Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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I visited a friend of mine in Italy a few years back. He is from Naples, but now lives in the north. A local café owner there is also from Naples and they always spend about 5 minutes haggling over the price that he has to pay for the coffee. It is great fun to watch, but can be frustrating, if you are trying to have a conversation.
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Regarding Apple and advertising, I think the one thing nobody has discussed is how Apple is going to do advertising.
Google does advertising by finding as much out about the people visiting the sites they go to as possible, as do Facebook and most other advertising companies. That is the problem and that is what Apple needs to overcome, if its advertising is going to be a success.
I don’t mind ads, per se, they are annoying, but as I can’t afford to subscribe to every site I visit, the revenue to keep those sites going has to come from somewhere.
I begged for a long time for something like Club TWiT, not because I didn’t want the adverts, but because I didn’t want the tracking that comes with it. Why? It never makes the adverts any more relevant.
All the tracking ever seemed to do was track what I had bought and offer to sell it to me again. Bought a dishwasher? Here are another 20 that might interest you! Yeah, erm, no, I only have one kitchen, so showing me adverts for more dishwashers is just defrauding the advertisers, the broker has to the data to know that the last thing I need is another large expense item of the type I have just bought, yet they sell advertisers space on my screen to show adverts for those products, that they know I won’t be interested in for at least a couple of years, for months on end, that is pure fraud, nothing else, and a complete waste of my time.
So, if the tracking information is totally irrelevant, why do they need to collect it? Because they can try and sell advertising based on the idea that they have this mythical knowledge of what we want to see, only it is industrial scale snake oil.
If someone can start doing advertising that isn’t tracking me and is showing me products that are no less irrelevant as they currently do, that would be a huge step forward.
Why not sell adverts based on what I am currently looking at? Why not base them on the stories I read, the sites I visit? Surely that is a lot more relevant than the current snake oil they are trying to shift? They know I am interested in what I am currently watching/reading, because I am watching/reading it! That makes the whole job a lot easier, and cheaper, because they just need the site operator to provide some simple meta data on the current page and sell ads based on that, they don’t need all this invasive third party tracking that doesn’t work anyway.
I’ve gotten to the point, where I use a PiHole at home and I block all tracking sites. I don’t explicitly block advertisers, but if they track me, they are blocked. If there were ethical advertisers out there, they would be whitelisted, but all the time they insist on tracking me and STILL throwing up irrelevant adverts, they can go to hell!
If Apple can somehow bridge this gap, sell adverts about what I’m using or watching, as opposed to who I am, that would be a major win and a major step forward. Unfortunately, we can’t look deep into how Apple is going to do this, and I am not really that hopeful that they will do it right. 
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I think I personally am unadvertisable to. I don’t mind ads if they’re not flashing, blinking or moving… i.e. static ads. But they have no effect on me, and I can easily ignore them. I am probably not alone, so this is why they have to up the ante to have all the annoying flashing and blinking and video. The thing is, those sorts of ads just make me angry, and likely to apply blocking, and if that doesn’t work, to leave the site and never go back. Leo’s host read ads have a little more chance with me, but I am very adept at tuning them out (bathroom break, etc) or skipping past them.
I make fun of ads on TV when I see them, and the more they repeat, the more I make fun of them. To me, it’s almost always a thought process of what is wrong with the product that they have to try this hard to sell it to someone. There’s almost always an obvious flaw that the advertisement is trying to wallpaper over.
I think the entire concept of advertising is a fraud. The better solution would be for the product companies to spend that money on sending out product to reviewers. I think that the whole industry based on advertising needs a reform. YouTube is hailed for allowing anyone to make content, but most of it is horrible crap clickbait with no redeeming value. If YouTube didn’t advertise and people could honestly rate content as clickbait when it showed up, it would quickly die off. Make the content and sell it for a reasonable markup over what it cost to make, and allow the distributors to charge a reasonable markup to make it available. People will choose what they want to see and the content that probably never should have been produced in the first place will eventually fail by the wayside.
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Regarding Google’s troubles with the Competition Commission in Europe and why Apple isn’t also being investigated, Google had a monopoly on search (>90% market share) and smartphones (>80% market share), Apple is not in search and had under 20% market share in Europe at the time of the investigation, so they were not covered.
On the other hand, Google was leveraging its position in search to bolster ads, its position in Android to bolster search etc.
With respect to Mike, the EU Competition Commission is about user choice, it is about ensuring that companies don’t unfairly squeeze competitors out of the market and limit choice for the consumer.
It is funny, he says that the US is about the consumers and the EU is about other businesses, in Europe, we say that the EU is about consumers and the US is about protecting big business… 
Regarding sound in films & TV, I have noticed this, mainly because I watch mainly dubbed TV and films in German. When Foundation came out on Apple TV+, @Leo was complaining that the voices were hard to understand. In German, it was crystal clear. I switched to the original English soundtrack and, sure enough, the voices were subdued and throttled by environmental sounds.
I think in the dubbing, the audio engineers hold a high value on the speech being actually audible and clear enough to understand. I’ve since seen it in some other films and TV series. The German dubbed versions are actually often much clearer than the original soundtrack and make the program much more understandable.
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Big thumbs up from me with Apple pushing carriers to use eSIMS. Just hope the same happens outside of the US.
I’ve now lost my US roaming deal from my UK carrier. Brexit meant roaming in the EU went, and they took the opportunity to get rid of US roaming too 
So for my last couple of trips there I’ve just bought a 2-week unlimited data eSIM that’s so much easier. No fiddling with SIM trays, phone cases etc. Just arrives in your email and you enable it on day 1 of your trip.
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I think US roaming was part of the EU roaming deal, most carriers here include the US as an extension of the EU-zone for roaming (EU, EEA, Switzerland & USA).
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I did start to look into if I could do it the other way round, get a US carrier that had international roaming included, but the speeds or monthly data is limited. Plus I’d have a US number…
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Boom 
you nailed it
Regarding the closed captioning segment, as a 26 year old with no hearing issues and no diagnosed disabilities, I can explain why I like captions.
I’ve always been a guy who uses tech for tech’s sake, primarily because I find technology fun as a third-generation techie in the family. So, as a kid, that extended itself to learning all the functions of the Sylvania 13" TV/VCR combo I had in my room, including closed captioning. I thought it was cool initially that the TV could display what was being spoken, but as someone who reads better than they can listen, it quickly became an easier way to me to understand what was happening on a movie or show (and get annoyed at the captioners who couldn’t bother to type out the whole sentence being spoken).
It is still helpful for me today in ensuring I’m understanding what is being spoken, but also because when I watch something like a Marvel movie, or something with a lot of lore, it helps me understand what in-universe thing the character is referring to. When my wife first showed me Harry Potter, the captions helped me understand the things inside the world of Hogwarts. When I watch The Avengers, it helps me realize the Accords they speak of have nothing to do with Honda. 
For me, I use the closed captioning mainly in Twitter, because I have the feed running in the background all the time while working, but I’m usually in an office environment, where sound is not possible, so I read the captions as I’m working, if it is an important video - 99% of video get scrolled by unwatched, it is mainly just breaking news.
When I’m actually watching a film or TV show, I don’t turn them on, although I usually watch them dubbed into German, as I said above, and the dubbed tracks are usually much clearer than the original track. I only really use captioning when watching foreign movies in their original language - Akira being a great example, back in the VHS days, the captioning was based on the original Japanese audio, whereas the US dubbed version told a different story in places; there is a bar scene, where Tetsuo takes some pills off the bar, in the US dubbed version, they were referred to as peanuts!
I’m really torn on closed captioning. Watching House of the Dragon and Rings of Power it really helps with names and making sure you catch everything. On the other hand, I don’t like the experience of constantly switching attention between the image and the captions. I’d like to try an option where the words appear as smaller speech bubbles near the character, (like a comic) and there are no captions for music or sounds.
Re: the Figma deal. What’s crucial in valuation here is that the revenue comes from a subscription model. So, arguably an appropriate way to value such a company is through the present value of an annuity formula, which basically gives a “fair” value for those recurring revenue streams over a long time period.
My back of the napkin calculation shows that, setting the “fair value” interest rate to 8% as a historical USA figure, the value of 30 years worth of a 400m recurring revenue stream is about 4.5b. So from this perspective, you might think of Adobe’s bet being that they could more than quintuple that revenue over the next 30 years, either by growing the user base that much, converting existing customers to this model, or raising prices.
And that calculation ignores the additional risks posed by a strong competitor. So that risk probably lowers their bet to perhaps tripling those revenue streams, which is entirely plausible for a behemoth like Adobe.