Weekly output: OpenAI-enhanced customer support, fixed-wireless upgrades, MLS Season Pass, app-store competition report, FCC broadband map, Matter, Next Level Networks, Twitter offer to creators

Posted on February 5, 2023 by robpegoraro

I blew off work Friday to do something I hadn’t done in four years: go downhill skiing. Slope conditions were not awesome and I had snow guns blowing in my face most of the time, but it still easily beat spending those hours in a warm, dry home office.

1/31/2023: Can OpenAI Tools Help Customer Service Reps Sound More Human?, PCMag

The PR folks for Intercom gave me an advance on their news about adding GPT-based writing assistance to their widely-used customer-support platform.

1/31/2023: How MU-MIMO could change the FWA game for T-Mobile and Verizon, Light Reading

My editor at this trade pub asked me to summarize a rather technical report from Signals Research Group that found signs of a significant capacity upgrade in progress at T-Mobile–which that carrier had not talked up before but confirmed when I asked about it.

2/1/2023: Apple Invites Soccer Fans to Sign Up for MLS Season Pass, PCMag

After writing last summer about Apple signing this deal with Major League Soccer, I had to follow up with the pricing details Apple announced Wednesday.

2/2/2023: Feds Slam Apple, Google for Abusing App-Store Power (But Mostly Apple), PCMag

The lengthy report the National Telecommunications and Information Administration posted on Wednesday didn’t break any major news about the ways Apple and Google have run their mobile app stores, but its recommended remedies were still interesting.

2/3/2023: Is broadband available near you? This updated FCC map can tell you. Maybe., USA Today

I’d had this topic on my to-do list for a while, and then Federal Communications Commission chair Jessica Rosenworcel offered an update on the FCC’s connectivity-cartography efforts at an event Tuesday.

2/3/2023: With Matter, Apple HomePod 2 speaker aims to connect to devices no matter who makes them, USA Today

USAT publishing this post (a week and change after I filed it) wraps up my CES 2023 coverage.

2/3/2023: This startup aims to green broadband deserts with an old-school idea: Get customers to pay for the network up front, Fast Company

I first read about Next Level Networks from Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin, then learned that this Bay Area startup was building a fiber network at a development in Sonoma County, Calif.–not far from where I was already spending the holidays with my wife’s family.

2/3/2023: Twitter offers ad revenue share to creators, Al Jazeera

I was able to jump on Skype to offer a value judgment about Elon Musk’s insultingly vague promise of a share of advertising revenue to undefined “creators” who also pay $8 a month for Twitter Blue because I got back from skiing maybe 25 minutes before scheduled airtime.

Weekly output: 5G leaders, Mr. Antenna, streaming study, Desi Bundle, Disney’s Star+, Seinfeld coming to Netflix, two-factor authentication, HBO Max on Vizio, Locast logs off, Apple loosens App Store rules for “reader” apps, Nielsen nixed, checking wireless coverage, WhatsApp privacy fine

Posted on September 5, 2021 by robpegoraro

I worked a volunteer shift at a COVID-19 vaccination clinic Friday, the fourth time I’ve done so. On this occasion, we had far fewer customers than before, most coming for their second round of Pfizer or Moderna. But a few had yet to get any dose, which meant that they got to choose between those two vaccines or Johnson & Johnson’s; the latter needing a single jab made the difference for one man who said he was only getting vaccinated because his job required it. We also had a few under-18 kids who were limited to Pfizer–and one whom had been brought by her mom on her 12th birthday, so we had to take a minute to sing “Happy Birthday” to her.

8/30/2021: The 5G 50 to Watch Top Ten List, Light Reading

I helped write the bios for this list of top telecom industry executives put together by my trade-pub client. Yes, my last name is spelled wrong at the end of the piece.

8/31/2021: OTA antenna service alleges Vegas station refused to air its ads, FierceVideo

I spent most of this week filling in at my other big trade-pub client. I started by covering an allegation by a broadcast-antenna vendor named Mr. Antenna that a Las Vegas station had quit airing its ads because increased broadcast viewing would undercut its cable-TV income.

8/31/2021: New study finds more Americans splitting their streaming budget, FierceVideo

I wrote up a Leichtman Research Group study finding more Americans signing up for at least three streaming services.

8/31/2021: DistroScale streaming bundle serves up free South Asian channels, FierceVideo

If you didn’t know that “desi” is a term for people of South Asian descent before reading this post, you did after.

9/1/2021: Disney debuts Star+ in Latin America, FierceVideo

Writing this led me to dust off my VPN service for the first time in months to see what pricing this new Disney streaming service would show to a viewer in its target Latin American markets–the press releases I saw didn’t list any.

9/1/2021: Seinfeld coming to Netflix Oct. 1—and in 4K, FierceVideo

I only referenced one Seinfeld catch phrase in this piece, which I thought showed remarkable restraint.

9/1/2021: Why you shouldn’t rely on texts when using two-factor authentication to sign into accounts, USA Today

I could have written this column at any time in the previous two years, but T-Mobile’s latest data breach made it newly relevant.

9/2/2021: HBO Max app comes to Vizio connected TVs, FierceVideo

This post reminded me how much of HBO Max’s early struggles with getting its apps on streaming platforms.

9/2/2021: After hostile court ruling, Locast logs off, FierceVideo

As I tweeted after this story ran, the broadcasters who succeeded in suing Locast offline might not want to gloat too much. Viewers aren’t getting any less weary of endless pay-TV rate hikes, and telling people without good over-the-air reception to stick with cable will only get less persuasive every year.

9/2/2021: Apple to let video apps point users away from its payment system, FierceVideo

Apple deigning to allow “reader” apps to include one link to their own site shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is in the context of that company’s history of App Store control-freakery.

9/3/2021: Media Rating Council suspends Nielsen accreditations, FierceVideo

My last post for Fierce this week covered an industry group snubbing Nielsen’s audience-tracking work.

9/3/2021: Which wireless carrier has the best coverage where you’re going? Here’s how to find out, USA Today

A friend’s query about ways to see if T-Mobile or Verizon would offer better service than AT&T at his home was followed by my realizing that USAT had yet to cover the FCC’s release of a new and surprisingly helpful map of predicted LTE coverage from the major carriers.

9/3/2021: WhatsApp fined under GDPR, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language channel had me on to discuss WhatsApp getting hit with a €225 million fine for violations of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. The European Data Protection Board’s ruling in this case calls those failures of transparency, but I see the underlying problem as WhatsApp insisting on access to your phone’s contacts list to place a call or send a message to anybody who hasn’t already contacted you in the app.

Weekly output: Mark Vena podcast, Discovery’s streaming video ambitions

Posted on May 16, 2021 by robpegoraro

Ten years ago today, I finally crossed “see a space launch” off my to-do list, and I’m still working on the best words to describe what it was like to see, hear and feel Endeavour rocket into a cloudy Florida sky. Sometimes, I can’t quite believe that I did that–or that I’ve since had the immense privilege of returning to the Kennedy Space Center’s press site for two other launches. Fortunately, I have a framed print of the photo I took of the shuttle’s liftoff hanging on the far wall of my home office to remind me that I really did accomplish the goal I’d had in my head since I was 10.

5/11/2021: SmartTechCheck Podcast (5-11-21), Mark Vena

After a couple of weeks off, I returned to this podcast to talk about the tech business with our host from Moor Insights & Strategy and fellow tech scribes John Quain and Stewart Wolpin. Among this week’s topics: the legal battle between Apple and Epic over the former’s App Store governance, a newly announced smart-home standard, and the plague of ransomware.

5/12/2021: Discovery CEO says SVOD success won’t end its TV-bundle role, FierceVideo

My trade-pub client asked me to write up Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s interview at a conference hosted by the market-analysis firm MoffettNathanson. I figured Zaslav would wax optimistic about the company’s Discovery+ subscription video on demand (SVOD) service, but I didn’t expect him to explain that Discovery makes as much or more money off a D+ streaming subscriber than a cable or satellite viewer–and yet he expects no pay-TV provider will be able to get away with dropping Discovery from its lineup. I don’t imagine that many of you are feeling terribly sorry for those cable and satellite operators at this point.

Weekly output: password managers, streaming-TV forecast, Limelight earnings, EU vs. Apple

Posted on May 2, 2021 by robpegoraro

The most important item on my calendar this week: getting my second dose of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine.

4/28/2021: A cheaper deal from Dashlane invites a new look at password managers, USA Today

Dashlane’s PR firm offered me an advance on their addition of a new, cheaper price plan, which I used as a news peg for an overview of the password-manager market.

4/29/2021: Expect To Spend More On Streaming Video Than On Traditional Pay TV By 2024: New Report, Forbes

I wrote up a Strategy Analytics report predicting a slow demise for pay TV as we’ve known it. Sports fans, take note of the streaming deal for Italy’s Liga Serie A that one SA analyst described for me.

4/30/2021: Limelight revenues drop and losses widen, FierceVideo

I filled in at this client to cover this content-delivery network firm’s disappointing earnings.

4/30/2021: EU’s Answer To Spotify’s Complaint: Apple’s Rules Have Consumers Losing Out, Forbes

Writing this post about the European Commission’s preliminary finding that Apple abused its App Store authority to suppress competition from Spotify took me back to 2011–when it already seemed obvious that Apple demanding a 30% share of in-app subscriptions while forbidding app developers from pointing iPhone and iPad users to their own payment systems represented an abuse of power.

Weekly output: the App Store’s fake-reviews problem

Posted on February 14, 2021 by robpegoraro

Valentine’s Day is one event that hasn’t changed because of the pandemic. I love to cook, but I’m not so fond of seeing a restaurant at its worst because of Feb. 14 crowds. So this has always been my day to put together a fancy dinner at home.

2/12/2021: Lesson Of A Ripoff Roku Remote App: Beware App Store Ratings, Forbes

I started following Kosta Eleftheriou on Twitter a couple of weeks ago after seeing one of his threads unpacking an outrageous level of obvious fraud at Apple’s App Store. His Friday-morning thread about a third-party remote-control app for Roku media players conning people into signing up for $4.99/week subscriptions struck me as a convenient intersection of my longtime interest in app-store governance and my Forbes gig covering the intersection of tech and media.

Weekly output: iPhone 12 (x3), Pippa Malmgren, sustainable online commerce, Fig O’Reilly, Apple vs. Telegram

Posted on October 18, 2020 by robpegoraro

In case you hadn’t heard, Apple announced a new set of iPhones this week.

10/13/2020: iPhone 12, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language channel had me on to discuss the key features of this new lineup, starting with 5G. I felt sorry for the translator–the differences between millimeter-wave, low-band and mid-band 5G are confusing enough to native speakers of English.

10/14/2020: On Apple iPhone 12, it’s a battle of the 5G bands among AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, USA Today

I’m still puzzled by all the airtime Verizon got at Apple’s event, because its millimeter-wave 5G service increasingly looks like an epic disappointment. T-Mobile’s mid-band makes a better case for 5G–if you’re in one of the markets with the superior 5G flavor that T-Mobile has yet to highlight on its own coverage maps.

10/14/2020: Fireside: Friends or Foes? The impact of AI & Robotics on the Modern Workforce, Dublin Tech Summit Virtual

The first of three pre-recorded talks I did for this online conference had me interviewing science advisor and roboticist Pippa Malmgren about the future of drones–on Earth and across the solar system.

10/14/2020: Panel Discussion: Shopping for Sustainability, Dublin Tech Summit Virtual

My second DTS panel–but the last one I recorded–had me quizzing Etsy sustainability director Chelsea Mozen and Zalando product head Mike Mulligan about how these two online platforms are working to make their operations and their supply chains carbon neutral. We stuck around afterwards in the conference’s chat forum to answer audience questions.

10/14/2020: Fireside: Reach for the Stars, Dublin Tech Summit Virtual

As I noted in opening my talk with Fionnghuala (Fig for short) O’Reilly, who among things helps make NASA’s Space Apps challenge happen, the two of us share a few things in common: We both went to college in D.C., hold Irish passports, have pronunciation-defying names and know the joy of experiencing space launches.

10/15/2020: Apple To Telegram: Delete Posts Exposing The Belarus Dictatorship’s Enforcers, Forbes

I had meant to write this post last week, but held off on it to get some input from outside experts. Fortunately, nothing changed with the underlying story of Apple making the bizarre decision to tell the developer of a social app to delete individual posts allegedly doxing people propping up the dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus.

10/17/2020: SmartTechCheck Podcast (10-16-20), Mark Vena

I returned to the podcast Vena hosts for his employer Moor Insights & Strategy to talk about the pros and cons of Apple’s iPhone 12 lineup with fellow tech journalists Stewart Wolpin and John Quain.

Weekly output: online-video churn, Trump vs. social media, online-video UX, Tim Cook’s App Store history, Saudi Twitter spies, online-video ads, online-video lessons, Trump vs. TikTok

Posted on August 2, 2020 by robpegoraro

My biggest regret about this busy news week: I didn’t get to follow Access Now’s RightsCon digital conference. Having spoken at its real-world predecessor in Toronto two years ago–and knowing that friends were on this year’s panel schedule–I can only hope that I can catch up in my non-existent spare time this week.

7/27/2020: Sling’s ex-chief Warren Schlichting is content with churn, FierceVideo

My occasional trade-publication client signed me up to cover their OTT Blitz Week virtual event. I started that by writing up former Sling TV head Warren Schlichting’s observations about running an over-the-top video service.

7/28/2020: Here’s Trump’s Plan To Regulate Social Media, Forbes

Writing about the Trump administration’s proposal to have the Federal Communications Commission rewrite a law allowed me the unexpected pleasure of approvingly quoting experts at the left-leaning think tank Public Knowledge and the right-leading Charles Koch Institute, both of which said this plan seems nuts.

7/28/2020: There’s no UX without ‘you’, FierceVideo

My second post about OTT Blitz Week covered a panel that saw executives from Discovery, Sling, Pluto TV, Xumo and other online-video firms offering their insights on making their user experience feel comfortable for viewers.

7/29/2020: What Tim Cook Left Out Of His Version Of App Store History, Forbes

Apple’s CEO’s prepared statement for Wednesday’s tech-CEO hearings came close to erasing the history of online software distribution before the 2008 debut of Apple’s iOS App Store, and that bugged me. I wrote a correction of Tim Cook’s testimony, and I was flattered to see this post get a “Highly recommended” shout-out on Apple raconteur John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog.

7/29/2020: New charges for Saudi moles at Twitter, Al Jazeera

Stories involving Saudi Arabia behaving badly online often result in appearances for me on this Qatar-based news network. In this case, the news peg was a set of new charges against Saudi spies allegedly burrowing into Twitter.

7/29/2020: We’re not Facebook, OTT ad execs emphasize, FierceVideo

The executives on this OTT Blitz Week panel on addressable (read: targeted) advertising on streaming TV emphasized how they don’t want or need behavioral data that gets too close to individual viewers’ tastes.

7/31/2020: There’s no one template for over-the-top video success, FierceVideo

I wrapped up my coverage of Fierce’s virtual event with a recap of this lessons-learned panel, featuring CEOs from the rhymable firms Fubo, Xumo and Philo.

8/1/2020: Trump’s threat to ban TikTok, Al Jazeera

I made a second appearance this week on the Arabic-language news network to discuss President Trump’s possibly-idle threat to ban TikTok. As I wrote last week at Forbes, the fact that the U.S. isn’t China leaves Trump out of options to banish that social app from American screens.

Weekly output: Apple’s App Store vs. Hey, cable modems, voice tweets

Posted on June 21, 2020 by robpegoraro

Happy Father’s Day to all who observe! Fatherhood is probably the worst-paying job I’ve had, but it’s also the best job I’ve had.

6/17/2020: Apple To Basecamp’s Hey: Expect To Pay Us If You Want To Sell Privacy, Forbes

I jumped on the chance to write about Apple hard-balling the Hey e-mail app with a demand that Hey developer Basecamp add Apple’s in-app-payment mechanism–allowing the Cupertino, Calif., company to take 30% of all subscriptions opened that way. Then I discovered that writing for a site that lets me publish immediately does not curb my instinct to fuss over my prose before filing. Another realization with this post: Calling out Apple’s abusive behavior towards an app built along the privacy-optimizing principles it says rank among its core values did not yield page views by the truckload, notwithstanding the history of reader interest in that company.

6/18/2020: Don’t keep paying for that cable modem, Talking Tech

I talked to my USA Today colleague Jefferson Graham about my recent column reminding readers that they should buy their cable modems instead of renting them.

6/18/2020: Voice tweets, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news network had me on to explain Twitter’s introduction of audio tweets. I said the upside of this was letting followers pick up on differences in intonation that text alone doesn’t convey, while Twitter will need to be careful about abusive types exploiting this feature. I told my producer that my favorite example of a good use of voice tweets was Liz Phair improvising a song about this product development; since I don’t know if that made its way to TV, I’m sharing that with you all below.

New toy :)🥰 pic.twitter.com/CTlNGC7KEv

— Liz Phair (@PhizLair) June 17, 2020

Weekly output: Audi stoplight smarts, Big Tech banter at SXSW, SXSW strangeness, Facebook outage, Spotify vs. Apple

Posted on March 17, 2019 by robpegoraro

I’ve been recuperating from SXSW in the lamest way possible: by spending a lot of time weeding the lawn. Early returns suggest that my prior years of springtime toil have led to less chickweed, so I’ve got that going for me.

3/11/2019: How traffic lights might talk to your next car, Yahoo Finance

I spent a few days driving around D.C. and northern Virginia in an A8 that Audi loaned to test its Traffic Light Information system. The whole experience got a little more terrifying when I looked at the spec sheet for the loaner vehicle and realized that I was ~~trying~~ test-driving Audi’s stoplight-to-car data service in a sedan with a list price above six figures.

3/13/2019: Breaking up Big Tech: Advocates spar over how to trim sails of technology giants at SXSW, USA Today

I did not get to as many SXSW panels as I wanted, but I did watch the session featuring Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.). Warren advocated forced break-ups of tech giants, and over the next several days multiple SXSW speakers took it to task. The critiques you’ll see in USAT comments on this piece, however, amount to trash.

3/13/2019: SXSW 2019: Synthetic sushi, a buggy demo, and other weird gadgets, Yahoo Finance

I didn’t even have the SXSW trade-show exhibits on my must-see list until meeting a friend for lunch, at which point he strongly suggested I check out Sushi Singularity. He was right.

3/14/2019: Facebook outage, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me on to talk about the Wednesday outage of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. My takes: Securities and Exchange Commission regulations give us strong reasons to take Facebook at its word about the causes of this downtime; we should all work to depend less on Facebook and its vassal states for communication with bystanders, customers and fans.

3/15/2019: Spotify has a point about Apple’s App Store fees, Yahoo Finance

If you were reading me eight years ago, this column should not have surprised you. My opinion hasn’t changed since because Apple still acts as if it has a God-given right to annex up to 30 percent of the content income of many App Store developers.

Credit where it’s due: Thanksgiving tech support has gotten easier

Posted on November 23, 2018 by robpegoraro

I spend a lot of time venting about tech being a pain in the neck, but I will take a break from that to confirm that my annual Thanksgiving-weekend routine of providing technical support has gotten a lot easier over the last 10 years.

The single biggest upgrade has been the emergence of the iPad as something usable as the only computer in the house. It took a few years for Apple to make that happen–remember when you had to connect an iPad to a computer for its setup and backups?–but Web-first users can now enjoy a tablet with near zero risk of malware and that updates its apps automatically.

As a result, when I gave my mom’s iPad a checkup Wednesday afternoon, the worst I had to do was install the iOS 12.1 update.

That left me free to spend my tech-support time rearranging that tablet’s apps to keep the ones she uses most often on the first home screen.

Things have gotten easier on “real” computers too. Apple and Microsoft ship their desktop operating systems with sane security defaults and deliver security patches and other bug fixes automatically. The Mac and Windows app stores offer the same seamless updates for installed programs as iOS and Android’s. And while Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox aren’t in those software shops, they update themselves just as easily.

But the openness of those operating systems makes it easier for people to get into trouble. For example, a few weeks ago, I had to talk a relative through resetting Chrome’s settings to get rid of an extension that was redirecting searches.

Other computing tasks remain a mess. On a desktop, laptop or tablet, clearing out storage to make room for an operating-system upgrade is as tedious as ever, and it doesn’t help when companies like Apple continue to sell laptops with 128-gigabyte SSDs. Password management continues to be a chore unless (duh) you install a password manager.

Social media looks worst of all. Facebook alone has become its own gravity well of maintenance–notifications to disable to curb its attention-hogging behavior, privacy settings to tend, and propaganda-spewing pages to avoid. There’s a reason I devoted this year’s version of my USA Today Thanksgiving tech-support column to Facebook, and I don’t see that topic going out of style anytime soon.

Rob Pegoraro

Occasional shop talk about journalism, technology and a few other things

Tag Archives: App Store