Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 181 of the IA cast. All right, with me today, I have our usual crew. We have Marty Soba.

Hey, all.

We have Angie Fisher.

Hello.

And we have Lynn Snyder. Welcome back to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me back. I'm excited.

And then we have Unmute in the YouTube saying hi.

One castle up to another.

Yes.

So I want to say thank you all for joining us. It's going to be a great episode. We have a lot of content. We're going to try not to keep you for an hour and a half today, as we did last time. We had a lot to talk about, and there's quite a few things to talk about today as well, starting with quite a bit of tech news. So we had another conference this week. We had Microsoft Build, which is their developer conference. It's a lot shorter than other episode, other developer conferences. Google I O went for like three days. Microsoft goes for went for two days at least. The announcements did I don't know if Build went longer than that, but I think it was mainly two or three days. And then Apple WWDC goes for a week. So we got some fairly interesting announcements.

Their keynotes are shorter too, aren't they?

A little bit, but I think, yeah, the main keynote from Satya Nadella was like 25 minutes, and then they had other keynotes that showcased more of what he would talked about. But it was very interesting. There was a lot of talk of new products and things coming from Microsoft and interestingly, I think the coolest thing that we saw was Windows Copilot. What do you guys think of that?

Very far reaching, that's for sure. Intriguing.

I'd love to see it in the real world. How it's going to work.

That Copilot, like the 365 stuff you got, just the general guide is going to live in. Where is it in your taskbar?

Yeah.

I'm all about AI stuff, so this is exciting to me.

Definitely. We'll have to see how it gets implemented works in real life. Hopefully once it gets announced and it's actually out, it's not going to be too buggy in the first round. But we'll have to see.

Right? And interestingly with this Copilot, they make their little ads and commercials go so fast, but I was seeing things come across with like, phone link being used. I was seeing things with the different apps throughout Windows and just moving things back and forth. It's very interesting how much they're bringing into all of integrating basically chat GPT.

Into Windows and did anyone catch or maybe they didn't announce it. Are there any minimum requirements for being able to run it?

Most likely the latest versions of Windows Eleven. If you can run that, then you can run it's.

I think it's just awesome to see Microsoft sort of waking up when we would think about interesting news coming out of tech. It didn't particularly come from Microsoft. And now Microsoft is really getting a lot of attention and a lot of press with all these new things. Microsoft rises again.

Well, Microsoft is AI too. Yeah. Microsoft is a software company we've talked about. Apple is a hardware company and Google kind of does a little bit of every google is a we want your stuff company, your information. Yes. And Microsoft is known for pushing their own stuff like Edge and things like that, very heavily. And I've been hearing they're going to change the UI of Edge again, which how many times does that make that one thing?

When you lose count, that turns into an issue, I think.

Exactly.

Usually it means access issues or it has in the past.

Yes. One thing that concerns me is when we see Microsoft making these changes, what does that mean for, like you said, accessibility and will things work really? Because they're making so many changes at a time. What is that going to look like? So I think we just need to keep an eye on it. One thing that I do like though, is that they've added Bing into Chat GPT, like the actual Chat GPT website. If you're on GPT Four, you can select search using Bing. It even has the Bing logo and everything in there.

I use it all the time. I really enjoy it. I find it to be extremely helpful. Like I said, Chat is never going to look the same, I don't think.

Is that a general search to free accounts or just two plus accounts?

Right now it's just two plus.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Okay.

They're using a higher level, I think they're using 4.0 and plus.

Right. And I think you have to enable that.

Right?

You have to enable or have they just rolled it out to everyone?

You have to enable it and it's still 25 messages for 3 hours. I'm wondering when that requirement is going to go away.

Yeah, that seems so crazy.

Even in the paid version?

Even in the paid version, yeah.

Wow.

Are their servers being slammed that much that they can't get enough server support to get I mean, I don't understand. I haven't been able to figure that out.

Well, GPT Four's thinking power is so much higher and more precise than GPT 3.5. Like, most of us are still on the waiting list. Not all of us, but most of us are still on the waiting list to get API support for GPT Four.

Yeah, I'm still on the waiting list.

As well, so we'll get it when we get it. But it's just fantastic what we have been able to get so far.

Typically, it used to be that you would be working in Chat GPT and it would always say, well, I can't answer that question because my language models were changed, were updated from 2021 or something. That's crazy. Now we don't have that limitation because of the web access that we have.

I asked it an interesting and I'll link to this in the show notes, but I asked it to explain music fundamentals to someone that's a software developer. And I think it did a pretty good job. I actually do have a better understanding of music after reading that. And I think it's interesting that you can share a conversation now. I don't know how long that's been a thing, but there's a share conversation button that generates a link to make that conversation public that's been there.

I love it though.

That's so cool.

Because before what I was doing is just copying. Like if I wanted to copy a relevant portion of the chat, I could just long way, basically. But now it's so much simpler.

And that really who would have ever thought a year ago that Bing would have been a thing? That Bing would start becoming the superstar that it is.

Yeah, that's definitely interesting.

I know. I hadn't even used Bing in until these recent updates. Bing was just not something I ever even came in contact with. It was always Google. And I say, I can't remember the last time I looked something up on Google. It's been a while.

Me too. And I don't do searching in the same way that we always did. I haven't done it that way in months. I love it this way. It's so much faster. I feel like the information is a lot more accurate or a lot more you get it what you want much more quickly.

Right.

I've liked being for a long time just because it's different from Google. I feel like Google has become too. They rest on their laurels, as they say. The search sometimes is not even that relevant lately, in the past year or two, like if I go to look for code, I would like to get updated code results, not what they think is more relevant to popularity. And I feel like Google has become that. We're going to show you what's popular, not exactly what you want to find.

Right. And one of the things that really annoys me started to really annoy me about Google search is that, for example, if I'm doing a search for clay, I want air dry clay, but I don't want polymer. It used to be that you could use the boolean expressions or you could use the hyphen in front of the word and you could say, I don't want polymer. Don't show me that now. It doesn't work. I tell it I don't want polymer. What does it show me? Polymer clay, tools and stuff. And it really annoys me. I told it not to show me that.

Right. And that's one thing that a problem with Google is they think they know better and they change things. So there may be new ways of doing search like that, and they may have just changed it so who knows?

And then people have been able to sort of goose the algorithms and to put themselves front and center in the I mean, there's a whole industry of I forget search optimization.

Yeah.

And that's really unfortunate because we're not really getting the best searches, we're just getting the ones that play the game right and get themselves in the top spots.

Well, we'll get off Search here in a minute, but I think that's really where search is letting us down is it's not about what's relevant, but what's promoted, what's the ad space, what's paid for, what really kills it when you're.

Trying to do hardcore research into something.

Right. So become good prompt engineers, everybody.

Yeah.

So I think Microsoft build was great. I'm really excited about the Windows Copilot. Some things that are coming to Windows will be excellent. I'm really excited to see what they showed somebody changing from light mode to dark mode and back again with Copilot. And they also talked about for developers to build their own Copilots that can talk to each other. Now, that's pretty interesting.

That's bots across.

Did they give a timeline on when they thought it was going to be coming out to the public?

I'm sure they did. I didn't see it on the initial keynotes.

I love it. That's brilliant. That is going to be so much fun.

So there's just a lot of things coming very soon. I would like to say that the Windows Copilot is going to be a neat feature, but once I can actually say Mac had it first, Mac GPT. Now, granted, we have to pay for the API use, but if you really think about it though, guys, you're paying for it somewhere.

How long will it be before Apple scoops that?

Well, yes, but what I'm saying is, for Windows Copilot, you're paying for it somewhere. Whether it's Microsoft is digging all of that information you're typing into Copilot, you all know that either you're going to.

Pay for it or you're going to be bombarded with advertising. There are your two choices and you're.

Making the app better by using it.

Yeah, by training. Right. I know that when you go into Chat GPT, it does have a thing that if you don't want your data used to train, you can actually tell it that that you don't want your data used for training. I personally don't because I don't care. It can use my data because I have sort of an internal rule that I follow that says that anything I type into that search box can end up anywhere on the Internet.

If you type the keys online, you would expect them to go out to everybody.

Yeah.

Privacy is a misnomer.

I mean, within reason. There's ways that you can guarantee or get better at making yourself more private, but if you post it on something on the Internet, expect it to get out. That's why I personally have an open book policy. People pretty much know what I want them to see and not what.

That's right.

So Microsoft build really cool stuff. Now, Amazon, we talked about some products that Amazon released a week ago, but they released another. Amazon announced something that I thought was very interesting. The Echo pop was neat. Several devices they announced are pretty neat. But this, I think, really caught my attention because Google just announced the Pixel Tablet. Right. $430 tablet. Where 130 was the speaker? Or was it 499? I don't remember. But that speaker was $130. It's built in or that comes with the tablet. This Amazon tablet is $230, guys. And it has a pin and a keyboard, and I believe those all come with it.

Wow.

Same size too, isn't it?

As the Google eleven inch.

Yeah.

So that's an Android tablet, is that right? Yeah.

What's running it's actually an Amazon Fire tablet. So Fire is the operating system that's on their tablet devices, amazon's tablet devices, but they customize it with an Android base. They call it Fire because they make it an Amazon. What do you want to see? Like a customized Amazon front?

I wonder how Braille support is going to be on that thing.

I don't know how Braille support has been on the other Fire tablets, but it is a fork of Android and it has their voice view screen reader. It does not use Talkback, so it has their own gestures, which for a long time have been more similar to iOS gestures.

Okay.

I've got a Fire Eight tablet that's been sitting in a drawer for about two years.

I mean, I would say definitely the reason why it's so inexpensive is I think Amazon's strategy is to sell the hardware super inexpensive or as inexpensive as they can possibly get it so that they get you into their ecosystem and you'll buy all of their products on Amazon and stream all of the Amazon things. All of that stuff. So you're pretty much locked into their ecosystem on one of those tablets.

Exactly right.

The walled garden, as they used to say about AOL.

Well, they say that about Apple, too. It's definitely a walled garden. And interestingly, what's made Amazon very popular is the Windows subsystem for Android is based on the Amazon Fire store.

Well, they say that this tablet, from what I read, is supposed to be more of a productivity right, exactly. Type of tablet.

And $230 for a tablet with a keyboard and pin. How are you going to beat that?

The keyboard excites me quite a lot. That's really cool.

Does anyone know what kind of productivity apps are going to add to this or what's going to be the productivity part about it?

Well, I know they're probably going to have notetaking all that, but they do have their own store where you can download apps. There is a way, it's not sanctioned by Amazon, but a lot of people put Google play services on their Fire tablet. So it is a thing. I've never tried it. So you can get other apps, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft Office and all those since they have a partnership with Amazon for the Windows subsystem part, I'm sure Office and all those productivity apps will be there and things like that.

It'd be interesting to see how they run on that tablet.

I may have to pick one up just because.

Another thing to add to your drawer.

Yes. Yeah, most likely I have a I have a Fire Eight in in this drawer next to me. I have a Kindle Oasis because I do love to read books, but my eyes get tired, so I just stop using it. Yeah, but I love the paper experience. It does look like you're looking at paper like ink on that screen. So it's really a neat experience to look at books that way.

Yeah.

I think the thing that's more exciting, at least to me anyway, is the speaker that comes with a battery in it, because that's pretty cool. You can take it with you anywhere you want to go on a battery and still be in that ecosystem if that's something that interests you. I think everything has a place. So if you're in that ecosystem and you want to bring a little speaker with you and you can just prop it up anywhere, either if you're working or you're going somewhere, that's kind of a cool little feature, I think.

And $230 for a tablet is not bad. It kind of reminds me of the Nexus Seven.

I believe it also comes with an SD card slot. Right?

I haven't seen that, but that would be really cool if it does, that'd be exciting.

Yeah, I'd like to see how it runs. Is it slow and sluggish, clunky, or does it run pretty smooth and good and you can get away with a lot with it?

Yeah.

Probably having that wall garden and just having those certain apps makes the system more streamlined and you don't have people putting stuff on there that might slow it down so they have more control.

Yeah, you can do a lot of things. It's basically still android. Let's move on to our next thing. I was looking for a good segue and I just couldn't do it. So final cut and Logic pro for iPad. If you follow this podcast, you've probably been inundated with a bunch of episodes showing our Discover casts of these products. And I'm curious, have you guys listened or watched those episodes? What were your takeaways?

I was disappointed in the voiceover access a little bit in Final Cut especially.

And I thought you would think that little things like voiceover being able to identify buttons and things like that would be pretty spot on. And even in the setup I saw that you found in labels that weren't labeled correctly, or maybe they weren't labeled at all, or they said something they shouldn't have said right away, like, within the first few minutes of the setup. So I thought that was you would think they would take a little more time and polish that before they would release it to the public.

Appreciate that it's a 1.0. It's a first time out of the gate release, and I'm sure they will improve it, but blind people want to edit video, too. Guys, come on.

Yeah.

And thinking, oh, I can do a GoPro stuff. It's going to be really exciting. I thought get an iPad and have that be my portable editing, little on the go studio type thing, but I don't know.

All right, so we have a little surprise for you all. Jeff Bishop just joined us. Hi, Jeff.

Hey, Michael. Hi, everybody.

Yeah.

Hey, Jeff.

Come to us. Podcast.

Yeah. Welcome to the show.

It's been a week.

It has been a week.

We've had a lot of crazy out there.

Yeah.

A lot of stuff.

A lot of great stuff coming out. A lot of very questionable releases from Apple. We've been talking about we've been talking about Final Cut and Logic pro that we did several Discover casts on the IA cast about. And did you get a chance to really look into this, Jeff? What are your thoughts on it?

I've listened to the Discover cast, and I have not had a chance to play with them. I have an iPad six generation Mini, and I think that should be able to run them.

You have to have one of the M processors.

Okay.

Yeah.

But I don't know that I would use Final Cut as much. Logic is really where I'm wanting to go. But from what you guys were showing on the cast, it looks like it's going to be a little difficult from a voiceover perspective. Right.

So logic is better. It still could use a lot of polish and a lot of work for Voiceover users. But Final Cut is really the one that really is showing its incompleteness, I guess, because there were entire buttons and labels that were not labeled, and there were even controls where I was going through a dialogue, and you could see okay. The worst one was when it was asking me to subscribe to Final Cut. Okay. And I flicked past the last option on that screen, and all of the controls were visible to Voiceover.

And this was in the setup process. Right.

During the setup process, I could use the Final Cut app with the setup screen still loaded with Voiceover.

Nice. Apple. Wow.

And it was like that in several dialogues. Like, there would be a split button to change to different settings, but Voiceover would just read all the settings as if that split button didn't do anything, so somebody didn't test.

Also, it sounded like they were running out of time. They were coming down to the deadline of having to get it out. And I think that towards the end, I think some things fell through the cracks.

And also, let me ask you this, though. Do you think that this is something where they released it and maybe we're going to see something in 17 that sort of helps resolve some of these.

Issues that these apps have that's possible?

It'd be great if they dropped some updates that fix some of the issues.

Yeah, but I'm wondering if there's new technology stack that's coming, some new that's possible, like AI driven thing. I don't know.

But either way, like in Final Cut, there's no accessible way to move the playhead, at least in Logic Pro, I could use the rotor and move the playhead. And in Final Cut, I could double tap and hold and drag the playhead sometimes. But like if board support is really.

Rudimentary for that's an even bigger challenge.

Yeah. And I can move the key, the playhead by frame, but I couldn't move it by any other increment. And whenever I would play and pause, I'd have to put voiceover focus back on the playhead again in Vo space to be able to move by frame. So that was just a very big disappointment in Final Cut. I was very surprised that the experience was not great, and maybe it's down.

To just knowing how to use it, but I didn't find, like, if you're a new user, I didn't find the process of getting your media into the right place in the app very intuitive either.

Well, there's a bigger problem with that and that's that Apple did not add the ability to move multiple files into Final Cut or Logic. So, like on the Mac, I can take whenever I edit this podcast, I take all of our tracks and drag all four of them or all five into Logic Pro, and it just says, what do you want to do with these? I press the Enter, boom, we're done. I would have to drag each individual track into Logic for iPad from the files app.

What do they do about the scratch disk and all that stuff? Do they just put that somewhere and they don't tell you where it is and you got to go find it or how does that work?

Well, is that like one of the instruments?

No, it's like the overload files you get after editing. It's called the scratch disk. It usually stacks up, at least on the Mac platform, a ton of extra hard drive space. If you don't keep track of it and empty it out, it'll kind of eat up hard drive space.

Well, see, when I use a logic project, I just take my project, I save it as a logic project somewhere, and then I bounce the files. That's all I do. So they just save everything into a logic project inside of Logic Pro's application. And that's another thing, is that you can export out to Mac, but you cannot bring Logic projects or final cut projects from the Mac to the iPad. It's not strange to me.

It's an M One processor. It's not like I couldn't handle it, I wouldn't think.

Yeah, but it's not like it's just problems on the accessibility and these apps have genuine problems that need to be fixed.

Yeah, we were talking about this earlier michael and I were talking about this earlier, where it would be really cool if they made a way that when you fire it up, this could be on the Mac platform as well. You get to choose what it is you're going to do. So, for example, if you're going to do music, then, yeah, it'll load up all the music things, the drum beats and synths and all that stuff. But if you're going to do a podcast, it'd be great. If there was a podcast option, it would load up only what you needed to do a podcast and it would sort of hide all the other things that you wouldn't need.

And there is a way to do that, but you have to create it yourself. They don't have that built in now. Interestingly, in the past they did, they had a podcast template for GarageBand and Logic, but they took all of it out. It's very interesting. Like, Apple had a lot of other things, like macOS Server used to have, like Apache and all kinds of other really cool things in those applications. And they're like, well, we don't want to support all this. We're taking it out.

Yeah. And at this point, I don't even think they have Server anymore. I think they stopped supporting it.

Yes, they do.

Where would you get it now?

It's on the mac. It's built in still? No, it's in the Mac App store. It is in the App Store. And they still do betas for it during beta cycles.

They used to promote it much differently, I guess, than they do now.

Yes, they do it's now more of troubleshooting IoT things and network traffic and things like that. So very different use cases. So again, we're going to keep on the lookout for changes for these applications because I do think that they are a big step forward for professional development on the iPad. Now, let me ask you guys this. Do you guys think that having DaVinci Resolve on the iPad kind of told Apple, we probably should get into this space?

I say no. I think that Apple does what they want when they want to do it. I don't think they typically follow what other people are doing. I think DaVinci Resolve came out a bit after the M One iPads came out. And up until now, since these M One iPads, there's M One and M Two versions. Now, I think that everyone's been asking what's the reason for all of this overly powered hardware? If Apple doesn't have anything to put on there that is going to utilize that overly powered hardware and I think that's been the question since they've been starting to put M one M Two processors in these iPads, and so they're just now putting their pro apps on there.

So since we've seen two pro apps, do you think we'll see the third as an Xcode, maybe at WWE?

It depends. I think the biggest thing is they need to allow the iPad to be able to multitask. When I say multitask, I mean do more than one task at the same time. In the sense of, for example, if you're a podcaster and you're going to be in Zoom and you also want to be able to record locally, you should be able to do that. If you're going to be doing Xcode, then you're going to want to have a test window up while you're writing your code so you can kind of see what's going on. They need to kind of cross that barrier where the iPad, it's definitely powerful enough, but they need to make it so that you can do multiple tasks like that at the same time. I think once they do that, I think then yeah.

Now, what's interesting, and I think this might be a sign of things to come swiftly coding. Yeah, I like that. I think that's the theme for WWDC, right? Swiftly developing, I think is hard developing. Yeah. One of the things that's interesting in Logic Pro is some of the settings. Like, one, it was run in background, and that is Logic Pro can be looking for audio while running in the background. And I'm curious what that means. But also one thing that is different in Logic Pro that I have not seen in other apps, and I think we're going to start seeing it soon. You can select your audio destination and your microphone manually. That is huge because we aren't able to do that on any other app on the iPad.

Can you go to an external device as well, if you need to?

Yes.

That's cool.

So, in other words, I had the profile hooked up and I could pick the profile or iPad speaker as my speakers, or I could pick the iPad microphone. I mean iPad. Yeah, microphone. The Sennheiser profile or Airplay or no, those two as the microphone. So we're getting to that computer like experience with these apps, but I think it's a stepping stone. We took that first step. Now we just need to keep going and really encouraging Apple to go and make it better. Right. And as a community, we need to let them know, like, hey, we really do want this. We love it, we just want it better. Right?

Definitely.

You guys have any final thoughts on these apps before we move on?

I want an iPad.

Yeah, I feel like that too. For the first time, I never really thought that there was a use case for an iPad. For me, being totally blind, but as the hardware in. These iPads gets more advanced, I can start to make a use case, especially if I can use it with a keyboard or a rail display. I like my tech to walk with me. I'm not somebody that likes to be sitting in front of behind a desk. And I love the idea that the iPad can move with me, which I think is just a great thing.

Yeah. So as long as they keep innovating and updating, bringing updates to the software that they're introducing so that they can get rid of the bugs and keep it running at the most optimal level, that'd be awesome. And I would say open it up a little, let the iPad do some of the same tasks as a computer would do.

Yes.

Amen to that.

All right, let's talk about our main topic for today. See, we're keeping this one short, guys. We're making it happen. It's not going to be an hour and a half like last time. Streaming services are changing and I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. I kind of think it's a good thing, guys. And I'm I'm gonna be curious if your guys'thoughts on this, but one of, you know, a few things that are happening is, you know, Hulu and Disney Plus and ESPN are going to be making where all of their services are in as one on Disney Plus. Eventually I got a notice that Paramount Plus will be going up to 1199 instead of the 999 that have been paying, but they're forcing me to have Showtime. We have what's the one, Max, that just combined HBO and Discovery into one. And we have so many other services that are changing and some are even saying maybe we just need to go back to the way things were and just be a content company. People are urging Paramount to do that, but I kind of think the writing is on the wall here. And I think what we're going to start seeing is instead of having these streaming apps be plentiful, we might start seeing a folding back in of streaming apps. Because I feel like, like we've talked about before, people are having subscription fatigue because of so many services, and so they're not paying for content. So I wanted to bring this up today and talk about what are things that you are going to do or what your thoughts are on this? Will you be cutting back if these services keep going up? I haven't even mentioned Netflix with their password crisis. Well, that started this week here in the US.

Yeah.

Like yesterday or the day before.

Yeah, I think on Thursday.

Yeah.

Wow. So I'm even evaluating what streaming services I have, like, live TV, YouTube TV started out as one of the cheapest ones. Now it's $80.

Yeah, but that still might be a good deal, guys. I'm thinking actually I'm moving back to Arizona, and we've been for lots of reasons, trying to cut back on some services and things. And it's getting to the point now where I don't know if it's better to subscribe to a bunch of services or simply to get cable.

Yeah, right. Because the paradigm is sort of looking starting to look similar to cable, isn't it?

Yeah, it is.

You're being nickel and dimed and what are you really getting?

Right.

It's very reminiscent of the cable packages. Yeah, exactly.

And the cable companies are also sort of jumping on board and they're now making apps that you can put on your device and you can take your TV watching wherever you want to go. So that's a whole another thing. If you're going to pay one price and just have one app and you can watch all the channels, that's almost easier than having to keep track of all these different apps with all the different subscription fees and what's not on anymore. Wait, let me discontinue that one. But, oh, wait, this show is coming on over here. So let me go subscribe to that one. I mean, it turns into your rodeo.

I have a sister who pays for Stars because she likes one show. One.

Oh my goodness, who watches that? She's the only person I know that actually subscribes to that.

Yeah, there's a series that she likes. I forget the name of it. I'll think of it eventually.

But there's a lot of that, though. There's like lots of services where there's.

Only one TV, there's only one show. That one thing. And the thing is, now that everything is getting more expensive in general, people are going to start looking at that and saying, wait a minute, gosh. I'm spending all that on entertainment and what am I getting for it?

Well, as soon as Picard finished, I unsubscribed from Paramount. I was like, okay, I got what I needed, I'm done.

Well, you know, like for, for Paramount, I'm I'm still watching Deep Space Nine on it and I haven't purchased the Seasons on itunes.

I purchased the Seasons.

And I'm kind of wondering sometimes that saves you more money because if you just purchase what you want to watch. Because here's the thing that I'm finding. I don't like cable because, yes, sometimes I'm like, okay, I just want to see the news, what's going on. But if I want to watch a TV show, I'll just go into my library and go watch a specific show. I don't want to be told, okay, this is on at 03:00, you can watch it then. So that's the issue I have with cable TV. I just don't leave it on for noise. My mother will watch cable TV just for noise, but I don't do that. I'm very selective about what I watch and I'm very picky about those things. So that's the reason why I liked the streaming services, because I could be like, okay, Paramount has Deep Space Nine. I could go now. I think Netflix also has a lot of those shows as well. So it's like, what do you need? Because, like we've talked about, I think that the streaming services are getting to be as pricey as cable networks or as cable bundles.

Yeah.

So I'm wondering if I often think about this, do you think there's going to be consolidation of some of these services? Like somehow they're going to sounds like.

Some are doing that. Like with Disney, ESPN, and Hulu. Are those all three going to be together?

Yeah, because I think people would be more likely to agree to a higher price if they're getting a package of they're getting more than one or two shows that they really like, especially now that COVID is over. People are going out more, especially in the summer. They're working they're working in offices. They're not sitting at home like they were during COVID But do you guys.

Think we're going to start seeing a consolidation again of streaming services like back to, say, Netflix or the Disney Hulu conglomerate?

That's what I was just saying. Yeah, I would think some of these smaller services, they're just not going to make it.

Because one of the biggest things and I've been seeing this online is there's a show that we really wish would get made. Right. Jeff star Trek legacy. And they already have so much Star Trek that's already in the works. And they're kind of saying that, well, the budget and doing all these things is just not there because not enough people are paying for streaming. And then other people are saying, well, maybe you guys need to just go to a content only company and not worry about being a service. That way more people can find your content on other services like Netflix, Hulu, or others. And I'm kind of wondering if a lot of studios are going to go to that.

I think not anytime in the near future. And I say that because all of these companies have invested all this time into having their own service, their own streaming app, whatever you want to call it. In the beginning, when Netflix started doing the streaming thing second to the DVDs, it ended up passing the DVDs and going to the streaming first because that was easy for everyone, and everyone really liked that. But once everyone saw how good Netflix was doing, they all went, wait a minute. Netflix is like taking everyone's content and they're putting it on Netflix and everyone's paying Netflix. And now the companies have said, no, we don't want to do that. We want you to be on our platform. So we're going to pull the rights from Netflix, and you can only see whatever it is on your own platform. And that's why now you see everyone jumping around, oh, I got my show came to unsubscribe to that. Oh, now this show is coming on over here. So I'm going to go over here and sign up for this thing so I can get this show. But there's no way that they're going to give away the rights to go and let some other service stack up different kinds of media. If they own their own service and they put time and money, they're going to want to promote their own service. Unless the only caveat to this is that if one company owns multiple things, for example, Disney owns ESPN, so those two are going to combine. But if they don't own I think they're going to try and keep everything in their own apps, in their own ecosystems and try and get people to come over to whatever that app is.

Well, if you go try and buy Hulu today, and this has been this way for about a year, year and a half because we've been on it, we're not now, but we were they offered a bundle even a year ago where you could get Hulu, ESPN, and Disney all in one package and it was like $20. Now, I don't know if that means that they're going to truly consolidate and say, we're going to make that one entire company, or they're just going to continue to offer that bundle. I think what would be interesting is if you got like, Cox and Comcast to go after the Hulu and Disney and say, hey, we want to bundle this as part of cable.

Right?

And it might be really compelling. Like, for example, if you could get all your local TV stations and CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, whatever your news channels are of choice, plus a bunch of other stuff, plus Disney, plus Paramount, plus all these things I don't know, that might make it really interesting.

That would be interesting.

It would be interesting. So I think the pendulum is swinging back to a consolidated cable structure. And honestly, it's such a pain in the neck to know how to stay competitive with, like, well, where's the good deal and where's not a good deal and all that. The only one I will always keep is Apple One because there's too many other things that are combined in it, right? You've got fitness, you've got data. I mean, just the data and the fitness stuff alone is worth the subscription. But then you get Apple Music, not to mention Apple TV right now.

Is Apple News part of that?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

And they actually are improving it. There were some improvements that came just recently.

Oh my gosh. You wait till you hear my pick. Oh my gosh. I am addicted to something on Apple TV right now. Absolutely addicted to it.

And that brings me back to the word on the street is Disney is actually going to be merging Hulu and ESPN into the Disney app, or at least you'll be able to find all the content in the Disney app. And I'm a huge Doctor Who fan, and they said that they're going to be offering Doctor Who on Disney Plus in November. So it makes me think, are we starting to see a consolidation of streaming services?

Only because Disney owns all three of those. That's why they can do that. We'll just make it all in one app, which is good and bad, I guess, because maybe you want your kids to be able to watch Disney, but maybe not necessarily Hulu or ESPN.

Well, Disney is starting to have with Marvel, they're starting to have rated R content as well.

And I'm having issues with that with Disney right now. Disney has always been a very family oriented company, and frankly, so has Apple. Boy, some of the stuff on Apple TV, I wouldn't let my ten year old child watch it, that's for darn sure.

Well, Apple and all these companies are trying to compete with HBO and all these other things I know, which I don't know that they need to. And I just think that one of the things maybe I'm old fashioned, but let's bring back the 26 episode seasons of TV shows. Like, you know, even I kind of miss good old Filler episodes of Star Trek or things like that. These eight episode things are great, but I feel like it's too short. We don't get to know the characters, and it's really making television a mess, in my opinion.

We haven't brought up one thing, which is the elephant in the room, which is Max.

Yeah, they just came back, right, with some new.

Didn'T they have accessibility issues?

Yeah, that's where I'm going. Right? Exactly. So you launch this app and you try to sign into your account, and what do you get? You get an inaccessible captcha. Captcha. Good times.

Nice.

That's a real Max fail, is what that is.

Right.

And it'd be interesting to see if they actually fix that.

They can probably fix that server side, though, guys. That's probably something they can do. I suspect that that's going to get rectified rather quickly. I don't think that's going to require an app updated of any kind.

Also, we have a few chat messages that you can get the Spectrum app plan for $20 cheaper than the cable box service. So that's very interesting.

Oh, that's compelling.

Yes. But you can't record anything. Like, you can't save it's just watching. Only you can't record or save anything.

Is it saved to cloud?

They have a DVR feature in the.

App if they do that. If they do have a DVR feature in the app, then that's a newer feature, I think. Okay, but that'd be really cool, actually, if they did have a DVR built into the app and you can pay a flat rate, you get everything, including the digital menu, plus recording. And if you could use it, like a digital box that used to sit under your TV, where you can record seasons and do all the things you can do that way, all in one app that'd be awesome.

I know people that do that with the app, only I don't think they have a box at all. And I think they just have the app on their Roku TVs and they do DVR and all that stuff with just the app on their TVs.

Yeah, well, Spectrum makes an app you can just download straight to your device. So that's cool.

Yeah, that's what I mean, too.

Yeah, comcast Xfinity has that, too. But I think you have to have a subscription that allows you to record what do they call it? X One. But what I pay for cable is ridiculous. And when you look at the channels on cable, it is a wasteland. I mean, I don't even know how else to say it. It's just a complete wasteland. There are channels on there that are nothing but advertising, really. I mean, I'm paying for these stupid channels, and I'm paying a lot, and I'm starting to get really irritated. I wouldn't have it, except I have elderly people and people in the house that watch TV. Like, if it was if it was up to me, I wouldn't even have it. But.

It seems to me they double dip a lot. I mean, you think about Hulu, for example, right? You could pay $5 a month and you get the commercials. You can pay like 15 or $20 and they remove the commercials and the advertisements. How much do you pay for a cable subscription? And then they still show you more commercials than the actual show you're watching.

I think we're getting to a point and we're going to have to wrap up soon, but I think we're getting to a point where those on demand will be put into the cable networks like we talked about or they're going to start merging into each other, and we'll start I think that we may not see a Netflix appear again, but I think we're going to start seeing these companies fold into themselves and just provide them in one big app so that we have less options that we have to pick from. And I think that's going to be good for everyone. HBO and Discovery, combining Disney, Hulu, and ESPN, combining all of those things I think are going to be really good things for us in the long run because we don't have to worry about as much subscription fatigue. But I think it is good to look at your subscriptions now and then and see what is needed, what do what can I get rid of? And I think Netflix might be on the next on the evaluation list.

I actually got rid of it. I usually watched it for mostly for Stranger Things, actually.

Yeah, I'm waiting for season five. Waiting for season five. I might subscribe to it then. And then do I keep Paramount or do I keep Netflix? Because I think Netflix still has all star Trek.

I don't know.

Hard decisions and that's one of the things that you just have to do or do. You go out and buy them. The unfortunate thing is I wish that the Google and Apple had audio description for TV shows. They don't.

Me too.

I really wish they did. So, guys, we're going to go ahead and okay, one thing I want to point out, and there are times on Google Play and itunes, you can get some really good deals. One year, I got all twelve seasons of Big Bang Theory for $10 a season.

Wow.

And you got to keep it and it was yours.

Yeah, just buy the Seasons for $10 a piece.

Oh, that's great.

Especially around Christmas time. They have some really good deals going on, so be on the lookout for those things. I mean, they may not have audio description, but it's still fun to watch with your family. And then you can watch it whenever. You don't have to worry about commercials. You don't have to worry about those things. You have it, it's yours. You could download it to your device. Now the only thing really got to wrap up, but I want to add this in. The only thing that really bugs me about Apple is it used to be just your content front and center with Apple. Now when you open the TV app, it is always about something on Apple TV.

Plus.

I know they're trying to get their content out.

Even if you subscribe. That bugs the crap out of me, too. Even if you're a subscriber, they're still trying to push stuff and it's like, come on, guys, I'm already there, leave me alone.

Right. So I just wanted to mention that and maybe we'll see something better come soon. With pushy advertising, it's like, I'm going to watch your shows eventually. Just relax, relax. I got to finish all seven seasons of Deep Space nine first 26 episodes of seasons. Seven seasons is a lot to go.

Gotta wait. Just wait your turn.

Getting right. So, all right, guys, we're going to wrap this thing up, but it's been a great conversation. We'll probably have more to talk about later on this year as well, but I'm really excited that we're having such good conversations about these things. And so, as we typically do, let's go ahead and start out with Angie this time. What's your pick this time and where can people find you online?

I don't have a pick yet, but I will shortly. Hopefully people can find me online at Tech enthusiast at Dragonscape Space. Sorry, that's my Mastedon handle.

All right. And Jeff, you mentioned your pick earlier, so what's it going to be and where can people find you?

All right, let's see. So my pick this week is Silo on Apple TV Plus.

Good pick.

And if you are not oh, my goodness. It is so good, man. It's one of these shows where when picard came out, I would stay up until, I don't know, midnight and watch the episode the night before because it.

Would come before you go to bed. Yeah, exactly.

I did the same thing, and I'm doing the same thing with Silo now.

No, it's there. It's there.

It's so good. Yeah, it's really good. I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but basically humans have had to move below ground, and they're living in this quote, silo, and something has happened to the planet above. At least they think that something has happened to the planet above, and we're not really sure exactly what is going on there yet. Well, I am, because I read the books. Yeah, there's a trilogy, there's a murder mystery, and there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on. Lots of action, lots of Sci-Fi.

Who is the author of the books, in case people want to read the books, too?

Well, as people give picks, I'll get you the author. I'll look it up here on Audible in a minute here. But it's on Apple TV Plus, and it's Silo, and it's the number one rated streaming TV show right now across all subscription based services.

Wow.

So it's really popular right now. Let's see. I'm really not on Twitter much these days. I sort of keep an eye on it, but I'm not really posting there very much. But you can find me on Mastodon, and you can find me at Jeffbishop at Mastodon online.

All right, Marty, what is your pick and where can people find you online?

My pick is going to be an app called Good Tasks, and it's a really great Read It later app, which means if you're going through all your news and you want to save something and really read it later, you throw it in Good Tasks, and it's got great organization. It strips out all the ads. It's accessible with Voiceover, and it's on Mac, iPhone and iPad. It's a really great app. I highly recommend it if that's something you like to save your articles and read them later. Good links.

Good links.

Yes.

Not good task. Good task is something else.

Good links. Sorry. It's good links.

Good Tasks is not accessible, I don't think. Don't get good tasks, guys. Don't get that.

Yeah. Get good links.

Good Links. All right.

And you can track me down at feedback at unmute show.

All right, and Lynn, what about you? What's your pick and where can people find you online?

Okay, well, I guess my pick is a YouTube channel, and the person's name is I'm trying to think now. Sorry about that. I just lost my train of thought. Katie Morton, and she is a since we are celebrating or observing mental Health Awareness Month, she's a counselor, a certified counselor. She does great videos about mental health topics, and I just think it's Katie Morton, and she has done probably thousands of videos on all sorts of topics, and I just like her style. She's very empathetic. She's easy to listen to, and I just recommend that channel on YouTube. And as far as my email, you can send me an email at caneprints. [email protected].

Michael, before we move to you, probably, or who's ever next, the author of the book series is Hugh Howie, and the first book is called Wool. There's a reason why it's called Wool, by the way, but it's book one of the Silo trilogy. So there you go. I would recommend actually reading the books and watching the TV series because they're just both simply awesome.

I'm totally going to do that.

You know, I feel like I've heard of that book now, like, before they made it into a TV show. I feel like I've heard that title before, so that's fantastic. I will need to read those and watch the TV show edible Credits for next month.

Here we go.

Yeah, exactly.

Woo woo.

I'm already behind on my book reading, so I need to get caught up.

It's 15 hours. Book one is 15 hours, by the way, so buckle in.

I like long machine time. Yeah, I love long books. So my pick for this time is a new device that I technically have not turned on yet, but I know how good it is.

Before you go on, I think you need to punch your geek card because I don't know what's wrong with you. You're like slacking. That's unbelievable. What is going on over there in geekville over there? I think you're going to have to lose some Demerits or something here.

Promote it.

Well, I surprised. Angie like, crazy earlier when I said that I enjoy baseball and she couldn't believe I was into sports.

Oh, I totally didn't have you pegged for a sports fan. That was just like I was like, what? Really? No, I thought you were kidding. It for us. I'm like, no, really? Okay.

I'm not that devoted to it. I just like to follow my teams. I don't, like, watch every game, but I do enjoy sports, like baseball occasionally, especially the Texas teams. Unless they're bad and they're the Texas strangers and the Houston last rows, but gauntlet. Yes, I agree with you, Jeff. I'm terrible.

I'm curious about what this is now.

So I purchased yesterday the newest of the new Apple TVs.

Unboxing.

And it is a very cool I didn't do an unboxing of it because it was just an Apple TV. Everybody knows what those are. But they did change the box. It's a tiny box. It's not much bigger than an iPhone box, guys. Very interesting. Yeah.

That means the device is much smaller.

Yeah. Well, the interesting thing is I compared the two. They're not much different in size, but definitely different in size. The older Apple TV has the words Apple TV on the top, and the new one just has the Apple logo, which is interesting. And this one is the $150.01, which is interesting. They went down in price and it has 128 gigs.

Oh my God.

Yes.

And it actually has an Ethernet port built into it, too.

Well, the other one did, too. My older one did as well. But it supports HDMI 2.1, which is the latest standard, and it will support just like the other one's, ERC, and all those things. But I'm hoping it will run a little better for my gaming because I have the HomePod pair set up, which this is also why Jeff is giving me a hard time, because I have this HomePod pair set up and I have not played audio through it yet.

What's wrong with you?

Except for the one time earlier when Jeff called me and I sent Jeff to the HomePod instead of the speaker of my phone.

Oh my God, I've done that before. Hard to get out of it's.

Like, whoa. What's going on? I was like, oh yeah, it's the option right above that.

Jeff, I think it's time for you to have the conversation with him.

I already did. He's like, slacking. I don't know.

Intervention time after the show.

I don't know. I think Kay should take one of those gadgets away from him since he's not fulfilling his duties of being geekness.

Yes.

Hay is into her own new gadget that she got recently.

Oh, that's right. Where is she at? She should talk about her gadget.

Well, we did an unbox cast. She got the Victory Reader stream, third Generation.

Yeah.

And so we recorded an unbox cast and I just have to edit and post it. So that might be done tonight or tomorrow, I guess. Whereas people can find me you could find me producing content for here on the IA cast and other places. I'm on mastodon at Mikedoey's mikedoise at Techopolis social. That will take a long time to spell. So yeah, you'll find it in the show Notes and you can email me at mike [email protected]. You could find the podcast on any of your podcasters and you can email us at [email protected]. This has been a great discussion. We started recording on a different time, so I want to thank everybody for being here. This has been a great panel, great talks, and we'll see what the next thing that everybody will find to roast me about next time will be. But it's all on fun. So I just want to thank you all for being here. It's been a great episode and we will be back next week for another IA cast. So thanks everyone and we'll take care y'all, next time.

Bye, guys.

See ya.

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