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October 20, 2020
Netflix is looking to promote its service with a 48-hour free streaming event, confirmed COO Greg Peters during the company's Q3 2020 earnings call Tuesday afternoon. Netflix is looking to first test the free streaming offer in India, and may bring it to other countries in the following months.
"We think that giving everyone in a country access to Netflix for free for a weekend could be a great way to expose a bunch of new people to the amazing stories that we have," Peters said. "Really creating an event, and hopefully get a bunch of those folks to sign up."
Protocol was first to report earlier Tuesday that a recent version of the company's Android app includes mentions of a promotional event called StreamFest that's scheduled for Dec. 4 (hat tip to Mishaal Rahman). A Netflix spokesperson confirmed the plans for the event Tuesday morning, telling Protocol: "We're always looking at different marketing promotions to attract new members and give them a great Netflix experience."
If it happens as teased in the app's code, StreamFest will be accessible via any device that Netflix is currently available on, and users won't have to enter their credit card number to access free streaming. "We don't need any payment details — just your love and undivided attention," according to a text string found in the app. However, anyone who wants to keep watching after the conclusion of the two-day event will have to sign up for a regular account.
There seems to be some limitation on the number of people able to access the promotion, as one of the in-app text string informs users that "Netflix StreamFest is at capacity." Netflix frequently tests new features with a subset of its audience; limiting access could be one way to test StreamFest metrics against other forms of promotion.
Netflix's plans to launch StreamFest surface just days after the company discontinued 30-day free trials in the U.S. The event is similar to the way premium TV networks like HBO and Showtime have been promoting their programming for years. Showtime, for instance, was available for free to Comcast Xfinity cable subscribers for 48 hours in August.
Netflix's Q3 results came in below the company's already-cautious forecast. During the quarter, Netflix added 2.2 million paying subscribers worldwide, including less than 200,000 in North America. Executives attributed much of that to the company's outsized growth during the early months of COVID, and said that Netflix already had added more subscribers during the first nine months of 2020 than during all of 2019.
The pandemic also affected Netflix's production schedule, but co-CEO Ted Sarandos said that the company was on schedule to finish 150 productions by the end of the year. "We're back to near-steady state in physical production," Sarandos said. "Materially, we're back in business."
This post was updated throughout following Netflix's Q3 2020 earnings call.
From Your Site Articles
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
Google’s trying to build a more inclusive, less chaotic future of work
Javier Soltero, the VP of Workspace at Google, said time management is everything.
With everyone working in new places, Google believes time management is everything.
Image: Google
March 4, 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.
March 4, 2021
Javier Soltero was still pretty new to the G Suite team when the pandemic hit. Pretty quickly, everything about Google's hugely popular suite of work tools seemed to change. (It's not even called G Suite anymore, but rather Workspace.) And Soltero had to both guide his team through a new way of working and help them build the tools to guide billions of Workspace users.
This week, Soltero and his team announced a number of new Workspace features designed to help people manage their time, collaborate and get stuff done more effectively. It offered new tools for frontline workers to communicate better, more hardware for hybrid meetings, lots of Assistant and Calendar features to make planning easier and a picture-in-picture mode so people could be on Meet calls without really having to pay attention.
<p>Soltero joined the Source Code podcast to talk about the new tools and how he's planning for the future of work both as a team leader and a product maker.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/c6b03386-d5b4-4fd3-97f3-648321bb9b14?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>You can hear our full conversation in this episode of the Source Code podcast. The following excerpts from our conversation have been lightly edited for length and clarity.</em></p><p><strong><em></em>I was talking to somebody the other day who said, "We've never had clients ask us about burnout before." They care, but it's never been sort of a top-of-mind concern: How do I make sure my employees are happy, and that work-life balance is real, and that they're taking time off? These have just never been things that are top of mind when you think about quote-unquote productivity software.</strong></p><p><strong>But the whole universe of this stuff feels different now. And it seems like both for you as somebody who runs a large team, but then also having to build that kind of ethos into products, that would feel hugely complicated, and totally unlike anything we've ever done in this space before.</strong></p><p>Look, if you're lucky enough to love what you do for a living, you'll never work a day in your life. </p><p>Except now. </p><p>Right? Not everybody is lucky enough to work on something they're passionate about, but even to those that are, there's that new set of conflicts. You've now disassociated or disconnected work with a specific location, and that is both a blessing and a curse in its own way. And along with that, the need for time and attention management at the individual level becomes crucial. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Both of these things were true before the pandemic, they were just not universally experienced. They were viewed as a mere speed bump: "Oh, yeah, I can check my email on on the road," or "Hey, today, I'm working from home because I have a doctor's appointment." And then on the time and attention management front, no shortage of products and apps and devices and so forth are calling to us, for different reasons. That was also a known problem before, but when that's happening in the midst of all these other demands, and you're already also emotionally spent, then the energy that normally kept us fired up about our work is harder to sustain. </p><p>Lastly, there's the absence of human connection, which I've personally found maybe the hardest of all things. I've got two executives on my team who I've never actually witnessed in three-dimensional space. Yeah, I'm leading a team of people around the world who have experienced me through a two-dimensional piece of glass, right, which is terrible. So that the absence of that human connection, which is felt, again, universally by everyone, in their own way, also saps at that, and there are no good ways, at least for now, to remedy that. Saying "Well, let's spend more time on video calls" isn't the answer.</p><p><strong>It's an underrated feature of a physical workplace that I can just walk over to you and ask you something. And when that's gone, what do we do? I feel like that's the next big question.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>I saw some really creative applications of existing capabilities meant to try to address some of the problems that are at the heart of how this has affected us all. I'll give you a good example: I noticed that a group of people in my team were using their out-of-office email autoresponder to provide daily updates, to basically auto-reply to every message to set expectations with the sender about their working hours and their availability.</p><p>Then you get to the uneven application of that, and you ask, well, why? And part of the answer is a little scary, because it involves the courage that those people had to actually explicitly say, "No, I actually am not available, because I've got other responsibilities, other demands on my time." In pre-pandemic work culture, there was a question there about whether you will be perceived as a hard-charging, go-getter type of person, when you're even with the best of intentions trying to set expectations for other people. </p><p>And you get to the product opportunity around that. You say, well, this is a really crude instrument for this. So we've got this capability now to set working hours. And we introduced a bunch of enhancements around the minimal set of actions that I can take as an individual — to convey to others who want to collaborate with me and communicate with me — my availability. And it's really elegant and important in how we do it. </p><p>But what the usage of that feature represents is an aspect of a social contract that every company has, around how its workers behave with each other and how they respect each other's time. Very few, if any, companies that I've seen have taken the trouble to actually describe what that contract actually looks like. Much less to try and steer it.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><strong>So do you feel some responsibility to try to have and share a right answer inside the product?</strong></p><p>No, not a right answer. That's where people get it wrong. I think with productivity software, it's a very difficult needle to thread. Because you have to have a point of view. "Productivity Construction Kit" is not an answer, because actually what it leads to is you putting the burden on the client, on the user and on the team to establish that, and not everybody is thoughtful enough or equipped enough to do that. </p><p>And I think when you see customers struggle with products you find that the diversity of options you have creates, well, less than an orderly, predictable exchange of information. So the threading the needle part is, you have to be opinionated enough and in the right places, but leave room for the individual user and ultimately the organization they are a part of to express their own approach to communication and collaboration and express that social contract. </p><p><strong>Google Calendar is a good example of that, right? Calendar feels like the space in which to solve a lot of these things that you're talking about. If one of the core things we need to do is get a better understanding of where we are and who's available, Calendar seems like the place to do that, right? I feel like you guys are getting, if not more opinionated, then at least more, I don't know, tools-y about what you think a calendar can be.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Yes, tools-y in the sense that we know there's an opportunity, given what I told you about the time and attention management problem being crucial. Google Calendar has this unique role in being perhaps the only global-scale, personal and work calendar management service system of record. There's a responsibility, I guess, and an opportunity for us to continue to encourage people to not only use that, but to use it more effectively both in their own individual time management and in their time management across groups of people. </p><p>The best example to offer here is recurring events. I've long joked that you should be forced to do linear algebra before you are actually allowed to create a recurring event that involves multiple people. Possibly even just yourself. The reason for that is because exactly how far ahead can you plan? </p><p>You create a recurring event with the best of intentions that says, "I want to call my parents every week at 6 p.m. on Wednesday." Now, there's a segment of people for whom that proves to be very effective. They actually are rigorous enough about surrendering the entirety of their decision-making and their time management to a calendaring surface, digital or otherwise, that having that there helps. But to the vast, vast, vast majority of people, the calendar surface risks becoming a reminder of exactly how inconsistent and undependable you are as a human being. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>And so how you approach the task is to go back to the sort of toolsy-ness of Google Calendar, because there are a million things you can add to the calendar to create the absolute perfect, most comprehensive time management thing ever. You could even employ AI to this effect and get pretty far. But it's only successful if it's actually impacting behavior and if the person is actually being able to truly manage their time. The impact that actually has is what we're interested in measuring, not just "did we give you a lot of knobs to make you feel good as some kind of GTD pro."</p><p><strong>The first insight, back when it was G Suite, was to take all of these things that were single player and make them multiplayer, right? It still looks like an 8.5-by-11 inch sheet of paper when you open a Google Doc, but you can do it with another person. And that was a fundamentally new thing. </strong></p><p><strong>But now we're getting to the point where that thing is kind of table stakes. We're not all the way there yet, but that is clearly the future where all of this is going. And the next step, it seems like, is breaking the idea that all of those should be different products at all. That Workspace should be <em>a</em> thing, not a bunch of things.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>Remember the show "Mad Men"? There's a picture I found on the internet of the set — no people — and you can see old-school intercom systems, typewriters, old-school inboxes, filing cabinets, a whole range of things. What we've done is we've digitized them, almost on a one-for-one basis. To be fair, there's been more innovation than that, but at heart, they're still treated in the same fashion. <br></p><p>We've now officially and irreparably broken away from that in a way that's going to create room for people to look at this problem space differently. It's by no means a finished job for us or anybody else. We still have to work hard to earn the right to be the choice of billions of people around the world, for all these important jobs. But yeah, I think we've kind of moved past that. </p><p>I don't want to have happy hours over video. There's a bunch of stuff about life in this particular period of time that people are going to look back and say, "Oh, that really sucked. Let's not go back to that." And I'm happy to turn the page on that.</p><p><strong>I've been talking to people all year about, what are the KPIs for remote work? The KPIs for regular work have always been just, like, "ass in chair," which is not good. But these questions of what it means to know you're working hard and doing well — or even just doing well, period — seem different now. And there are all these questions about what managers want to know versus what employees want to know and want to share. So I'm curious both for you as a boss, and you as a product maker, how you think about that stuff right now.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>I don't believe that metrics about communication volume, frequency, depth of organizational graph, how information flows through the organization — that you can actually productize those insights in a way that is sufficiently unique to a company in a way that makes it actionable. </p><p>You may say, "Javier, you spent 72 hours in meetings last week." And I don't know the judgment of whether that is good or bad. It's very subjective, right? In addition to the understandable creepiness of, how is this information being used? Is my performance being assessed from the point of view of how many minutes am I spending in email or how much multitasking I'm doing during times where I'm otherwise supposed to be in a meeting? Some cultures and organizations and job responsibilities will reward them. Others would point at that and say, "Pay attention, man." </p><p>I'd rather put more emphasis, for example, on the rhythm of work. I'm from Puerto Rico, I love music. And there's a rhythm at which work takes place, it's not a universally-described thing, not by industry, not by company. There are lots of rhythms, even within my own organization, teams that for one reason or another move faster or slower, make more heavy use of real-time communication versus asynchronous communication. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>You don't just lay out the tools and say, "I don't know, pick what you need, go ahead!" You also don't just say, "Here's an adjustable wrench and a multi-headed screwdriver. Good luck!" You have to curate the set of tools that you offer. It's somewhere between an unbounded expanse, and a bike lane that says "This is the One True Way of collaborating." That's not not really for us or any other vendor to describe.</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.
Sponsored Content
The future of computing at the edge: an interview with Intel’s Tom Lantzsch
An interview with Tom Lantzsch, SVP and GM, Internet of Things Group at Intel
February 28, 2021
Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
February 27, 2021
An interview with Tom Lantzsch
Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corporation
Edge computing had been on the rise in the last 18 months – and accelerated amid the need for new applications to solve challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Tom Lantzsch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corp., thinks there are more innovations to come – and wants technology leaders to think equally about data and the algorithms as critical differentiators.
In his role at Intel, Lantzsch leads the worldwide group of solutions architects across IoT market segments, including retail, banking, hospitality, education, industrial, transportation, smart cities and healthcare. And he's seen first-hand how artificial intelligence run at the edge can have a big impact on customers' success.
Protocol sat down with Lantzsch to talk about the challenges faced by companies seeking to move from the cloud to the edge; some of the surprising ways that Intel has found to help customers and the next big breakthrough in this space.
What are the biggest trends you are seeing with edge computing and IoT?
A few years ago, there was a notion that the edge was going to be a simplistic model, where we were going to have everything connected up into the cloud and all the compute was going to happen in the cloud. At Intel, we had a bit of a contrarian view. We thought much of the interesting compute was going to happen closer to where data was created. And we believed, at that time, that camera technology was going to be the driving force – that just the sheer amount of content that was created would be overwhelming to ship to the cloud – so we'd have to do compute at the edge. A few years later – that hypothesis is in action and we're seeing edge compute happen in a big way.
<p>The last 18 months have been a wild time to be in technology. We've seen edge compute come to life to help businesses adapt during the pandemic. At the same time, we are also seeing how 5G is going to drive up interest, especially from a networking perspective, rather than a use-case perspective. We also see lot of people that are focused on their data, but the <em>algorithms</em> that companies train with the data are going to be their critical assets. It doesn't matter what company or what industry; <em>this</em> will really become the differentiator for many companies.</p><p>And particularly amid the backdrop of the pandemic, we've seen how companies are using technology to either bring workers back in safely or <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-sensormatic-article.html" target="_blank">serve their customers in new ways</a>, <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/customer-spotlight/stories/brentwood-academy-customer-spotlight.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">educate children in new ways</a> -- all things that have accelerated the digital transformation that had been underway. I recently read a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">McKinsey survey</a> that reported on the "speedup in creating digital or digitally enhanced offerings. Across regions, the results suggest a seven-year increase, on average, in the rate at which companies are developing these products and services."</p><p>And based on what we're seeing at Intel, those are lifesaving and industry saving investments happening today – completely re-designing the way that <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-mic-article.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">patients are treated</a>, and businesses operate.</p><h4>What are you particularly expecting to see this year?</h4><p>What I find most interesting is the work that combines IoT with networking capabilities – and I think this is going to be a year of expansive exploration and working with our customers to put these two things together to solve real business challenges.</p><p>When we first started the integration of networking technology and operational technology capabilities and layered that across the industry verticals, we could count the amount of interested customers and opportunities on one hand. Last year, it was five times that many and this year we see that number increasing significantly already. So, we're excited to see the industry continue to build excitement to scale those types of deployments.</p><h4>What role does AI play at the edge and in what way is Intel involved?</h4><p>An AI use case recently grabbed my attention: employees in a restaurant being screened by a device that checks temperature while the employees are washing their hands – and provides a determination on whether they'd done it adequately before they report to work. I have seen other applications using similar technology in the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/offering/a5b3b000000TiMSAA0/using-ai-to-make-construction-site-safer?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">construction industry</a>, where an AI algorithm scans to see if employees have their helmet, goggles, vest and other safety equipment on properly to determine if they are ready to work. And the best part is – that the employer can see aggregate data on these interactions to determine if more training on handwashing or helmet wearing is needed.</p><p>At Intel, in addition to providing the fundamental base technology to enable these applications, we work with a lot of third-party developers to create these applications. And we help the developers scale them across multiple industries with our salesforce. So, we may not make the scan technology that determines if you have the right gear on, but we orchestrate that coordination across our ecosystem with all of our partners to effectively put it into a <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">catalog</a> so that if customers are interested in that sort of application, we can provide them with different parties to make that happen.</p><h4>Is there a problem with fragmentation in the market and how can that be solved?</h4><p>It's very fragmented. I gave just two examples of totally different workers coming to work in different industries and I can give you five more that are different again. Although the base technology that Intel creates to enable this type of innovation is very horizontal in nature, the reality is that bringing those to life must be very "vertically-centered" and very "use-case centered" – and must take into account, geography. The two employee use cases I cited look very different if you are talking about employees in North America, India or Germany. So, all in all, this is a holistic ecosystem challenge – and an ecosystem solution.</p><p>At Intel, we're in a unique situation to orchestrate these solutions. </p><p><cite class="pull-quote">People tend to think of Intel as providing the technical footprint that enables edge computing – but we also have the developer reach – and we can use our ecosystem and scale to help our end customers get access to the best solutions.</cite></p><h4>What sort of challenges do customers face when they're attempting to adopt edge computing?</h4><p>There are two common challenges. One is the technical question of 'Who can I work with?' A customer may have a chip focus but actually, it's a more complex question than a chip. We like that complexity, because we can be an adviser to them and <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bring to the table partners</a> that they can work with to solve that complexity leveraging our technical knowledge and ecosystem network. </p><p>The second thing that companies struggle with is the challenge of how to fund getting into this space – even if the business case warrants the investment. The world has changed. Companies don't want to write a big capital check for these types of investments – they want a pay-as-you-go model, like you see with the cloud. We've been working with customers to find a way to make that happen – and I think that is going to be a bigger part of the conversation moving forward.</p><p>You can see it across almost every aspect of technology now. We rent compute more than we buy compute. Evidenced by the success of AWS, companies can rent compute from Amazon instead of building their own data center – and there are many benefits to that approach. In the old world, even for this video conference that we're having today we would have installed capital to do this. Now it's just a service. And I think that edge as a service is right around the corner.</p><h4>Do you have an example of that?</h4><p>A customer in Mexico wanted to deploy outdoor WiFi and add security features into it. So, it was an edge-based computing issue that was part connectivity. But there was actually way more to it than just installing it. We not only helped to solved the technological challenge creatively and coordinated the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ecosystem of providers</a> to solve this, but we also found a way so that the customer could get into this market with a service-based model without needing to outlay a lot of capital.</p><p>Other semiconductor companies would have a difficult time partnering on both sides of that challenge, but Intel can do it because we have the scale.</p><h4>How do businesses identify which functions they do want to perform at the edge versus in the cloud?</h4><p>It really comes down to a question of what you're trying to do and how you do it at the lowest cost, highest quality and standard in computability.</p><p>If you have an application and it can perform what you need it to do in the cloud, you'll probably run it there. The cloud is a great thing - there's infinite compute and lots of choice in a well-understood developer environment.</p><p>But there are many things you can't or shouldn't do in the cloud for certain reasons. Take the camera example from earlier. Say you have eight high-density cameras, and you want an action on them immediately. You may not be able to afford the latency that comes with going up into the cloud. Or it may be a financial challenge – that its actually more expensive to send that data to the cloud over and over again, and it makes sense to invest in compute at the edge. There are nuances in the decision-making. It really comes down to what you want the application to do, how quickly and how much it should cost.</p><h4>How does Intel help developers to learn, to build and then test their solutions at the edge?</h4><p>To enable what we know to be interesting and challenging use cases at the edge, required us to change our focus on who these developers are and what they care about. We learned that they <em>really</em> don't care about what hardware they're running on. The modern developers are fairly well extracted from the hardware – they just assume the compute is going to be available for them to do their work.</p><p>To make sure we can deliver on that, we typically target developers by specific capability. The most advanced case that we've been studying on the edge recently is focused video and specifically, video inferencing and AI inferencing. We created a tool called <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a>, which was developed in a way that developers didn't have to care about the hardware it runs on. It's a model optimization technology that enables them to easily scale out to different hardware platforms. That's proven to be an interesting value proposition to these developers.</p><p>Our goal with <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> is democratize AI activity and inference at the edge. We want to make it simple -- to put these tools in the hands of non-data scientists and make it work. As a part of that process, we're also creating an environment where they can develop anyplace, anytime, anywhere they want to be. We're so proud of our <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> community and are constantly working to grow the community and release new features and capabilities to edge developers.</p><h4>What's the possible next breakthrough that you see for Intel in edge computing and the IoT space?</h4><p>I'm looking forward to the big breakthrough when we show integrated 5G, Virtual Private Network and the edge workloads all in one unit. More to come.</p>
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Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
Power
Viewers like you: How PBS is adapting to the streaming age
The public broadcaster has had considerable success on YouTube and other digital platforms. Now, it is looking to revamp pledging.
PBS has begun to talk to ad-supported video services, including some that distribute programming via free 24/7 channels, to help it compete in the streaming age.
Image: PBS
February 28, 2021
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.
February 25, 2021
If there were a playbook for the streaming wars, it might read something like this: Take your most valuable assets, slap a plus behind your most recognizable brand name, and start counting the money.
For PBS, things aren't quite that easy. While the public broadcaster has made some inroads in streaming, it has been slower to embrace digital business models than some of its commercial competitors. But that could change in the coming months. PBS is in discussions to bring its app to additional platforms, including a new crop of ad-supported video services, and has plans to turn smart TVs into donation machines that could ultimately make the old-fashioned pledge drive obsolete.
<p>For much of its existence, PBS and its 300-plus member stations have enjoyed an elevated profile in the media landscape. Cable companies, for instance, have been forced to distribute PBS alongside commercial broadcasters like Fox, ABC and CBS, ensuring that PBS NewsHour, PBS Kids programming and shows like "Antiques Roadshow" were always just a channel or two away from "American Idol," "Survivor" and "Good Morning America."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Fast forward to the streaming age, and PBS suddenly competes with Netflix, Hulu and HBO Max, whose viewers have no idea what broadcast call signs like KCET or WGBH even stand for. That's why in 2019, coinciding with its 50th birthday, <a href="https://current.org/2019/11/pbs-begins-rollout-of-electric-blue-brand-refresh/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">PBS unveiled a rebranding</a> that was made with digital in mind. The broadcaster's logo was optimized for different screen sizes, and local stations were encouraged to incorporate PBS into their own brands. </p><p>PBS Chief Digital and Marketing Officer Ira Rubenstein estimated that to date, around 70% of its member stations have adopted the new brand identity, with some even undergoing a complete rebranding. "KLRU in Austin is now Austin PBS," he said. "UNC TV is now PBS North Carolina."</p><p>The brand refresh has helped to raise PBS' profile and made it easier for consumers to associate a PBS show they may stream on YouTube or Facebook with their local station. It has coincided with an expansion across digital platforms. Dedicated PBS apps are now available on five of the major smart TV platforms; deals with additional platforms are in the works and could be announced within weeks.</p><p>PBS has also begun to talk to ad-supported video services, including some that distribute programming via free 24/7 channels. The industry has seen <a href="https://www.protocol.com/plex-live-tv-linear-streaming" target="_self">a lot of growth for these kinds of channels</a>, with consumers embracing them as free replacements for the kind of curated lean-back experience offered by the basic cable grid. "It's an ongoing discussion," Rubenstein said. "But I hope that we'll have some announcements in the next three to six months."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Since PBS doesn't carry traditional advertising, any presence on these ad-supported services would primarily be about fulfilling the broadcaster's mission of informing the public. That's also how PBS has been using YouTube, where it has seen its audience grow significantly in recent months. Take PBS NewsHour, for example. The daily news program grew its digital audience by 80% year-over-year, to the tune of 53 million viewers in January. On YouTube alone, PBS NewsHour streamed 101 million videos last month, with total watch time growing by 239% year-over-year.</p><p>However, eyeballs alone don't pay the rent. Around 50% of the PBS budget is being paid by local stations, which rely on donations from individual viewers for a good chunk of their respective budgets. Back in the old days, that's where the pledge drive came in. Getting those viewers to open up their wallets is a lot harder when they jump back and forth between YouTube, social media and a bunch of streaming subscriptions every night. </p><p>That's why PBS introduced <a href="https://current.org/2020/09/pbs-expands-one-click-donations-to-amazon-fire-tv/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">one-click donations on Amazon's Fire TV</a> platform last fall. Fire TV users can now donate to their local station right from within the PBS app, using the credit card details that Amazon already has on file, and even join to become a sustaining member. The simplicity of this approach seems to be a hit with consumers, with Rubenstein pointing out that it has had a higher conversion rate than any other donation page for local PBS stations. "There's a very strong future for this," he said. "My vision is that we expand that one click to every platform."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>This process may take some time. Accepting donations comes with legal strings attached, and routing them to the right affiliate adds extra complexity. "None of these platforms are taking donations yet," Rubenstein said. "We're really breaking new ground."</p><p>However, Rubenstein argued that the results could be transformative for public media. "Digital fundraising on these platforms can become the most powerful way stations fundraise," he said.</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.
Transforming 2021
Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports
Digital verification systems could give people the freedom to work and travel. Here's how they could actually happen.
One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Photo: CommonPass
February 23, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 23, 2021
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
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</div></p><p>But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed. </p><h3>Competing projects, similar standards</h3><p>Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ibm-blockchain-supply-produce-coffee" target="_self">food production</a> and <a href="https://www.govtech.com/products/Blockchain-Voting-Debate-Heats-Up-After-Historic-Election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voting</a>, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol. </p><p>Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another. </p><p>Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others — in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in <a href="https://www.newtimes.co.rw/opinions/digital-technology-re-opening-africa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">East African countries</a> who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground. </p><p>"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors. </p><h3>Something for everyone </h3><p>With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."</p><p>For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems — we can do that every day," Piscini said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTM1MjYyM30._ykxxCyx3_wDbZrYgCcmK0QT2Ue1tZFdP5pf60kOmPU/img.jpg?width=980" id="c81c9" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3967636652192acfdaad341861263bc8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IATA's digital passport app.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: IATA</small></p><p>For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all <a href="https://simpleflying.com/qatar-iata-travel-pass-launch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expected</a> to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.</p><p>The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the <a href="https://www.who.int/groups/smart-vaccination-certificate-working-group" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group</a>. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months. </p><h3>What could go wrong?</h3><p>It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work — still masked, of course — scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>First off, there's the … reality … of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/health-care-revolution/electronic-health-records-after-coronavirus" target="_self">even paper records</a>. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said. </p><p>But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc4My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNzg3MTM2M30.RZtqR7F_FuXK1S24V6jVaqUZ0xOSG-gCwj00xU3fxcM/img.png?width=980" id="b0bd3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="11d8002d92c0cd6ef39b12fc7b8dccf8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">How CommonPass's app shows your records. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: CommonPass</small></p><p>And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iceland-covid-passports-canada-1.5904828" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">many countries around</a> the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said. </p><p>"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."</p><p>"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"</p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
People
How Chess.com built a streaming empire
Twitch users watched 18.3 million hours of chess content in January, nearly as much as they consumed throughout 2019. Last week, chess even surpassed League of Legends, Fortnite and Valorant as the most-watched gaming category.
To date, Chess.com has over 57 million members.
Photo: William West/Getty Images
February 22, 2021
Hirsh Chitkara (@ChitkaraHirsh) is a researcher at Protocol, based out of New York City. Before joining Protocol, he worked for Business Insider Intelligence, where he wrote about Big Tech, telecoms, workplace privacy, smart cities, and geopolitics. He also worked on the Strategy & Analytics team at the Cleveland Indians.
February 22, 2021
There's something inherently perverse in calling chess "open source." It's a bit like saying France "pivoted" from monarchy to republic, or that indoor plumbing was a "10x idea."
Nevertheless, it's true: Anyone has free rein to make a chess game.
<p>This makes it all the more surprising that one company — Chess.com — dominates the world of online chess. A company representative estimated that 65% to 70% of online players use Chess.com. As of this writing, there are 427,580 people around the world playing games on the site. Total registered users grew from <a href="https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-many-chess-players-are-there-in-the-world" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">20 million</a> in 2017 to over <a href="https://www.chess.com/members" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">57 million</a> today. </p><p>Some of Chess.com's success has to do with the network effect, since having more players improves matchmaking, which in turn attracts more players. Chess.com also excels at detecting cheaters and bots, an essential capability when we're all just a few clicks away from consulting <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMTcawGzbOk" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Magnus-level</a> chess engines. </p><p>In 2018, Chess.com <a href="https://www.chess.com/terms/komodo-chess-engine" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">acquired</a> an engine of its own, Komodo, which was <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-kings-of-chess-are-computers-1420827071" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">once considered the best</a> but has since been narrowly <a href="https://www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">usurped</a> by the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/science/chess-artificial-intelligence.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">open-source Stockfish</a> project. Regardless, investment in engines has been another key to Chess.com's success. Komodo offers post-game analysis, revealing player blunders and missed mate opportunities. Chess.com's engineers have also developed dozens of opponent AI personalities for the community: Some are adaptive, meaning they adjust the skill of each move according to how well the opponent plays; others bring chess legends back to life, using old game logs to emulate their skill and style of play. Following the release of "The Queen's Gambit," Chess.com worked with Netflix to develop engines that simulated Beth Harmon's gameplay from different periods in the show. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>These factors are foundational to the success of Chess.com, but they haven't been driving the incredible growth over the last year. That would be streaming. </p><p>"The first thing to understand is that this is many years in the making," Nick Barton, VP of business development at Chess.com, told Protocol. "We've had a partnership going with Twitch since 2018 in which the onus was on Chess.com — because of our market position within the playing sphere, the size of our playing platform and the size of our player base — to try to grow what we would call now the middle class of streamers."</p><p>Chess.com has showcased how investing in a streaming community can provide immense returns over time. Building out from a core group of Chess.com-sponsored streamers, chess has taken Twitch by storm. Throughout February, for instance, Chess.com has been hosting the latest iteration of its signature <a href="https://www.chess.com/news/view/chess-pogchamps-mrbeast-pokimane-xqc" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">PogChamps</a> tournament featuring Twitch megastars xQc, Rubius and Pokimane as well as rapper Logic and actor Rainn Wilson. Altogether, Twitch users <a href="https://twitchtracker.com/games/743" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">watched</a> 18.3 million hours of chess in January 2021 — nearly as much as they consumed in the entirety of 2019. And for a brief period last week, chess surpassed League of Legends, Fortnite and Valorant to become the <a href="https://twitter.com/chesscom/status/1361456501534175235?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">top gaming category</a> on Twitch by viewers. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><h3>A star is born</h3><p>When he was 2, Hikaru Nakamura <a href="https://hikarunakamura.com/about-hikaru/#:~:text=Hikaru%20Nakamura%20is%20an%20American%20Chess%20Grandmaster%20who%20was%20born,father%20and%20an%20American%20mother.&text=He%20began%20playing%20at%20the,author%20and%20teacher%20Sunil%20Weeramantry." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">moved</a> with his family from Japan to the U.S. At 7, he played his <a href="https://vault.si.com/vault/2001/12/17/on-the-board-early-only-14-hikaru-nakamura-is-the-best-young-us-player-since-bobby-fischer" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">first game</a> of chess, and at 15 years and 79 days old, he became the youngest American Grandmaster ever, <a href="https://www.uschesschamps.com/bio/hikaru-nakamura-9" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">breaking</a> Bobby Fischer's record. Nakamura has since become a five-time U.S. Chess Champion and the top-ranked player in blitz, a high-speed chess variant.</p><p>This is all to say that Nakamura is one of the greatest to ever play the game, which makes his status as a bona fide Twitch celebrity even more improbable. </p><p>Top chess players have historically been shrouded in mystery, more like academics than movie stars. Legends such as Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker and José Raúl Capablanca spent much of their lives sequestered indoors, developing chess theory in a bid to elevate the game to new heights. Tournaments gave the world an opportunity to behold their genius, though to the untrained eye, the events provided little in the way of entertainment. </p><p>Nakamura began streaming in July 2017. Danny Rensch, chief chess officer at Chess.com, had been an early advocate for Nakamura to take to Twitch. Looking back on his first stream <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6i69R8QrjA" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">three years later</a>, Nakamura joked that Chess.com locked him in a room and told him to stream if he wanted a contract. By his own standards, Nakamura's first stream was unpolished (referring to himself: "This dude needs to get some energy and some excitement because he sounds really depressed."). The inaugural stream still managed to attract several hundred viewers, thanks in part to promotion on the Chess.com landing page. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>In late 2018, despite being on the globetrotting professional chess circuit, Nakamura began streaming on a <a href="https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaru/statistics" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">semi-regular basis</a>. His camera presence improved, as did the channel's production value, thanks to a small team that included Chess.com employees. </p><p>Nakamura turned out to be a genuine streaming talent; his hard-hitting chess content was just as likely to garner views as his<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C30oYMzknPM" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> exhaustive ranking</a> of fast-food chains or his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV0ayW1WUuA" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">session playing the Windows XP pinball game</a>. His streams tap into the appeal of watching a prodigy show glimpses of being an otherwise ordinary person, as when Nakamura tries to identify the meat in his breakfast croissant or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJjfqODUmTI" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">scrolls through memes</a> posted by the <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/HikaruNakamura/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">r/HikaruNakamura</a> subreddit. </p><p>By the start of 2020, Nakamura amassed <a href="https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaru" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">over 80,000</a> Twitch followers — enough to be in the ranks of professional streamers, but not breaking the top 100. </p><p>Then lockdown happened. Sports leagues shut down and boredom became a way of life. This led to what Chess.com's Barton calls the chess meta. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"A meta on Twitch is sort of this respectfully ironic engagement of [something] like a game from childhood or an inside joke among a community," Barton said. "A few key content creators really wanted to tap into what we call the nostalgia meta … and chess became part of this." </p><p>One of those creators was xQc, a French-Canadian streamer and <a href="https://blog.gfuel.com/xqc" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">retired professional Overwatch player</a>. xQc is one of the top personalities on Twitch, where he <a href="https://twitchtracker.com/xqcow/statistics" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">regularly streams</a> nine or more hours a day, bouncing between games that catch his interest. Nakamura offered to give xQc a chess lesson while streaming. They went over fundamental tactics in this first session, which now has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSzIbeMYkd8" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">over 1.4 million</a> views on YouTube. </p><p>Though Nakamura's channel was already gaining viewership from the chess meta, his lesson with xQc marked an inflection point. In the weeks leading up to the lesson, Nakamura's channel <a href="https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaru" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">would attract</a> around 2,000 live viewers; by May 2020, average live viewership had soared above 13,000. His livestreams now average over 24,000 viewers, making him one of the <a href="https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaru" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">top global streamers</a>.</p><h3>Cross-pollination </h3><p>Nakamura wasn't the only chess streamer benefitting from the broader Twitch community's interest in the game. In fact, his channel accounts for <a href="https://twitchtracker.com/gmhikaru/statistics" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">around 20%</a> of <a href="https://twitchtracker.com/games/743" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">total time spent</a> watching chess on Twitch — a sizable amount, but he's not the only show in town. </p><p>Prior to the pandemic, Chess.com sponsored most of the top chess streamers, even though many of them averaged only a few hundred live viewers per stream. This early investment in the community paid off, as channels such as BotezLive (Alexandra Botez and Andrea Botez), GothamChess (Levy Rozman) and Chessbrah (Eric Hansen) saw viewership increase significantly over the course of 2020.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>This wasn't a simple case of a rising tide lifting all boats. Chess.com helped facilitate collaboration between streamers, which helped build a sense of online community and sustain viewers' interest in the game. The Botez sisters <a href="https://youtu.be/MrEX8NNkQ5Y" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">faced off against a blindfolded Nakamura</a>, Nakamura invited Rozman on his channel to help <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95057f-T0VE&t=2237s" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">rank the greatest chess players of all time</a>, Hansen challenged Alexandra Botez to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPOgGGsRnx0&t=132s" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a series of blitz games</a> with $1,000 on the line — the cycle went on and on. </p><p>"We were able to create this roster of diverse personalities so that someone could log on and watch an untitled player that might be at the same level they are or they could watch Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, who now has over a million followers on Twitch, and everything in between," Barton said. "This was the core focus for us for quite a few years, and it took a very long time for it to catch on." </p><p>Streaming provided a secondary benefit to the chess community in that it gave lifelong players a new way to monetize their talents. Similar to aspiring professional athletes, chess amateurs often dedicate their youth to the game, hoping to become one of the top 20 or so players who can make a living on tournament earnings alone. If amateurs failed to reach this ultra-elite status, their remaining options within the chess world were primarily limited to coaching or migrating to the business side. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>The Botez sisters are exemplary of the new paradigm. Alexandra and her younger sister Andrea started playing chess at age 6. They trained with their father and began winning competitive tournaments — so much so that they both were chosen to represent Canada in the Chess Olympiad. Alexandra won the <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/12/05/alexandra-botez-is-taking-the-chess-world-by-storm-live-on-twitch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">U.S. Girls National Championship</a> at 15 and later captained the Stanford chess club. </p><p>Despite all the accolades, Alexandra and Andrea didn't think they could make a living from chess. Andrea told Protocol that Alexandra began streaming while at Stanford "as a hobby, just something for fun, because she missed playing in competitive tournaments." After graduating, Alexandra co-founded a social media startup, but it <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/12/05/alexandra-botez-is-taking-the-chess-world-by-storm-live-on-twitch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">folded in 2019</a>. </p><p>It was only after the pandemic hit that the Botez sisters began streaming together regularly. Alexandra moved back home, and Andrea was wrapping up high school. "That was right before the chess boom, so we were able to build our foundation as a sibling channel," Andrea said. Since the start of the pandemic, BotezLive has seen <a href="https://twitchtracker.com/botezlive" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">live viewership increase</a> by more than 1,600%. In December 2020, Alexandra and Andrea <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhxgxfObL8Q" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">signed to Team Envy</a>, a top esports organization. </p><h3>Sustaining the meta</h3><p>If xQc's first stream with Nakamura was the most important event for jumpstarting the chess meta, then PogChamps has been the most important for sustaining it. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>Chess.com put up $50,000 in prize money for the <a href="https://www.chess.com/news/view/chess-com-pogchamps-twitch-rivals" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">first PogChamps tournament</a> in June 2020. It <a href="https://www.chess.com/news/view/voyboy-moistcr1tikal-win-chess-pogchamps-finals" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">featured</a> many of <a href="https://www.chess.com/article/view/chesscom-pogchamps" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Twitch's top streamers</a>, including xQc, Ludwig, moistCr1tikal and VoyBoy. Nakamura and Alexandra Botez coached the participants and later served as commentators for live matches. The inaugural tournament broke all sorts of viewership records, <a href="https://www.chess.com/news/view/voyboy-moistcr1tikal-win-chess-pogchamps-finals" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">including</a> the first chess stream to break 1 million unique views and the first time a chess video reached 150,000 concurrent viewers on Twitch. Many of these records have since been eclipsed by the second and third iteration of PogChamps, as well as the BlockChamps tournament (for Minecraft streamers) produced by Chess.com in collaboration with the Botez sisters. </p><p>PogChamps significantly raised the profile of chess in the esports and streaming world — so much so that the wider chess world took notice. Most feedback was positive, but a few prominent voices complained that it degraded the sport. Stefan Löffler, an editor at ChessTech, <a href="https://www.chesstech.org/2020/is-pogchamps-a-good-way-to-promote/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">likened PogChamps</a> to reality TV in which "celebrities embarrassed themselves for attention, publicity and a handful of cash." On his own stream, Grandmaster Ben Finegold disparaged PogChamps participants (referring to xQc as "QVC") as having "negative talent in life." Grandmaster Yan Nepomniachtchi was a bit more even-keeled when he <a href="https://twitter.com/lachesisq/status/1363614821002969091?s=20" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a>, "With all respect towards [Chess.com] and amount of work they put into promoting chess, #PogChamps3 as a popcorn stuff is replacing and displacing any real chess content and this is just terrifying."</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<a href="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY3MzI3NC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2NzQ3NjQwN30.HBdOgU5PTRXzZ16fN7u5IJC4za9SqCY0Y_ZgshKwvy0/img.png?width=980" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY3MzI3NC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2NzQ3NjQwN30.HBdOgU5PTRXzZ16fN7u5IJC4za9SqCY0Y_ZgshKwvy0/img.png?width=980" id="b8360" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="6e981fd7ddbe28ef19a2a1557b9c0197" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">WFM Alexandra Botez, GM Hikaru Nakamura and Chess.com's IM Danny Rensch were commentators during PogChamps 3. </small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">
Image: Chess.com
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</div></p><p>Politics aside, the simple fact is that Chess.com's streaming efforts have helped chess reach a broader audience than perhaps ever before.<br></p><p>This expanded audience includes people like Sunjay Josyula, a product manager in Michigan. Josyula turned to streamers after "The Queen's Gambit" renewed his interest in chess, which he hadn't played since childhood. "Now when I have time after work, I would rather fire up a chess game and play that versus watch a show," Josyula told Protocol. </p><p>Similarly, after lockdowns shut down the pickup basketball scene, D.C.-based journalist Cole Carnick found himself without a competitive outlet. He stumbled upon Nakamura and Rozman chess content on YouTube. He has now played over 4,000 games on Chess.com. "At the time, a lot of people were talking about how they wanted to get a pandemic hobby," Carnick said. "That wasn't the situation — it was just something I started doing, and then I realized I was playing several matches a day."</p><p>For those worried Twitch and PogChamps are changing chess for the worse, there may be some comfort in appreciating the longevity of the game. "Chess has been around for a very long time, and it will continue to exist long after the term esports has ceased to exist," Barton said.</p><p><strong><em>Correction</em></strong><em>: This story was updated Feb. 22 to correct the spelling of Sunjay Josyula's name.</em></p>
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Hirsh Chitkara (@ChitkaraHirsh) is a researcher at Protocol, based out of New York City. Before joining Protocol, he worked for Business Insider Intelligence, where he wrote about Big Tech, telecoms, workplace privacy, smart cities, and geopolitics. He also worked on the Strategy & Analytics team at the Cleveland Indians.
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