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Apple Considers Paid Subscription Podcasts?

A slew of recent articles1 claim that Apple is creating a new paid subscription service providing premium podcasts. According to these reports, Apple thinks they need to start shelling out cash for big name podcasts in order to compete with Amazon and Spotify. This is the same Spotify that was recently downgraded from neutral to sell by financial group Citi because Spotify hasn’t seen the kind of returns they would like on the hundreds of millions they spent locking down premium podcast providers such as Gimlet Media, Joe Rogan, and others.

From fortune.com:

Apple has been the dominant distributor of podcasts in the U.S. for more than a decade, offering the programs for free. […] But the company now faces significant competition from two of its biggest rivals: Spotify and Amazon.com Inc.

So let me get this straight, Apple has been offering podcasts for free for almost 20 years and NOW they suddenly face significant competition to their FREE offering?

It’s not crazy that Apple may feel they are leaving money on the table. It’s not uncommon for Apple to discuss ways it could improve growth and it makes sense to explore the idea of bringing in top tier podcasts as an additional draw to Apple Music, but Apple does not care one iota about Spotify’s attempt to monetize podcasts. If anything they chalk it up as a win when people use their hardware more often regardless of the service they are using.

From The Information:

“Apple—long considered the sleeping giant in the podcast space—is waking up. The company, which runs the most widely used podcasting app in the industry, is discussing launching a new subscription service that would charge people to listen to podcasts, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Apple has plenty of “discussions” about all kinds of ideas. Don’t go to print until at least there is a hint that they’ve decided on something.

Here’s my Claim Chowder: There will be no premium podcast subscription service from Apple. If there is any truth to these rumours, it’s about Apple giving a little more love to their Podcast app (which has also been rumoured). If Apple were to offer “high quality”, “paid” podcasts, it will be tied into users’ existing subscriptions to Apple Music.

Update: They did it. Apple is now offering subscription podcasts. What I didn’t understand when I called down the idea was that they wouldn’t pay upfront for finished shows or personalities but would facilitate podcasts adding a subscription and then take a cut of the proceeds.

1. Apple Is Ready to Invest in Its Own Original Podcasts, Apple Developing Podcast Subscription Service to Better Compete With Spotify, Apple Plans Podcasting Subscription Service in Threat to Spotify, Apple Mulls Podcast Subscription Push Amid Spotify’s Land Grab.

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Infographic Stolen — Intel Releases Earnings Report Early

On Thursday, hackers made out with a copy of one of Intel’s financial report infographics which left the company little choice but to release their earnings report early.

From the Financial Times:

Intel said it was the victim of a hacker who stole financially sensitive information from its corporate website on Thursday, prompting the company to release its earnings statement ahead of schedule. 

The US computer chipmaker believed an attacker had obtained advanced details about a strong earnings report it was due to publish after the stock market closed, said George Davis, chief financial officer.

It published its formal earnings announcement upon discovering the problem, six minutes before the market closed. Intel’s shares rose more than 6 per cent on Thursday, including almost 2 per cent in the final 15 minutes of trading.

“An infographic was hacked off of our PR newsroom site,” Mr Davis said. “We put [our earnings] out as soon as we were aware.”

A copied infographic changing the course of a $232 million company — that’s something. You might be asking yourself, was the graphic in question any good? I’ll let you decide. It’s this one they use on their main results page. It’s unclear how much time passed from when it was discovered that the infographic was out there and when they posted their earnings report. Apparently, the earning report was released 12 minutes before markets closed at which time Intel was going to report anyway. When milliseconds matter it becomes very difficult to say with much certainty how much time passed after the information first became available.

From Matt Levine:

[Y]ou can only be so precise about when a piece of news becomes public. If you are a public company and you load your press release onto your website and then push a button for it to go live, and you look over at your atomic clock at the precise moment that you push the button, you will be able to record a time. A fraction of a second later, the button on your mouse or keyboard will send a signal to your computer, and then another fraction of a second later your computer will send some signals out into the world. And then those signals will, through the intermediation of further computers and wires and perhaps even human actions, arrive at various important places. Your earnings release will show up on your company’s website, and on the Bloomberg terminal, and on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Edgar website, and on the Nasdaq website, and elsewhere, each at slightly different times due to differences in, like, the lengths of the wires and the complexity of the computer programs that transmit your release from your computer to those sites. And then there will be some teensy fraction of a second of delay as light travels three feet from those screens to the eyeballs of people looking at them, and then there will be a longer delay as those people think about what they are seeing and, maybe, decide to push some buttons of their own to buy or sell some Intel stock. Other people will have a more direct feed that bypasses screens and eyes: Some service will transmit the press release in machine-readable form directly to their algorithms, and the algorithms will scan them for numbers and perhaps compare those numbers to expectations, and make a quick decision to buy or sell Intel stock.

(via Money Stuff)

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Colon vs Comma Quotes

As someone that does a lot of quoting, I’m embarrassed to say I had to look up the grammer usage rule for a colon vs a comma when giving a quotation for my grade 5 class. I’m posting here for future reference.

There are few different rules but the main thing to keep in mind are these two rules which will help you get it right most of the time:

Rule 1: Complete sentence: “quotation.” (If you use a complete sentence to introduce a quotation, use a colon (:) just before the quotation.)

Rule 2: Someone says, “quotation.” (If the word just before the quotation is a verb indicating someone uttering the quoted words, use a comma. Examples include the words “says,” “said,” “states,” “asks,” and “yells.” But remember that there is no punctuation if the word “that” comes just before the quotation, as in “the narrator says that.”)

Rule 3: If Rules 1 and 2 do not apply, do not use any punctuation between your words and the quoted words.

And remember that a semicolon (;) never is used to introduce quotations.

The APA is supposed to have posted rules for blockquotes on its style blog, but it’s gone dark. I found, via the Waybackmachine, a copy of APA block-quotation examples(84KB .pdf).

(Link)

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Contronyms

The English language is full of words that mean two opposing definitions at the same time. These words are called contronyms.

From a list of 75 that I found online; read and behold the paradox of the contronym:

  1. Apology: A statement of contrition for an action, or a defense of one
  2. Aught: All, or nothing
  3. Bill: A payment, or an invoice for payment
  4. Bolt: To secure, or to flee
  5. Bound: Heading to a destination, or restrained from movement
  6. Buckle: To connect, or to break or collapse
  7. Cleave: To adhere, or to separate
  8. Clip: To fasten, or detach
  9. Consult: To offer advice, or to obtain it
  10. Continue: To keep doing an action, or to suspend an action
  11. Custom: A common practice, or a special treatment
  12. Dike: A wall to prevent flooding, or a ditch
  13. Discursive: Moving in an orderly fashion among topics, or proceeding aimlessly in a discussion
  14. Dollop: A large amount (British English), or a small amount
  15. Dust: To add fine particles, or to remove them
  16. Enjoin: To impose, or to prohibit
  17. Fast: Quick, or stuck or made stable
  18. Fine: Excellent, or acceptable or good enough
  19. Finished: Completed, or ended or destroyed
  20. First degree: Most severe in the case of a murder charge, or least severe in reference to a burn
  21. Fix: To repair, or to castrate
  22. Flog: To promote persistently, or to criticize or beat
  23. Garnish: To furnish, as with food preparation, or to take away, as with wages
  24. Give out: To provide, or to stop because of a lack of supply
  25. Go: To proceed or succeed, or to weaken or fail

Here are the rest.

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Zoom Helped Chinese Surveillance

Should we continue to use — and promote the use of — Zoom at institutions and organizations that stand for liberal democratic values when Zoom has been discovered terminating accounts and disrupting video calls about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy activists? Obviously, we should find something else.

From The Washington Post:

Prosecutors said the China-based executive, Xinjiang Jin, worked as Zoom’s primary liaison with Chinese law enforcement and intelligence services, sharing user information and terminating video calls at the Chinese government’s request.

If our organizations believe in free speech then it behooves us to tell our organizations about Zoom.

Zoom continues to fail us and mark my words, this will not be the last time we hear that this corrupt company is in the news.

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Sedition!

I’d never heard of Randy Rainbow, but he’s got quite the collection of song parody YouTube videos. I especially liked this one about sedition.

It’s amazing the amount of work he must have put into this video and the speed in which he put it out. Mark Evanier suggests Randy Rainbow is a one man show:

Supposedly, he does all this himself from a not-huge apartment in New York…and he’s got to do it quickly because these days, current news has — as Jon Stewart used to say of The Daily Show — the shelf life of potato salad. “Topical Humor” used to be about something that had happened in the last month or so. Now, folks like him and Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah and Jimmy Kimmel are going on-air or on the web with material about what happened six hours ago…or less. No wonder MAD Magazine with its six-week lead time couldn’t compete.

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Kieran Healy on the Mob at the Capitol

Required reading: author and researcher Kieran Healy on what happened during the mob raid of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

From the moment he knew he’d lost the presidential election, Trump absolutely wanted to get the result overturned. Some large proportion of his own staff and Congressional Republicans thought there was no harm in humoring him. Many surely knew him well enough to realize he was quite serious about it. But most, falling into a way of thinking that Trump has repeatedly benefited from over his entire career, and especially during his Presidency, figured that he could not possibly overcome the weight of institutional and conventional pressure behind the transition of power. Still, by the first week of January he had not relented in his efforts to find some way to do it, whether through bullying local election officials, chasing wild geese through the courts, or directly intimidating state officials. That all failed, or looked like failing. The next thing on the horizon was Electoral College certification.

She points out that she doesn’t have any more information than anyone else following the story, but she does paint a coherent and plausible outline based on the facts we know of what Trump and the Whitehouse might have been thinking. I think this is exactly what happened.

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