The history of Roku and the fight over CarPlay | The Vergecast
In Version History, we tell the story of the Roku Netflix Player, debate its legacy, and try to decide whether this thing belongs in the Version History Hall of Fame. After that, it’s time for debates. Nilay Patel and David Pierce yell at each other about who should own the screens in your car. Are CarPlay and Android Auto the answer, the solution to universally crappy automaker software? Later, David answers a question from The Vergecast Hotline about political spam texts.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00Welcome to the verge cast the flagship podcast of dedicated streaming hardware. I'm your friend David Pierce. And if you're seeing this
00:00:07I'm already dead. I'm just kidding. I'm on vacation right now as you're listening to this or seeing it on YouTube
00:00:12I am probably in the woods of Vermont
00:00:16I don't know running up and down a mountain or whatever you do when you're in the woods
00:00:20The point was just to like get away find somewhere with fewer screens and more trees and just spend two weeks
00:00:27Detoxing and detoxing sounds like more aggressive than I actually mean it. I kind of like life with screens
00:00:33It's all I think mostly fine
00:00:34But it's nice to have a break every once in a while and I will say when I go
00:00:38Even like a day or two sort of deliberately turning all of that off
00:00:42It is really rejuvenating in a way that just totally resetting usually is
00:00:47Anyway, while I'm gone, we've prepared some really fun stuff for you over the next two Tuesdays
00:00:52So we're forever experimenting with new ideas and new formats and even new shows we might want to launch at the verge and
00:00:59Mostly, they just live like in meetings and Google Docs and their ideas and things we want to do
00:01:04But we figured while I'm gone, let's try some stuff out
00:01:07So what you're gonna hear from us over the next two weeks is two versions of two different ideas
00:01:12We've had one is kind of a rewatch show and one is kind of a debate show
00:01:16Just new ways to talk about tech still should still feel like the verge cast
00:01:20It's gonna be people you recognize
00:01:21But we wanted to just try some new ways of talking about this stuff that we don't do on this show
00:01:26Typically, maybe there'll be segments. Maybe there'll be new shows. Maybe you'll hate them and we'll never do them again
00:01:31Who knows but we're gonna try some stuff
00:01:33So the reason I tell you all this is because I genuinely want to know what you think of all of this as you listen
00:01:39Or as you watch tell us what you think. Do you like these formats? Do you wish we asked different questions?
00:01:44Do you wish we structured them slightly differently? Do you have other show ideas or format ideas?
00:01:48Do you think that we should do inside of the verge cast? I want to hear everything
00:01:52We want all of your feedback all the time, but especially on this
00:01:55This is deliberately us just being like these are things we've been talking about for somewhere between months and years
00:02:00We want to know what you think. So anyway, all of that is to say
00:02:04Should be fun. We're trying new things. I'm nervous about this episode in a way that I think it's very fun
00:02:08So I'm gonna go back to vacation. I hope you enjoy. This is the verge cast. We'll be right back
00:02:14Welcome back. So for our first pilot, we're exploring an idea
00:02:18We've been talking about internally for I think more than a year at this point
00:02:22And it came from the fact that a lot of us really like rewatch podcasts the ones where usually it's people who were on a show
00:02:29Go through the show episode by episode and they talk about what they remember from making that episode some fun behind-the-scenes stories
00:02:35They talk to guest stars just a kind of memory lane walk in which you both get to experience
00:02:41But also learn new things about it. One of the ones I really like is the always sunny podcast about the show
00:02:47It's always sunny in Philadelphia. They stopped doing that show and I'm very sad about it
00:02:50But that's a great one office ladies, but the office is really popular West Wing Weekly. It was a big one
00:02:55There's the rewatchables on the ringer. That's pretty popular
00:02:58There are a million of these and I really enjoy them
00:03:01It seems like every star at some point during the pandemic was like I'll do a rewatch podcast and I will happily listen
00:03:07To all of them. So our idea was how do we do this for tech, right? There are all these stories out there of
00:03:13individual
00:03:14gadgets or apps or kind of
00:03:16These contained stories that we felt like we could go through and talk about in similar ways a lot of them
00:03:21We at the verge lived through we use them. We wrote about them
00:03:24We covered them and there are lots of stories that we have from those days that are just fun to talk about again
00:03:29Plus it's a good way to kind of go back in history and talk about how we got here
00:03:34But doing it kind of one gadget and device and app at a time felt like a really fun way to do it
00:03:40So we've been kicking around this format for a long time
00:03:42I've been kind of borrowing and stealing things from other rewatch podcasts that I really like and we've put together something
00:03:47We're calling it version history. I don't know if that's actually the name
00:03:50I don't know if this is a good idea at all, but we've recorded a couple of them now and it's been really fun
00:03:55So I hope you enjoy the show and I'll see you in the next one
00:04:04As much as we did the first one is about the very very very first Roku here goes
00:04:16All right, Alex Krantz, hello. Hey, what's up? Neelai Patel? Welcome. You're dead to me
00:04:23This is how we like to start every this
00:04:26Starting a thing. I'm on vacation. It's the whole thing. So the thing we are going to talk about in this first segment is
00:04:34The original Roku it's called the Roku Netflix player. And here's how we're gonna do this
00:04:38We're gonna basically there are three pieces of this show that we're gonna try to do here
00:04:43And I think if we end up doing these longer episodes there will be more but we're gonna do is I've broken it down to
00:04:49Three pieces we have like a brief history lesson. I have a whole bunch of notes
00:04:53So I'm gonna like tell you the brief story of this thing. Y'all should chime in and have feelings and thoughts
00:04:57We're gonna talk about how people felt about it. I've looked up a bunch of reviews
00:05:01I have a lot of like funny stuff. I want to show you and then we have some questions that we're gonna see if we
00:05:06Can figure out this thing's legacy and whether it matters and then we are starting a thing called the version history Hall of Fame
00:05:12That's all I've decided about it so far
00:05:14But then at the end we're gonna decide whether this thing belongs in the Hall of Fame
00:05:17So the Roku Netflix player, so this goes all the way back to like
00:05:222002 this guy Anthony would starts a company called Roku
00:05:25Originally to build
00:05:27music products
00:05:28They built a couple of things that you've never heard of that don't really matter
00:05:31But also at the same time Netflix this company that shipped DVDs to people
00:05:35Decided that they wanted to build hardware. They wanted to like have a box for this new instant watch thing that they had on Netflix
00:05:43Where you could watch TV shows on the Internet, which was quite a thing
00:05:46Was it because they knew that silverlight sucks? So no. Oh, I mean
00:05:53Debatable, okay
00:05:54The only place this is a good point the only place at this moment that you could watch
00:05:58Netflix shows on the Internet was on a Windows computer through Internet Explorer because of silverlight
00:06:04There was a lot of enthusiasm about silverlight coming to other platforms, which is a very funny thing to read about all these years later
00:06:09I think we need to stop and remind our audience that silverlight was Microsoft's competitor to Adobe flash in that Adobe flash
00:06:17Was Adobe's ill-fated media platform for the web where you had plugins in your browser and you could run entire games and
00:06:25Applications but inside like Adobe's weird framework
00:06:28I'm only saying this because we have an audience that is young and
00:06:31This was a thing that happened to all it like it was just made to happen to us
00:06:36Yeah, we had no choice in the matter and there was a time that flash was considered like very good
00:06:40Yeah, and silverlight was kind of a would-be competitor to flash would be is very accurate
00:06:47Yeah, it was it was a it was a pretender to the throne of a toby flash when the first iPhone came out
00:06:52It was a major controversy that it didn't run
00:06:55Flash or silverlight or any is crazy answer. That's where we are. We were many many many years away from this
00:07:01I'm just pointing out that at the time Netflix was like we're betting on not flash which was in itself bananas
00:07:08But like the whole web was built on these like weird plugins. Yes. No that that's right
00:07:13That is so that is that is good context
00:07:14So at some point in this process Anthony would meets Reed Hastings the CEO of Netflix
00:07:20At a conference and this is where there is some disagreement on the history
00:07:24But I believe the actual correct answer is that Anthony would
00:07:28Convinces Reed Hastings to partner with his company Roku to build a player for Netflix
00:07:35Anthony would was not a Netflix employee
00:07:37He was kind of a Netflix employee, but he was like a contractor who was hired to work there
00:07:42Roku was always a separate company
00:07:43This is the thing a lot of people get wrong in retrospect Roku did not spin out of Netflix
00:07:48Roku was its own thing that worked with Netflix. But anyway, they go through they start building this thing called project Griffin
00:07:55that is basically going to be a box through which you can play Netflix on your television and
00:07:59Team about 20 people work on it for a while. They get it ready. They get it done. It's gonna be a box
00:08:04It's gonna be a streaming box
00:08:05Everybody's very excited and then right before the thing ships Reed Hastings gets cold feet and says basically
00:08:11I am afraid that we are going to
00:08:15alienate all of our partners by making hardware and that if they mail if they make a Netflix box
00:08:20They are going to lose all of these other companies that they want to work with to put Netflix on all the screens everywhere
00:08:26They had made other partnerships
00:08:27They were talking to Apple and lots of others about putting Netflix on other devices and thought if they made their own
00:08:32They would piss people off
00:08:33So instead they basically give this project back to Roku and they gave them some people some patents
00:08:40The all the work they had done so far and in return got I think it was 15% of Roku
00:08:46Which spoiler alert they sold and should have held on to for a very long time
00:08:51Netflix does not have diamond hands. No, not not in that case. Certainly so then in
00:08:58March of 2008 the the Roku internet player gets launched and again just to give you a sense of
00:09:04Timing there at that time Netflix had just reported that it had eight million subscribers. Most people were on DVDs
00:09:11Again, the only way you could stream Netflix at the time was on a Windows PC through Internet Explorer
00:09:16Nothing did unlimited streaming like this
00:09:18It like wasn't a thing that you could do the the whole watch instantly thing on Netflix brand-new very exciting
00:09:25Neal I you'll appreciate this particularly I wrote down the list of ports that the Roku Netflix player had it had an HDMI port
00:09:32It had component ports. It had composite ports. It had an Ethernet jack. It had s-video and it had optical ports. Yeah
00:09:38We call that. Yeah, that's the full
00:09:41The full port s-video is a lot is you're like, I'm not interested in quality, but I want to pretend that I am. Yeah
00:09:49So it costs $99 do either of you have memories of the first ever Netflix box
00:09:55I do as big streaming nerds. Yeah, you yeah, you were at and gadget like chronicling this stuff
00:10:00There was a lot of Engadget stuff back then. Yeah, AOL has since deleted those
00:10:04I went looking for them. They're gone, but we wrote a lot about this device
00:10:09Because it was like you said the first mainstream streaming device Netflix's catalog is really small
00:10:15So there's a lot of jokes, but what you couldn't could not watch on it
00:10:18But it was like obvious that gadget nerds would love this thing
00:10:21And then the fury about it was that it was only for ADI which really explains that s-video port
00:10:29Right, like this thing could stream in in interlaced SD
00:10:33so it was they were trying very hard to conserve bandwidth in an early preview of
00:10:38Don't ever bet on someone to issue a software update. They kept telling us that it also supported 1080i
00:10:44I and they alluded to maybe doing more than just stereo sound to there were lots of big ideas about like
00:10:50Oh, this box is very powerful. It'll do lots of other stuff
00:10:52Yeah, and then those software updates never came and became the jaded monster that I am now
00:10:57But the the idea was so sound and then the question was do you want a single appliance for a single app?
00:11:04Right that only has Netflix's catalog can Netflix make its catalog big enough and you kind of just like immediately got into all of the
00:11:11Streaming questions from this one little box that had a tiny catalog that streamed in 40
00:11:14I and was a little glitchy, you know, like none of this technology work yet
00:11:18There was at that time they were still it's hard to believe major questions about whether the Internet was
00:11:25Architected to stream video in this way like infrastructure like physically if it could do it
00:11:30Yeah, whether like a packet switch network like the Internet could do and it's like now you're like, what are you talking about?
00:11:35I can do this on my phone whatever I want like at the time
00:11:39There was there were like architecture questions and Comcast another big ISPs
00:11:42If you were remember around the same time, we're like if you plug your Xbox into a Comcast connection
00:11:50We will give it a dedicated lane of broadband so we can serve it video
00:11:56Disclosure Comcast is an investor in boxing, you know
00:11:59That idea did not work and actually a lot of trouble over it because that was the beginning of like a net neutrality fight
00:12:05But like in it's like primitive state
00:12:07But it came out of something very sincere
00:12:09Which is like can the Internet do video in the Netflix box was the first?
00:12:13Thing that was like we will just stream video to you. We will figure this out Kranz
00:12:17Do you did you have one of these do you remember this thing coming out? No, I didn't have one because it didn't run plex
00:12:22I really wanted to be super into Netflix streaming at the time, but I only had max and
00:12:29The Windows Silverlight thing. So I was like f this noise
00:12:31I'm going full plex and it couldn't run plex. So I was like, I don't why do I need that?
00:12:36I honestly thought that was a bit plex has been around that long. Yeah, I've been on plex since like 2008. That's nuts
00:12:43It was originally it's a spinoff of Xbox Media Center
00:12:47XBMC Wow, so this is this is how old all this stuff is
00:12:52Yeah, I appreciate that you skipped right past
00:12:55Let's find the like useful way and went straight to just pirate at chaos
00:13:00I love this for you
00:13:01Look the useful way came later than the pirate at chaos useful way was like so far behind everybody else
00:13:08Yeah
00:13:08and I'm glad you were also early to the let me get a
00:13:11movie on Netflix
00:13:13Rip it to my computer and then ship it back to Netflix because that was like the single best use of Netflix that existed
00:13:19So Nila you you mentioned some of these things, but I went back through a bunch of the reviews of this thing
00:13:24Which are very funny
00:13:25I would say the thing people liked
00:13:28Most was how easy it was to set up you could just plug it in to whatever TV you had and I log into Netflix
00:13:34It did the code thing where you would like log in on Netflix's website and enter a code and it would connect that way which
00:13:41Was way ahead of its time people were very annoyed by typing in their Wi-Fi password on like five arrow cursor
00:13:47Which still annoying so kudos everybody for figuring that out. I just want to point out
00:13:52It's been like 20 years and no one has better ideas. That is still the best interface
00:13:55We have it's ridiculous
00:13:56But the two things that annoyed people were one as you said Neal I the selection and this is at the time
00:14:03Netflix said it had about a hundred thousand things that you could get which is much larger than the Netflix library today most that stuff
00:14:10Was on DVDs and the streaming stuff was only about 10,000 titles and that included like individual episodes of TV shows
00:14:16I have a quote from CNET which I very much enjoyed that said March of the Penguins is the only movie in the top
00:14:21100 that's available for streaming and it's also only one of four streamable documentaries
00:14:26There was 30 rock. There was the office
00:14:28So like I would have been fine, but for the most part people were unhappy about it
00:14:32One thing I very much enjoyed people were psyched that it only took about a minute to load a video
00:14:38This is like a this is like a win was when you press play
00:14:41it only took about a minute to start playing and this was back in the buffering days when you would just sit and like
00:14:46wait for Netflix to
00:14:48Chug its way through
00:14:49It is impossible for me to remember when that would have felt fast to the point where now it's like that would I would turn?
00:14:55Off my television and be like something is broken. I mean think about back then people having
00:15:01megabit internet connections
00:15:04Was still like it wasn't unusual, but it was rare enough
00:15:08Right that you couldn't just count on it
00:15:11Like I graduated from law school in 2006 with a megabit internet connection and I was like, yeah
00:15:16that was that moment like
00:15:19Bandwidth was not a thing and Netflix was trying to cram this device into an internet that was just not ready for it
00:15:26Yeah, there were a bunch of people talking about their internet speeds in in their reviews and a bunch of folks were like
00:15:33Oh, yeah, I have a 1 megabit per second connection and it does fine
00:15:36And then somebody's like I have a 2.2 megabits per second connection and it's sick like fast as hell guys. You don't even know
00:15:43Which I I loved again for a young audience a megabit is a unit of bandwidth it is much smaller
00:15:50Imagine if your current internet connection was
00:15:531,000 the speed that it currently is. That's what we're talking about
00:15:56And also the the thing that Netflix did to make this thing work was it was just a player
00:16:03You couldn't search at the beginning. You couldn't find stuff. You couldn't browse
00:16:06You would put things in your queue on
00:16:08Netflix comm and then you would go to the player and you could browse through your queue and pick stuff to watch people that you
00:16:14Had two different queues. This is a thing
00:16:15I had forgotten you had a DVD queue and you had a streaming queue and this that was true for like years and I had
00:16:21completely forgotten that that was the case and
00:16:22You had to like manage what you were getting when and you could stream some stuff and you could DVD some stuff and it was
00:16:28Insane chaos and I don't miss that one tiny little bit. Well, you have to remember the entire
00:16:34Netflix paradigm was queues, right? Right, so they had this like weird problem
00:16:40we're stuff that is very familiar to us now like discovery and algorithmic recommendations and blah blah blah like
00:16:46Didn't exist because the entire Netflix model was you were gonna we're gonna mail you some DVDs
00:16:53You're gonna mail them back and we'll mail you the next ones
00:16:56So even though they had recommendations Netflix famously had a challenge to develop a better recommendation
00:17:03algorithm the model that they were still using was you're gonna put
00:17:09Physical movies in a queue like discs in a queue to be mailed to you
00:17:14And I think they didn't want to break that right away
00:17:17I thought it was a really good way of like that was still at a time where we hadn't fully like
00:17:23Comprehended how instantaneous media could arrive in our lives, right?
00:17:28Like even music at the time was like wow, you can just download this off of iTunes
00:17:31It was a big deal. And so them saying hey, you can get a whole movie
00:17:36It felt like this this big magical moment
00:17:38But also getting drunk and then waking up the next morning and being like, what did I add to my queue?
00:17:44best feeling in the world
00:17:47Incredible feeling when you're in college
00:17:49Kranz I really like imagining you like coming home from the bars at 2 30 in the morning and be like
00:17:54Let's let's Netflix Q baby. It was the frat houses
00:17:59Okay
00:18:00That's good. All right. Well, we we are time-constrained here. So let's let's just jump
00:18:05These are some of the the questions we're going to ask for every single one of these as we go
00:18:09The first one is what was the best thing in retrospect about this thing to me?
00:18:13It's just that it was a box for streaming, right?
00:18:16Like I feel like that's just the whole Neil Neil. I really wants it to be the s-video port. I can like see it
00:18:23I'm gonna give you like a really esoteric answer to this, please
00:18:26It made a Roku like, okay, we've talked to Anthony wood on this show many times over the years that
00:18:34company just has
00:18:36Re-architected how TVs work like
00:18:39Fundamentally the modern TV ecosystem every version of it looks like Roku's plan
00:18:45Yeah, and they started with this silly Netflix app, but they knew what they were making was the cable box of the future
00:18:51They knew it from the beginning. Yeah that this thing would be the cable box
00:18:55They would give them away for as cheap as they could and they would charge fees like the App Store models
00:19:00To all the apps that were on the thing and they would just come to dominate
00:19:03And I think that is like in some ways made the TV world a lot weirder
00:19:09It's just it's weird out there
00:19:11But it wouldn't have happened without this device the way that Apple and Microsoft were going at the time
00:19:17Was just really slow right like the Apple TV existed the Apple TV came out way before this
00:19:22Remember it was a hobby
00:19:24And it was basically a Mac Mini with a hard drive and you could buy movies and they would download
00:19:28Overnight and megabit per second internet connections. They would download overnight to a hard drive wind
00:19:34Microsoft was doing Windows Media Center. They've been doing it for almost a decade at this point every CES
00:19:39Bill Gates would stand on stage and be like I'm gonna put a Windows PC in your living room
00:19:45Yeah
00:19:45Like just threatening America in the world this concept and they were just not getting it done because they were
00:19:52Insistent that they needed to put computers like big computers in your living room
00:19:56And so Roku showed up with this little box $99 didn't have much of an interface
00:20:01But it did the one thing which is stream movies over the internet and that I think caused just a sea change in the industry
00:20:08I agree with that
00:20:09I think the like the extent to which Roku had had this plan fleshed all the way out from the very beginning
00:20:15Really surprised me and going back and researching this like they were saying from the jump like we want to have more
00:20:20Apps on this we have plans for an app store
00:20:22We like they saw the whole thing and like pulled it off in a surprisingly
00:20:28Coherent way over time and go just go back
00:20:30I was just tell you just go back look at the very first Apple TV, which was a Mac Mini
00:20:34It had the Intel processor and a hard drive. Yeah
00:20:38Like they were just way off in the weeds on that thing
00:20:41One of the knocks on some of the reviews for this thing was that you couldn't rent or buy movies
00:20:46Which is a very funny knock and retrospect like being mad at Netflix for not letting you rent movies would be a is not a thing
00:20:53You hear so much anymore. What was the worst thing about this thing? Oh, I mean, it was a piece of junk
00:20:57It wasn't very good. Yeah, like it only ran Netflix so good it existed bad
00:21:03Everything else about it. Yeah, you know
00:21:05I said the thing about never not believing and in software updates coming or like not reviewing potential
00:21:11This was like the this is all of that is wrapped up in there, right?
00:21:15We'd never review a product based on its potential this thing like this device. You're like, oh man, the next one's gonna be great
00:21:22This one on the other hand
00:21:24That's a real mess, right? But the next one was great. Like the next Roku's were
00:21:30Exceptional they got there
00:21:31It took a long time for Roku to figure out and even now the Roku product line is like what are you doing?
00:21:37Series two they said yeah, you can do plex and
00:21:42That was
00:21:46Nothing else matters. Yeah, the pendulum of Roku was that it got way way better and then it got way way worse and I
00:21:51It's like I don't think it's good now, but it was good for a long time
00:21:54I feel like we've talked a lot about bandwidth on this episode and it is really hard to remember a time
00:22:00When people's ideas were constrained by bandwidth and so you could see like you're like, oh, this is how it should work
00:22:07I should select a movie and it should start playing and if you will remember the cable companies had those systems
00:22:14They had video-on-demand systems running on their weird proprietary cable networks with horrible interfaces and bad software
00:22:20Like all of it was bad
00:22:21But those networks were optimized to let you just do video-on-demand and no one thought the internet could do it
00:22:26So this device could like let you do it
00:22:28Now we live in a time when people are like 6g and everyone's like what for and like we don't know
00:22:34But like it at that moment in time the things people wanted to do were out racing the networks
00:22:41Which was what made it all so exciting because you could see the networks would catch up
00:22:45All right
00:22:46Next question if you could go back in time and make it before anybody else did so in this case you meet Reed Hastings at a
00:22:52conference before Anthony wood does
00:22:54What would you do differently? I mean, I think we know Neil is answer and involves
00:22:58More
00:23:01Man it's like that first one was was correct in its ambition
00:23:05But they they got there should have had more apps on it. That's my answer to actually go go convince
00:23:12Hulu or somebody to like also do streaming Plex Hulu and boxy. We're all like
00:23:18Existing in 2008 at least two of those were brand new baby
00:23:23Concepts boxy and Hulu but like they could have done it
00:23:27They could have put some of that other stuff on there. And at the time most people who were using
00:23:32Streaming video and stuff. They were streaming it locally and they were using XBMC. They were using
00:23:37Plex that's how they were getting everything. And so the fact that Roku was late to like net and
00:23:43Internal network video was was a bummer because it could have been really just hit the ground running
00:23:49I just want to point out that who launched in 2007 with only an announcement and no content
00:23:55Yes, I love it. It would have been it would have been you could have gotten Hulu on there. That's what I'm saying
00:24:00Where's the ABC go? It would have just been the look. I
00:24:04Want to look at just the logo and then I want the ABC go app ABC was still on go.com for up until recently
00:24:10Wonderful toes ESPN
00:24:12I think the idea that it was an appliance actually served it well in its moment because remember everyone else was trying to shove
00:24:18computers under your
00:24:19TV and you were bringing in all of these computer metaphors and this device was like it's just your Netflix queue
00:24:26It's just delivered here instead of in your mailbox
00:24:29And it was there was a simplicity to it that made people think about it differently
00:24:34The thing I would have changed is I would have gotten Netflix
00:24:37To spend more money to put at least a couple hit movies on there
00:24:41Because every review basically ended with there's nothing to watch like this is the future
00:24:44There's nothing to watch and I I think the big change would have been hey
00:24:48Like what's find the money to get one blockbuster movie on here so that people have something to watch and like they're excited about it
00:24:56Oh, the studios were terrified at that time, though
00:24:59They would have said absolutely not
00:25:01They didn't want any of their stuff streaming that way because they thought it was gonna be like the end of how they make money
00:25:06Didn't it was?
00:25:09Correct
00:25:10Yeah, but yeah, it's it's an interesting
00:25:12Well, I was the next question is actually is there an alternate timeline in which this thing was even more successful like what parallel universe?
00:25:18Makes the Netflix player an even bigger hit and I think that's the one where Netflix starts spending on original content
00:25:23Slightly quicker, right? The thing that made Netflix streaming work was years later, right?
00:25:28This is like in my in I can't help but think about this timeline in terms of gadget plugs
00:25:322008 was in gadget Netflix launches House of Cards. We were at the verge
00:25:36Yeah, right and that's like years later and that that was the turn like just fully the turn into okay
00:25:43Now these devices have their own content and Netflix knew it this the movie studios did not want to give them the content the TV
00:25:49Studios did which is how you end up with the office and suits and all this other stuff happening
00:25:53But that that was the thing they were missing and eventually they just spent the money to figure it out by owning it directly
00:25:58All right, a couple more questions. Then we'll get out of here. Could you reboot this in 2024?
00:26:02I think the answer is no I think like a Netflix specific thing
00:26:05It has no place in 2024
00:26:07What if it's like an as an add-on?
00:26:09For the Apple TV and all the other ones where Netflix refuses to still have its continued watching in their apps
00:26:16Oh, that's interesting
00:26:17I mean, but like is it is there something too?
00:26:20I want to turn on my TV and the very first thing that appears is just Netflix like skip the home screen do out
00:26:25Just give me Netflix. I kind of think no. No. Yeah, I think we're past that point
00:26:28That would have been great in 2020 or 2019, but 2024 nobody wants that. Yeah, that's kind of where I land, too
00:26:36You know, I what do you think the constant ecosystem is just too fragmented. That's what I think too
00:26:40Would this thing have been a bigger hit if Apple had made it is the next question?
00:26:44No, cuz they did and it wasn't a hit nobody made this thing
00:26:48I don't mean Apple had made its own version
00:26:50I had like a marketed this thing take the Roku player and put Apple's name in front of it
00:26:55Would it have been a bigger hit? Yes, I think so, too
00:26:57This is 2008 Apple is coming off the iPhone things are starting to happen. I think this thing would have been bigger
00:27:02Wait, how do you like this specific device? No way?
00:27:06No, like the Apple Netflix player would have been a hit
00:27:09I absolutely think so the Steve Jobs
00:27:11Apple does not release this device as evidenced by the fact that they did not in this world that I'm creating the Steve Jobs
00:27:18Apple releases this device Walt has told the story many times on the show Walt Mossberg where he was talking to Steve and
00:27:25Steve desperately wanted to build a proper cable box and
00:27:29He went to the cable companies and said I'm gonna build an actual cable box that it runs our software
00:27:34It looks great the whole thing and the cable company said here's our garbage middleware software
00:27:39To authenticate to our cable networks
00:27:41You have to put a cable card in your box and Steve Jobs said no
00:27:44Like absolutely not like I'm leaving this category behind and everyone will just hear my literal dying words
00:27:50I finally cracked it haunt them for a generation because TVs are garbage now
00:27:55And it was just because he didn't want to use can s video port man
00:28:00No way
00:28:01Okay, fair enough
00:28:02and to be clear
00:28:04They got all the way to the future of TV is apps with the Apple TV and they have since walked that back
00:28:10By launching Apple TV plus and doing the exact thing Netflix had to do which is making their own content to drive their own services
00:28:16Yep, 100% agree. I also think it would have been a bigger hit if Apple made it
00:28:20and
00:28:22Last question before we go does does the Roku Netflix player belong in the version history Hall of Fame?
00:28:28100% no Kranz. I want I want to hear you first. Why?
00:28:32Because I think what we've said here. This was this was where the streaming box came from, right?
00:28:37This is where streaming kind of like started to take off. This was that first big moment
00:28:42I would argue that the next Roku was the actual moment. See that's the one I'd put in the Hall of Fame
00:28:47That's the one you'd put in the Hall of Fame
00:28:48I just think this one is so important because we wouldn't have that next Roku without it. It's tricky. It's tricky
00:28:54Neely is your argument. It's not this one. It's the next one. Yeah, it's the first one that that people started buying, right?
00:29:00I mean, that's that's real. This one was not a huge hit. It was like the opposite. It was like a I don't know
00:29:06It was like a sketch
00:29:07It was like they sold a prototype and they realized they had a good idea and then they finished the idea
00:29:11And that's the one that like actually changed the industry because it moved the way consumer demand was going
00:29:17Okay. All right
00:29:17Well, we will we will rehab this debate when we do that one because that'll be a fun episode too
00:29:22But for now, I think it stays out of the Hall of Fame
00:29:23Okay, also because this is the first time we've ever done it if we put the first thing in the Hall of Fame
00:29:27It just feels like we're on a bad path. Yeah
00:29:30Everything's entering the Hall of Fame. Yeah, no good. Yeah, it's like are you gonna put Windows Media Center?
00:29:40But Microsoft Silverlight, yes
00:29:42By the way, Microsoft took the deal from the cable companies and shipped Windows PCs with cable card slots in them
00:29:47Yep nightmare and actually I think the headline in a gadget was night
00:29:54Feels right. All right. Thank you both for going on this journey with me
00:29:58We gotta take a break and then we will come back and we have more pilots for you. We'll be right back
00:30:12You
00:30:16Welcome back so for our next pilot
00:30:19We're gonna do a debate show Liam James our producer has been wanting to do this
00:30:24Like for as long as I've been back at the verge
00:30:27he just has this idea of like okay, what if we basically structure a way for everybody to yell at each other and
00:30:33This is the kind of thing that we've discovered comes up on the show actually all the time
00:30:37There are tons of things in tech with one side and then the other we've had
00:30:42you know PlayStation versus Xbox and we've had Android versus iOS and we've had debates as weird as like which brand of
00:30:50Windshield wiper fluid is the best the point is it's just fun to pit things against each other and yell at each other about them
00:30:56And that's kind of what we do all day at the verge anyway
00:30:59So Liam put together a whole structure a whole thing and basically set up a very formal
00:31:07Litigious universe in which we can settle once and for all which is better for the first one we picked
00:31:13I would say one of the things we feel more aggressively contested about right now
00:31:19Which is the software in your car? This is the is carplay the future or is it a nightmare debate? Here we go
00:31:30Good day, I'm Liam James moderator for today's debate and my job is to facilitate a debate between today's hosts
00:31:36On the topic of automotive infotainment systems like carplay and Android Auto today
00:31:41We have editor-in-chief Neelai Patel. Welcome Neelai. Hello and
00:31:45Editor-at-large David Pierce David. Welcome to the debate. Thank you. All right before we get started
00:31:51I'd like to share the rules with our audience
00:31:53so each person will make their case for the verge cast audience a
00:31:56Virtual coin toss will do my opponent is a communist a virtual coin toss will determine who goes first
00:32:02We'll have opening statements and following that each host will be given two minutes to answer my questions with up to an optional one minute
00:32:08Rebuttal from the opposing host the questions were not shared in advance with either person
00:32:13Our hosts may use the internet to confirm factual details, but they use their limited time while doing so
00:32:18Okay, and with that let's get to our topic for today all the way back in June 2013
00:32:23If you can remember that far back Apple introduced carplay actually they called it
00:32:27I was in the car if I remember correctly originally, it was a standard that enabled in dash head units
00:32:34In cars to display and control a more modern smartphone like interface not long after Andrew didn't introduce their own standard with similar
00:32:41Capabilities, but a lot has changed since then in mid 2024. We asked the question
00:32:47What is better for consumers?
00:32:49Is it carplay Android Auto and similar systems or should the automakers take back control and do this all themselves?
00:32:56All right, we are gonna start off by doing a quick virtual coin toss
00:33:02Technically, you're the visiting team Eli. So you get to pick heads or tails tails never fails. All right
00:33:09And it is tails. So Neely would you like to go first or would you like to go last with your?
00:33:17Closing statements. I'd like to go last you'd like to go last and
00:33:22It's a real defer to the second half move, it's good. Yeah, it's the right call. It's the right call defense wins championships
00:33:28Okay, great
00:33:29It will be no surprise to our audience that
00:33:31Neely will be arguing today for the car makers and David will be arguing for carplay and Android Auto
00:33:38Alright, let's get started with opening statements David. You're up first. You have up to two minutes
00:33:43My argument is very simple, which is that it's not that you couldn't have very good
00:33:49Software built by car makers. It's that you won't it's that it doesn't exist
00:33:54It has never existed and it will never exist by bringing your phone into the car
00:33:58What you get is an interface you understand you get the apps you already have you get the data that already exists on your device
00:34:05You don't have to rely on a bunch of car companies who have made decades worth of awful software and now are trying to charge
00:34:12You more subscriptions. They're trying to sell your data
00:34:14They're trying to own more of the experience
00:34:17Largely based on software sacks that some company including those car companies is not going to keep caring about. I
00:34:23Am in control when I use carplay I get to plug the thing in or pair it over Bluetooth. It just works
00:34:29It is my music app. It's my podcast app
00:34:31I can use whatever I want for navigation not whether somebody signed a deal with ways or here or whoever
00:34:38It's my phone and the car should do car things
00:34:41The car should keep me alive and get me where I'm going and everything else should be somebody else's problem
00:34:46And there is precisely zero evidence to show that car makers can build good software
00:34:51Including the car makers everybody says build good software do not build good software. They build good car software
00:34:56so my thing is let's let software companies be software companies and let car companies be car companies and
00:35:01Everybody can win and it's just that simple and you like to tell your opening statement
00:35:07My fellow Americans I come before you with two arguments
00:35:10Well three first David is a communist that's important. We should not agree to his radical communist agenda
00:35:17Second no matter what I wife as long as I've made that point clear. I think that's important, too
00:35:22I'm not arguing that car makers are good
00:35:25I'm arguing that carplay in particular is bad carplay has not meaningfully changed in a decade
00:35:31you can't do something as simple as
00:35:35Look at a list of songs while looking at the map in carplay
00:35:38You just can't do it the idea that Apple will somehow get good
00:35:42It's showing you two applications at once on an iOS device is a pipe dream that we've seen fail over and over again with the iPad
00:35:48For a decade now, they're just not gonna do it
00:35:51Your opportunity for carplay is limited and that's fine
00:35:54If like communist David here you think the state should limit you to one application at a time in your car
00:36:01My second point is that cars are getting ever more complicated and the idea is that cars are not a software experience
00:36:08It's silly. I'm not saying they're good at the software now, even your Tesla's your Rivian's
00:36:12I've been test-driving a Rivian for three days now. It's not great
00:36:16I'm not pretending it's great but things like charging your EV managing your range knowing where all the nearby chargers are
00:36:24combined with
00:36:26Autonomous driving setting a destination on the map and letting the car help you get there
00:36:30All stuff the car is gonna do more and more of and if you're an Apple fan
00:36:35You know that integrated solutions are better than the weird Bluetooth
00:36:39Fragmentation that David and his commie brethren would foist upon you
00:36:43Be a true American let GM put Android in your car
00:36:49That was fantastic, okay with those opening statements, we will move on to our first question, which is going to be for David Pierce
00:36:56Hello David driving can be considered one of the more dangerous activities we complete in our daily lives
00:37:03many people consider the CarPlay and Android Auto interfaces to be less tactile and more specifically
00:37:11the removal of buttons inside of modern cars has caused a lot of
00:37:18Consternation on the side of older drivers. What do you say to the people that want all?
00:37:25The important safety interfaces things like windshield wipers
00:37:30climate control for fogged up windows
00:37:34things that you need to be able to
00:37:36Quickly turn on and off in the car being relegated to touchscreen interfaces
00:37:41I have two points to make and Liam. Thank you for asking that very good question
00:37:47Point number one. This is this is a bad trend
00:37:51You always know the person's not sure what they're gonna say yet when they compliment the moderators questions. I'm sorry
00:37:56I'm reclaiming my time from the moderator
00:37:59This trend is wrong. I am pro buttons. We are pro buttons here on the verge cast buttons are good
00:38:05We should have more dedicated controls for doing things
00:38:08That is not the trend that we are on and neither Apple nor Google caused that trend this this trend swords
00:38:14Touch interfaces for everything in cars is I believe a bad idea
00:38:19But it is the one that we are on and so what I'm arguing is that rather than present you with a giant set of
00:38:25brand new controls every time you get into a vehicle or onto a scooter or
00:38:30Anything that you should have a system that you understand and that I am now bringing this thing with me instead of basically just being
00:38:37Tossed into the deep end of somebody's bad software design every single time
00:38:42I sit down in front of the steering wheel
00:38:44Would I like to completely change the car industry such that none of this was important and that there was a button
00:38:49That I could just roll the windows down with and I didn't have to guess how to open the handles to get in the freaking car
00:38:54Yes, of course, but that is not where we are. And so what matters more than ever actually is
00:39:01consistency and having some
00:39:03Cross-car understanding of where things are and how they work and there is no better system for that than CarPlay and Android Auto
00:39:10Well, that was exactly two minutes
00:39:12Eli, would you like to read about that spoken like a true communist?
00:39:16Is there a penalty for ad hominem attacks on this David would have you turn away from the freedom and innovation?
00:39:24liberty of the market to put insane door handles on vehicles and instead have Tim Cook impose a
00:39:32Draconian system of weird sliders and that grayscale that they do that doesn't look good even on an OLED display
00:39:40You know, I'm talking about it's just not good. It just doesn't look good as Americans
00:39:44We should have the freedom to have cars that look cool and operate the windshield wipers in ever more esoteric ways automatic
00:39:50You say nay, I will push whatever button I choose to push my car socialist
00:39:55I think I may be a car socialist. I never thought about this David hates Liberty
00:39:59He ever wants everyone to drive one of those weird
00:40:01Russian cars with the bubble windshields and all the controls are exactly the same and you know how to use them
00:40:06Because you've been given a car by dictator Pierce over here
00:40:11American let's keep taking the open road with a variety of buttons and knobs. Let's keep the rhetoric down gentlemen
00:40:19Moving on to our next question. Yeah, let's just move the gas pedal who even cares do whatever you want
00:40:24It doesn't even matter cars are fine. What's the worst that could happen? That's free market, baby
00:40:27Next question is for you. Neely. Neely you mentioned in your opening statement the problem of
00:40:33Having many more capabilities in cars and the inability to
00:40:39Show those in ways that allows for multitasking or multi window interfaces to make this both easier and safer to use
00:40:47What makes you think automakers are the right people to fix that problem again? Let me be clear
00:40:53I'm arguing mostly that carplay is bad. I don't think that car makers are the best people to solve this problem
00:40:59In fact, I think they might be some of the worst
00:41:03But no one will try to solve the problem if we just give everything to one company
00:41:08We just hand over our interfaces
00:41:10to one company with no incentive to do anything other than to get you to buy another iPhone or to sign up for one of
00:41:16Their various services you want to buy a new car that comes with three months of free Apple TV plus be my guest
00:41:22Let it ride
00:41:23I'm just saying you will never get new ideas in this market if you give up and
00:41:29David would have us give up to live in his top-down government control emphasis on live less in remain alive
00:41:38I'm just saying what we're gonna be in it where we're headed towards a future where I
00:41:44Believe people would like to both look at the map and pick the next song
00:41:49Without having to literally switch apps because the car will be doing more of the work itself
00:41:54I don't see a pathway from the carplay we have today to that future and I see no indication that Apple's interested in that
00:42:00I also see a future in which there are more screens in the cars
00:42:04there are more screens in the car where passengers are doing more things on the screens in the car and
00:42:09Having that all tied to one phone seems a little bonkers
00:42:12I think you want your car to be as integrated and as functional as your smartphone
00:42:18And I think it's on car makers to get there and I'm saying I get there now
00:42:22But I'm saying I don't want to live in David's weird dystopian nightmare future
00:42:27The weird dystopian nightmare future you're describing is one in which you know how to use your car
00:42:32Is that is that what we're talking about? I I am pro competition
00:42:36I believe in the idea that we can have lots of different options here
00:42:40I don't think a world in which carplay is the only interface that exists is
00:42:45The
00:42:46Ideal outcome. I'm just saying it's better than a world in which I am getting into a car and just
00:42:54Banking on GM to have finally for the first time in its history built good software
00:42:59I would point you to GM a company that very famously broke up with Android auto and carplay has had
00:43:05Disastrous consequences had to stop selling the first car on which it made its own software because its software was so bad
00:43:13This is what we're up against I'm not arguing carplay is the solution to all of our problems
00:43:17I'm just arguing it's better than that real-time fact-check
00:43:20Sir, you light is not your real-time chance to respond with your next question now
00:43:24Yeah, listen, you know, the move is just talk over the moderator. We've we've been through this before. Come on
00:43:32Some very bad lessons along
00:43:34Please I welcome your real-time fact-checks, sir. All right
00:43:38Again no one's saying that Jim is good at software
00:43:40It wasn't the move away from Android auto that caused the blazer to get recalled and have the stop
00:43:46So that was their bad battery software. It's GM's general software ineptitude
00:43:50I'm just it's different software. The escalates are moving people are buying escalates
00:43:55People are buying the cars that don't have the stuff
00:43:57But what they are enjoying about it is they get in the car and it already has a Spotify app and it already has Google
00:44:02Maps which are the only things people want and are completely duplicative of the apps that they already have on their phone gentlemen
00:44:07We need to move on. The next question is for you David Pierce long before
00:44:12Options like CarPlay and Android Auto came out. We had problems with cell phones in cars text messaging distracting people
00:44:19People talking on the phone lots of things went in place to try to regulate that hands-free options and stuff like this
00:44:25Are you really saying that people should have apps in their cars?
00:44:28Should they be playing with Spotify and Apple Music and all of these interfaces when they're driving a car?
00:44:35I would encourage you to spend one minute watching people drive their cars
00:44:40Everyone is looking at their phone all of the time
00:44:43and
00:44:44again
00:44:44would it be great if some of the systems that these companies have tried to implement had worked if they're if the things like the
00:44:50Driving modes and the auto text response that says driving call you back later. Have you ever gotten one of those texts?
00:44:55No one's ever gotten one of those texts. Those aren't a thing
00:44:58the good news is because as my
00:45:02Ridiculous opponent said in the first correct thing. He said this entire time people do just want a couple of apps
00:45:08Maybe it's Google Maps and Spotify
00:45:10Maybe it's Apple Maps and Apple Music what I gain by bringing my own device is I get to use the apps that I want
00:45:17I'm not forced into
00:45:18Someone else's locked down system that will inevitably be an old version of Android running old apps and not running very many apps
00:45:25I get to have this stuff that I want
00:45:27So the best case that I have for safety is to push that stuff
00:45:31To the large display in front of me instead of requiring me to constantly look down at my phone
00:45:36so actually every single app that I'm adding to one of these two app stores through which I can actually get the things that I
00:45:42Care about is an improvement. It's not going to solve everything because everybody is still going to look at their phone
00:45:48But it's better my friend. How popular is carplay extremely popular ever everyone has it, right? It's everywhere
00:45:54Yeah, do you know why people are still looking at their phones in their cars because carplay sucks
00:45:59That's why because it can't do the things that the people want to do so they pick up their phones anyway
00:46:04making driving
00:46:06According to latest statistics. I've seen
00:46:095,000% more dangerous
00:46:11Based on America David Pierce wants you to look
00:46:14Right, you can look at my website. You know, I Patel for a carplay president calm and please donate
00:46:20All I'm saying is if carplay was good
00:46:22You would not see people constantly using their phones in their cars
00:46:26And if car makers could make good software people wouldn't be using carplay
00:46:29No
00:46:29Because you're plugging in your phone or worse you're on wireless carplay which has brought down the rate of new car
00:46:36Satisfaction because it's so flaky over the past three years
00:46:40You've taken a big real estate of the big screen and you've turned it into a single unit asking
00:46:46Limited application model and then people use their phones
00:46:48Anyway, why not allow that screen to do multiple things at once?
00:46:53Nilay what makes you think car makers can do this at all to two things one. They're trying which is interesting
00:47:01You don't see a lot of trying in technology these days and second
00:47:05There are some results that show that how we build and design cars is changing. So Tesla's way ahead here
00:47:11They've reduced the number of computers in their cars over the years
00:47:15To almost nothing at this point and that's Tesla great
00:47:19They've also reduced the number of curved surfaces on their trucks to zero
00:47:23And then you look at Rivian which just updated the r1 platform to something you're calling the zonal architecture
00:47:28they're combining the multiple sensor arrays and microprocessors and controllers and
00:47:35System and integrated systems on their cars into big computers in zones of the car that control various functions
00:47:42That's a big deal
00:47:44That's literally a rethink of how cars are
00:47:46Designed how they operate all the functions of a car all the bits and bobs or anything that can be controlled
00:47:52Not only from the touchscreen, but remotely
00:47:54Requires the car to have a computing architecture that can do all the stuff then you can put an interface on top of that
00:48:00Maybe the interface is carfly, but you need to do that work the hardcore
00:48:04computer design integration work across the car to even have the opportunity to do something like
00:48:10Introduce cool new features
00:48:13Over with over-the-air updates. You just have to design the car differently all the car makers want to do this
00:48:18so they have the desire and then there's competition a market that's pushing them to deliver and if you just give up the screen to
00:48:24Apple and say look this car is here to get you from point A to point B
00:48:27I believe the world will turn gray much like the Soviet Union
00:48:32Have you ever seen the hunt for red October?
00:48:34It's one of my favorite movies if they'd car playing submarines it would have solved a lot of problems
00:48:39David do you want to respond to that?
00:48:40I do want to respond my response is that I agree that car companies should be in charge of making their cars work
00:48:47That's not what we're debating here
00:48:49that's not a complicated question and to the extent that making a car work is increasingly a job of
00:48:54Building and maintaining computers sure learn how to do that
00:48:58But it is just simply true that these companies have no track record and very little ability to build good
00:49:06usable software for humans
00:49:09most of the time most of what's happening in a car is
00:49:12Abstracted away from the person who is using it and that's good
00:49:15Most of it should not be
00:49:17Your job to figure out all the time if you had to pick which brake you applied every time you applied the brakes bad things
00:49:22Would happen it's good that that's attracted away from you the stuff that is not is the stuff that is in front of you
00:49:27It's the navigation. It's the music
00:49:29It's it's basic controls over the systems inside of your car that stuff should be separate and you the user
00:49:35the driver the passenger whoever you are in the car should be able to control what that is and you should be able to
00:49:40Bring it with you in a way that is consistent and is personalized and is yours. Let the car companies be car companies
00:49:52Okay go into closing statements David your first
00:49:55Okay, let me describe to you some things that I don't want
00:49:59I don't want a car that I get in and cannot make any sense of no matter what
00:50:06I don't want a car that doesn't have my apps
00:50:08I don't want a car that has my apps but doesn't know anything about me like where I live or
00:50:14Where my office is or any of the places that I like to go. I think of
00:50:19car companies and tech companies as like
00:50:21Sports owners like they're very good at business
00:50:23They make a lot of money and then they go buy a sports team and they think because they knew how to run like a
00:50:28Mortgage company they know how to run a sports team and they'll just do it the same way different things
00:50:32let different things be different things and
00:50:35letting someone build good infotainment software that humans are supposed to use is so
00:50:41Radically different from what it takes to make a car work very well. I don't think the Apple car was a good idea
00:50:47I kind of think Waymo is weird and way out over at skis and doing some crazy stuff
00:50:52Like let let the tech companies do the tech things let the car companies do the car things
00:50:57I'm not interested in updating my car's software every time a new Spotify feature appears
00:51:03I am NOT interested in having to upgrade my car just because Google forgets about its Android automotive nonsense in two years
00:51:10I want to be able to bring my technology to my car and I want my car to keep me alive
00:51:17Those are two different jobs and I'm okay with them being different jobs and mr. Patel my friend David Pierce
00:51:24makes a
00:51:25compassionate case
00:51:27But my friends he is wrong
00:51:29Because if you listen to him, you would believe that carplay is any good at all
00:51:35It's not it just isn't just look at it. You don't have to believe me
00:51:40You don't have to look at charts and graphs or go to my website vote for Patel car software
00:51:45Calm and leave a $20 donation 95% of Americans have donated $20 or less
00:51:51You don't have to do any of those things, but you should just look at it who are you gonna believe David Pierce his slick tongue
00:51:58his carpet bag
00:52:00It's not good. It hasn't substantively changed in a decade. It's just the same list of things. I
00:52:08like many Americans most Americans all Americans
00:52:11Believe that the greatest joy in life is buying something expensive and then pushing all of the buttons in
00:52:18Pierce's communist America
00:52:20There's no more there's none of that you just get in the car and it's the same old dumb car play that you've had for the
00:52:25Past ten years with nothing new on the menu. I don't want to live in that America
00:52:29I want to live in America where God forbid some software designer at Ford has
00:52:35Decided to move all the climate controls around and then you got to figure it out and then you figured it out and you've won
00:52:41one tiny shred of victory in your life
00:52:46Vote Patel, I can see why you were a good lawyer. You just said nothing and I'm like, yeah
00:52:5480% how you sound 20% what you say? That's good. I I feel it you're dead wrong and the car plays
00:53:02No one no one thinks car play is great
00:53:04It's just that it's better and I'm I live in a world where better is enough
00:53:10Here here I'll I've again I've spent several days with a Rivian the Rivian maps are better
00:53:15They're good, but the actual zooming when you drive around with the maps is so deeply confusing
00:53:21Because it zooms in on the map as you get closer to a turn
00:53:25Rendering your ability to know how like when the turn is gonna be like to nothing perfect
00:53:31It's good, but it's better but it's better than car play. That's all I'm saying
00:53:35You can you can have the music player and the map on the big screen at the same time
00:53:40I mean that does sound nice. I'll give you that. No, there can be no agreeing. No agreeing hate each other
00:53:46Okay, verge cast listeners. What do you think? Did Neely make the case better or did David?
00:53:51Let us know what you think by calling 866 verge 1-1 or email us at verge cast at the verge calm
00:53:56And let us know what you think of this new format and what other topics you'd like us debate
00:54:00There's a whole lot more to this conversation at the verge calm
00:54:03We'll put some links in the show notes, but also read the verge calm
00:54:11All right, we gotta take one more break and then we're gonna get to the verge cast hotline we'll be right back
00:54:21All right, we're back let's get to the hotline as always the number is 866 verge 1-1 and the email is verge cast at the
00:54:28Verge calm we love all your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week this week
00:54:32We have a question about something that is unfortunately near and dear to my heart right now as well
00:54:39David it's Liam from Virginia. I have a problem
00:54:43How do I stop all of these insane spam and political texts in the last like two weeks?
00:54:51I've gotten over 60 spam texts or text begging me to donate to different political campaigns
00:54:59Candidates that I've never given my information to I'm assuming they got my info because of some candidate
00:55:04I gave a donation two years ago. How do I get off these lists?
00:55:08Of course, there's just the regular spam stuff that I get but it's completely taken over my messages app
00:55:14I don't want to get a new phone number. I like my phone number a lot of stuff's tied to it
00:55:19Is there anything that I can do? I know getting on the do not call list doesn't help with political campaigns. Help me out here
00:55:26Thanks
00:55:27Okay, so at least for people in the United States, this is a huge and widespread problem
00:55:33I don't know how big a deal it is in other countries
00:55:36I've heard a lot about folks getting political spam on whatsapp and other places
00:55:39but I just want to talk about the US for right now because this in a funny way is actually
00:55:43maybe more complicated in the United States than most places and the unfortunate answer to the question is
00:55:49There really isn't anything you can do at least not anything that is kind of guaranteed to work in a sweeping broad way
00:55:56So there's one kind of text that is from a legitimate business about legitimate business purposes
00:56:04Right. Those are the ones sometimes that you'll sign up for when you get a receipt from Square, right?
00:56:10you'll you'll have signed up to get text messages and usually what those things will have is they'll say stop to unsubscribe and
00:56:16Typically you respond stop and it stops right like that
00:56:20that is actually a thing that these companies are legally required to do is
00:56:24Stop when you say stop and there are there are systems that some carriers have to block that stuff like that
00:56:30Actually works as a system
00:56:32When it is legitimate when it's not legitimate the problem with replying stop to a mass text message is
00:56:40Actually what you've done is you've confirmed to whatever spammer is sending that spam text that your number is real and that
00:56:48Someone is paying attention to it. And what that essentially gives them is license to keep spamming you
00:56:52There's no technical reason that they have to stop if you say stop and they won't
00:56:58So this is the risk that you're taking right if you get a political text
00:57:01Let's say from an actual campaign run by an actual above-board organization and you reply stop
00:57:07You'll stop getting it all it does is stop that one thing and frankly the honest truth is
00:57:13Your phone number and my phone number have probably been sold a million times to a million different organizations
00:57:18So you're forever playing this game of whack-a-mole
00:57:20There's no just like turn off the political text button that you can press
00:57:23But you can do it one by one and if you reply stop over and over and over again
00:57:28The numbers will go down. That's been my experience every time I get one that is obviously from a campaign and
00:57:34Usually you can google the number by the way
00:57:36And it will tell you pretty reliably if it is a real number from a real campaign
00:57:39If it is and you reply stop it will go down again whack-a-mole
00:57:43But it'll work if you get it wrong and you reply to something that looks like a political text
00:57:49But is actually a spammer or a scammer of some kind which is a thing that they do especially in moments like this
00:57:55You've just caused yourself extra problems. So really what you have to balance here is okay
00:58:00Do I want to do the work of verifying every one of these numbers in order to go press the stop button?
00:58:06Which just means texting stop and make them go away or is it less work to just frankly ignore the text messages?
00:58:14there are also a couple of things you can do other than replying one thing you can do is
00:58:18Delete it and report it to your carrier which in theory will tune their systems for detecting spam
00:58:25So that might make it better for everybody
00:58:27But it also is you know manual labor every time you get one of these from a new number you swipe and you hit delete
00:58:33and report junk and it goes to Verizon and whoever your carrier is and
00:58:38That slowly makes things better, but it will not immediately solve all of your problems
00:58:42There's also things like Robo killer and other apps that try to intercept some of that stuff. I found that they work
00:58:49Ish like there are a lot of things like that that will make things slightly better
00:58:53But there is no way to just go and say do not send me political texts
00:58:59Unfortunately by the time you get one that ship has probably sailed your number is in some database
00:59:04Everybody has access to that database those databases get sold a million times over and you are forever resigned to getting a lot of
00:59:11Politics texts one thing I've heard from a bunch of people is that if you are getting a lot of these
00:59:17Using the filters, especially on iOS that will actually filter out
00:59:22Messages from unknown numbers can be really handy if you're getting like an overwhelming number of these
00:59:27You can go into settings you can filter unread messages and it'll just dump those into it's kind of the equivalent of like the other
00:59:34inbox on
00:59:35Facebook or one of the other like LinkedIn kind of social apps that people you haven't
00:59:41Necessarily put into your contacts or declare that you care about get foisted into that other one
00:59:45I did that for a while and it turned out I missed a lot of text messages from people who I actually cared about
00:59:50But didn't have their number your mileage may vary
00:59:52So, like I said, there are a lot of half measures here
00:59:56but I think what I would recommend if you're trying to get this down is
01:00:00Google the phone numbers of ones you're getting a lot to make sure that they're legitimate and then delete those text messages
01:00:07Reply stop and report whatever spam and junk you can to your carrier that helps you and it helps everybody
01:00:14But be careful because all it takes is a couple of incorrect responses and all of a sudden you've flagged to whoever sent that
01:00:22message and to whoever owns the database of those numbers and everything else that you are legit and you are paying attention and
01:00:28When you do that to the wrong people, it can be a problem
01:00:31The politics extra only gonna get worse if you have a better idea about how to get rid of them
01:00:35Please let me know I'm all ears because I am getting just aggressively too many of them right now
01:00:41And I'm deeply tired of it, too. So good luck to all of you out there with your text messages. I hope that helps a little
01:00:47All right, that is it for the verge cast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show. Thank you for listening again
01:00:52We want to hear everything you think about these pilots. We're trying new formats
01:00:56It's been fun to mess around and see like are these things we want to do on the verge cast every once in a while
01:01:00Are these entirely new shows we should launch let us know everything you're thinking
01:01:05There's also lots more on all this stuff our coverage of CarPlay and the automakers
01:01:08Our coverage of Roku and the streaming wars all this stuff is all over the verge comm
01:01:12We'll put some links in the show notes, especially to the stuff that we referenced in a lot of these pilots
01:01:17But just check out the website. It's good website. It's a shockingly newsy summer
01:01:21So keep it locked on the verge comm and as always if you have thoughts questions
01:01:25feelings or other streaming gadgets that you think we should make shows about
01:01:29Email us at verge cast at the verge comm or keep calling the hotline. It's 6 6 verge 1 1. We love hearing from you
01:01:35I'm on vacation. I'm gonna be back in two weeks
01:01:38We're gonna have lots more to do because again
01:01:40It's a real newsy summer
01:01:41This show is produced by Andrew Marino Liam James and will pour verge cast is verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network
01:01:47Nila and the gang will be back on Friday to talk about I don't even know I'm on vacation
01:01:52Whatever news there is because there just keeps being news. We'll see that rock and roll