will put a bunch links in the show notes. But as always, read the verse.

I M cool. Upset the last thing. This is probably the last call for this, but if you have questions about the verge or the verge cast, you want us to answer on our meta first episode.

Get them in. Now we're recording that episode really soon. We have a tone of fun stuff. It's going to a be really fun epson, this shows produced by Andrew reno and liam James brook meters is our editorial director of audio. The verge cast is a verge production and part of the box media podcast network. Mei alex nail will be back on friday to talk about met a connect the code conference and whatever else happens this week, because everything just keeps happening.

Support for this episode comes from A W S. A W S, generate A, A, I gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.

Support for the show comes from atn t. What does he feel like to get the new iphone sixteen pro with A N T next up anytime? It's like when you first light up the grill and think of all the mouth watering possibilities, learn how to get the new iphone sixteen pro with apple intelligence on A T N T and the latest iphone every year with A N T next up, anytime A N T connecting changes everything. Apple intelligence coming fall twenty twenty four with theory and device language that publish some features and languages will be coming over the next year. Zero dollar offer may not be available on future iphones next up any time, future maybe discontinued at any time, subject to change additional fees, terms and restrictions apply C A T dog com sash iphone for details.