David Pierce

Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, just published his annual letter, which is sort of a State of The YouTube Union address. There’s nothing new in here, really: YouTube is big on AI, loves creators, etc. etc. But I was yet again surprised by how big a subscription business YouTube is:

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell just gave a really interesting (and surprisingly thorough!) answer to a question about how the NFL thinks about streaming. He gives Peacock and YouTube and others a lot of credit, but ultimately: “We are really committed to broadcast television.”

As part of its moves to comply with EU regulations Apple announced last week that it was opening up iOS to other browser engines — in theory meaning Chrome and Firefox could build better, more competitive browsers. Mozilla pretty quickly said it was “extremely disappointed,” and that Apple was trying its best to make the process awful for competitors. Now Google Chrome’s Parisa Tabriz says the same.

Wired has an interview with Rachel Lambert, a product manager at Meta, all about the state of Threads’ plans to decentralize and join the world of ActivityPub. The short version: it’s a process, but it’s happening! And Meta knows exactly how big Threads is, what it’ll do to the fediverse when it joins:

At one point during this episode, as we discuss our Vision Pro review — and the reaction we’ve seen from around the web — Nilay begins to debate how he’s scored every Apple product ever. It’s that kind of Vergecast, y’all. And then, as TikTok loses a key music partner and foists shopping on users everywhere, we wonder: is it time to call the top on TikTok?