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February 26, 2020
Disney's outgoing CEO turned the media conglomerate into a tech company. The question now: Can his heir continue that trend?
Longtime Disney chief Bob Iger announced Tuesday he's stepping back from the role immediately, though he'll stay on as president through 2021. He is being replaced by Disney veteran Bob Chapek, the current head of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products.
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"On paper, Chapek's cross-company experience makes him better-suited to be CEO of Disney than when Iger was appointed CEO in 2005," advisers at LightShed Partners wrote in a note.
Still, Iger oversaw a huge, digital transformation at Disney since succeeding Michael Eisner in 2005. He rekindled a partnership with Apple, helped the company gain full control of Hulu, and topped it off with the launch of the Disney+ streaming service late last year. And he'll stay involved in his role as executive chairman directing "creative endeavors" until the end of 2021.
Those are large shoes to fill for his successor. But Chapek has his own track record in technical innovation.
An early digital adopter
Chapek joined Disney in 1993 and has worked in most parts of the company since, including helping oversee the Disney Vault home video strategy back when people actually bought physical media. He also helped steer digital distribution strategies, including major deals like with Apple's iTunes that Iger helped make a reality.
"Bob Chapek has been at the forefront of new technology for many years, and has the expertise and track record to guide and consolidate our future distribution efforts," Rich Ross, then head of Walt Disney Studios, said in 2009 when naming Chapek president of distribution, according to Variety.
From 2011 to 2015, Chapek led Disney's consumer products division, where the company says "he drove the technology-led transformation" while guiding everything from retail to app licensing. Then he took over parks, before a 2018 reorganization essentially put him in charge of parks, resorts, as well as his previous consumer products purview.
Speaking of parks …
Parks is one of Disney's largest endeavors, and it expanded greatly on Chapek's watch, with the opening of the company's first mainland China outpost, Shanghai Disney Resort, and the launch of Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland and Disney World.
Parks are actually a huge hub of innovation for things like frictionless ticketing and payments, and while Chapek was in charge, Disney led the pack with its RFID chip-equipped MagicBands — a (sometimes controversial) bracelet that serves as a connector for almost everything visitors can do in the parks and resorts.
The future is immersive
Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge was built on the technology prototyped via MagicBands, as well as other park innovations, to create an immersive experience where everything, including gift shops, rides and "cast members," are themed and supposed to transport visitors to a commercialized science fiction play world using a combination of technology, design and storytelling. Not quite "Westworld," but it's definitely trying to head in that direction.
"It feels like you're actually in Batuu. That's unique," Chapek told CNN last year. "We're really part of a big machine, a big story-telling machine, but we do it in a physical world."
That speaks to the kind of world-building Disney is going to need to keep doing under Chapek's leadership as it continues to build its various cinematic universes and experiment with new kinds of media frontiers, including virtual reality. In fact, Disney is already doing some of this now in parks through an attraction called The Void, where visitors can have virtual reality experiences that feature Disney properties like "Wreck-it Ralph" or "Star Wars."
But what about streaming?
One of the few areas in the company Chapek has less experience in is also a big part of its future: streaming. In fact, some Wall Street watchers thought the head of Disney's direct-to-consumer division, Kevin Mayer, would end up in the top spot because of his work in that arena.
That includes advisers at LightShed, who noted Chapek "has zero ties to the TV business." When it comes to streaming, Chapek, they wrote, "is the execution/operations exec," not the "strategy guy."
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But that may be where timing comes into play. Disney+ is already up and running, and much of the strategy is already in place, so Chapek is in more of a caretaker role — especially with Iger continuing to help steer the ship from the executive chairman spot.
With the plumbing already in place for streaming, there are plenty of other areas where Chapek could try to innovate — and declining theater ticket sales suggest that figuring out a path forward for theatrical releases might be a good next target. Maybe the one-time theme-park exec's history building big story-telling experiences can help as cinema learns how to make use of VR.
Andrea Peterson
Andrea Peterson ( @kansasalps) is an independent journalist with extensive experience reporting on technology policy. Peterson was a staff writer for The Washington Post from 2013 through the end of 2016. Her byline has also been published by POLITICO, Ars Technica, The Daily Beast, Slate and other outlets.
Protocol | Fintech
Plaid’s COO is riding fintech’s choppy waves
He's a striking presence on the beach. If he navigates Plaid's data challenges, Eric Sager will loom large in the financial world as well.
Plaid COO Eric Sager is an avid surfer.
Photo: Plaid
March 4, 2021
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
March 4, 2021
Eric Sager is an avid surfer. It's a fitting passion for the No. 2 executive at Plaid, a startup that's riding fintech's rough waters — including a rogue wave on the horizon that could cause a wipeout.
As Plaid's chief operating officer, Sager has been helping the startup navigate that choppiness, from an abandoned merger with Visa to a harsh critique by the CEO of a top Wall Street bank.
<p>But things have been breaking nicely for Plaid during the COVID-19 crisis, which has let the company really charge. </p><p>Plaid, which is based in San Francisco and has more than 600 employees, charges financial apps for a service that helps consumers verify and connect their bank accounts, a key step for moving and managing their money. It also, controversially, pulls transaction data from those newly connected accounts and sells insights based on that information.</p><h3>Surfer-in-chief</h3><p>Plaid's surfer-in-chief describes the customer base as a series of waves.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"The first wave is the core fintech companies — the Robinhoods, the Venmos, the Squares, the Chimes," he said, noting how these "early fintechs are getting more and more successful."</p><p>"The second wave [composed of] banks and financial institutions are rapidly moving to digitize. … The third wave are the Googles, the Apples, the Lyfts, the Teslas. Everybody is moving towards building digital financial services."</p><p>"We're riding all three of those," he added. "If anything keeps me up at night it's making sure that we continue to kind of scale the business."</p><p>Sager admits that, as a surfer bro, he can be an intimidating presence at the beach.</p><p><br></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<a href="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTcxMzc4NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1ODQ1Mjc4NX0.2-3V-Md9VtATd0QhCvcc6VFQNXuu7_reFyIPjdEVuAA/img.jpg?width=980" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTcxMzc4NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1ODQ1Mjc4NX0.2-3V-Md9VtATd0QhCvcc6VFQNXuu7_reFyIPjdEVuAA/img.jpg?width=980" id="3c170" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4978fb31443a663192df9fc1643a9eb4" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Sager with wife Melissa Miao.</small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Photo: Plaid</small>
</p><p><br></p><p>"I'm 6'8", I have a 10-foot-board and my family has a history of skin cancer, so I go out there with a hat," he told Protocol. "So all the little kids that are surfing always make fun of me. But once I'm on the wave, all the short boarders get out of the way."</p><p>Plaid's latest charge is toward payroll data. On Thursday, the company unveiled a new product that would make it easier to verify employee income for different financing needs, including securing a loan, applying for a mortgage or leasing a car. </p><p>Plaid is supporting real-time payroll authentication for more than 250,000 of the largest employers in the U.S., which the company estimates makes up to 60% of the total working population. </p><p>"It was something we heard a lot from customers who were being asked to verify income and so forth," Sager said. "Every single lending customer we have would love to have this information for the exact same reason that it makes the onboarding flow easier."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Melody Brue, analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, said the new offering could "open up so many possibilities for employers, lenders, neobanks — pretty much everyone in the fintech ecosystem." </p><p>"Access to payroll data can change the way lenders look at underwriting and servicing loans and significantly cut costs and time spent on verification," she told Protocol. </p><h3>'A blessing in disguise'</h3><p>It's Plaid's first major product rollout since the collapse of merger talks with Visa. Brue called <a href="https://www.protocol.com/plaid-visa-deal" target="_self">the scuttling of the deal</a> "a blessing in disguise" after Plaid saw stronger demand for its infrastructure in the COVID-19 crisis. The company, which has raised $310 million in funding from investors that include Goldman Sachs, Citi Ventures and Visa, was last valued at $5.3 billion. That has <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/plaid-shareholders-field-offers-at-15-billion-after-merger-collapse" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reportedly jumped to $15 billion</a> following the collapse of the Visa deal.</p><p>But Plaid's latest product offering, she said, will also likely make it more of a target: "This will likely be seen as a threat to financial institutions, as they already fear security issues from open banking and now may fear losing customers."</p><p>Plaid emerged as a powerhouse by providing banks and financial startups real-time access to consumer financial data, such as bank and investment accounts. Plaid, whose services integrate with 11,000 financial institutions, has more than 4,000 customers, including Square, PayPal, Robinhood, SoFi and Affirm.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>But Plaid has taken fire for the way it manages financial data. "Plaid has irritated a lot of the banks," Logan Allin, managing general partner and founder of Fin Venture Capital, told Protocol. "You heard Jamie Dimon saying Plaid's playing dirty, right?"</p><p>He was referring to the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/15/jamie-dimon-says-jpmorgan-chase-should-absolutely-be-scared-s-less-about-fintech-threat.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">JPMorgan Chase CEO's remark</a> on a call with analysts calling out "people who improperly use data that's been given to them, like Plaid." Dimon's remarks came despite a 2018 agreement the companies signed that they said would "protect customer data."</p><p>Plaid also faces a class action lawsuit filed by a consumer, accusing the company of using deceptive and misleading data practices.</p><p>"Imagine there is a company that knows every dollar you deposit or withdraw, every dollar you charge or pay to your credit card and every dollar you put away for retirement, within hours after you make the transaction," <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.361471/gov.uscourts.cand.361471.1.0.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the lawsuit filed on behalf of California resident</a> Logan Mitchell began. "Imagine that, as far as you know, you never provided your username and password to this company or otherwise authorized it to access your online accounts."</p><p>The lawsuit argued that Plaid "acquired its mountain of consumer data by deceiving consumers into giving Plaid the key to their financial lives: their bank usernames and passwords." It accused the startup of committing "fraud by erecting a sophisticated edifice of deceit to trick users into thinking that they are logging into their financial institutions, when in fact they are turning over their credentials to Plaid."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>Sager declined to comment on the lawsuit or Dimon's remarks. But he said Plaid has built features meant to give consumers control over their data. "If you're a consumer, you can log on to a dashboard, you can see every single connection you've ever made, you can permission and un-permission that information."</p><h3>Debate over data access</h3><p>However, critics, including some fintechs, argue that Plaid does not offer enough clear and convenient opportunities for consumers to opt out of having their data accessed. Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, CEO and cofounder of Flinks, a Plaid rival based in Montreal — it's been called the "Canadian Plaid" — would not comment directly about Plaid, but he said consumer consent in fintech data aggregation is a serious issue. </p><p>"The bad data practices that we've seen in the market are practices where there will be an ongoing aggregation of the data on a daily basis, without having expressly giving the consent to do so," he told Protocol. "Our thesis is that that's not Flinks' data, that's the consumers' data. And we have no right to use that data, unless it's clear that they are giving us that right."</p><p>Steve Smith, CEO of Finicity, another Plaid rival which was recently acquired by Mastercard, also emphasized the need for "full transparency" in the way consumer financial data is accessed. He stressed the importance of "bringing down the walled garden of data, but doing it in a very responsible way."</p><p>"I can't speak to Plaid's specific data governance policy or Yodlee's specific data governance policy," Smith told Protocol, referring to another major data aggregator which has <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/dataprivacy-envestnet-yodlee/envestnet-yodlee-seek-dismissal-of-privacy-lawsuit-over-financial-data-collection-idUSL1N2HR39K" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">also been sued for its data collection practices</a>. "Clearly, I think you'll find differences between the three organizations and the way they view data or the way they approach this conversation."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Sager stressed that making all that data accessible to banks and fintechs has been a game changer for many consumers. "A lot of the innovation fintech is helping address is suddenly people are getting products that they previously weren't able to get," he said.</p><p>His views were shaped by an unusual career. Born and raised in Germany, he moved to the U.S. as a high school exchange student. He had hoped to go to California or Hawaii, for the surfing spots, but the program sent him instead to Mississippi where he also went to college.</p><p>His first job after graduation was with Capital One. He was part of a team at the credit-card issuer that ran tests to evaluate the effectiveness of direct mail campaigns. "What's the difference in response rate if the letter is blue versus pink versus white?" he said. "What's the difference in response rate if the font on the APR is 10 points versus 12 points? There's just nothing we didn't test."</p><p>That included the unorthodox, and legally dubious idea, of putting a dollar bill inside promotional mailers. That didn't sit well with Capital One's management, who promptly told them to shut it down.</p><p>"Well, I didn't put it in there myself," Sager said of the dollar bill scheme, laughing. "The results were good, but it's obviously not the kind of thing you want to be doing at scale so we shut that down. It was my first job. I was 22 and it was probably not the best judgment call."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>He subsequently got an MBA from Harvard before working at Bain. He then plunged into the fintech world, first as head of sales at Square, then as chief revenue officer at BlueVine, a small business-financing startup. <em>[Disclosure: This reporter worked with Sager at BlueVine.]</em></p><p>When he joined Plaid as COO in 2019, it was a challenging transition. Plaid was six years old, and still growing quickly. He was the new guy, and he didn't want to screw things up.</p><p>For the first time in his executive career, Sager said, he was leading a team that he didn't help build from the ground up. He was used to being one of the most experienced people in the room.</p><p>"I was used to saying, 'Hey, I built this. I actually was there when we built it from zero to one or from one to two,'" he said. "Suddenly, you're in a world where it's already at 10. It was already a big, successful company. Suddenly, you're in a situation where you're going literally all day long talking to somebody else and they know way more, but they're still looking to you as if you should have some unique insight. It will make you feel dumb very quickly."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>Charley Ma, who was a growth manager at Plaid when Sager joined the startup and is now a general manager at Alloy, remembered him as an effective leader. "He's very German, very direct, which I like," he told Protocol. </p><h3>Democratizing finance</h3><p>Brue of Moor Insights & Strategy said Sager has become instrumental in "driving the company" in the direction of "actually democratizing finance. The company is giving people access to financial services they've previously been excluded from."</p><p>That approach was influenced by Sager's early years in the U.S.. His first credit card after moving to the U.S. from Germany had an APR of roughly 30%, he said. "I just didn't have a good credit score because I just had never been part of the U.S. system," he said. "Don't get me wrong. Nobody should feel sorry for me. I had a good job and I could find other ways of doing it."</p><p>"But think about how many people in the U.S. aren't in that position — they don't have the history, they can't get loans or they have to get really really expensive loans. You're in a bad cycle. You're trying to take care of your family. You're forced to take high-interest loans. Now you have to work to pay off the high-interest loans and before you know it, you end up in a very negative spiral."</p><p>Fintech is helping fix this, he said. Broader data access is making it possible to offer better financing to more consumers, including those who may not have what's traditionally considered stellar credit. "At the end of the day right, better data means better underwriting," Sager said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>In fact, having more data could have improved the work he did at Capital One, he said: "If we just had some of the data that we now have, we would have been able to make much better decisions. We would have been able to offer people much lower rates."</p><p>"It's not impossible" for a consumer to provide more data then or now, he said. "The other version 10 years ago would have been you asked for all the bank statements, I go print them out, I put them in the mail or I go go to the office and drop them off and you work through all that. It's not like it couldn't be done, but it's about removing the friction."</p><p>Sager acknowledged that data access has become a "flashpoint" in financial services. Banks and other traditional financial institutions have been <a href="https://www.protocol.com/fintech/cfpb-banks-financial-data" target="_self">resisting calls to make consumer data</a> they collect and hold more accessible to new financial players. </p><p>Leboeuf, the Flinks CEO, said it's a debate in which his company and others are aligned with Plaid: "I do think that the best approach is driven by Plaid and Flinks because ultimately we are working for the best interests of the applications and the consumers."</p><p>Sager echoed that view, saying: "At the end of the day, it's the consumer's data. Whoever you've been banking with, it's your data and you should have the same rights to that data digitally as you would if you were to print out your bank statement, if you wanted to use that to get a car loan, if you wanted to use that to input that information manually into an Excel spreadsheet so you could do your budgeting — whatever it is, it's the consumers' data."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>It's the view Sager hopes will prevail as Plaid gears up for that swell on the horizon. Will Sager get a clean ride — or will Plaid find itself locked in?</p>
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Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
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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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