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Why An Amazon-Oracle Merger Is A Very Real Possibility ForbesView full coverage on Google News(Reuters) - In the bestselling novel “Circe” — optioned by WarnerMedia for its forthcoming HBO Max streaming service — the daughter of the Greek god Helios tames wild beasts and menaces the gods.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (L), Maisie Williams, Emilia Clarke, Sophie Turner and Kit Harrington of HBO's "Game of Thrones" pose backstage with their award for Oustanding Drama Series at the 68th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California U.S., September 18, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Blake
WarnerMedia executives want “Circe” to unleash a different power: attracting young viewers to the company’s belated entry in the streaming-video war.
HBO Max, which will be HBO plus movies, original shows, and TV classics such “Friends,” will be available starting this spring to 10 million AT&T customers who are also HBO subscribers in the United States at no extra charge, according to AT&T Chief Operating Officer John Stankey, who disclosed the figures for the first time in an interview with Reuters.
These are a portion of the customers that currently pay for an AT&T-owned product such as DirecTV or AT&T wireless phone service.
By 2025, AT&T aims to reach about 80 million global subscribers, with about 50 million in the United States, a source briefed on the plans told Reuters. They are ambitious targets that would be consistent with Netflix Inc’s (NFLX.O) early progress, and in the mid-range of Disney+, Walt Disney Co’s (DIS.N) Netflix rival, set to launch on Nov. 12.
WarnerMedia hopes this service will get a boost in 2021 when it launches an advertising-supported option at a lower cost, insiders said.
After it launches the ad-supported option, the company will add live programming on HBO Max.
A long-term goal for HBO Max is to help AT&T retain wireless subscribers, according to executives, and also allow the company to pair wireless and DirecTV satellite data to learn more about consumers — and in turn, charge higher rates to advertisers.
As one of the final entries in the streaming wars, HBO Max faces a tough competitive landscape. Although the Warner Brothers archive includes thousands of films and TV series like “The Shining” and “Scooby-Doo,” it does not have the same brand awareness as Disney properties like Pixar or Marvel.
Price could also be an obstacle: HBO Max is likely to cost slightly more than the $14.99 the company charges for HBO — significantly more than competing services from Apple Inc (AAPL.O) ($4.99) and Disney ($6.99), and slightly higher than the standard $12.99 Netflix plan.
Selling HBO Max by piggybacking off the entrenched HBO service has its own challenges. Stankey wants to convert HBO’s 35 million U.S. subscriber base, which includes the 10 million customers AT&T controls, to HBO Max. Doing so involves renegotiating deals with current pay TV providers, who may be wary of helping AT&T snatch their video customers.
And while AT&T executives believe that HBO Max could reduce churn on its cell phone business to boost profits, the link may not be that clear.
“AT&T hasn’t seen any more improvement (in churn) with wireless/video bundling than Verizon has seen without it,” said MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett.
AT&T, saddled with $162 billion in debt, faces a litany of challenges. Activist investor Elliott Management has expressed skepticism about Stankey, considered the heir apparent to CEO Randall Stephenson.
Elliott is pressuring AT&T to justify its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner — now called WarnerMedia — which it finalized in February, and to consider unwinding its $48.5 billion purchase of DirecTV, which has rapidly bled subscribers.
“The success of HBO Max is built on the ability for the company to rationalize why (the companies that AT&T bought) all belong together,” said Stankey earlier this month.
WarnerMedia will announce HBO Max pricing and details on Oct. 29. In interviews with Reuters, Stankey and Robert Greenblatt, chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment and Direct-to-Consumer, spelled out a plan to aggressively expand HBO’s base.
The key to that growth is to continue providing content in the style of HBO — the company defines that as “quality”; industry watchers invariably say “sexy” or “edgy” — to its current over-40 viewers, while expanding to a younger audience that is used to streaming content and does not want to pay for cable.
“We know there’s 75 million people in the range from two to young adults that are available to us as potential new subscribers that aren’t part of the HBO universe already,” said Greenblatt.
That focus explains the investment in shows like “Circe”; a “Gremlins” animated series; and a reboot of “Gossip Girl” that will appeal to the under-40 crowd.
WarnerMedia is also investing in children’s content and will feature “Sesame Street” on HBO Max.
Even as it expands beyond traditional HBO programming, executives want to position the new service as something different from Netflix, which AT&T’s Stephenson likened to Walmart at a 2018 investor conference. They use a variety of euphemisms to make that distinction: from “thoughtfully curated” to “Not a Walmart” to “Premium.” They bristle at “general interest.”
Another opportunity to expand is by promoting HBO Max to DirecTV customers who do not already subscribe to HBO. “We didn’t buy DirecTV because we love satellite,” said Stankey. “We bought DirecTV because we love the customer base and the customer base could be migrated into more on-demand-oriented products and services.”
Stankey also hinted at the possibility of bundling HBO Max with AT&T wireless subscriptions. T-Mobile gives away Netflix to some customers, and Verizon is providing a free year of Disney+ to some customers.
On Tuesday Stankey, Greenblatt and others will reveal their plans to investors, on the same stage where Warner Brothers shot actress Judy Garland’s comeback film “A Star is Born.”
Their performance will help determine AT&T’s future.
Reporting by Helen Coster and Kenneth Li in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker
The Tesla Model S fire that killed Omar Awan in February.Local 10 NewsThe family of Omar Awan, a Tesla lessee who died after his Model S sedan caught fire, is suing the electric-car maker, alleging that "the Model S' design was defective and unreasonably dangerous."
Awan died in February after his Model S veered off a parkway, hit a palm tree, and caught fire. A policeman and other bystanders on the scene of the fire were not able to attempt to rescue Awan because the design of the Model S' door handles prevented them from opening the vehicle's doors, the family's attorneys claim in the lawsuit.
The Model S has distinctive door handles that lie flush with the vehicle's sheet metal unless the key fob is nearby, at which point they can extend outward, allowing the driver or passenger to grab them and open the door. The door handles on Awan's car would not extend for the policeman and other bystanders who tried to rescue him, according to the lawsuit.
In February, a Tesla representative directed Business Insider to its emergency-response guide for the Model S, which says the vehicle must be opened from the inside if the exterior door handles are not working.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit on Thursday.
The attorneys representing Awan's family allege that Awan did not die from the collision's impact. Instead, they claim he was killed by the smoke that filled the car after its battery caught fire.
"The Model S's design precluded those on the scene of the crash from getting Dr. Awan out of the cabin because the door handles failed," the lawsuit claims. "The Model S had an unreasonably dangerous fire risk that was not addressed through proper design. And Tesla failed to give any appropriate, adequate, full or fair warnings about the risks relating to the door handles or the smoke and fire."
Are you a current or former Tesla employee? Do you have an opinion about what it's like to work there? Contact this reporter at mmatousek@businessinsider.com. You can ask for more secure methods of communication, like Signal or ProtonMail, by email or Twitter direct message.
The Tesla Model S fire that killed Omar Awan in February.Local 10 NewsThe family of Omar Awan, a Tesla lessee who died after his Model S sedan caught fire, is suing the electric-car maker, alleging that "the Model S' design was defective and unreasonably dangerous."
Awan died in February after his Model S veered off a parkway, hit a palm tree, and caught fire. A policeman and other bystanders on the scene of the fire were not able to attempt to rescue Awan because the design of the Model S' door handles prevented them from opening the vehicle's doors, the family's attorneys claim in the lawsuit.
The Model S has distinctive door handles that lie flush with the vehicle's sheet metal unless the key fob is nearby, at which point they can extend outward, allowing the driver or passenger to grab them and open the door. The door handles on Awan's car would not extend for the policeman and other bystanders who tried to rescue him, according to the lawsuit.
In February, a Tesla representative directed Business Insider to its emergency-response guide for the Model S, which says the vehicle must be opened from the inside if the exterior door handles are not working.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit on Thursday.
The attorneys representing Awan's family allege that Awan did not die from the collision's impact. Instead, they claim he was killed by the smoke that filled the car after its battery caught fire.
"The Model S's design precluded those on the scene of the crash from getting Dr. Awan out of the cabin because the door handles failed," the lawsuit claims. "The Model S had an unreasonably dangerous fire risk that was not addressed through proper design. And Tesla failed to give any appropriate, adequate, full or fair warnings about the risks relating to the door handles or the smoke and fire."
Are you a current or former Tesla employee? Do you have an opinion about what it's like to work there? Contact this reporter at mmatousek@businessinsider.com. You can ask for more secure methods of communication, like Signal or ProtonMail, by email or Twitter direct message.
Google is currently rolling out a change to its core search algorithm that it says could change the rankings of results for as many as one in ten queries. It’s based on cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) techniques developed by Google researchers and applied to its search product over the course of the past 10 months.
In essence, Google is claiming that it is improving results by having a better understanding of how words relate to each other in a sentence. In one example Google discussed at a briefing with journalists yesterday, its search algorithm was able to parse the meaning of the following phrase: “Can you get medicine for someone pharmacy?”
The old Google search algorithm treated that sentence as a “bag of words,” according to Pandu Nayak, Google fellow and VP of search. So it looked at the important words, medicine and pharmacy, and simply returned local results. The new algorithm was able to understand the context of the words “for someone” to realize it was a question about whether you could pick up somebody else’s prescription — and it returned the right results.
The tweaked algorithm is based on BERT, which stands for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.” Every word of that acronym is a term of art in NLP, but the gist is that instead of treating a sentence like a bag of words, BERT looks at all the words in the sentence as a whole. Doing so allows it to realize that the words “for someone” shouldn’t be thrown away, but rather are essential to the meaning of the sentence.
The way BERT recognizes that it should pay attention to those words is basically by self-learning on a titanic game of Mad Libs. Google takes a corpus of English sentences and randomly removes 15 percent of the words, then BERT is set to the task of figuring out what those words ought to be. Over time, that kind of training turns out to be remarkably effective at making a NLP model “understand” context, according to Jeff Dean, Google senior fellow & SVP of research.
Another example Google cited was “parking on a hill with no curb.” The word “no” is essential to this query, and prior to implementing BERT in search Google’s algorithms missed that.
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Google says that it has been rolling the algorithm change out for the past couple of days and that, again, it should affect about 10 percent of search queries made in English in the US. Other languages and countries will be addressed later.
All changes to search are run through a series of tests to ensure they’re actually improving results. One of those tests involves using Google’s cadre of human reviewers who train the company’s algorithms by rating the quality of search results — Google also conducts live live A/B tests.
Not every single query will be affected by BERT, it’s just the latest of many different tools Google uses to rank search results. How exactly all of it works together is a bit of a mystery. Some of that process is kept intentionally mysterious by Google to keep spammers from gaming its systems. But it’s also mysterious for another important reason: when a computer uses machine learning techniques to make a decision, it can be hard to know why it made those choices.
That so-called “black box” of machine learning is a problem because if the results are wrong in some way, it can be hard to diagnose why. Google says that it has worked to ensure that adding BERT to its search algorithm doesn’t increase bias — a common problem with machine learning whose training models are themselves biased. Since BERT is trained on a giant corpus of English sentences, which are also inherently biased, it’s an issue to keep an eye on.
The company also says that it doesn’t anticipate significant changes in how much or where its algorithm will direct traffic, at least when it comes to large publishers. Any time Google signals a change in its search algorithm, the entire web sits up and takes notice. Companies have lived and died by Google’s search rank changes.
Everybody who makes money on web traffic absolutely should take notice. When it comes to the quality of its search results, Payak says that “this is the single biggest ... most positive change we’ve had in the last five years and perhaps one of the biggest since the beginning.”
It’s hard to become the world’s richest person – and just as hard, or even harder, to stay No. 1.
Amazon boss Jeff Bezos will reportedly drop to the No. 2 spot on the list of the world’s richest people after Amazon’s stock price tumbled in after-hours trading Thursday.
SINGAPORE'S RICHEST MAN SAYS 'MISSING PIECE WAS GOD THROUGH JESUS CHRIST'
Who’ll be the new No. 1? Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, according to Bloomberg. Bezos had overtaken Gates to claim the top position in October 2017, the report said.
The Amazon stock drop is estimated to give Bezos a revised net worth of $102.8 billion, nearly $5 billion lower than Gates, Bloomberg said.
It’s been a tough week for Bezos. Earlier this week, The Washington Post – which Bezos owns – reported that he went largely unrecognized by students when he recently paid a visit to a Washington, D.C., high school.
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Bezos visited Dunbar High School to talk about Amazon's Future Engineer Program, the report said.
Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 MAX aircraft are parked on the tarmac after being grounded, at the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California on March 28, 2019.
Mark Ralston | AFP | Getty Images
Strong travel demand helped lift Southwest Airlines revenue and profit in the third quarter, but the low-cost carrier warned the financial hit from the Boeing 737 Max grounding would "grow" into 2020.
The airline is the largest operator of the 737 Max and it had 34 of them in its fleet at the time of the worldwide grounding in mid-March, in the wake of two fatal crashes.
Southwest said the flight ban, the largest ever, cost it $210 million in revenue in the quarter, but sales still rose just over 1% to $5.64 billion, in line with analyst estimates. Net income rose 7% to $659 million, a third-quarter record. On an adjusted per-share basis, third-quarter earnings came in at $1.23, above analysts' expectations of $1.08 a share.
The airline's stock was up close to 2% in premarket trading.
Southwest said the grounding cost it $435 million in revenue in the first nine months of the year. The airline added that it expects "the damages to grow into 2020."
The airline removed the plane from its schedules through Feb. 8, later than any U.S. airline.
The grounding has forced airlines, like Southwest, to curb their growth plans, but the limited capacity has helped boost fares.
Boeing on Wednesday reiterated its forecast for regulators to remove the ban on the planes before the end of the year. The manufacturer has developed software changes for the planes after a flight-control system was implicated in the two crashes, but regulators haven't yet signed off on the fixes.
Southwest's CEO Gary Kelly warned that even if the FAA lifts the ban before the fourth quarter, the carrier would need one to two months to complete pilot training and other steps to get planes ready for passengers.
"The FAA will determine the timing of MAX return to service, and we offer no assurances that current estimations and timelines are correct," Kelly said in a release.
Boeing in the second quarter took a $4.9 billion after-tax charge to compensate airlines but final amounts are unknown because regulators haven't yet lifted the grounding.
"We have not reached a settlement with Boeing, and no estimated settlement amounts have been included in our third quarter 2019 results," Kelly said.
