There’s a phenomenon in the phone world that’s as smart as it is frustrating. That’s the one where a company announces an exciting new feature, only to eventually note that it’s going to roll it out in stages. You can’t get it now. You might not get it for a while. And if anything goes wrong, it’ll push things back further. (And you’ll likely not get any further communication.)
That, friends, is the “trollout.” It’s mean to roll things out in a responsible way, in case things go wrong.
This week’s trollout entry is the upcoming live sports streaming service that combines the assets of Disney (which means ESPN), Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery. The service — often referred to as a “joint venture,” which is business speak for when competitors decide to work together on something — doesn’t have a name. We don’t know when it’s going to go live, short of probably before the college football season. And we don’t know a price, other than maybe somewhere around $50 a month. Maybe.
Those are the big outstanding questions. These are maybe not the most important things — that would be what sports will actually be available on the service. And we pretty much know what that will be (see below).
But those remaining black holes of information didn’t stop the chief executives of Disney, Fox, and WBD from separately talking about this upcoming joint venture at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference despite not actually giving any additional information.
We do at least know the target audience of the new service: someone who doesn’t currently subscribe to anything. That’s a point of confusion for media outlets who are trying to put this whole thing in context. Some have crowed various versions of “It’s missing too many sports!” And indeed it will be. The point isn’t to cover everything. The point is to cover enough sports that someone who doesn’t have any other subscriptions will find value in it. The point is to mine the untapped vein that is these “cord nevers.”
“We want our brands and our content available to as big an audience and as many viewers as possible, wherever they are,” Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said on March 4, basically repeating what he’s previously said. “And for us, that means the audience that are cord cutters or cord nevers — which is a huge, market in the United States. If we can put our sports in front of those, those fans … we think that’s an important place to be.”
Disney CEO Bob Iger was singing the same tune a day later.
“You’ve got a lot of people — young people — who have not subscribed to the multichannel fat bundle,” Iger said. “And you have a lot of people that used to be subscribers that lapsed. We want those. We want them in. They want to watch sports. We’re trying to provide a less expensive, more focused opportunity for them.”
We still don’t know how much less expensive it will be, but the real question is going to be “less expensive than what?” The answer is “less expensive than getting those same sports as part of a traditional cable or streaming subscription.”
Plenty of details remain. A big one for me is whether it’ll include things you could only get on ESPN+, and it kind of sounds like that might be included. But there also are the little things, like a name, and a price. We’ll get them. Eventually.
Instagram is making its way to yet another screen, and this time, Apple TV is getting a taste of the Reels rabbit hole. The company has launched a dedicated Instagram app for Apple TV, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live shows to the big screen. So, if watching one quick clip on a phone somehow turns into an hour of scrolling, there's now a much larger screen for that.
Instagram brings Reels and more to Apple TV
Audio-Technica, a brand well known for making some of the best studio and professional headphones on the market, has just come out with the ATH-AWX7000, which the company itself claims to be its "finest headphones ever." The new flagship closed-back headphone has debuted at an eye-watering price of $3,799. It combines hand-finished Japanese woodwork with a newly developed 58mm driver.
The earcups are made from Kiso cypress, a prized wood historically used for Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each housing is finished by hand with traditional Echizen lacquer, which brings out the grain and is expected to darken over time. The frame and sliders are finished in a deep navy kachi-iro shade traditionally associated with samurai.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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