Dear Studio Fam,
This week we bring you even more news from the metaverse with a hardware announcement from Meta, another AR easter egg from Apple, and an overview of the world’s first totally free television. We also take a look at some tech companies who have suffered massive cuts to their valuations and examine how Internet censors are still oblivious to the Streisand Effect.
Meta Unveils Quest 3 Headset Ahead of Apple AR Event
It’s no secret that Mark Zuckerberg has high hopes for the metaverse, going so far as to completely rebrand Facebook to “Meta” and spend over $20 billion on developing metaverse hardware and software. Despite these monumental investments, adoption of metaverse technology has been slow. But that has not deterred Zuck from continuing to pursue his dream of writing “the next chapter of the Internet overall” and continuing to iterate on Meta’s metaverse hardware with the announcement of the new Meta Quest 3 Mixed Reality Headset.
The timing of the announcement is no coincidence as Apple is widely expected to debut its AR headset next week at WWDC. While not yet available for purchase, Meta detailed a number of product specifics including an overall lighter and thinner design, better graphics performance, and updated hand controllers that provide a more immersive haptic response to metaverse interactions. Perhaps most significant is the enhancement of the “pass through” technology, which uses cameras to recreate a user’s physical environment and project interactive elements onto otherwise real tables, floors, and walls.
The Meta Quest 3 will be available in September.
Small Bytes: Apple WWDC AR Demo
Apple has dropped another easter egg that practically guarantees the debut of an AR headset next week, this time in the form of a mobile friendly AR experience on the WWDC website. Click here from an iPhone or iPad and click “View the AR experience.”
Telly TV Is The First Free TV
Despite two years of record inflation, some things have actually gotten cheaper over this time. On the top of that list are smart televisions, the largest versions of which can be had for as little as a few hundred dollars despite many of them subject to 25% tariffs since 2019. This is no small part due to massive subsidies from streaming services that pay for their apps to be preferenced in smart TVs interface design – Roku doesn’t put a Netflix button on the remote for free! Smart TV makers also harvest viewer data from their customers, sometimes going so far as to directly sample screen images to figure out what you are watching.
The price drop has now literally reached bottom with the introduction of Telly TV, the first totally free television that also sports a unique double panel design. From the co-founders of free streaming TV company PlutoTV, Telly TV hopes to upend the “most the same” smart TV industry by offering a high quality picture, sound, and new features for the lowest price possible – free.
“We’re going to disrupt not only the price point, but let’s actually build the world’s smartest TV. Let’s load it with extra computing power [and] extra sensors,” told Telly TV co-founder Ilya Pozin to The Verge. “Let’s put awesome speakers in it. Let’s put a camera in there so you can do Zoom calls and motion-tracking fitness and gaming. Let’s put a second screen in there so you can see stats in your fantasy sports and do sports betting. And when you’re watching a movie, check out movie reviews and see actor information on the bottom screen instead of overlaying everything up top. Let’s put a microphone in there so you can run a full assistant.”
All of these advancements sound great, but don’t forget the old adage: If something is free, the product is you.
Big Tech Write Downs Force Companies To Rethink Valuations
While some tech companies like Nvidia and Apple have seen monumental valuation growth in the past year, other tech companies have been forced to write down their valuations or spin off underperforming acquisitions for pennies on the dollar. Here’s a rundown of some of the most notable cases of sky high valuations leading to big losses.
- Twitter: Fidelity Investments maintains a private stake in the new Twitter and recently wrote down its stake to one third of Elon’s purchase price.
- Giphy: Meta acquired GIF keyboard maker Giphy in 202 for $315 million only to divest the company for a paltry $53 million in response to UK regulator demands.
- Kustomer: Another Meta acquisition, Zuck paid over $1 billion for this CRM company in 2020 with hopes of using its technology to unify the admin views of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. It divested Kustomer this year for a massive loss, retaining a minority stake in the newly formed company now valued at just $250 million.
- WeWork: Once valued at over $47 billion, the now-public WeWork has a market capitalization of just $350 million (that’s $700 million less than founder Adam Neumann was paid to leave the company).
Twitter VP of Trust and Safety Resigns Over Documentary Film, Triggers Massive Streisand Effect
In an incredible culmination of a bizarre censorship controversy that played out in real time on Twitter yesterday, Twitter VP of Trust and Safety Ella Irwin has reportedly resigned in response to Elon Musk overruling her censorship decision against a conservative documentary.
Twitter staff reportedly decided against allowing conservative media company The Daily Wire to distribute its gender-critical documentary “What Is A Woman?” on the grounds that a scene in which a father refers to his transgender daughter with male pronouns constitutes “harassment and abuse.” The decision was confusing to the producers of the film because of Musk’s reinstatement of accounts like The Babylon Bee that had been banned by the former Twitter leadership for similar violations of a policy against misgendering.
Less than eight hours after the film’s producers began Tweeting about the new censorship decision, Elon tweeted that the decision to censor the film “was a mistake by many people at Twitter” while simultaneously stating that the film was “sensitive” and would not be eligible for advertising or recommendation to non-followers of The Daily Wire. But he then directly tweeted a link to the film to his over 140 million followers and stating, “Every parent should watch this.”
As of this writing, the film has been viewed 18 million times on Twitter confirming that the Streisand Effect is quite real.