Hello, and welcome to Protocol Entertainment, your guide to the gaming and media industries business. This Thursday we’re looking at what’s new with Netflix’s advertising plans and Amazon’s embracing of third-party voice assistants. Well: The worst work in technology this week.
Netflix is playing the long game on ads
Netflix shared a few more details about its advertising plans this week, including a somewhat vague deadline: The company wants to launch a streaming-supported level of ads “around the early part of 2023,” it said in the letter Its Q2 to investors Tuesday. Read also : 5 Inspired Moments of Latin Music This Week (July 9).
Executives still kept mum on some key details, including how much consumers will have to pay to watch Netflix with commercials. However, during Tuesday’s earnings call, they set out the company’s strategy at once, stressing that this was not a quick Band-Aid, but a multi-year plan intended to evolve over time. .
One big revelation: The level of ads will have a smaller catalog. There have been reports that some of the studios were asking Netflix to pay a significant premium to include their licensed content at the level supported by a company advertisement.
We found some vague clues about pricing. Peters and his colleagues also made sure to tell investors that there is no risk of cannibalization, even if some existing members decide to switch to the cheaper level.
Don’t expect commercials to solve all of Netflix’s problems. The company is playing the long-running game on video backed by commercials, and executives have told investors not to expect big returns right away.
The message here is clear: Ads are a long-term opportunity – and Netflix will look for other ways to generate some extra money until the advertising business is fully operational.
Disclosure: The Protocol is owned by Axel Springer, whose chairman and chief executive officer Mathias Döpfner is on the Netflix board.
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Voice interoperability is becoming a thing
This week, Amazon announced a whole bunch of updates for its Alexa assistant as part of its annual Alexa Live developers conference. This may interest you : Netflix and accounts: which streaming services are really worth paying for?. A little buried in the updates was the news that the company will start issuing Universal Device Commands over the next year, which will make it easier to use multiple assistants working simultaneously on the same device.
Amazon’s multi-assistant strategy is a big deal. Two assistants who can stop the same radio stream can be trivial, but it’s part of Amazon’s vision of environmental computing to work. That vision includes Alexa, third-party assistants like Sonos and white-labeled versions of Alexa all working together.
A version of this story first appeared on Protocol.com.
In other news
Discord goes down on Xbox. The PC voice chat platform is finally available on Xbox consoles, helping to bridge the gap for cross-platform gaming. This may interest you : Nikola founder asks judge to block evidence of “wealth”, “lifestyle” in fraud case. Sony invested in Discord last year to do the same, but PlayStation fans are still waiting for the feature to be launched.
Google starts testing its AR glasses. The company will test an AR prototype device capable of transcribing the spoken word in real time in the wild. The tests will include only “a few dozen Googlers and select trusted testers.”
FaZe Clan becomes public. The gaming and sports lifestyle brand FaZe Clan was made public on the Nasdaq on Wednesday through a SPAC merger that valued the firm at $ 725 million.
When you sue. A small installation art company is suing the social media and metaverse giant over naming rights. If there was only one word to describe this whole situation …
Another Activision Blizzard merger. Quality assurance testers at Blizzard Albany, a studio formerly known as Vicarious Visions, formed a new union with the CWA and ran for an NLRB election, following in the footsteps of QA workers at Raven Software.
LG has high hopes for webOS. The company hopes to be able to license its webOS-based smart TV platform to 200 TV producers.
When she is highlighting her news tab. Allegedly, the company is leading people to work on creator’s economy tools.
YouTube joins Shopify. Speaking of the creator’s economy: YouTubers will soon be able to sell things from their Shopify stores directly on YouTube.
This newsletter is brought to you by a guy with a hose
It was a hot week! Heat waves have hit large parts of the United States and Europe, which has begun to have an effect on internet infrastructure: Google and Oracle UK data centers have been reduced by ” cooling-related failures “Tuesday. Did you notice any cuts? Then you can thank a very low-tech remedy: European data center operators have been putting some of their employees on their roofs to spray their AC units, according to Bloomberg. So if you are busy tweeting, snapchatting or watching Netflix during the next heat wave, spare a few moments to think of the poor sap that bakes on top of a roof, pipe in hand, to keep things cool for the rest of us.
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Thinking outside your wall: How the road to zero requires a new approach to collaboration and knowledge sharing: Asking suppliers and associated companies to review the way they work is no feat. small, but PepsiCo is taking a three-point approach centered around the principles of education, empowerment and incentive. The Sustainability Action Center aims to engage and equip value chain partners with tools to make their journey of sustainability.
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