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September 11, 2020
The total amount of internet advertising revenue in the U.S. is expected to decline by 3.4% year-over-year in 2020, PwC is predicting in the latest edition of its Global Entertainment & Media Outlook. That's a massive decline when compared to last year, which saw ad dollars in the U.S. grow by nearly 16% year-over-year.
PwC is expecting the online ad market to return to growth in 2021, and ultimately arrive at a compound annual growth rate of 4% for the five years spanning from 2019 to 2024. The U.S. ad market will be hit harder than overseas markets, with PwC predicting that global 2020 online ad spending will be down around 2.5% year-over-year.
Ad spending has become a bit of a wild card ever since the beginning of the pandemic, with industries like hospitality, travel and theaters hit hard, while online shopping has done comparably well. As a result, many companies withdrew their guidance for this year. PwC Principal CJ Bangah told Protocol that the company usually releases its annual Entertainment & Media Outlook report in June, but that it decided to delay the publication this year to better account for the impact of the crisis.
"Advertising is extremely susceptible to the economic performance," Bangah said. "It also recovers very quickly."
As in previous years, PwC is predicting the move from desktop to mobile advertising to continue. And while mobile hasn't been immune to the decline of ad spending, video advertising actually seems to be the least affected, effectively staying flat year-over-year in 2020.
However, our collective pandemic binging didn't help ad-supported video services nearly as much as it did for the Netflixes of this world, with online video subscription revenue expected to grow 30% in the U.S. this year. Video subscription services' revenue will continue to increase with a compound annual growth rate of 12.65% until 2024, while video advertising revenue will only see a growth rate of 6%, according to PwC.
Bangah attributed some of that to changing consumer expectations, with especially younger viewers preferring ad-free environments over those with high ad loads. "They want fewer ads," she said.
Ultimately, the current environment requires tech and entertainment executives to remain vigilant and flexible, Bangah argued. "Consumer habits can take a lifetime to form," she said. In a crisis like this one, consumers may ditch them overnight.
Janko Roettgers
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
People
The future of the cell phone, according to the man who invented it
Martin Cooper comes on the Source Code Podcast.
Martin Cooper with his original DynaTAC cell phone.
Photo: Ted Soqui/Getty Images
January 21, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
January 21, 2021
Martin Cooper helped invent one of the most consequential and successful products in history: the cell phone. And almost five decades after he made the first public cell phone call, on a 2-pound brick of a device called the DynaTAC, he's written a book about his career called "Cutting the Cord: The Cell Phone has Transformed Humanity." In it he tells the story of the cell phone's invention, and looks at how it has changed the world and will continue to do so.
Cooper came on the Source Code Podcast to talk about his time at Motorola, the process of designing the first-ever cell phone, whether today's tech giants are monopolies, and why he's bullish on the future of AI.
<div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/21947943-bc81-43d9-9eb3-f18341a6c8b6?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>The following excerpts from our conversation have been edited for length and clarity.</em><br></p><p><strong>I want to get to the phones, but before we do I want to talk about pagers, because I have this deep obsession with pagers. I think pagers are a much better example of the direct predecessor to the cell phone than landlines. Even though you couldn't make phone calls, it seems like spiritually, pagers were cell phones before they were cell phones. You made pagers, and they were huge. And I guess my big question is, why didn't pagers get their due? We kind of skip over them, but it feels like they were a big thing.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Well they were, at the time we did it. In the U.S. there were at the peak over 50 million pagers. And the principle is freedom. Our biggest customers were people like doctors, who were trapped next to their patients because they have to be available. And the pager set them free! They could go play a game of golf and know that they could get a beep and be at the hospital at 10 minutes. So the concept of freedom, I don't want to beat it to death, is really the essence of what portability is. </p><p>And since you brought the subject up, one of the battles that I'm engaged in today has to do with education and the need for broadband for education. And the solution that the FCC is proposing is wired broadband. Cable! We're going through the same thing all over again. And I am trying to persuade them that if you want to solve the digital divide in education, it's going to have to be with wireless broadband.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p><strong>I agree. And one of the other things you're involved in right now is 5G stuff, right? I spend all of my time talking to people in tech who are, let's say, overzealous about the potential of 5G. Everybody has spent five years telling me that 5G is going to change everything, that it's the panacea of technology, and I'm not sure that I see it. Tell me what you think about 5G: Is it as big of a change in how all of this stuff works as some people like to make it out to be?</strong></p><p>Not really. I think you put your finger on it: 5G is an incremental change. It introduces a couple of new capabilities to what existed in 4G. One of them is the use of millimeter-wave where there is a much bigger bandwidth, but a big handicap is the fact that the millimeter waves don't travel very far. There are other things that are done that reduce latency. </p><p>So it turns out that those two characteristics — very high speeds and low latency — are very useful in things like running a robot. If you've got a factory and you want to run robots, you're going to need those kinds of things. Unfortunately, for people like you and me, 5G does essentially nothing. You have to understand, I think 5G is a wonderful thing, and we have to keep progressing. But I don't appreciate being deluded. And the carriers have done that: They talk about having remote operations and autonomous cars and things of that nature. And guess who's paying for the 5G? It's you and me.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><strong>OK, let's go back and talk about the DynaTAC stuff. My favorite scene in the book was when you're at a restaurant in Chicago, and a bunch of people have brought you prototypes of this cell phone. And nobody has any idea what a cell phone is supposed to look like. What's that day like?</strong></p><p>Well, you have to start at the beginning of that, because two weeks previously, I approached Rudy Krolopp. Now, Rudy didn't work for me. He ran the Industrial Design Group for this division. But he was a visionary. I told him where we were going to build a cell phone, and he said, "What's a cell phone?" And I described what a portable phone was like, and he reassigned all the people in his group to come up with their concept of what this portable phone might look like. And so I felt I had to reward them in some way. And that's why I invited them to dinner. </p><p>Each of these guys got up and presented what his vision was, of what a portable phone would look like. And they all ended up being a vision of what actually happened. There was a slide phone, there was a flip phone, and there was what they call a capsule phone. These guys were just remarkable. </p><p>We ended up picking what we called the shoe phone — for obvious reasons — because it was simple.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><strong>You say you picked the shoe phone because it was simple, but it doesn't seem like it would necessarily be obvious that it was simple, because again, nobody had ever done this before. Most of the parts that were required didn't really exist yet. What's your criteria for thinking, "this is the one we can do?"</strong></p><p>It was mechanically simple. It was just the box. Anytime you put hinges and sliders, things of that nature, they're going to break. We actually ended up all agreeing that this was the way to go. And I wanted to make sure that I appreciated the efforts of these other guys. So even though I picked this one, we selected this as a group. Everybody agreed that this is the way to go. </p><p><strong>I guess it makes sense to say, "we have to invent 1,000 things just to make this work. Why invent 1,001 that we don't have to?"</strong></p><p>That's exactly right. [Pulls an original DynaTAC model out.] Calling this "simple" … the insides of this phone are incredibly complex, much more so than a modern phone. A modern phone has a million times the power of this box that we're looking at now. But the complexity, the number of parts — there are like 10 times more parts in the old phone, and they were all hand-soldered together. It's close to a miracle that we got one to work. And they actually got two to work!</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p><strong>The timing of all this is interesting to me, because you're in the middle of this fight against AT&T. It seems like there was something about that fight, and that moment, that made this whole project go. And I was wondering, if Motorola had been super successful, doing fine, under no real threat from AT&T and the FCC, does a project like this happen? Or does it take this kind of existential threat to push something like the phone forward?</strong></p><p>How could I ever have persuaded my management to start investing? They ended up pretty much betting the company, between 1969 when the Bell System announced their desire to continue their monopoly on cellular, and 1983 when we actually have service. This battle that we engaged in lasted 13 to 14 years, and the company spent $100 million of 1970 dollars. So how would I ever have persuaded them, if we didn't have an enemy? If we didn't have to bet our whole company against them, because they would have put us out of business?</p><p><strong>You really don't think you could have pulled it off by yourself? You had a lot of power and trust and autonomy at Motorola.</strong></p><p>We would have come up with a phone, but getting the FCC to move really took a huge amount of effort. The Bell System had 200 lobbyists calling on the FCC alone. They had two guys assigned to each of the nine commissioners. At that time, our total lobbyists force in Washington was three guys, who called on the FCC, the Congress, and all the government agencies. So it really took that kind of challenge to make this thing happen. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p><strong>So let's talk about monopolies. You've truly been in the center of fighting against one, and now we're having these same arguments again, about Google and Amazon and Apple and Facebook. What do you make about the antitrust fight happening right now? Does it rhyme with history to you, as you see all this stuff happening?</strong></p><p>It's a different problem. But it's still a problem.</p><p>There's no question in my mind that some of the practices that Google and Amazon exercise are anti-competitive. And so we've got to do something about it. But there's a difference between that and a regulated monopoly where the government decides what the price is going to be and the monopoly just makes all the decisions, and they have no competitive pressures. That's what Bell Systems did. </p><p>The whole process was different. Bell Labs — which by the way, was an extraordinary organization — had all the funding that they wanted, because they had a monopoly supporting them. And they would invent something, and they would think, "Oh, this is interesting, let's make a product." And they would turn the product over to Western Electric, which was part of the monopoly, and they would make them all and then they would turn that over to the operating companies. And the operating companies would come to you and say, "David, this is what you want, right?" </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>That's exactly backwards from what we do today. Marketers today look at what people need and want, what problems they solve, and they work backwards through that process. The research guys work on, hopefully, what are going to solve human problems.</p><p><strong>But then on the flip side, then come questions about how power works differently. And especially as we get to privacy and data collection and all this stuff. Bell Systems <em>felt</em> like a monopoly: You could just look at it and be like, "this is clearly a monopoly." It feels messier now, but maybe not any less consequential.</strong> </p><p>I think the real problem is not Google and Facebook and Amazon. It's the people that think they're getting something for nothing. They're not getting anything free, they're giving up their information, which has value, and they're getting less value in return. When people start realizing that and that they have alternatives, the problem is going to get solved. So once again, it sounds like I'm being overly optimistic. And it may be that the government has to intervene in the process, but the real solution there is education.</p><p><strong>Speaking of the privacy and society side of all of this, when you were in the early days of the cell phone, were you thinking about "what does it mean for society when everyone has a phone like this?" You wrote the book that you imagined that when everybody was born, they'd be given a phone number. And were you guys asking this sort of philosophical question?</strong> </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>No.</p><p>You know, it's one thing to be a visionary. And I really think that we were visionaries. We stuck our necks out on that thing. But when people asked me what I was thinking of when we made the first public call, it was, "I hope this thing works." </p><p><strong>Before I let you go, I want to talk about AI. Because I think that's another place we have a lot of optimists and a lot of pessimists, and the way you seem to think about where artificial intelligence and humanity meet is about as optimistic a take as I think I've heard. So convince me that the future of AI is mostly good news.</strong></p><p><strong></strong>When I look at a product, I define the usefulness of a product, or at least the interface, as bad, good and optimum. A bad interface is one where you need an instruction manual to work something. If you have a device or a service that is intuitive — you look at it, and you could figure out what to do without looking at an instruction manual — that's pretty good technology. The optimum technology is invisible. It's there, it works for you, it solves your problem. You don't even have to think about it. Well, if you're going to do that, something has to be behind the scenes, making decisions for you. And that's artificial intelligence.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>There are people that are very optimistic about how quickly that's going to happen. And it turns out that there are some things that the brain does that we haven't even figured out how to copy. It doesn't compute very well, it doesn't remember very well. But other things? It can abstract in ways that machines cannot. And so I think it's going to be a slow process, where the machines are little by little going to take over more and more of the routine things in our lives, are going to make us more efficient. </p><p>Society is much more resilient than people think. People are more resilient. People keep saying, "Oh, no, we are going down the tubes, because the kids aren't talking to each other anymore." Yes, I do see lots of cases where kids sit around the table all looking at their cell phones, but most of them are texting each other. And it takes time for society to embrace and understand new things. </p><p>These things are all new, it's going to take a generation for us to accommodate them. But human minds are very flexible. The brain is amazing. It's going to be many generations before artificial intelligences take over. And when they do take over, we won't even notice it.</p>
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Election 2020
Google says it’s fighting election lies, but its ads fund them
A new report finds that more than 1,600 brands, from Disney to Procter & Gamble, have advertisements running on sites that push pro-Trump conspiracy theories. The majority of those ads are served by Google.
Google is the most dominant player in programmatic advertising, but it has a spotty record enforcing rules for publishers.
Photo: Alex Tai/Getty Images
January 14, 2021
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
January 14, 2021
Shortly after November's presidential election, a story appeared on the website of far-right personality Charlie Kirk, claiming that 10,000 dead people had returned mail-in ballots in Michigan. But after publishing, a correction appeared at the top of the story, completely debunking the misleading headline, which remains, months later, unchanged.
"We are not aware of a single confirmed case showing that a ballot was actually cast on behalf of a deceased individual," the correction, which quoted Michigan election officials, read.
<p>The note was a clear bait-and-switch on a story that boldly pushed a false conspiracy theory about the election. But just as striking as the editor's note is what sits at the top of this story, and every story on Kirk's site: a Google ad.</p><p>Since the 2016 election, endless attention has been paid to the way election misinformation can spread through targeted ads on social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube. But an equally insidious and less-discussed problem is how programmatic advertising, a field dominated by Google, has become the lifeblood of misinformation sites. With or without social platforms, these ads allow misinformation sites to exist and even thrive all on their own by providing a source of revenue, and companies like Google have a shoddy record of policing them. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>In a new <a href="https://www.newsguardtech.com/special-report-advertising-on-election-misinformation/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">report</a> released Thursday by the news rating company NewsGuard, researchers found ads for more than 1,600 mainstream brands, from Disney to Procter & Gamble, running on <a href="https://www.newsguardtech.com/election-misinformation-tracker/" target="_blank">160 sites</a> (including Kirk's) that have openly pushed election conspiracies. Google was responsible for ads on a whopping 80 percent of those sites. Another ad exchange, The Trade Desk, was running ads on roughly half.</p><p>Among the examples NewsGuard lists: ads for Harvard University appearing on One America News Network's website, ads for AARP appearing on sites like The Gateway Pundit and ZeroHedge, and Walmart ads appearing on NOQ Report, a site that recently argued Satan uses Democrats to do his bidding, including stealing the election.</p><p>In some cases, the ads create discordant messaging between publisher and advertiser. While reporting this story, Protocol found ads for Planned Parenthood on Kirk's site, despite Kirk's frequent <a href="https://twitter.com/charliekirk11/status/1263209491581018114?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">calls</a> for Planned Parenthood to be defunded. Thanks to these ads, Planned Parenthood is effectively funding Kirk.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTQ1MDA1Mi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNTY4MDEwOH0.qplQOYcTtVCBgeOXCbDihtGMd6uAjeg-XL39oaEr8Bw/img.png?width=980" id="f1e64" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="42c21c19889922502d0fba8fec366b71" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" data-width="2226" data-height="712">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">A Planned Parenthood fundraising ad appears on a story containing election misinformation at the top of Charlie Kirk's website.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Screenshot: Protocol</small></p><p><br></p><p>Google has <a href="https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9335564?hl=en&visit_id=637461598271119369-2898334728&rd=1" target="_blank">policies</a> forbidding publishers who post demonstrably false election misinformation and other types of content from placing Google ads on their websites. "Claims that voter fraud was widespread or that the election was stolen are all prohibited by our policies. When we find content that violates our policies we remove its ability to monetize," a Google spokesperson said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The company demonetizes individual stories first, reserving site-wide demonetization for egregious, persistent offenders (The company recently demonetized a far-right militia site following the Capitol riot). In 2019, the company removed ads from 21 million individual pages, the Google spokesperson said. The problem: Google serves billions of ads every day. </p><p>It's not that the company is unaware it's serving ads on the sites NewsGuard noted in its report. In August, a group of philanthropists <a href="https://www.protocol.com/google-ads-charities-disinformation-sites" target="_self">wrote</a> to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai after reports showed that ads for groups like the Red Cross and Save the Children were appearing alongside COVID-19 misinformation on TheGatewayPundit and elsewhere. The philanthropists urged Google to institute a new model that "does not put [advertisers] into unwanted and damaging associations that undermine their good works and values." </p><p>Since then, the company has taken action on individual Gateway Pundit articles, but five months later, Google has yet to fully demonetize the site despite repeated violations, enabling it to continue growing and spreading misinformation. </p><p>The power programmatic advertising has in sustaining these sites is particularly relevant now as social media giants begin to more forcefully crack down on accounts, including the president's, that regularly post dangerous conspiracy theories or incitements to violence. For many of these companies, last week's riot in the U.S. Capitol was a wake-up call, showing them the disastrous real-world consequences of allowing people to believe lies about the election being stolen. But chasing the accounts that peddle those lies off of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is only part of the solution. As long as the people behind those accounts have a way to make money on their falsehoods, why would they ever stop?</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
People
How a startup fixed the future of TV
Reelgood doesn't make shows, and it doesn't make TVs. What it does is try to make sense of the future of TV and movies — and it's doing that really well.
Before the pandemic, Reelgood's offices were bustling (and messy).
Photo: Christie Hemm Klok
December 14, 2020
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
December 14, 2020
David Sanderson's journey to fix the future of TV started with a simple and extremely familiar problem: He canceled cable and suddenly couldn't find anything to watch. This was 2013, and the Canada-born Sanderson had moved to Silicon Valley to work at Facebook's headquarters after a year and a half in its Dublin offices. After one look at the price of cable TV, he decided against it, thinking, "I don't really watch TV anyway." Netflix was enough.
In his day job, Sanderson, tall and confident and relentlessly cheerful, was a rising star. He "fell into product management," he said, but had a knack for it. He was on the ad-product team, working on the tool that made Facebook a self-serve ad platform (and helped turn Facebook into the ad giant it is today). When that did so well, his bosses told him to write his own job description going forward.
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Facebook had plenty of interesting problems, but Sanderson was increasingly hung up on the one he faced every night when he went home. What started as a Netflix subscription had ballooned into something bigger. When he got into "Homeland," he got a Showtime subscription, then "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" hooked him into Hulu. Every night, when he'd get home from a long day in Menlo Park, he'd have maybe an hour to watch something. "And every night," he said, "I was like, 'is there a new episode of one of the shows I'm watching?'" He'd open one app, click around, close it, open another, rinse and repeat. All that searching, not much watching.
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By now this is a mainstream problem — there's too much to watch! — with a new set of solutions. Universal search for TV shows and movies is available on plenty of platforms, and the notion of re-bundling the unbundled streaming landscape is on the top of everyone's mind. Much of that progress is due to Sanderson, who eventually quit Facebook, founded a company called Reelgood, and in the last five years has become an indispensable part of the streaming ecosystem. But the future of entertainment continues to get more complicated, and Reelgood's story makes clear just how big this problem is even now — and why Reelgood might be the company to fix it.
</p><h3>Coming up next</h3><p>
Let's fast-forward a couple of years. By 2015, Sanderson was a manager at Facebook, jumping from product to product, moving up in the company. "He was promoted faster than anyone in the history of Facebook at that time," said Kim Scott, the author of "Radical Candor" and a mentor and friend to Sanderson. (They met shortly after Sanderson moved to the Bay Area, and he babysat Scott's kids after she had what she called a "nanny crisis." He's apparently an excellent babysitter.)</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDk0ODg2MC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1MDY1MTAzMX0.gtSPCnA9yWPSdzcTPaJDg-jxNUaJZlUl9yveGeXmsxo/img.jpg?width=980" id="492b5" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="80d024d0eecca3285cae9be489e4699e" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="David Sanderson" data-width="3000" data-height="2000">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">David Sanderson on the couch, where he has his best TV-watching ideas.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: Christie Hemm Klok</small>
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Success and all, Sanderson couldn't stop talking about this streaming TV thing. He'd tried all the supposedly helpful ways to aggregate streaming services, like Can I Watch It and Fan TV, and all left him cold. He'd started to understand that the streaming problem was really a data problem and a user interface problem, "and I'd launched enough products at Facebook to know how to do it." He was starting to get itchy at Facebook, too; as he rose in the company, it became easier to get ideas approved and resources marshaled. Which, for Sanderson — a guy who loves a fight and seems to love proving himself — was almost boring.<br>
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One night at dinner with Scott, Sanderson got to talking about his streaming-app idea again, and Scott got tired of it. "She was like, 'David, shit or get off the pot,'" Sanderson said. "'You're either going to keep doing your thing at Facebook, or you're going to do this.'" (Scott doesn't remember her saying exactly that, but said that's the message she was going for.)
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Scott also told Sanderson that before he made any decisions, he should go meet with "Michael." Sanderson didn't know who that was or why they should meet, but said OK. "Michael" turned out to be Michael Dearing, the founder of Harrison Metal and an investor in early-stage companies. Soon after, the two men had lunch, and Sanderson, as he tended to do, talked a lot about his streaming idea. At the end of lunch, Dearing had a proposal: He'd give Sanderson $1 million to leave Facebook and start it.
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Dearing then gave him a project: Invent a valuation of your company, I'll do the same, and we'll meet in the middle. So Sanderson talked to a few people and came up with a number: $7 million. Dearing, it turned out, had come up with $5 million. So just like that, Sanderson's unnamed, unbuilt, unstarted streaming company was worth $6 million. Sanderson opened a bank account for this company and put a dollar into it. Soon after that, another million appeared. And just like that, Sanderson had a company called MyFlickList, and now he had to build something.
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After hiring a team — first a few freelancers from Upwork, then a group from Popcorn Time, that infamous Netflix-for-piracy service that has been both beloved and in various kinds of trouble over the years, then the rest of the staff — Sanderson and his crew set out to build a social watch-listing app. Users could track what they were watching and build and share the lists of stuff they liked across multiple streaming services. (It was basically Spotify libraries and playlists for movies and TV.) It did OK, and people liked the idea, but most people only used the app in the occasional moments they needed a friend's recommendation. Plus, "seeding a social app is hard," said Reelgood's director of product, Eli Chamberlin, "without huge gobs of money."
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<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDk0ODg2My9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNjQ1NzA2M30.kfCtJ5hVwcsgN-C_cA3RVLA65LpO3faAnAtc0_aJHNE/img.jpg?width=980" id="aca3e" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="dc1f7414e0ab9b06344a455565a87cff" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Reelgood executives" data-width="3000" data-height="2000">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">A few of Reelgood's executive team. From left: Head of marketing Cat Burhenne, CEO David Sanderson, head of data Pablo Lucio Paredes and head of product Eli Chamberlin.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: Christie Hemm Klok</small>
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But the thing people liked about Reelgood was slightly different. The service had already started to grow, largely thanks to people looking for answers to questions like "where to stream 'Arrival'" and "is 'Molly's Game' on Netflix?" "It's like, I want to search across everything," Chamberlin said. "And I want to be able to click a few buttons and make this big filtered thing that shows me everything I can watch that I like." That had initially been a means to a social end, but it quickly became the main product.<br>
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This, again, is not a particularly complicated or revolutionary idea. Decades ago, when the advent of cable brought the number of TV channels from three to hundreds, the TV Guide became a staple of the system. Streaming then turned hundreds of channels into a practically infinite library, with no regard for what's on right now. <em>Everything </em>is on right now. So building a new kind of guide seemed more important than ever. What Google was to the internet as a whole, Reelgood wanted to be to internet video.
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Part of the reason the Reelgood problem appealed to Sanderson in the first place was that it seemed like it ought to have a relatively simple solution. TV shows have names, cast members, genres; movies have all the same plus box-office data. Somebody had to have all this data, right? At first Reelgood licensed a database from a big provider (Sanderson didn't want to say which one, it's a small industry), which has long offered a database for movies and shows. But it didn't work. Sanderson remembered "Tarzan" as a particularly good example: "There was the new 'Tarzan' [in 2016], and it would say 'It's on Netflix!'" But then Reelgood users would press Play and be served the 1999 Disney movie. Or "Tarzan's Greatest Adventure" from 1959. Or any of the dozens of other Tarzan movies made over the last century. Bad results killed Reelgood's reputation, and people would stop using the app when they felt like it wasn't helping them.
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The other problem Reelgood discovered was that data was often out of date. Here, too, Sanderson remembered one specific title: HBO's "The Young Pope." "HBO had all their marketing budgets going toward 'Young Pope,'" he said, "and like a week and a half after it came out, it still didn't say it was on HBO." He emailed the company asking for a fix, which took another few weeks. The show was one of the biggest things on TV, but as far as its data — and thus Reelgood — was concerned, it simply didn't exist.
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After giving up on its provider, the Reelgood team looked around at different providers to see if there were better options out there. It was a bizarrely manual process: They'd compile a list of everything they could find on, say, Netflix, and then check the databases to see which was most accurate. Luckily the vetting didn't take long, because there weren't many options and they were all pretty bad. But they needed something, so they signed up with Guidebox, which was at least better than the rest. "We were customers of theirs for a couple of years, actually" Sanderson said. "Until we bought them."
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It acquired the company in 2018, betting the combined team could build something even better. Everything else was paused for six months while they worked on the data. "And we've spent literally millions of dollars, and years, perfecting this system," Sanderson said. "Because we're a nice front end, but none of it matters if our data is not accurate." Reelgood never intended to be a data company, but it suddenly had to become one.
</p><h3>Channel surfing</h3><p>
Here's the simplest way I can think of to explain why it's so hard to sort and search through all your streaming services: Almost nobody wants you to be able to do that. Netflix wants users to open Netflix, then watch whatever Netflix Original its algorithms think they'll like. (That's why you won't find Netflix in the Apple TV app, for instance.) Hulu, Amazon and the rest all feel the same. A search box flattens some of their branding, takes away their ability to cross-promote content and keeps people away from the screens reminding them to subscribe. There are innumerable streaming services, each of which wants to build a universe for users to explore, not a database to be queried.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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As a result, there's no universal way of identifying a piece of content. Sure, they all have titles, but what about 1992's "Gladiator" and 2000's "Gladiator?" Or the three movies, made over four decades, all called "Bad Company?" To say nothing of the director's cuts, extended cuts, recuts and theatrical cuts that are at once both the same movie and different movies. And even that doesn't account for the slightly different runtimes, cast lists, posters and other metadata that would make most systems think the same movie is actually two different ones. </p><p>
The way it should work, both Chamberlin and Sanderson said, is with something akin to barcode systems. (This is clearly how Reelgood talks about the issue internally, since both described it nearly identically in separate interviews.) "Let's say there are two chairs," Sanderson said. "You can see they're identical. Those both had barcodes on them, and one is at Crate & Barrel and one is at West Elm. If you have a person at each store, they scan it, and it's like, 'Yep, same ID, no problem.' But if you don't have that, how do you have a computer figure out the identity of those?" </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>There have been many attempts over the years to create an ID system for shows and movies, which just means there are now lots of ID standards out there. (You know <a href="https://xkcd.com/927/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">what they say about standards</a>.) Netflix and Hulu have no incentive to work together, so things aren't likely to get easier. As a result, there's really not even a way to reliably understand whether the movie called "Reservoir Dogs" is actually the same thing on Fubo and Showtime as it is on Amazon Prime.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDk0ODg3Ny9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2MDQzNjE5Nn0.EmEdei_R1Afv-R_5SCrK3dpVKTOpe6B8yaz5lPCqB-4/img.png?width=980" id="f907c" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="48f981bb97bd35b7ad316668ad830405" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Reelgood interface" data-width="1322" data-height="910">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Reelgood's interface tries to make sense of a lot of complicated data, all in one place.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: Reelgood</small></p><p>Reelgood's systems use machine learning to try to collate all that messy, multiple-source data into a single entry for each title, with all the permutations and ID numbers and conflicting data coming from each service. On top of that, they're building an interface that tries to make it all make sense. Sanderson's quick to admit it's not yet perfectly accurate, but it's dramatically better than everything else out there.<br></p><p>As Reelgood gets more popular, its data gets better. There's a constant stream of feedback coming from users about titles for which streaming data is outdated or just wrong. That data goes to Reelgood's manual review team, which fixes individual problems and then uses the solutions to train the company's machine learning models. Every time, the system gets a little smarter about how streaming services work.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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One good metric for success at Reelgood came quickly: The very studios and companies that should have already had this data started wanting to buy it from them. "I think others are coming into this space," Sanderson said, "and some of them have just thrown their hands up." He said Reelgood's future isn't as a white-label company providing real-time insights on streaming services to anyone who pays a license fee, but it's turning into a heck of a business. Reelgood powers universal search tools for Roku, Dell and Microsoft, and studios like Lionsgate and CBS pay for Reelgood's data as well. Even hedge funds are poking around the database. They all want to know what's available where, who's watching what and how content and viewers move between services. Nobody, not even the streaming services themselves, knows any of that better than Reelgood.
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In recent months, as the pandemic has driven more people home and the annoyance of streaming has driven more people crazy, Sanderson said he's had conversations with practically everyone in the industry about using Reelgood's data and software. "People are starting to want to make [our app] their home screen," he said. "It's not an app, it's The Thing." Soon enough, rather than turning on their TV to find rows of app icons, they might see a page full of shows and movies available to them, no matter where they stream.
</p><h3>Universal universal search</h3><p>
Reelgood has grown quietly but quickly over the years, and then even faster during the pandemic. It now has 6 million users, up from 2 million at the beginning of 2020. Its website is its most popular platform, driven by some excellent SEO work and a pop in Google searches for "where to stream" shows and movies. Reelgood wasn't the first player in the space, but it was early enough and good enough to have an advantage.
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Of course, it wasn't always easy. In the earliest days of the company, a lot of investors didn't understand why people needed better ways to find stuff on TV. At one point in 2016, Sanderson said, Reelgood was close enough to running out of money that employees were starting to interview at other companies, until an investor who had previously passed came back and wanted in. Once that happened, suddenly everyone else wanted in, too, and Reelgood had all the cash it needed.
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As the streaming world continued to grow, the need for Reelgood only seemed to increase. Hulu and Netflix and Amazon Prime gave way to Disney+ and HBO Max and Peacock and Paramount+ and Apple TV+ and so many others, all of which picked up subscribers as millions of people ditched their cable subscriptions. <a href="https://blog.tivo.com/news/trends-and-research/tivo-q1-2020-video-trends-report/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">A recent TiVo report</a> found that the average TV watcher subscribes to as many as seven streaming services, and that 84% of them wanted some way to browse and search it all in one place. Streaming was becoming the clear future of TV and movies, and Reelgood was there to put it all together.
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<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNDk0ODg3NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxNjMwNjc5N30.jBqru3nMwFKKLy0FX4Nv7ntLjYX17M9AZpX4Qa9tfqQ/img.jpg?width=980" id="ea436" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3b43bd4cc0ff0470253f49248777001e" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="David Sanderson using Reelgood" data-width="3000" data-height="2000">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Reelgood's goal is to list everything you might want to watch, no matter where it comes from.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: Christie Hemm Klok</small>
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But the streaming boom also meant bigger players started to encroach on Reelgood's turf. One of the worst days at Reelgood was March 25, 2019, the day Apple introduced the Apple TV app. A Reelgood developer had built an Apple TV app a few months earlier, and early users were loving it; then Apple basically built the same thing. "It was almost pixel-for-pixel identical to ours," Sanderson said. It had universal search, it showed all the stuff people might want to watch no matter where it was. The Reelgood team had gathered in Sanderson's living room to watch the announcement, and Sanderson almost sent them home. He tried to convince everyone that this was good news, it validated the market, all the normal CEO-speak. But suddenly, Reelgood felt under threat.
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The team eventually convinced themselves that because this was just for one set-top box — and a relatively niche one, at that — that Reelgood wasn't dead yet. Morale went up even higher when the Apple TV app launched and didn't work very well. It only indexed a few services, had a clunky interface and suffered from all the things Reelgood was well on the way to fixing.
</p><p>There's still the threat of a big company going all-in on solving the TV data problem. "Maybe a really small team builds a great product, and Facebook buys them, and suddenly they have Facebook TV and they have 80 million users," said Howard Hartenbaum, a partner at August Capital and an investor in Reelgood. But increasingly, that's not how it works. Increasingly those big players are trying it themselves, realizing how hard it is, and coming to Reelgood instead.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="11">
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</div></p><h3>The couch-to-TV problem</h3><p>
Reelgood isn't likely to build its own streaming box or TV set anytime soon. The team thought about it, but so far has decided that being a neutral platform would make it easier to work with others. But there is one other piece of the TV-watching puzzle that has come to fascinate everyone at Reelgood: the remote. In a strange way, the remote was Reelgood's biggest competitor, because people could use their phone to find a show but then would have to pick up the remote to actually go watch it. For the smartphone to be a great remote, it needed to be … a remote.
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At a company retreat and hackathon earlier this year, a small team started to hack together a prototype with a simple goal: make it possible to tap a title on a phone and have it automatically play on a Roku. (Roku's the most popular set-top box maker, so it seemed like an easy choice.) Initially, they figured it was impossible, but at least they'd learn something. But they got it to work, using some clever web hooks and deep-linking on the Roku platform, so they filed a patent for the tech and shipped the new feature: Instantly, Roku users started to use the app more often and to watch more. The Reelgood app can now control Android TV and Fire TV boxes, along with LG Smart TVs, and the team's working on more.
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Still, though, it's finding and surfacing content that keeps Sanderson going. He sees Spotify as a sort of North Star: The service knows every song down to its notes and tempos, understands its users and how their needs change, and has access to practically the entire canon of music.
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Sanderson said he's still trying to understand how that works in video. "If you take something apart, does it have the same meaning?" he said. Can he assume that because one person watched "The Crown" that they'll like other shows about royals? Will they like "Doctor Who" just because Matt Smith is in it, too? For now, he said, simple pattern matching seems to work better than anything else they've tried. If 10 people like the same 10 shows, and nine of them also liked an 11th, there's a good chance that's a useful recommendation for the one who hasn't seen it yet. But he still thinks there's more to do there.
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Complicating matters even more is the fact that "TV" is an increasingly amorphous thing. If he had it his way, Sanderson said, Reelgood would also index TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and Snapchat Originals and every other source of video on the internet, all available in the same space. But if streaming services are reluctant to open up access to their content and algorithms, Big Tech is on another level entirely.
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Sanderson, a person who tends to get bored without a challenge, seems excited about this one. "Our absolute perfect view of the world is, yeah, we have all of them. Your 'Continue Watching' would have your Instagram stories for that day, then a YouTube influencer that's queued up for you, then the Jets are playing so that game is there on demand. It's just, like, you sit down on the couch and turn on the TV, and we know exactly what you want." Will he and Reelgood get all the way there? Probably not. But Sanderson is absolutely convinced it's what the future of TV <em>should</em> look like, and he's going to keep trying to get there. One messy database at a time.
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
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Sonos CEO Patrick Spence: There’s money in ad sales for us
The smart speaker maker adds in-house ad sales as radio service continues to grow.
"Given the kind of customer base that we have and given the adoption we've seen in Sonos Radio, there's absolutely advertising revenue there," Patrick Spence says.
Photo: Andrej Sokolow/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
November 18, 2020
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
November 18, 2020
Sonos is doubling down on its efforts to monetize services on its platform, and is now looking to build out an in-house ad sales team for its free Sonos Radio service. Sonos CEO Patrick Spence confirmed the news in a conversation with Protocol on Wednesday, saying that in-house ad sales could help the company attract the right kind of brand advertisers to its platform. "Given the kind of customer base that we have and given the adoption we've seen in Sonos Radio, there's absolutely advertising revenue there," he said.
Spence made these remarks ahead of the release of the company's fiscal Q4 2020 earnings results. The company grew its revenue 16% year-over-year, to the tune of $339.8 million for the quarter. Earnings per share came in at $0.15, ahead of the $0.02 that analysts had expected. The company added 1.8 million new households to its customer base in its fiscal 2020, and close to 11 million households now own Sonos products, with an average of 2.9 Sonos products in each of those households.
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</div></p><p>Sonos saw overall listening hours increase by 33% for the full year. Sonos Radio seems to have played a significant role in that growth, and became the fourth most-used service on the platform, as well as the most popular radio service, <a href="https://www.protocol.com/sonos-radio-free-ad-supported-streaming-stations" target="_self">just months after its launch in April.</a> The free service did not cannibalize other services on the company's platform, Spence said. "This is not a zero sum game in any way," he said. "People are listening to Spotify, Apple Music and [other] on-demand services in addition to what's happening on radio."</p><p>The company <a href="https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/next-up/sonos-radio-hd-paid-subscription-service?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1" target="_self">introduced a paid tier, dubbed Sonos Radio HD</a>, last week. Spence said that Sonos was still learning how to perfect both free and paid services after having solely focused on hardware products for so long. "We're kind of excited about having another part of the business that is experience-based, feels very Sonos, but is more iterative in nature," he said. "We'll learn and we'll grow it from there."</p><p>Sonos is forecasting between 9% and 13% revenue growth for its fiscal 2021, compared to 5% growth in 2020. Spence expressed confidence in hitting those numbers despite increased competition from companies like Google, Amazon and Apple, all of which have introduced new smart speakers this fall. "Our business continued to grow in scale in the face of those introductions," he said. "We're always watching and seeing what's out there. But I feel like we've shown that we can grow. We're going to continue to innovate and execute in the face of whatever anybody else does."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p><em><strong>Update: </strong>This post was updated to more clearly identify full-year vs. quarterly growth.</em></p>
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Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
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Pluto TV CPO Shampa Banerjee explains why free video is booming
Video services have to get over their U.S.-centric thinking to succeed internationally, Banerjee says.
"We're always very U.S.-centric. We think everyone is like us, with 500 devices. It's not [like that]," said Pluto TV CPO Shampa Banerjee.
Image: Pluto
December 23, 2020
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
November 16, 2020
ViacomCBS is on track to make $2.5 billion with digital video this year, and a growing part of that revenue stream is Pluto TV, the ad-supported video service the company acquired in early 2019. Pluto ended Q3 with close to 36 million monthly users and video ad dollars more than doubling year-over-year. "It's an amazing asset, and it's growing even faster than we had hoped," said ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish during the company's Q3 earnings call earlier this month.
A key part of Pluto's success has been its product design, which mimics the look and feel of cable TV, complete with linear channels and a traditional programming guide. To learn more about what makes Pluto tick, and what the service has in store for 2021, we recently caught up with Pluto TV CPO Shampa Banerjee.
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Banerjee joined Pluto in early 2020 from Eros Now, an Indian streaming service that has amassed close to 200 million registered users to date. In our conversation, she talked about the Indian streaming market, her plans to attract new audiences to Pluto, and what it takes to build a global streaming service.
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<em>This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.</em>
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<strong>Before joining Pluto, you led product for Eros Now, which primarily targets the Indian market. That's also where Disney+ is seeing a lot of growth these days, to the point where one in four Disney+ subscribers is now in India. Why is streaming seeing such a boom in India right now?</strong>
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Indians love movies. They love entertainment. That's not new. But when I started with Eros in 2014, it was kind of a different world. People would go to work, download their movies, come home and watch offline. We had to give people a download feature. Now, all that has almost gone away. One of the big things that happened: Carrier prices have become very cheap. Jio had a huge role to play in it by making bandwidth so cheap, and they have also upgraded the network. I think that's really part of the reason for the explosive growth.
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India is very varied. Every region has its own language. India has 22 official languages. People either watch Hindi, English or they watch their regional languages. Typically, somebody from one state will watch either English or Hindi, and their entertainment in their language, but not something from another region. People watch English entertainment, they watch a lot of Hollywood movies. A lot of the content that you see here in the U.S. is already popular. So the appetite is there.
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<strong>What lessons did you learn from working for Eros and on a product targeting the Indian market?</strong>
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One of the things I learned is that in Southeast Asia, people don't want to pay. I grew us from nothing to 150 million subscribers, but they were all freemium. When I left, there were around 23 million paying subscribers around the world in 135 countries. The interesting part was, 80% of our user base came from India, but 80% of our paying user base came from outside of India, primarily from the U.S.
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So we were actually looking at a model very similar to Pluto: having linear channels, and we were going to monetize it with advertisements. We were looking at that because [we thought]: These people, they'll never pay us, [but] they want to watch us. Let's monetize it. That's actually what attracted me to Pluto, because it felt like, boom, this is the growth area.
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<strong>Now that you are in charge of product at Pluto, tell us about its secret sauce.</strong>
</p><p>
I think it's partly the familiarity of the interface. The second thing is, someone has done the programming for you. You know, people are lazy. They just want to veg out in front of the TV set. [They] don't know what to watch because there's so much out there to choose. That choice is made for you by Pluto; the linear channels have that choice made for you.
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And then our shows, it's familiar content people have seen before. And despite everything, even with Netflix originals, "The Office" and "Friends" were the two most popular shows on Netflix. People want to watch shows that they're familiar with, especially now with COVID. I think it's a safety thing. It's something I know, something I'm in control of. We just got that right.
</p><p>
<strong>Does having that familiar, cable-like interface limit what you can do to innovate?</strong>
</p><p>
No. We have a certain audience that is attracted to our service. It's a fairly large audience. But there's a lot one can do to get a new audience that did not grow up watching linear TV. At times, I want to watch a linear channel, maybe because I'm lazy. But sometimes, I want to figure out what I want to watch, or [get] recommendations, based on my behavior, versus something that's editorially curated. I think there's a lot one can do, keeping the same format, keeping the same interface, or similar interface.
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And then there's advertising. That's a big thing we're working on, the ad experience. You know, we have the data, we have the intelligence. What can we do to keep them watching? Because I watch ads, it can be extremely useful if the right ad is targeted to me.
</p><p>
<strong>Other than these product improvements, what else is Pluto focusing on next year?</strong>
</p><p>
International is a big focus for us. We'll be going to different countries. That itself has its own nuances, understanding what works. Every region has its own nuance.
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We're always very U.S.-centric. We think everyone is like us, with 500 devices. It's not [like that]. [If you are] launching in Latin America, for instance, casting is very important. That's how the family watches. Everyone, mobile is what they have. They have one big screen. That's it. And it may not even be a smart TV. So they buy a casting stick, and that's what they're using. Behaviors outside of the U.S., they're quite different.
</p><p>
<strong>Any other trends you're seeing ahead for 2021?</strong>
</p><p>
I honestly think AVOD [advertising-based video on demand] is going to become much bigger in 2021. People do like to watch reruns. They do like to watch old shows.
</p><p>
Why do you think people are <a href="https://www.protocol.com/cord-cutting-q3-2020-data" target="_self">leaving cable</a>? They're leaving cable because [they ask themselves], "Oh, my God, I'm paying all this money for what? To watch old shows. And if I can watch them for free, why should I be paying for it?"
</p>
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Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
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