13 ms·

The Great Unbundling

246 points by notoriousarun 6y ago

lesinski 6y ago
So many "trend" type presentations like this one take for granted that streaming will eat TV. Sure, cord-cutting is a trend. But Covid-19 isn't necessarily accelerating it. A huge contingent of the population, especially internationally and among US boomers will keep their cable bundle. Smart marketers will figure out how to leverage TV as digital advertising gets more competitive and streamers go on without ads.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  A huge contingent of the population, especially internationally and among US boomers will keep their cable bundle. Not just Boomers. I've seen numbers showing that Gen X is getting tired of jumping through hoops to watch TV, so they're going back to cable, or going * gasp * OTA. The numbers also show that Gen Z seems to embrace "owned" physical media a lot more than Millennials, and that they're also more likely to go full OTA just because they see little value in paying for multiple streams or a cable subscription. It seems that Millennials love streams and subscriptions, and everyone else is rethinking whether that's a good idea.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    It took me a long time to get over the hump of canceling cable TV. But, then, I don't get any OTA. If I got good broadcast TV signals, I'd probably have taken the leap much sooner. I'm also not sure it's useful to distinguish a cable bundle from streaming if that streaming includes YouTube TV or whatever. You're really just getting the bundle in a different form at that point--and not really saving a lot of money.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      > I'm also not sure it's useful to distinguish a cable bundle from streaming if that streaming includes YouTube TV or whatever. You're really just getting the bundle in a different form at that point--and not really saving a lot of money. Expect one you can cancel and purchase within seconds whenever you want or need to, and can watch on any device you want, and deal with fewer ad breaks. Cable TV is on no way a comparable product to the streaming services. People complaining about the horror of clicking a few buttons to cancel and resubscribe on a website gave no idea of the type of horror that awaits when dealing with a cable company.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Fair enough, although that only applies if you want to dip in and out or watch on different devices. Had I actually watched cable TV latterly sufficient to justify what I was paying for it, I'd have had very little reason to switch to YouTube TV or whatever. The content is pretty comparable and the issue for me was that I just wasn't watching it nearly as much as other services that cost a lot less. I still wish I had live TV now and then but not enough to pay for it. I was actually pleasantly surprised that when I canceled cable TV and my landline from Comcast they didn't even put up a mild fight. (I still have Internet from them.)
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    As a millennial, there was a "golden age" for video streaming that has now passed where Netflix was the biggest game in town and had most of the desirable content. Now that there are 6 or 7 streaming services each with their own exclusives (and regional differences) streaming is becoming much less appealing.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Netflix was never that great for movies but you could always subscribe to their DVDs. Unfortunately, more and more titles are becoming unavailable. (I resubscribed for a while during the pandemic but just canceled it again.) Of course, you can often just rent a la carte as well. It is a very fragmented landscape. On the other hand, I find I can subscribe to a few services and get access to far more good content than I have time to watch. There's very little that I just have to see and, if there is, I can just spin up some service for a month.
      - tomjakubowski 6y ago
        Circa 2007-2011, before their deal with Starz expired, Netflix streaming usually had any movie, new or old, I ever wanted to see. The catalogue was massive. Now, around 3/4 of the time (my estimate) I'd be forced to rent or stream elsewhere. https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/09/netflix-to-lose-starz-its-most-valuable-source-of-new-movies.html https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/...
        ghaff 6y ago
        I guess we have different tastes. I actually canceled Netflix streaming when they started charging separately for it and only picked it up again when House of Cards came out. And I still remember telling a Netflix exec I knew that their streaming movie catalog wasn't very good. His response was that people come to Netflix for movies and stay for the TV shows. I read people saying what you did but it just doesn't match my experience; I kept a DVD subscription the whole time until fairly recently. But I don't think any of the streaming services are great for movies. I watch what they have and then either rent from RedBox, buy a disc if it's something I think I may want to rewatch, or pay for a streaming rental.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    Those who are tired of paid streaming services can just go torrenting. Either Gen Z has become absolutely technologically inept or these numbers are used to shape a narrative that pleases the news conglomerates.
    - orthoxerox 6y ago
      Gen X and older Millenials are the most technologically adept age cohorts if we're talking about computers. Younger Millenials and Gen Z grew up with computers as appliances.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Sports alone are a huge reason that keeps many people on their cable bundle--and it tends to be something a lot of people want to watch on their TV rather than a computer. >It seems that Millennials love streams and subscriptions, and everyone else is rethinking whether that's a good idea. I'm a bit skeptical of a lot of generational stereotypes. I think many people are having some subscription fatigue especially with video. But I can't say that I've seen a lot of evidence that Gen Z is particularly addicted to accumulating "stuff" especially media in physical form. e.g. https://www.rev.com/blog/how-gen-z-and-millennials-consume-video-content-what-that-means-for-production-teams https://www.rev.com/blog/how-gen-z-and-millennials-consume-v...
    - hong_kong 6y ago
      Cable operators already offer skinny bundles with only news/sport for lower cost, so you'll get a new leg down just from that + full cord cuts. But that's just delaying the inevitable I think - they'll abandon cable TV when margins turn negative (half a decade or so), and live off their broadband businesses.
    - martinald 6y ago
      I think sport is the next thing the streaming services will look at. Amazon has started to do this, and now has some (a small percentage) of the England premier league soccer matches in the UK. Amazon (and netflix, apple, etc) has way deeper pockets than the current rightsholders (Sky, which was owned by Murdoch until he sold to Comcast recently, and BT Sport, which is also completely dwafered by Big Tech). It's difficult to see them not going big for this next time the rights are up for renegotiation. Amazon and Netflix have extremely high household penetration already, with their apps prebundled on so many TVs.
    - devmunchies 6y ago
      only a matter of time before all ESPN and Fox Sports are bundled into Disney+, since Disney owns both.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        I would hope they keep it as an option. Sports make up a big chunk of an overall cable bill. So if Disney bundles it in, expect that to put big upward pressure on the price of a subscription.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    I guess I'm Gen X. Or a very young Boomer. I've just stopped watching TV altogether. "News" is a joke, and everything else seems like a waste of time.
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      This. And I refuse to watch serials anymore, just feature-length films. Why? Because I’m tired of being strung along. Here, watch this season now. But wait 12-18 months for the next season. Repeat. By the time that next season rolls around, I just don’t care about the characters anymore. Fiction writers love to play this trick with book trilogies and book series. So I don’t start a book series unless all books are already in print.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        They're just different forms. Films, multi-film series and connected series, miniseries, episodic TV, serialized TV, blends of episodic and serialized, anthologies, shorts, etc. are all different and have their own pluses and minuses. It's obviously fine to prefer some and not others. You can equally see TV seasons as giving the opportunity to take a break from something for a while.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        So you loved True Detective then? Beginning, middle, end, all crystalized in the writer/producer's mind before they even began shooting? I also don't like the season-after-season thing you're referring to, but I am encouraged that over the last 3 or 4 years we've seen a small increase in the number of stories being told with a defined story arc, and no sequels.
    - alea_iacta_est 6y ago
      Xer here. If by joke you mean it's brainwashing and propaganda, I'm with you. A joke, randomly oriented, I could take, the one sided preaching that news, TV and movie broadcast 24x7 is just infuriating.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    OTA? With ads every 15 mins? I don't think so. Netflix (and later amzn video and to a slightly lesser extent hulu) was the way out of that hellhole, and I don't see even boomers like me "going back".
- benedictevans 6y ago
  See slide 53
- devmunchies 6y ago
  streaming in inferior in a lot of ways. It used to be I could turn on the TV and it powered up instantly. Now it takes about 30 seconds to turn on my TV, open streaming app, and click play. There's a real benefit to some analog mediums.
  - jimbokun 6y ago
    There is a lot of content I have passed up on watching, because it required firing up an app on my phone, searching for the content, turning on the tv, finding the Apple Play icon. And some apps still don’t support AirPlay. And some work directly with my TV, and some only with Apple TV. Vs just turning on the TV and flicking channels to see what’s on.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      > Vs just turning on the TV and flicking channels to see what’s on. Which is great until the answer is "nothing worth watching", which is pretty common in my personal experience with my personal tastes (i.e. take this as a valid datapoint, but only a single datapoint).
bijant 6y ago
I do like his blog. But I‘m not going to click through a presentation without him even teasing his core thesis. A tldr would be much appreciated otherwise I would prefer if he packaged his (without a doubt) great presentation into an article (he already has all the illustrations)
- ridruejo 6y ago
  I'd agree in general, but there are a few people that are worth going though whatever presentation they put together. Ben is one of them
- ffhggyh 6y ago
  I don't understand how you're too lazy to click through a 100-slide slideshow—and yet have the energy write a full paragraph complaining about it here.
  - dEnigma 6y ago
    I can't tell if this sarcasm or not. Clicking through 100 slides takes quite the effort, even if you're just skimming.
    - saurik 6y ago
      Yeah. So, I did click through it; it took forever, and was exceedingly annoying. I found myself wanting to go back a few times, and that just not being worth the effort... since I am not the one giving this presentation--which is already a problem... slides exist to support a speaker, and I am not the speaker! either this should be a video or an article, not some disconnected set of slides (from which I can't imagine I am actually getting the connections between the content)--I have absolutely no use for a "one slide at a time" UI: either all 100+ slides of this should be rendered one after another so I can quickly scroll down through it, or (preferably) this shouldn't be a PDF file so I can decide how I scroll.
      - ghaff 6y ago
robenkleene 6y ago
Does anyone recognize which software is used to make these graphs and diagrams? (I love how everything is aligned very precisely, and the design is cohesive across slides with respect to colors and fonts.)
- high_priest 6y ago
  Looks like a normal PowerPoint to me
  - robenkleene 6y ago
    Could be, I'd love it if anyone else could confirm. For the record, I've tried to create graphs like these in Excel, and I've struggle getting them just right. So the question I have is whether it's just because I don't know Excel well enough, or whether I should be using other software.
    - sogen 6y ago
      Can confirm Excel can do very clean graphs
    - pbronez 6y ago
      Both. PowerPoint + Excel can do some pretty good charts. You need to put time & effort into custom themes to really make it work. Using custom themes keeps colors and styles consistent across charts and slides, with smarter defaults so you don’t have to make as many manual changes. I’ve found it quickly breaks down when you push beyond the canned styles or try to apply them to more complex data (e.g. more than 5 categories). Then you have to move to something like Plotly. As always, your data graphics are only as good as your data. Make sure you’re working from clean tables to ensure you don’t start making errors.
      - robenkleene 6y ago
        Great tips here thanks. I haven’t looked at custom themes before that sounds like a promising direction.
sradman 6y ago
Former a16z partner and now independent analyst, Benedict Evans [1]: > Every year, I produce a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘The great Unbundling’. This is a 134 slide presentation: > Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. 20 trillion dollars of retail, brands, TV and advertising is being overturned, and software is remaking everything from cars to pharma. Meanwhile, China has more smartphone users than Europe and the USA combined, and India is close behind - technology and innovation will be much more widely spread. For that and lots of other reasons, tech is becoming a regulated industry, but if we step over the slogans, what does that actually mean? Tech is entering its second 50 years. [1] https://www.ben-evans.com/ https://www.ben-evans.com/
forrestthewoods 6y ago
Is there a way to full screen the slides on iOS Safari! Text is too small for me to read. I tried clicking all the widgets but couldn’t find a way to blow it up. :(
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > Is there a way to full screen the slides on iOS Safari! In the controls bar just under the slides themselves, click the "Full screen" widget to the left of the "Options menu" widget (looks like a gear).
  - forrestthewoods 6y ago
    I don’t think I have that option? https://imgur.com/a/qx9f8XB https://imgur.com/a/qx9f8XB Turning off content blockers did not change anything.
    - CharlesW 6y ago
      > I don’t think I have that option? Apologies for my poor reading comprehension! I was using Safari on macOS. I also don't have that option when using my iPhone, and couldn't find any tricks for getting around it. I was able to zoom in and out with gestures, in case that's helpful.
- tchvil 6y ago
  Pinch/zoom it to go to an area you want bigger. Then it can be scrolled, not every time but most of the time. Unzoom to go to the next slide.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Can I recommend the "Another podcast" Ben Evans has recently started up with a friend of his. They have a pretty good dynamic and you get a sense of the nuance that slides just don't convey. Also second the whole "you can do this in powerpoint / keynote" amazement :-) link: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/another-podcast/id1535359773 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/another-podcast/id1535...
- tonicb 6y ago
  Thanks for recommending the podcast - we've actually got an episode coming out tomorrow around the topic of pulling such a presentation together. Hope you enjoy it. Toni (aka 'the friend':) )
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    (sheepish grin) Although two things in my meagre defence - - Toni "The Friend" Cowan-Brown does sound like someone out of the Sopranos. - Actually finding an episode of yours in the Apple Podcast app was so frustrating (again just now) that it highlights how immature the "new" media still is - I spend waaay more time listening to podcasts than watching TV and yet newspapers carry TV schedules and the Radio Times publishes nothing on podcasts. Independant reviews I am sure exist somewhere on the internet but who knows where, and the main client seems to actively fight me whilst trying (like everything else) to sell me something sparkly and new. Ok I am going to start my usual insomnia rant about software agents soon. Looking forward to your next episode - keep up the good work I am loving it :-)
    - tonicb 6y ago
      I'm adopting Toni "The friend" from now on. It has a good ring to it. We certainly didn't make things easy by calling our podcast "Another Podcast" and yes I agree with you - although audio has been around for a long time, the podcast space still has a lot of maturing to do, and on many fronts. Thanks for tuning in (is that what people say these days? I don't know anymore) - it's appreciated.
whb07 6y ago
Unless China solves for the skewed demographics in the next ten years, seems like sheep-behavior to include them in projections for the future. Has anyone seen these types of presentations but say 1980, except it says Japan instead? I'd like to see some original thinking that stands away from the crowd for once.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > Unless China solves for the skewed demographics in the next ten years, seems like sheep-behavior to include them in projections for the future. True, long term, China has sealed its future, but even if you half China's population, it will still be no. 1 in pretty much everything it is no. 1 today. Pretty much nothing aside of war, civil war, or a second cultural revolution scale political crisis can stop it overtaking USA economically in coming 1-2 decades.
  - pbourke 6y ago
    I’m genuinely curious why this comment is receiving downvotes. China becoming the world’s economic power by mid-century has been my set assumption for years. Has something changed with this expectation?
    - edoceo 6y ago
      China population is 1398 Million, india is like 1366. China in half would be 700 million. Maybe it just don't add up? IME this site downvotes bad maths.
      - bigpumpkin 6y ago
        This. China may have more factories but its focus is on industry not spirituality. India will achieve Religious Victory by 2050.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
ghaff 6y ago
I don't know about China but, yeah, in the late 80s or so there was this incredible panic about Japan buying everything up. And various Nobel Prize-winning economists telling anyone who would listen that we had to institute government-industry partnerships like MITI or the US was doomed. And we did create organizations like SEMATECH to counter a perceived gap in semiconductors. Some of it was probably a useful kick in the pants, especially in manufacturing processes. But a lot of it was panic emulation of Japan that was neither needed nor especially useful.
treis 6y ago
I'm not sure I quite get the retail unbundling argument. Chinese sellers selling through Amazon is not direct to the buyer. It's through Amazon.
- dash2 6y ago
  But then he points out the growth of Shopify.
  - treis 6y ago
    Right so you don't really have a bundling or unbundling. You have the same trend that happened in brick and mortar happening online. Speciality retailers are doing fine. Massive scale retailers are doing fine. And everyone in the middle gets squeezed.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    Shopify needs a satisfaction guarantee like PayPal. I mean you can use PayPal but the biggest risk here is fraud.
    - sjg007 6y ago
      The problem with un-bundling US retail is what we currently see via 3rd party Amazon sales. You end up with exploding hover boards, electrical fires caused by bad chargers, tainted or counterfit makeup etc... The appeal of Target or Walmart is that they have a duty to their customer to not sell them dangerous products and they have clout to get cheap prices. 10,000 eCommerce shops selling private label chargers exacerbates this problem. I can trace the product to a factory in China sure, but that doesn't solve my lawsuit problem. Do I sue shopify in this case?
devmunchies 6y ago
The slides on vehicle emission regulations (slides 121-122) made me think of needing to report how much energy your servers are consuming. But don't worry! AWS will automatically keep track for you and add the tax to your monthly bill.
tasubotadas 6y ago
Can somebody summarize this in 20 words or less?
- Clewza313 6y ago
  Software eats the world, COVID made it even faster, companies need to sell direct to consumers to survive.
  - tasubotadas 6y ago
    Perfect. Thanks
masswerk 6y ago
Sorry, I do this seldom, rather, never, but reading in the introduction, "Tech is entering its second 50 years.", I couldn't advance any further. Usurpatory taxonomy is even worse than pervasive superlatives. (Is it 160 BC? Are we going to see the Antikythera mechanism? Really?) This is very much stereotypical trend presentation wording.
- morelisp 6y ago
  But if he admitted τέχνη goes back more than 50 years then Ben would need to engage some actual STS instead of just projecting current investment trends! He might even need enough object permanence to understand things existed before he was born!
  - shuckles 6y ago
    Pretty sure Ben read history at Cambridge and is aware of the past.
  - masswerk 6y ago
    I even have some difficulties figuring out what might distinguish 1971 as a landmark. In computing, it was a mildly impressive year seeing the introduction of coin-op video games (Computer Space), the general availability of floppy disks (while 1960s tech), Niklaus Wirth gave us Pascal as the latest in Algol-like languages, but not really that much out of the ordinary. (Well, the intel 4004 was introduced, starting the age of cost-effective Japanese calculators. But the 8008 was sketched out before that, relying on the late 1960s design of the DP 2200 – and it would take a few years before anyone took serious interest in that one.)
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      Well as we all know, all of computing revolves around Unix, and therefore effectively begins at 1970-01-01. I'm... mostly joking, although that's actually basically true for the parts of computing that I personally work in so I actually do use 1970 as the beginning mark for the "modern era" in my head.
vsskanth 6y ago
How much of a drag is the high mobile data cost in the US for the technology market ? Or does it even matter ?
- pas 6y ago
  Prices are high because demand is there. The US is cursed with being too rich. The exact same thing happens in healthcare, education, etc. Sure, the rent seeking is enormous in all of these sectors, but to eliminate that faces the usual obstacles.
  - ashishb 6y ago
    Prices of services produced in the USA is high because the USA exports dollars https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-class-politics-of-the-dollar-system https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-class-politics-of-t...
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      But mobile networking should not be a service in the labor-cost-predominating sense. That said, I'm very glad to see others citing Phenomenal World :),
  - vsskanth 6y ago
    I acknowledge the high prices. I'm just wondering what kinds of opportunities this prevents.
trollski 6y ago
they totally missed that not only tech is entering its second 50 years but also third 25 year period.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Thanks Ben, I have fond memories of listening to your a16z discussions about the iPhone 8 (or so) while rocking my baby to sleep. We live in fun times.

246 points by notoriousarun 6y ago

So many "trend" type presentations like this one take for granted that streaming will eat TV. Sure, cord-cutting is a trend. But Covid-19 isn't necessarily accelerating it. A huge contingent of the population, especially internationally and among US boomers will keep their cable bundle. Smart marketers will figure out how to leverage TV as digital advertising gets more competitive and streamers go on without ads.

reaperducer 6y ago
A huge contingent of the population, especially internationally and among US boomers will keep their cable bundle. Not just Boomers. I've seen numbers showing that Gen X is getting tired of jumping through hoops to watch TV, so they're going back to cable, or going * gasp * OTA. The numbers also show that Gen Z seems to embrace "owned" physical media a lot more than Millennials, and that they're also more likely to go full OTA just because they see little value in paying for multiple streams or a cable subscription. It seems that Millennials love streams and subscriptions, and everyone else is rethinking whether that's a good idea.
- ghaff 6y ago
  It took me a long time to get over the hump of canceling cable TV. But, then, I don't get any OTA. If I got good broadcast TV signals, I'd probably have taken the leap much sooner. I'm also not sure it's useful to distinguish a cable bundle from streaming if that streaming includes YouTube TV or whatever. You're really just getting the bundle in a different form at that point--and not really saving a lot of money.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    > I'm also not sure it's useful to distinguish a cable bundle from streaming if that streaming includes YouTube TV or whatever. You're really just getting the bundle in a different form at that point--and not really saving a lot of money. Expect one you can cancel and purchase within seconds whenever you want or need to, and can watch on any device you want, and deal with fewer ad breaks. Cable TV is on no way a comparable product to the streaming services. People complaining about the horror of clicking a few buttons to cancel and resubscribe on a website gave no idea of the type of horror that awaits when dealing with a cable company.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Fair enough, although that only applies if you want to dip in and out or watch on different devices. Had I actually watched cable TV latterly sufficient to justify what I was paying for it, I'd have had very little reason to switch to YouTube TV or whatever. The content is pretty comparable and the issue for me was that I just wasn't watching it nearly as much as other services that cost a lot less. I still wish I had live TV now and then but not enough to pay for it. I was actually pleasantly surprised that when I canceled cable TV and my landline from Comcast they didn't even put up a mild fight. (I still have Internet from them.)
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  As a millennial, there was a "golden age" for video streaming that has now passed where Netflix was the biggest game in town and had most of the desirable content. Now that there are 6 or 7 streaming services each with their own exclusives (and regional differences) streaming is becoming much less appealing.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Netflix was never that great for movies but you could always subscribe to their DVDs. Unfortunately, more and more titles are becoming unavailable. (I resubscribed for a while during the pandemic but just canceled it again.) Of course, you can often just rent a la carte as well. It is a very fragmented landscape. On the other hand, I find I can subscribe to a few services and get access to far more good content than I have time to watch. There's very little that I just have to see and, if there is, I can just spin up some service for a month.
    - tomjakubowski 6y ago
      Circa 2007-2011, before their deal with Starz expired, Netflix streaming usually had any movie, new or old, I ever wanted to see. The catalogue was massive. Now, around 3/4 of the time (my estimate) I'd be forced to rent or stream elsewhere. https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/09/netflix-to-lose-starz-its-most-valuable-source-of-new-movies.html https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/...
      - ghaff 6y ago
        I guess we have different tastes. I actually canceled Netflix streaming when they started charging separately for it and only picked it up again when House of Cards came out. And I still remember telling a Netflix exec I knew that their streaming movie catalog wasn't very good. His response was that people come to Netflix for movies and stay for the TV shows. I read people saying what you did but it just doesn't match my experience; I kept a DVD subscription the whole time until fairly recently. But I don't think any of the streaming services are great for movies. I watch what they have and then either rent from RedBox, buy a disc if it's something I think I may want to rewatch, or pay for a streaming rental.
- rglullis 6y ago
  Those who are tired of paid streaming services can just go torrenting. Either Gen Z has become absolutely technologically inept or these numbers are used to shape a narrative that pleases the news conglomerates.
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    Gen X and older Millenials are the most technologically adept age cohorts if we're talking about computers. Younger Millenials and Gen Z grew up with computers as appliances.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Sports alone are a huge reason that keeps many people on their cable bundle--and it tends to be something a lot of people want to watch on their TV rather than a computer. >It seems that Millennials love streams and subscriptions, and everyone else is rethinking whether that's a good idea. I'm a bit skeptical of a lot of generational stereotypes. I think many people are having some subscription fatigue especially with video. But I can't say that I've seen a lot of evidence that Gen Z is particularly addicted to accumulating "stuff" especially media in physical form. e.g. https://www.rev.com/blog/how-gen-z-and-millennials-consume-video-content-what-that-means-for-production-teams https://www.rev.com/blog/how-gen-z-and-millennials-consume-v...
  - hong_kong 6y ago
    Cable operators already offer skinny bundles with only news/sport for lower cost, so you'll get a new leg down just from that + full cord cuts. But that's just delaying the inevitable I think - they'll abandon cable TV when margins turn negative (half a decade or so), and live off their broadband businesses.
  - martinald 6y ago
    I think sport is the next thing the streaming services will look at. Amazon has started to do this, and now has some (a small percentage) of the England premier league soccer matches in the UK. Amazon (and netflix, apple, etc) has way deeper pockets than the current rightsholders (Sky, which was owned by Murdoch until he sold to Comcast recently, and BT Sport, which is also completely dwafered by Big Tech). It's difficult to see them not going big for this next time the rights are up for renegotiation. Amazon and Netflix have extremely high household penetration already, with their apps prebundled on so many TVs.
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    only a matter of time before all ESPN and Fox Sports are bundled into Disney+, since Disney owns both.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I would hope they keep it as an option. Sports make up a big chunk of an overall cable bill. So if Disney bundles it in, expect that to put big upward pressure on the price of a subscription.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  I guess I'm Gen X. Or a very young Boomer. I've just stopped watching TV altogether. "News" is a joke, and everything else seems like a waste of time.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    This. And I refuse to watch serials anymore, just feature-length films. Why? Because I’m tired of being strung along. Here, watch this season now. But wait 12-18 months for the next season. Repeat. By the time that next season rolls around, I just don’t care about the characters anymore. Fiction writers love to play this trick with book trilogies and book series. So I don’t start a book series unless all books are already in print.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      They're just different forms. Films, multi-film series and connected series, miniseries, episodic TV, serialized TV, blends of episodic and serialized, anthologies, shorts, etc. are all different and have their own pluses and minuses. It's obviously fine to prefer some and not others. You can equally see TV seasons as giving the opportunity to take a break from something for a while.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      So you loved True Detective then? Beginning, middle, end, all crystalized in the writer/producer's mind before they even began shooting? I also don't like the season-after-season thing you're referring to, but I am encouraged that over the last 3 or 4 years we've seen a small increase in the number of stories being told with a defined story arc, and no sequels.
  - alea_iacta_est 6y ago
    Xer here. If by joke you mean it's brainwashing and propaganda, I'm with you. A joke, randomly oriented, I could take, the one sided preaching that news, TV and movie broadcast 24x7 is just infuriating.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  OTA? With ads every 15 mins? I don't think so. Netflix (and later amzn video and to a slightly lesser extent hulu) was the way out of that hellhole, and I don't see even boomers like me "going back".
benedictevans 6y ago
See slide 53
devmunchies 6y ago
streaming in inferior in a lot of ways. It used to be I could turn on the TV and it powered up instantly. Now it takes about 30 seconds to turn on my TV, open streaming app, and click play. There's a real benefit to some analog mediums.
- jimbokun 6y ago
  There is a lot of content I have passed up on watching, because it required firing up an app on my phone, searching for the content, turning on the tv, finding the Apple Play icon. And some apps still don’t support AirPlay. And some work directly with my TV, and some only with Apple TV. Vs just turning on the TV and flicking channels to see what’s on.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > Vs just turning on the TV and flicking channels to see what’s on. Which is great until the answer is "nothing worth watching", which is pretty common in my personal experience with my personal tastes (i.e. take this as a valid datapoint, but only a single datapoint).

bijant 6y ago

I do like his blog. But I‘m not going to click through a presentation without him even teasing his core thesis. A tldr would be much appreciated otherwise I would prefer if he packaged his (without a doubt) great presentation into an article (he already has all the illustrations)

ridruejo 6y ago
I'd agree in general, but there are a few people that are worth going though whatever presentation they put together. Ben is one of them
ffhggyh 6y ago
I don't understand how you're too lazy to click through a 100-slide slideshow—and yet have the energy write a full paragraph complaining about it here.
- dEnigma 6y ago
  I can't tell if this sarcasm or not. Clicking through 100 slides takes quite the effort, even if you're just skimming.
  - saurik 6y ago
    Yeah. So, I did click through it; it took forever, and was exceedingly annoying. I found myself wanting to go back a few times, and that just not being worth the effort... since I am not the one giving this presentation--which is already a problem... slides exist to support a speaker, and I am not the speaker! either this should be a video or an article, not some disconnected set of slides (from which I can't imagine I am actually getting the connections between the content)--I have absolutely no use for a "one slide at a time" UI: either all 100+ slides of this should be rendered one after another so I can quickly scroll down through it, or (preferably) this shouldn't be a PDF file so I can decide how I scroll.
    - ghaff 6y ago

robenkleene 6y ago

Does anyone recognize which software is used to make these graphs and diagrams? (I love how everything is aligned very precisely, and the design is cohesive across slides with respect to colors and fonts.)

high_priest 6y ago
Looks like a normal PowerPoint to me
- robenkleene 6y ago
  Could be, I'd love it if anyone else could confirm. For the record, I've tried to create graphs like these in Excel, and I've struggle getting them just right. So the question I have is whether it's just because I don't know Excel well enough, or whether I should be using other software.
  - sogen 6y ago
    Can confirm Excel can do very clean graphs
  - pbronez 6y ago
    Both. PowerPoint + Excel can do some pretty good charts. You need to put time & effort into custom themes to really make it work. Using custom themes keeps colors and styles consistent across charts and slides, with smarter defaults so you don’t have to make as many manual changes. I’ve found it quickly breaks down when you push beyond the canned styles or try to apply them to more complex data (e.g. more than 5 categories). Then you have to move to something like Plotly. As always, your data graphics are only as good as your data. Make sure you’re working from clean tables to ensure you don’t start making errors.
    - robenkleene 6y ago
      Great tips here thanks. I haven’t looked at custom themes before that sounds like a promising direction.

sradman 6y ago

Former a16z partner and now independent analyst, Benedict Evans [1]: > Every year, I produce a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘The great Unbundling’. This is a 134 slide presentation: > Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. 20 trillion dollars of retail, brands, TV and advertising is being overturned, and software is remaking everything from cars to pharma. Meanwhile, China has more smartphone users than Europe and the USA combined, and India is close behind - technology and innovation will be much more widely spread. For that and lots of other reasons, tech is becoming a regulated industry, but if we step over the slogans, what does that actually mean? Tech is entering its second 50 years. [1] https://www.ben-evans.com/ https://www.ben-evans.com/

forrestthewoods 6y ago

Is there a way to full screen the slides on iOS Safari! Text is too small for me to read. I tried clicking all the widgets but couldn’t find a way to blow it up. :(

CharlesW 6y ago
> Is there a way to full screen the slides on iOS Safari! In the controls bar just under the slides themselves, click the "Full screen" widget to the left of the "Options menu" widget (looks like a gear).
- forrestthewoods 6y ago
  I don’t think I have that option? https://imgur.com/a/qx9f8XB https://imgur.com/a/qx9f8XB Turning off content blockers did not change anything.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > I don’t think I have that option? Apologies for my poor reading comprehension! I was using Safari on macOS. I also don't have that option when using my iPhone, and couldn't find any tricks for getting around it. I was able to zoom in and out with gestures, in case that's helpful.
tchvil 6y ago
Pinch/zoom it to go to an area you want bigger. Then it can be scrolled, not every time but most of the time. Unzoom to go to the next slide.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

Can I recommend the "Another podcast" Ben Evans has recently started up with a friend of his. They have a pretty good dynamic and you get a sense of the nuance that slides just don't convey. Also second the whole "you can do this in powerpoint / keynote" amazement :-) link: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/another-podcast/id1535359773 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/another-podcast/id1535...

tonicb 6y ago
Thanks for recommending the podcast - we've actually got an episode coming out tomorrow around the topic of pulling such a presentation together. Hope you enjoy it. Toni (aka 'the friend':) )
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  (sheepish grin) Although two things in my meagre defence - - Toni "The Friend" Cowan-Brown does sound like someone out of the Sopranos. - Actually finding an episode of yours in the Apple Podcast app was so frustrating (again just now) that it highlights how immature the "new" media still is - I spend waaay more time listening to podcasts than watching TV and yet newspapers carry TV schedules and the Radio Times publishes nothing on podcasts. Independant reviews I am sure exist somewhere on the internet but who knows where, and the main client seems to actively fight me whilst trying (like everything else) to sell me something sparkly and new. Ok I am going to start my usual insomnia rant about software agents soon. Looking forward to your next episode - keep up the good work I am loving it :-)
  - tonicb 6y ago
    I'm adopting Toni "The friend" from now on. It has a good ring to it. We certainly didn't make things easy by calling our podcast "Another Podcast" and yes I agree with you - although audio has been around for a long time, the podcast space still has a lot of maturing to do, and on many fronts. Thanks for tuning in (is that what people say these days? I don't know anymore) - it's appreciated.

whb07 6y ago

Unless China solves for the skewed demographics in the next ten years, seems like sheep-behavior to include them in projections for the future. Has anyone seen these types of presentations but say 1980, except it says Japan instead? I'd like to see some original thinking that stands away from the crowd for once.

baybal2 6y ago
> Unless China solves for the skewed demographics in the next ten years, seems like sheep-behavior to include them in projections for the future. True, long term, China has sealed its future, but even if you half China's population, it will still be no. 1 in pretty much everything it is no. 1 today. Pretty much nothing aside of war, civil war, or a second cultural revolution scale political crisis can stop it overtaking USA economically in coming 1-2 decades.
- pbourke 6y ago
  I’m genuinely curious why this comment is receiving downvotes. China becoming the world’s economic power by mid-century has been my set assumption for years. Has something changed with this expectation?
  - edoceo 6y ago
    China population is 1398 Million, india is like 1366. China in half would be 700 million. Maybe it just don't add up? IME this site downvotes bad maths.
    - bigpumpkin 6y ago
      This. China may have more factories but its focus is on industry not spirituality. India will achieve Religious Victory by 2050.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]

ghaff 6y ago

I don't know about China but, yeah, in the late 80s or so there was this incredible panic about Japan buying everything up. And various Nobel Prize-winning economists telling anyone who would listen that we had to institute government-industry partnerships like MITI or the US was doomed. And we did create organizations like SEMATECH to counter a perceived gap in semiconductors. Some of it was probably a useful kick in the pants, especially in manufacturing processes. But a lot of it was panic emulation of Japan that was neither needed nor especially useful.

treis 6y ago

I'm not sure I quite get the retail unbundling argument. Chinese sellers selling through Amazon is not direct to the buyer. It's through Amazon.

dash2 6y ago
But then he points out the growth of Shopify.
- treis 6y ago
  Right so you don't really have a bundling or unbundling. You have the same trend that happened in brick and mortar happening online. Speciality retailers are doing fine. Massive scale retailers are doing fine. And everyone in the middle gets squeezed.
- sjg007 6y ago
  Shopify needs a satisfaction guarantee like PayPal. I mean you can use PayPal but the biggest risk here is fraud.
  - sjg007 6y ago
    The problem with un-bundling US retail is what we currently see via 3rd party Amazon sales. You end up with exploding hover boards, electrical fires caused by bad chargers, tainted or counterfit makeup etc... The appeal of Target or Walmart is that they have a duty to their customer to not sell them dangerous products and they have clout to get cheap prices. 10,000 eCommerce shops selling private label chargers exacerbates this problem. I can trace the product to a factory in China sure, but that doesn't solve my lawsuit problem. Do I sue shopify in this case?

devmunchies 6y ago

The slides on vehicle emission regulations (slides 121-122) made me think of needing to report how much energy your servers are consuming. But don't worry! AWS will automatically keep track for you and add the tax to your monthly bill.

tasubotadas 6y ago

Can somebody summarize this in 20 words or less?

Clewza313 6y ago
Software eats the world, COVID made it even faster, companies need to sell direct to consumers to survive.
- tasubotadas 6y ago
  Perfect. Thanks

masswerk 6y ago

Sorry, I do this seldom, rather, never, but reading in the introduction, "Tech is entering its second 50 years.", I couldn't advance any further. Usurpatory taxonomy is even worse than pervasive superlatives. (Is it 160 BC? Are we going to see the Antikythera mechanism? Really?) This is very much stereotypical trend presentation wording.

morelisp 6y ago
But if he admitted τέχνη goes back more than 50 years then Ben would need to engage some actual STS instead of just projecting current investment trends! He might even need enough object permanence to understand things existed before he was born!
- shuckles 6y ago
  Pretty sure Ben read history at Cambridge and is aware of the past.
- masswerk 6y ago
  I even have some difficulties figuring out what might distinguish 1971 as a landmark. In computing, it was a mildly impressive year seeing the introduction of coin-op video games (Computer Space), the general availability of floppy disks (while 1960s tech), Niklaus Wirth gave us Pascal as the latest in Algol-like languages, but not really that much out of the ordinary. (Well, the intel 4004 was introduced, starting the age of cost-effective Japanese calculators. But the 8008 was sketched out before that, relying on the late 1960s design of the DP 2200 – and it would take a few years before anyone took serious interest in that one.)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Well as we all know, all of computing revolves around Unix, and therefore effectively begins at 1970-01-01. I'm... mostly joking, although that's actually basically true for the parts of computing that I personally work in so I actually do use 1970 as the beginning mark for the "modern era" in my head.

vsskanth 6y ago

How much of a drag is the high mobile data cost in the US for the technology market ? Or does it even matter ?

pas 6y ago
Prices are high because demand is there. The US is cursed with being too rich. The exact same thing happens in healthcare, education, etc. Sure, the rent seeking is enormous in all of these sectors, but to eliminate that faces the usual obstacles.
- ashishb 6y ago
  Prices of services produced in the USA is high because the USA exports dollars https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-class-politics-of-the-dollar-system https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-class-politics-of-t...
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    But mobile networking should not be a service in the labor-cost-predominating sense. That said, I'm very glad to see others citing Phenomenal World :),
- vsskanth 6y ago
  I acknowledge the high prices. I'm just wondering what kinds of opportunities this prevents.

trollski 6y ago

they totally missed that not only tech is entering its second 50 years but also third 25 year period.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Thanks Ben, I have fond memories of listening to your a16z discussions about the iPhone 8 (or so) while rocking my baby to sleep. We live in fun times.