The JWST's first space images, YouTube TV's bundle bet, and the Vergecast Hotline Q&A

Last week, we put a call out to people on Twitter about our new Vergecast Hotline, a phone line we set up for anyone to leave a message about a tech-related question they may have — whether it’s how to find your next router, when Spotify HiFi is actually coming, how to track when all of your favorite shows have new episodes, or whatever — so we can answer them on The Vergecast. We plan to do this about once a month, so if you missed it, that number is 866-VERGE11 (866-837-4311). It’s still open, and you can call at any time. We have a ton of great questions already, so we picked out a few voicemails we liked for today’s episode. Our colleagues — Verge reviewer Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, Hot Pod reporter Ariel Shapiro, Verge writer Cameron Faulkner, and managing editor Alex Cranz — help answer these questions on the show. You can hear that segment at around 31:00 in the episode. There’s a lot more in today’s episode as well. David starts the show with senior science reporter Loren Grush to chat about what it took to get those beautiful images from the James Webb Space Telescope we saw this week. In the middle of all of this, David spends some time on the show talking about YouTube TV — the video platform that is trying to make the cable bundle model work for streaming. Christian Oestlien, VP of product management at YouTube, talks about the goals for YouTube TV and its approach to bundling packages. You can listen to that segment around 20:44 in the episode. Email us at [email protected], we'd love to hear from you. Call our Vergecast Hotline! 866-VERGE11 (866-837-4311) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of toll-free phone calls. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am currently in the car on the way to the Comcast store, which is improbably a real thing that still exists. Because after I don't even know how many years, I finally canceled cable. I'm having a lot of feelings about it and we're going to talk about them later in this episode. We have a lot more to get to today, too. We're going to talk to Lauren Grush about the James Webb Space Telescope, which I don't know if you've seen, has been putting out these unbelievable images of space like we've never seen it before. It's very cool and there's quite a story behind it, so we're going to dig into it. We're also going to take a bunch of your questions. We set up a Verge hotline, which we'll talk more about later, but you guys sent in some really great questions and we're going to get to as many of them as we can.

• 0:45David Pierce?

  And in between, I'm going to have more feelings about cable TV. Anyway, we're going to get to all of that in just a minute, but before we do, I have to run into the Comcast store and drop off this box. So, this is The Vergecast. See you in a sec.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:29David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Before we get going, here's the deal. If you haven't seen the spectacular first images coming from the James Webb Space Telescope, you need to pause this podcast, go to theverge.com and look at them.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Mr. President, if you held a grain of sand on the tip of your finger at arm's length, that is the part of the universe that you're seeing, just one little speck of the universe.

• 2:58David Pierce?

  Galaxies on galaxies, you can see light bending in space. You can see stuff from billions of years ago. It's incredible. I'm serious. Go look. And this is only the beginning of what we're going to get from the JWST. It's been a huge amount of work and billions of dollars to get this telescope into space and operational, and now it's time to just do science super hard.

• 3:22David Pierce?

  The Verge's Lauren Grush spent a bunch of time with the team at NASA ahead of this reveal, and she wrote a great story, which I'll put in the show notes, about what it took to get the JWST truly up and running in space to start getting images like these. So she's here in between all the huge announcements coming from NASA to give us a sense of what these images mean and what's to come. Hi, Lauren.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 3:44David Pierce?

  I really like the story that you wrote, and I want to talk about it because you did a very fun thing, which is make me realize that the way that I have thought about these space telescopes is totally wrong. Like, we talk all about the launch, it's like a whole big thing, and then it's like, they go to space, and then they are just sort of in space, and then stuff happens. And you were basically like, no, actually, they have to like do things before it can do the space cool stuff.

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:06David Pierce?

  I want to get into all that, but I think that maybe the quick, let's just do sort of a quick recap of kind of where we are for the people who are not following the JWST quite the way that we are. So like, if you back way up, what is the point of this thing? Why did they spend all this money and all this time making this telescope?

• 4:24Speaker 03

  Sure. So the entire point of JWST is to unlock the secrets of the universe, if you will. I mean, every astronomer's dream is to peer deeper into the universe and see with better clarity than we have before. And to do that, we send bigger and bigger pieces of mirrors into space so that we can gather more light and, you know, see deeper into the universe than we have ever before. And JWST's mirror is the largest mirror that we've ever sent into space. And so it will hopefully be able to gather light from some of the earliest galaxies and stars that formed right after the Big Bang. So when the universe began, the universe as we know it began in earnest.

• 5:07David Pierce?

  Okay. And this is the first new version of this in a long time, right? It's not like, we're not like launching one of these every six months.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  No, I mean, we have various observatories in space, but this one was particularly ambitious because it needs to see in the infrared, so it has to operate at a very cold temperature. Because infrared light is a type of light that we can't see, but we feel it as heat. And so in order to pick that up, it has to be extra cold. So there were certain design elements that had to be put in in order to make that happen. And also, like I said, the mirror is just very big. And so back to your original point about the fact that it didn't just go up, it had to do a lot of things when it went into space. The mirror was so large that the observatory had to be folded in on itself when it launched. And so that complicated

• 6:00Speaker 03

  the design because it had to both do these amazing sciences, but also it had to be engineered in such a way that it could deploy and move in these very intricate ways, once it got into space, and also didn't break.

• 6:14David Pierce?

  Didn't it launch on Christmas last year?

• 6:16Speaker 03

  It did launch on Christmas. And I am forever going to be plagued by covering important launches and important space missions on holidays. That is just the way of the world, it seems to be.

• 6:28David Pierce?

  That sounds about right.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Just to be clear, for me personally, this is coming out the day after the release, but July 12th, the day of the release, is my birthday. So. JWST, two for two on hitting important Lauren Grush milestones.

• 6:43David Pierce?

  NASA, if you're listening, if you could just like be cool the next time, that would be very helpful. We'd really appreciate that. Okay, so it launches on Christmas and my memory of it is that the the big thing like you're talking about was whether it would sort of unfurl correctly. And that happened pretty fast, right? That was like the the big undoing the Swiss Army knife thing happened pretty quickly after launch and went pretty well. Everybody was happy. And then that is like the last I heard about the JWST. But that is like, things kept happening. So like, what happens right after that happens?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  So the unfurling was probably the more dynamic time of this commissioning phase. And yeah, it was very dramatic. It had to kind of blossom like a flower, if you will. But that took about two weeks. And then it shifted into this much more quiet phase of commissioning. But no less important phase where they had to essentially align the mirrors ever so slightly and then also commission and calibrate the instruments on JWST. So one of the aspects of this mirror, this massive mirror that I've been talking about, is we couldn't launch it as is. There's no rocket currently operational that could have launched the mirror completely unsegmented because there are just no rockets that wide.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  Or at least their fairings, the nose cone where the that shrouds the payload just aren't wide enough to launch something of that size.

• 8:06David Pierce?

  And a big, flat mirror is not the most like aerodynamic of things, generally speaking?

• 8:12Speaker 03

  No, no, probably for the best that it was folded up during launch anyway. But they built the mirror in these 18 hexagonal segments that are supposed to basically perform as if they were a single mirror. But they couldn't launch that way, obviously. And even though they deployed after they did launch, they still had to be aligned so precisely that they did perform in this kind of functional way. And so that took about four months of work where they first had to take the mirrors off these things called snubbers, which made them extra snug and Kept them safe during the launch. But even then, and once that part was done, then they had to just tweak their movements just so slightly

• 8:56Speaker 03

  so that they got them all in sync together. And that was just a very tedious process of, you know, taking images with the mirrors, however they were aligned, you know, sending those images back to Earth, using a series of algorithms to figure out, you know, what needed to be done to fix them. They would then move the actuators on the back of the mirror segments, you know, ever so slightly. And they had to do them sequentially, too. And they couldn't go too crazy with the movements because the mirrors might actually run into each other, too. So it was a very precise method and very delicate. And, you know, everything with JWST has to be so meticulous because it's our one shot, essentially. You know, unlike Hubble, which is in orbit around Earth right now.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Over time, we've been able to upgrade Hubble and service it and tweak it. With JWST, it had, everything had to go right the first time. We cannot service it. It's living a million miles from Earth, roughly. So there's really no way that we can go out there and fix things if it breaks. A good example of this is in May, the JWST was hit by a larger-than-expected micrometeoroid, which left a dimple in one of those 18 mirror segments I was talking about. And they just kind of have to live with it. They've adjusted the mirror to, you know, take out as much distortion and damage that it caused. But ultimately, that dimple is there to stay for the lifetime of JWST. So going back to the mirror alignment, it's just, these things had to be ever so precise

• 10:26Speaker 03

  because any kind of error could jeopardize the mission.

• 10:29David Pierce?

  So these people basically just spent months doing like, you move it an eighth of a millimeter, take a test picture, another eighth of a millimeter, test picture, eighth of a millimeter. And then you get to the one and you're like, okay, we did it. And then you go on to the second. This just sounds like the most like, it sounds like a certain kind of torture. Like, I'm sure it's like, cool and interesting and rewarding. But like, what intense tedious work to have to do sometimes?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you also have to understand that it's been about two and a half decades to get to the launch pad for JWST. I mean, this entire mission has been besought by delays because they've had to be tedious in their work. And they've been doing this testing on the ground to prepare for this moment in space. So I'm sure the tedium of being in space probably doesn't even compare to the amount of testing and deployment and simulations that they've run on the ground for the last, you know, 20 something years.

• 11:22David Pierce?

  A lot of that is dedicated to like the camera piece of it. But you were writing about a bunch of the other stuff going on. There's spectrographs and there's other sensors going on that they're trying to work. Like, is this same process repeated for every single one of those?

• 11:35Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah. So while the mirror alignment was happening, they booted up the four main instruments on JWST and started, you know, the calibration phase where essentially, you know, you have to make sure that these instruments are performing and taking the measurements the way that they're designed before you actually start doing science. And yes, you know, they have cameras, they have spectrographs, they have these things called coronographs where you can block the light of a star so you can see objects, faint your objects nearby. The four instruments each have different operating modes. So they had to verify that those operating modes were working correctly, too. So it involved a lot of taking measurements, you know, doing demonstrations, looking at target objects,

• 12:19Speaker 03

  target stars, and taking data from that and then cross-checking from what we know about the stars and the galaxies in our universe. And so that also was another painstaking process that was a massive to-do list that they had to get through in order for the observatory to be ready to do the science that it's about to do.

• 12:40David Pierce?

  So not only do you have to make sure that, like, the camera works, you have to make sure it's, like, actually capturing the imagery it's supposed to be capturing in the correct way.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 12:50David Pierce?

  That's just where you get to crazy things where it's like, it's going to take pictures of things we've never seen before. How do you know if they're real? It's like this stuff gets so, like, mind-blowing sci-fi so quickly. It's insane.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Well, and the one thing that one of the commissioning scientists was talking to me about is that, you know, every camera has distortions in it. And so part of this was also just taking those basic images and finding the distortions to correct for them so that when they start taking those pictures, we know how to, you know, take out those errors in the data and get the best data that we can.

• 13:22David Pierce?

  Is this so much work upfront because, like you were saying, it's kind of a one-shot deal and it's not like an annual reset process? It's like they're trying to like prepare this thing to sort of have a long life on its own, right?

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. One nice thing about it is that, you know, it was really only designed to last five years. That was kind of the baseline. But because of the efficiency of its launch and the precision of its launch, apparently it didn't need as much fuel to get to its final destination. And so now it should have enough fuel to operate for at least 20 years. So hopefully we'll have this, you know, extraordinary piece of machinery still going strong for the next couple of decades, which thank God, because, you know, it cost us nearly $10 billion to make. And like I said, two and a half decades to get to the launch pad. So having it for at least 20 years is tremendous. But yes, I mean, like

• 14:16Speaker 03

  you said, it has to go right. We don't have a way to service it as of this moment. It's not designed to be serviced. And also, just so many people want time with it. You know, this is an extraordinary observatory that astronomers have been dreaming of for, you know, years and years and years. And scientists around the world are kind of clamoring to get time with it. I mean, when they first put out the call for the first year of science, they got over 1,000 different proposals. And those are just going to keep coming. Each year, they're going to do a new round of proposals and more and more people are going to throw their hat in the ring to get time with the telescope. Basically, they have to show that the telescope can do what it advertises before they kind of give it off to the science

• 15:01Speaker 03

  community and say, okay, here you go. Here's your time. Let's run.

• 15:05David Pierce?

  I just love imagining the meeting at NASA where there's like an engineering team and then like a science team and somebody just like hands a key to the scientists and they're like, "It's your time now. Go do science." There's gotta be some ceremony that happens here with that's like they knight each other with a sword or I don't know. It's there's gotta be something.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  There will be some celebrations, I'm sure. I'd love to see them. But no, that's a great point that you made this the optical or Lee Feinberg, who's the head of the optical instruments. I asked him, you know, how's it feel to be kind of transitioning control of the telescope? And of course, he's still gonna have work to do, but you know, it's things are moving into this new phase where, yeah, the scientists are kind of taking charge. And he was just expressing, you know, how happy he is to finally kind of sit back and discover the universe along with the scientists now, you know. So all of this work up until this point has just been to get this thing into space and make sure that it works. And so now we actually get to see the fruits of that labor. And so it's gonna

• 16:08Speaker 03

  it's a it's a whole new era for this telescope that many people have been working on for decades.

• 16:13David Pierce?

  That's awesome. What do we know about the first year? Obviously, the science doers are starting to do science and the first stuff is starting to come out. Like, how much do we know about what's coming in the next, say, 12 months?

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Sure. So like I said, the first year is jam packed. There was a lot of proposals that were competitively bid. I did a story on it when JWST launched in December. There's a lot. Like, I think if you go to the Space Telescope Science Institute's page, they have a full list of what they're looking at. And it's everything you could possibly imagine. One that has the most time is this one called Cosmos Web. And it's just going to take like a full, deep image of tons of galaxies and the deepest recesses of the universe, kind of like the Hubble Deep Field, but even bigger and in more detail. And then one really exciting

• 17:05Speaker 03

  aspect of the science that JWST will do, which wasn't even envisioned when it was built, is looking at the atmospheres of exoplanets. So exoplanets are Our planets outside of our solar system. And it's really in relative terms, it's a very new field of study. You know, we didn't even know exoplanets existed until, you know, a few decades ago. And now we've discovered, you know, thousands of these worlds outside of our solar system. One thing that J W C will be able to do is, you know, peer into the atmospheres of these exoplanets and discover what the constituents are. So what kind of molecules are present? And those certain types of molecules and their recipes and what kinds of mixes there are

• 17:49Speaker 03

  in those atmospheres could give us a better understanding if, okay, maybe this planet might be able to host, you know, life as we know it. Not saying that we will get those answers, but you know, there's plenty of exoplanet targets that are in the first year of science. Another exciting portion is a few years ago, they discovered a full planetary system with, I believe, seven planets around one star. And so it's called the Trappist system and we'll be taking a look at that. It's a very exciting system. So there's a ton of stuff, I mean, and that's, I'm only scratching the surface. Like the real big stuff is looking into, you know, the early cosmos, you know, the first stars and galaxies that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Bang. That's really what J W C was designed to do. It's also going to be looking at the planets and moons in our own solar system. It'll be tracking asteroids and comets, you know. I believe dark matter is involved in certain ways, you know. There's tons of applications for this telescope. It's, and it's, that's what makes it so popular is because it's going to touch almost every aspect of astrophysics and astronomy.

• 18:58David Pierce?

  I think in like year eight, when the hype has died down and people are like, oh, James Webb, I don't even remember, we here at the Vergecast, we're gonna, we're gonna buy some time and we're gonna do some science on the telescope. I don't know what we're gonna do, but it's gonna be amazing.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:14David Pierce?

  Lauren, thank you so much. This is really fun.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, no problem.

• 19:19David Pierce?

  Okay, we're gonna take a break and then I want to get back to my cable cancelling adventure because I actually need some help with some things. We'll be right back.

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• 19:59Speaker 04

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• 20:45David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So I have to confess something. I'm kind of a TV completist, which is just another way of saying I spend way, way too much money on streaming services. I have Netflix, and Hulu, and Amazon Prime, and HBO Max, and Disney Plus, and ESPN Plus, and Discovery Plus, and Apple TV Plus, and I'm just about to sign up for Paramount Plus because I want to watch the new Star Trek show. As I say all of that out loud, it's really, it's rough. I spend way too much money on this stuff. Oh, and the worst part is that until recently, as you heard a few minutes ago, I also had cable. Because a cable subscription, believe it or not, still gets me stuff that no other service does. A lot of live sports, for instance, all the broadcast networks, and one of those TV Everywhere

• 21:29David Pierce?

  logins that I can use on tons of channel apps that have lots of on-demand content you can't get anywhere else.

• 21:36David Pierce?

  I've always kind of thought cable subscriptions were a better deal than people think, honestly. It's one price, one bill, one service with access to a huge amount of content. It's just that the user experience of cable has always kind of sucked and it's really hard to cancel. So, over the last few years, a bunch of companies have tried to replicate that cable bundle in a more internet-y way. There's Hulu with live TV, there's YouTube TV, and there's Sling. Those are probably the three best known, but there are a few others. And YouTube TV announced this week that it has 5 million people either paying for or trying out the service, which obviously still pales next to the cable giants, but is growing really fast and means this whole bundle thing might not be dead yet. Christian Ostleyn has been one of the lead product folks on the YouTube TV team since

• 22:21David Pierce?

  the product launched in 2017, and actually even a couple of years before that. And he told me that when he first started investigating the cable world, he discovered that a lot of people were like me. They liked the bundle, they liked the TV, they just hated the way it all worked.

• 22:34Speaker 05

  The idea that you had to sign up for a two-year contract, that there was all this obscurity around pricing, that there was very little choice and you had to rent these really dated boxes with limited amounts of storage, limited ability to record multiple shows. So he really started to think, okay, there's something there and YouTube could probably really help. We could probably make the television experience much better. And that was really the kernel of what ultimately became YouTube TV.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  With unlimited DVR and personalized recommendations, YouTube TV is live TV reinvented for the 21st century.

• 23:02David Pierce?

  I should say, by the way, that there's one kind of content that continues to drive the regular TV ecosystem more than anything else, and that is sports.

• 23:11Speaker 06

  Welcome to Friday Night Baseball on Apple TV Plus, presented by QL.

• 23:15David Pierce?

  Big money, super complicated deals that regulate where games can be shown, how, to whom, on what device. It's insane. And it's because the leagues want to slice up the pie as many ways as possible to make as much money from their content as possible. That's how you end up with like the NFL making an exclusive mobile rights deal with Verizon so you can't watch games on cell networks with other carriers. It's stupid and it's just how it works.

• 23:41Speaker 05

  When we started, we originally had this crazy idea of like, could we just do the four main broadcast channels and do a $10 to $15 bundle and see how that would work? And of course, we had yet to sort of really work in earnest with all of our broadcast partners and the bundled set of channels that they offer is still very core to how they approach distribution of their programming. So those are just kind of the the hard choices you have to make.

• 24:02David Pierce?

  But the good news is, a lot of these companies have spent the last five years starting to figure out the internet, and this should all work better now, right? Christian told me it's, well, it's not getting better exactly, but it's definitely changing.

• 24:15Speaker 05

  Oh, it's a completely different world. You know, most of the network and broadcast partners that we work with have launched direct to consumer services, have placed a lot of emphasis and focus on that. We've gone through a pandemic, which was a really interesting experience from the perspective of selling TV, especially when there was no sports on live TV. And I think there's a really big market for TV, you know, I think football, news, all these things are really important for the average household. And it's great to be able to build a service that gives them choice, you know, if on YouTube TV, if you just want to subscribe to Showtime or Starz, you can actually do that, you know, we offer the ability to subscribe to standalone subscriptions. And if you want the full thing and with a bunch of add-ons, you can do that, too.

• 24:55David Pierce?

  There's a really interesting idea in there, right? He's saying that YouTube TV's main thing isn't, we give you live cable channels over the internet. It's the bundling itself that's the main thing, just giving you one place to see all your stuff, live, on demand, ad-supported, subscription, whatever, all in one app. That would be, by the way, a huge change from the way that streaming services work right now, which is to try and keep you inside their apps as much as possible. It's going to be hard work to get that to change. And YouTube is going to have some serious competition as that new channel bundler, given that Apple TV and Amazon are both also investing in ways to let you subscribe to HBO and Starz and stuff like that. Most streaming services, by the way, haven't gone

• 25:37David Pierce?

  for that channel strategy, but it seems like it's starting to catch on. The NFL is actually a good example of just how weird this is going to get. A lot of its media contracts have just come up in the last couple of years, and it's gotten insane.

• 25:58David Pierce?

  Amazon is gonna start having Thursday night football. Local networks mostly kept the Sunday games, but they're also gonna start streaming some stuff on their own apps. It also sounds like a streaming network is gonna get the NFL Sunday ticket, and the NFL is also working on its own streaming service. It's insane. A bundle for that sounds great, right? You just have one place to watch football. But getting all of those players on board is gonna be damn near impossible. Christian told me that he doesn't think it's as impossible as I do. He just sees it as a new kind of super complicated contract to sign.

• 26:30Speaker 05

  But even in a world where everybody goes direct to consumer, you still have this issue as a sports fan that ESPN has one set of games, another network has another set of games, and you just have to think about the pricing strategy that would have to be implemented there to make that all work. You end up in a place where a bundle actually makes a lot of sense.

• 26:48David Pierce?

  In general, Christian told me that the networks and studios basically want two things. They want money, which YouTube handily has lots of, and they want reach, which YouTube also has lots of.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  We've got 2 billion users worldwide, so I think whether content is distributed in a bundle or where over time we explore other ways of distributing it, I think YouTube can be a great partner there. The larger purview I have at YouTube is that I manage our connected TV business. We think about sports globally. We think about it not just in terms of how we work with the broadcasters, but also how we work directly with the leagues. And again, we're just trying to make sure that wherever possible, we're getting this content in front of YouTube users, and we're doing it in a model that makes sense for the end customer and also for the network partners, leagues and broadcast partners we work with.

• 27:28David Pierce?

  The thing he's really saying there, and the thing I find so fascinating about YouTube TV, is that YouTube is the internet's best video distributor. And in the long run, YouTube doesn't really care what form that video takes. If nothing else, I think YouTube TV exists as the same kind of backstop as cable. It's kind of a bridge between the cable box and whatever the future looks like. And YouTube, by the way, is desperately trying to build what that future looks like. Either way, though, I need something like YouTube TV. But YouTube TV is expensive. It starts at $65 a month, and it goes up quickly from there. This whole cable replacement thing has quickly stopped being cheaper than cable. So if it's not cheaper than cable, what's the point? And is YouTube TV the way to go?

• 28:13David Pierce?

  I mean that question sincerely, by the way. I currently still subscribe to a million streaming services, but I haven't replaced cable with anything, and I feel like I need to. So I want to know what you think and what you do to solve this problem. Tweet at me, email [email protected]. Tell me what you do, and seriously, please tell me how to spend my money. I'll report back on what I end up doing and hopefully try to solve this problem once and for all.

• 28:38David Pierce?

  And with that, we should take a quick break and then we're going to come back and answer some of your questions on the brand new Verge hotline without all things tech. We'll be right back.

• 28:51Speaker 07

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• 29:21Speaker 01

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• 30:00David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So last week, we put out a call to people on Twitter about our new Vergecast hotline, which is just a phone line that we set up for anyone like you to leave a message about a burning tech question. So we can answer them right here on the Vergecast. If you missed it, that number is 866 VERGE11. You know, like 411 or 311. The number is 866-837-4311. But you should just remember 866-837-4311. 866 VERGE 11. The number's still open. You can call anytime. And I think we'll probably try and answer a batch of those questions once a month on the show. And we're also going to ruthlessly steal all of your best questions and ideas and use them as big segments on the show. We'll give you full credit, of course. I think this is going to be really fun. I'm super excited about it. So call us anytime. Again, 866 VERGE 11.

• 30:44David Pierce?

  For this one, we got a lot of great questions already. So we picked out a few voicemails we liked, brought in some of our colleagues at The Verge, and we're going to try to answer some of your questions right now. Our first question comes from Alex. Let's hear it.

• 30:57Speaker 08

  Hi, my name's Alex. Over the weekend, my router decided to die. And so I'm on the market for a new Wi-Fi router. I'm just trying to decide whether or not I need to go ahead and get a Wi-Fi 6 or upgrade to the Wi-Fi 6E. Just trying to figure out what would be best for an average home user and all these new ones coming out this summer. Just trying to figure out which one works the best. Thanks.

• 31:18David Pierce?

  Okay, so I am perhaps America's least qualified person to answer this question. So instead, I brought in Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, who is much more qualified than I am. Jennifer, thank you for doing this with us.

• 31:30Speaker 09

  Happy to help and sorry about your Wi-Fi router, Alex. That's really annoying.

• 31:36David Pierce?

  It's a very universal feeling.

• 31:37Speaker 09

  Yes. Well, he sounds so much calmer about it than I would have been. I mean, ah, but now he gets to do something fun, right? Which is buy some new tech. So we're here to help. In general, I would say my first rule of any tech purchase is to buy the best you can afford. Better, newer tech, you know, can future-proof your gadget, potentially extend its life and technically is thereby kind of saving money. Because you'll hopefully have it for longer and it'll be more useful. And Wi-Fi 6E is the newest tech in Wi-Fi routers. And if you can afford one of them, a Wi-Fi 6E router, I would recommend getting one. But they are really still very expensive.

• 32:20Speaker 09

  And while there are a few cheaper ones out there that have just sort of popped up, there aren't a lot of reviews out yet on them. And unless you have gigabit or higher internet and devices that actually use Wi-Fi 6E, which is a new Six gigahertz band, you probably aren't going to see any benefit with a Wi-Fi 6e router today over a Wi-Fi 6 router. It's a bit confusing, but if you do have supported devices that work on the six gigahertz band, which right now includes a few high-end smartphones, like the Google Pixel 6 and some gaming laptops, but no Apple devices. These gadgets get their own superhighway with 6e. You get a wider, cleaner band that can handle multi-gigabit speeds.

• 33:05Speaker 09

  It's basically like a fast lane for your phone and computer. And actually, my colleague Jake did a great explainer on all the benefits of 6e, which we'll link to in the show notes if you want to find out more. But as Alex mentioned, he's an average consumer. I'm going to guess that maybe that doesn't apply to you right now. And while more devices will support 6e in the next few years, and a new router should last four or five years, hopefully. But if you're upgrading from Wi-Fi 5 or an older than that router, which I hope not, a good Wi-Fi 6 router will be a significant step up and one I think he'd be really happy with. So I would say go with Wi-Fi 6 now. While it doesn't have its own six gigahertz band,

• 33:50Speaker 09

  it does improve the speed of your network overall because it helps your router handle more devices better. And most of us nowadays have multiple devices taxing our Wi-Fi router. And while those devices are going to have to be Wi-Fi 6 capable, there are way more Wi-Fi 6 products out there than there are 6e capable products, such as like the last couple generations of iPhones, most laptops and Android phones from the last couple of years. So there's more that's going to be able to take advantage of it for the average consumer.

• 34:19David Pierce?

  I like it. So it's like your next upgrade is probably a 6e router. For now, 6 is probably good enough for just about everybody.

• 34:26Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 34:27David Pierce?

  I have been like threatening to stop renting a router from Comcast.

• 34:32Speaker 09

  Oh, you shouldn't do that.

• 34:33David Pierce?

  I know, I know. And I'm going to stop. So you've helped Alex and me today.

• 34:37Speaker 09

  Great. Happy to help.

• 34:38David Pierce?

  Awesome. All right. Well, Jennifer, thank you. Let's move on to the next one. Our next message comes from Tim from New York.

• 34:45Speaker 10

  Hi, my name is Tim calling from New York. I'm just wondering what's going on with Spotify Hi-Fi. They announced that this is coming at the end of 2021. It's still nowhere to be seen. Will we ever see Hi-Fi? Will we ever see Dolby Atmos? Will we ever see true innovation in music? Or is it just now a podcast slash soon to be audiobook service? Thanks. Love the podcast.

• 35:08David Pierce?

  Okay, I love this question and it is something I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about. I brought in Ariel Shapiro, our Hot Pod reporter, to help me answer it because you know better than I do. Ariel, hi, thanks for doing this.

• 35:20Speaker 11

  Hey, thank you, Tim, for that great question.

• 35:23David Pierce?

  It's a good question, right? Like, what is going on with Spotify is like a perfectly valid thing to wonder about the world right now.

• 35:29Speaker 11

  No, it is a really good question and they don't want you thinking about it because they have made, to all appearances, they have made absolutely no progress on it. I really would not hold my breath on getting lossless audio from them anytime soon. The last official update they had was in January, which was that they will make it available to premium subscribers in the future. So truly any point. And I actually just checked in with them today to see if they had any updates and they don't.

• 35:55David Pierce?

  So in theory, it's still happening. We just have no idea when.

• 35:58Speaker 11

  It doesn't seem to be dead, but you know, money is a lot tighter than it was when they announced it.

• 36:03David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 36:04Speaker 11

  A year and a half ago. And on top of that, music is just not their priority when it comes to innovating at the company because music is incredibly expensive to operate and lossless audio, even though like I love it, sounds like Tim loves it, sounds like you love it. But you know, it's not something that's going to like drive a ton more subscribers and necessarily be worth it for them. So you know, their calculation is podcasts have a higher profit margin. Audiobooks have a higher profit margin. So that's what they're going to be focusing on and that's really where where those energies are heading. And I would say to Tim, like if music audio is your priority, I use Apple Music for that reason. The audio is a lot better quality than Spotify. And if you're a real audio geek, I've heard that title is great and that they're, they really are kind of like the standard

• 36:48Speaker 11

  when it comes to lossless audio for streaming.

• 36:50David Pierce?

  So one last question, like more broadly on this, because this is a thing I've been wondering about too. Like Spotify doesn't really seem interested in like doing new, interesting things with music. I feel like the most innovative thing that has happened in music in a while is like Kanye's weird STEM player thing. Is anybody out there doing like wild, cool, new stuff in the music space? Or is this just like a solved problem and everybody is trying to figure out better ways to make money?

• 37:15Speaker 11

  Really, the only things that are happening right now with music in terms of real innovation is discovery, right? Like you kind of see these places really investing in AI technology. Like SoundCloud just bought a startup that has this technology that apparently can listen to like crazy amounts of music at a time and identify which songs are potential hits, right? And then that helps the platform put them on playlists or really push them forward when they're trying to elevate new artists to listeners. So that's the kind of thing that I would pay attention to if you're looking to discover new artists, or if you're just thinking about like how the algorithms are working at these companies. But yeah, in terms of the actual experience you're going to be getting as a listener on any of these

• 37:59Speaker 11

  services, I don't want to say they don't care, but it's just, it's just really not the focus right now.

• 38:04David Pierce?

  Fair enough. Well, I feel like, I don't know that we're going to make Tim feel any better, but I think we've at least answered his question. And Tim, subscribe to Hot Pod. As soon as it gets better, Ariel will make sure you know. All right, Ariel, thank you. Appreciate it.

• 38:16Speaker 11

  Yeah, thanks so much, guys.

• 38:17David Pierce?

  Okay, our next question is from Logan, and it's another good one.

• 38:22Speaker 12

  Hey, this is Logan. I recently moved into my new apartment and I'm getting furniture, like a desk, and I'm also interested in getting some sort of display or computer monitor. I do like the design of the Apple Studio Display, but given the reviews and things like the webcam, I'm sort of hesitant to get that one. What kind of recommendations do you guys have in terms of a display that is in a similar price point and maybe offers some extra features such as maybe a better webcam, or at least better display technology with things like local dimming? I'm sort of struggling to find something I like that has, you know, good display features and good design. Thanks.

• 39:03David Pierce?

  Okay, this is a great question and a very timely one because Cam Faulkner, who is here, has spent, I think, like an outrageous amount of time with monitors in the very recent history. Cam, welcome. Thank you for doing this.

• 39:15Speaker 13

  Hey, thank you. And Logan, congrats on the new apartment. So yeah, Logan, welcome to the hell that is trying to find a monitor that ticks all the boxes. Like you said, the Apple Studio Display is lovely, design-wise, but it's pricey and it's kind of imperfect. I kind of want to point your attention to Samsung's M8 Smart Monitor. I know it's not going to meet all of your display criteria. It doesn't have local dimming, but it's kind of similar to the Studio Display in that it has a minimalist design and it includes a webcam. And it's 700 bucks, which is less than half the cost. Sadly, its webcam isn't quite as good as I hoped it'd be in the review, and it doesn't have the same stellar build quality. So if finding a display that has a webcam built in is a priority for you, I'd actually just suggest that you buy the webcam piecemeal.

• 39:59Speaker 13

  The Elgato FaceCam and the Logitech DreamCam are each really solid options that shouldn't cost you any more than 150 bucks.

• 40:06David Pierce?

  So that, we should say, by the way, seems like pretty good, like, universal advice, right? Like, have we encountered anything that is both like an extremely good screen and an extremely good webcam? It feels like that is like a beautiful dream that just basically does not exist in the world.

• 40:19Speaker 13

  Yeah, not yet. I have faith that we will get there at some point. But I know that some people on our team, I'm not sure if I can like name drop them. I don't know if they want that on themselves at this point.

• 40:31David Pierce?

  Their webcam shame cannot be known.

• 40:32Speaker 13

  But they started the pandemic, they're like, oh, heck, yeah, I've got this mirrorless camera. Look how beautiful I am. Dan and Alex. They have since kind of like realized that it's a little bit more upkeep than what they want to deal with on a day-to-day basis. And you know what? They still look great.

• 40:47David Pierce?

  Fair enough. Okay, so what else you got for them?

• 40:49Speaker 13

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, like, if you have some patience and you really want the best webcam available currently, you can currently request to get an invite to buy the $300 Opal C1. It's a webcam that I really like. A lot of people on the internet really like it. You can check out my review. I think it's the best one. It uses some machine learning fanciness on the inside to kind of like auto-balance the colors and the exposure. Kind of regardless of where you are, like I usually work in a studio apartment in my basement. And the lighting is atrocious in there. Very few windows, not very much natural light, but I look all right when I use the Opel. It's it's kind of cool. But, you know, getting back on track, I know you want to find a display. Unfortunately, your options are kind of limited and the ones, the options that you do have are

• 41:33Speaker 13

  definitely in the in the pricey range. If you really just like want to get to the quick answer, you could buy something like the 42 inch LGC 2 OLED for the best overall picture. I mean, those have pretty nice design, though they aren't really made for computer desks. Like the stands are very small because they're assuming that you want to put it on your entertainment stand. And really, like if you're thinking about getting an OLED, I would warn that if you use documents a lot, if you're in spreadsheets, anything that's going to like cast a large, bright white on your face, like OLEDs currently, especially like the TVs, aren't aren't particularly great at handling that. They have luminance limiters to preserve the pixels and to avoid burn in, they drastically reduce the brightness.

• 42:16Speaker 13

  My colleague Sean Hollister reviewed the LGC one for us and he got literal headaches from using it for work. So don't be like Sean. Maybe don't use an OLED if you're spending most of your time in like Google Docs than playing a game or watching TV. But I I do have a couple of other suggestions. I know it's it's sounds pretty dire at this point. If you want to try sticking with OLED, Alienware makes a new curved 34 inch ultra wide QD OLED. It's $1,300. It offers a lot of bang for your buck. I mean, primarily it looks great. It's a little bit more catered to general use unlike a standard OLED, LGC one or LGC two. But wait times have been a huge problem for that model. Like I remember when my review went up, it was kind of like, well, I I want to tell

• 43:01Speaker 13

  people to buy this thing, but they actually have to wait like three or four months before they can even get one. Curved displays are cool again. Who knew? Well, it's like the convergence of of several kind of cool things. It's like curved, QD OLED, and the price, I guess $1,300 for all of that is pretty appealing. But I checked right before hopping on this segment and wait times are currently set to mid September. And, you know, who knows what's going to happen in mid September? Do you really want to wait that long to get your display? One last suggestion I have is if you are someone who wants to do some gaming on the side, or if you you value entertainment, Sony's new in-zone M9 monitor, Alex and Neel I talked about it on the last Vergecast, it's a 27-inch 4K IPS monitor that costs $900,

• 43:46Speaker 13

  which is a lot of money for that size, but it has 144 Hz refresh rate, it has full array local dimming with 96 zones, which is really impressive and pretty uncommon for, you know, a monitor. It's not a TV, you usually can get that kind of high-quality display in a, something beyond $1,000, and I know you're getting a much bigger TV for that price. But if you want something that's like focused, not too big, you can mount it on a monitor arm, it's basic compatible, that might be a good option for you. But like, this is a surprisingly tough question to answer, and I know like David, you said, I think we'll get there someday, when there's like an all-in-one solution that offers an amazing, you know, webcam experience, has awesome speakers. We see hints of it, like, I haven't

• 44:28Speaker 13

  used the Studio Display personally, but I heard that the speakers are actually pretty good on that. So like, companies are figuring out the pieces to it, but no one has figured it all out quite yet.

• 44:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I also feel like, we should just say, like, I hear Logan's question, and I feel like part of it is just him being like, please tell me that I'm not an idiot if I just buy the Studio Display. And it's like, like Logan, if you want to buy the Studio Display, like, follow your bliss, right? Like, it's a very good monitor, the webcam sucks, the speakers are pretty good, like, generally speaking, it's like a very expensive but very good thing with a crappy webcam, so buy a better webcam. But I feel like, you can kind of pick and choose really good stuff, but the perfect thing sadly does not exist. So it's like, buy a really good screen and buy a webcam, feels like probably the right advice, right?

• 45:11Speaker 13

  I'm with you, that's the advice that I'd personally follow. But I would also say that like, sometimes the general performance or like your personal needs sometimes don't match up with what you read in reviews. Like, we have really high expectations for products, and like, if it's feasible at all, if you live within close proximity to an Apple Store or any, any other place you can find the Studio Display, check it out. Like, maybe if, if there's a good return policy, like, buy it. That goes the same for the webcams. Like, everyone has different kind of lighting situations and whatnot that can impact the quality, impact how we feel about it. Sometimes products get better over time, and we're just not like able to keep up with every kind of release that brings little improvements. So yeah, just check it out. Be curious. Follow your bliss, as David said.

• 45:55David Pierce?

  I like it. All right. Well, Logan, I hope we helped. Cam, thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, our last question for today is from Adam and is one I'm personally very excited about. So let's hear it.

• 46:06Speaker 14

  Hey, Vergecast. This is Adam. My question for you is, is there some solution out there that can aggregate all the shows that I watch on all the streaming services and notify me when new episodes are available that I haven't watched yet? I have not been able to find anything like this. It's basically, I'm looking for a replacement for a DVR from cable where things just appear and the most recent ones are at the top. And if you haven't watched it, it's bolded. It's so great. But with cable going away and all the streaming services, the best I could find is like a TiVo 4K or like a Google Chromecast and they don't really do the job. And it's so hard to know when all of the shows from all the different services that I

• 46:49Speaker 14

  watch are available when a new episode comes out. Hoping you had a solution. If not, do you think there might be one ever? Or maybe we can put a call up for somebody to create it because I really, really need it. Thanks. Bye.

• 47:01David Pierce?

  This is my favorite question of all time. And fun fact is maybe the thing I have spent the most time in my life reporting on. And the only other person who cares about this as much as I do is Alex Krantz. Hi, Alex.

• 47:11Alex Cranz?

  Hello.

• 47:11David Pierce?

  Do you have an answer for this person?

• 47:13Alex Cranz?

  I think there's a couple of answers, right? Like the true answer. If you really want a way to just know where everything is automatically, get it as soon as it's available. There's a very like gray legal area and it's getting something like Sonar, one of these digital DVRs and just BitTorrenting.

• 47:30David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:31Alex Cranz?

  But that's a very gray legal area. I've been told it's in fact illegal.

• 47:35David Pierce?

  It's also so much work.

• 47:36Alex Cranz?

  It's so much work. And like if your server messes up at all, it is hell to get it fixed. But that's a solution. That's the best like solution. Once you get it set up, you will have all of your content. You will have it when you want it. You should still pay all of those different companies their money. Is that a disclaimer? I don't know.

• 47:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, it works.

• 47:57Alex Cranz?

  You should do that. But unfortunately, like, the problem is, none of these companies actually want you to be able to do this. Right now, these companies all want you to just sit on their services and watch their content. So they go out of their way to keep this from happening, which means boxy R I P was like the last good solution. There's some hope, though, right? Like, David and I have talked about this, I think, on the Vergecast before. There's a little hope out there. Plex, I'm gonna say it, yeah, Plex is out there. That is a big ambition of Plex. Like, I've been told that by multiple people at the company repeatedly that this is an ambition of theirs, is to create this one-stop-shop. And they've rolled something out where you can sign into all of your different streaming accounts and have

• 48:40Alex Cranz?

  it tracked. I think the experience is pretty shitty right now, and don't personally recommend it. But it's available, and like Plex is working on it, and hopefully they'll be working on that instead of like their music player that I've used twice in my life.

• 48:53David Pierce?

  What you just described as like the grand ambition of Plex, the good news for our friend Adam here is that that is everybody's grand ambition, right? Like, that's what Apple's trying to do. That's what Plex is trying to do. That's what Google is trying to do with Google TV. Like, this thing where you just open up a thing and it tells you all the shows you haven't watched yet is like the dream, and it is everybody's dream. It's borderline impossible to pull off for all the reasons you just described. But like, I think eventually we're gonna get there, just because everybody is working on basically the same problem.

• 49:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and like, I would say Google and Apple are both pretty close. I would also throw out there, here's my dark horse candidate. It's this wonderful app. I've been using it for like two or three years now. I love it. It's called Channels. And what it does is it's a digital DVR, but a legal one. Ha ha, win one. And the idea is you're supposed to be able to like, just use it instead of a regular DVR, so you connect it. To your antenna and just get all of your stuff that way, or you connect it to your cable and get it all that way. But it also aggregates from all the other cable channels through this thing called TV Everywhere, where it'll just pull from HBO, it'll pull from AMC, all of these different

• 50:06Alex Cranz?

  places and record it and put it on this DVR. And I've found that using that, Apple, and then religiously checking Netflix and being mad because Netflix is really bad about presenting me when a new season of something is out. Those three are like my best current solution. Legal solution. Totally legal solution. You can do it right now. You will not go to jail. You will not have to pay tremendous fines to companies who sue you. And I love channels. It's great success. It's not as strong for the streaming as all the other TV, as like cable and linear stuff, but it's good. And it's pretty.

• 50:42David Pierce?

  All right. I like it. I would say go all in with one of the Google or Apple or something else platforms and just like bet on whichever one of those you think is going to get better faster. And then if you want to do like the crazy Alex Cranz streaming bonanza, go for it.

• 50:57Alex Cranz?

  I gotta watch my programs.

• 50:59David Pierce?

  All right, Alex, I think we have solved Adam's problem. So, thank you.

• 51:02Alex Cranz?

  Yes. Sorry, Adam. The world sucks.

• 51:05David Pierce?

  That's it for the questions for now, but like I said, we are going to be doing this call-in segment again. So, call us anytime. The number is 866-VERGE-11. That's 866-837-4311. But it's much easier to just remember, 866-VERGE-11. Call us anytime. Anyway, that's it for The Vergecast this week. Thank you so much for listening. There is tons more coverage on everything we talked about at theverge.com. And you can also follow us all on Twitter. Lauren is Lauren Grush. Jennifer is JP2E. Ariel is ARShapiro90. Cameron is Cam Faulkner. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. And I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Eleanor Donovan is our executive producer and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio.

• 51:49David Pierce?

  The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, or budget for us to use the James Webb Space Telescope, you can always email [email protected]. Alex, Neelai, and I will be back on Friday to talk about Elon Musk, iOS, MacBook Airs, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 52:18Speaker 16

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