Image: Jane Seidel/Protocol
Source Code at CES: Everything’s a streaming war

Hey there! It's the last day of CES, which means T-minus 10 days until people start emailing us about CES 2022. Today we're talking streaming services, TV remotes, voice assistants, robot toilets, Samsung phones and lots more. Thanks for being here with us this week! Hope to see you in Vegas next year.
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Janko Roettgers writes: TV makers come to CES to show off all the weird and wonderful things they're working on, with LG and Samsung in particular always looking to outdo each other. However, the TVs that get the most headlines tend to never turn into actual products. Remember LG's self-bending TV?
Still, CES offers some interesting insights into how that industry is changing, and which companies have the best shot to dominate the market. This year, the battlegrounds are more software than hardware:
If there's anything that unites all those competing smart TV platforms, it's that everyone is all-in on streaming. All in. Some of the TV remote controls shown off at CES have up to seven branded buttons for streaming services! TV makers are also getting more aggressive about marketing their own ad-supported streaming services, with Samsung even getting its own virtual show floor for Samsung Ads, the unit that monetizes its TV Plus streaming service.
In other words: Your next TV may not be transparent and bendable, but at least you'll never run out of things to watch.
Amazon may not have been officially present at CES, but Alexa was everywhere. The voice assistant can now be in your car, your shower, your bedroom, everywhere. And with that, said Anne Toth, the head of Alexa Trust at Amazon, comes a pretty huge responsibility to make people feel good about using Alexa.
Transparency is the key here: Users want to understand what's happening, why their data is being collected and what they get in return. "There's lots of data looking at introducing Alexa into new countries and languages and dialects," Toth said, "where the ability to use that voice data to dramatically improve our responses." When people understand that Amazon is using their data to improve the product, and that they can opt out, she said people tend to feel more comfortable. It's the not knowing that they don't like.
"I think we are in a period of time right now where skepticism is at an all-time high," she said. Worries about what Big Tech knows about users and what companies do with that data are everywhere. And as we saw this week with the dustup over WhatsApp's new privacy policy, she said, you ignore those concerns at your peril: "Privacy is not dead; people really do care, and it's something that everybody should be paying attention to."
For Raj Hazra, who is senior vice president of corporate strategy and communications at Micron, there has never been a more thrilling time than this golden age of data. In this interview, Hazra describes how "we are now at the doorstep of taking things that we thought were science fiction and making them real, and it's only going to be exponentially faster going forward". Read more from Micron's Raj Hazra.
We've talked a lot about the interesting, plausible, practical stuff here the last few days. But the most fun stuff at CES is always the weird, wacky, who-even-thought-of-this stuff. Some of it is ridiculous — actually, all of it is ridiculous. But if you look hard, sometimes the future's in there.
It wasn't technically CES news, but it'll almost certainly sell more than anything else launched this week: The Samsung Galaxy S21 is official now. It's big and fast and has 58 cameras, all the things you'd expect from Samsung. But there are two winning features here: the price, which starting at $799 is $200 lower than your average Galaxy S, and the fact that the S Pen stylus now works on phones not called Note. The only big downside as far as I can tell? Bixby's still around.
For Raj Hazra, who is senior vice president of corporate strategy and communications at Micron, there has never been a more thrilling time than this golden age of data. In this interview, Hazra describes how "we are now at the doorstep of taking things that we thought were science fiction and making them real, and it's only going to be exponentially faster going forward". Read more from Micron's Raj Hazra.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Anna Kramer and Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day; see you tomorrow.
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