Netflix: probably a winner in 2024. Disney Plus: rough times ahead. Peacock? Paramount Plus? Will they even exist in 12 months? Alex Cranz and I get to the bottom of this year’s streaming wars, and also maybe talk E Ink a little. But first: you know that creepy sound on TikTok videos about the North Sea? We have a story for you about that.
The company announced it sold out of its second round of 10,000 devices, 24 hours after the first batch sold out and barely 48 since it launched to the world. Something about the mix of ambitious AI, Teenage Engineering style, and that attainable $199 price just seems to be working for people.
The third batch is up for preorder now, but you won’t get your R1 until at least May.
Tom Coates was recently at a meeting with Meta’s Threads team talking about ActivityPub, the fediverse, and the future of social. He took a lot of interesting notes! And in those notes he has a near-future roadmap for Threads’ decentralization plans:
• Early 2024 (Part One) – the Like counts on the Threads app would combine likes from Mastodon and Threads users
• Early 2024 (Part Two) – replies posted on Mastodon servers would be visible in the Threads application
• Late 2024 – A “mixed” Fediverse and Threads experience where you will be able to follow Mastodon users within Threads, and reply to them and like them
[plasticbag.org]
I’m in Samsung’s CES booth this morning, where I finally got to see the new Ballie robot in action. It was cool! Helping with workouts, tracking air quality, making calls. And then… it got very confused about how its projector screen worked, and eventually stopped showing anything at all.
Poor Ballie might need a nap after all this work this week.
We ran into her at Samsung’s booth, where she was doing... a SmartThings cooking show, I suppose you’d call it? Somehow I doubt Martha’s using a ton of Bluetooth appliances and smart ovens, but hey, you never know.
Hard to tell, by the way, who drew the bigger crowd: Stewart, or Ballie. It was close.
