Spyglass - Feeling Supersonic

Day two of doing this daily. We made it.

Yesterday I linked to the still-rumored return of Oasis and sure enough, today the band confirmed it. They're back for a reunion tour next year. That's great, Oasis is great. But it's also sort of wild to me just how much this took over my social media feeds over the past 48 hours. I'm sure I triggered it by favoriting a few posts and retweeting another, but I do that with a lot of breaking news and I don't recall a swarm like I saw here. All of a sudden it was all-Oasis-all-the-time.

I'm not complaining – STOP CRYING YOUR HEART OUT – it was just, a lot, some might say. I'll stop. Don't go away. Or look back in anger. Roll with it. Live forever. Now I'll stop.

Maybe it has to do with being in the UK? Certainly it's a massive deal here and the time difference with the US perhaps also led the algos to believe that's all the content I ever wanted. Poor Blur fans.

🏔️ Anti-Climatic Ending for Paramount Bid — The deal that won’t die may finally come to a close as Edgar Bronfman Jr. has dropped his $6B counter-offer at the last minute. I would say it seems surprising except nothing seems surprising in this deal any more. This latest twist seemingly is because the bid couldn’t stand up to financial scrutiny, which seems important in a multi-billion dollar offer. And that leads to the question: so what was the point? Did it fall apart when the Mighty-Ducks-child-actor-turned-crypto-guy backed out? Amazingly, that’s a serious question. Congrats, Skydance? Now for the hard part... [NYT]

📽️ Hollywood Bombs in China – There was a time when all you heard was that the future of Hollywood and cinema was in China, given the size of the market. The latter may still be true, but it seems that it won't be with Hollywood content, which is now consistently underperforming in the country (and that's the content that is approved). Amazingly, over 80% of the box office is now for Chinese-made films. Meanwhile, IMAX is expanding in the country – no surprise there – and will be playing up the local content as well. [Bloomberg]

💰 Apple Switches Up CFOs — Doesn’t seem like there's anything to read into this beyond Luca Maestri wanting to do something new and perhaps less stressful than overseeing the finances of one of the world’s largest and most complex (not to mention profitable) companies. It is interesting that he’s continuing the trend of Apple executives non-retiring, as Maestri is staying on to lead the “Corporate Services” team, which notably includes real estate (and he’ll still report to Tim Cook). Meanwhile, good succession planning makes it easy to slot in current VP Kevan Parekh, who, aside from being at Apple over a decade, graduated from Michigan, continuing that great tradition. #GoBlue [Apple]

🍓 Strawberry Ripens – It sounds like OpenAI is aiming to roll out their reasoning product codenamed "Strawberry" (previously called the more curious and potentially problematic "Q*") this fall, perhaps timed to help fuel a new fundraising effort for the largest AI startup. Sales seem strong, but that deep relationship with Microsoft has shown signs of strain as the competition inches ever closer... [The Information 🔒]

🎙️ Kelce Brothers Get $100M+ Podcast Deal – It feels like all the major podcasting deals are falling into place at once, with Wondery nailing down this one – which shouldn't be a surprise given everything Amazon is trying to do with sports and sports-adjacent content (including Travis Kelce's new gameshow on Amazon Prime Video). No deals for Apple though... yet (more on this soon). I'm also partial to 'New Heights' since it's named after Cleveland Heights, which is just couple towns over from where I grew up as well. [Variety]

Analysis

Mark Zuckerberg’s Goal is to Be Neutral in Not Being Neutral

Is Meta going MAGA or GAGA?

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

Will the New, Delayed Alexa Truly Be ‘Remarkable’?

“I’m sorry, I don’t know how to answer that.”

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

Asides

🔐 While it's still not entirely clear what to make of Telegram's CEO being arrested in France, this whole ordeal has served as a good PSA: Telegram is not end-to-end encrypted for the vast majority of chats. And that matters because a lot of people seem to think it is. They have a feature, Secret Chats, that enables E2EE (though it is unusually implemented, as this post hits upon) but is extremely limited and obtuse. [Matthew Green]

⌚️ One more theory about the strange Monday date for Apple's next event: that day will be the 10th anniversary of the unveiling of the original Apple Watch (by Tim Cook, as a "one more thing"). And the device is slated for an update at the event. Rumors haven't especially touted it (a larger, 'Ultra'-like screen is the main thing out there), but perhaps the 'Series 10' will be 'Series X'? [MacRumors]

🏈 The latest NFL rule change, just as the new season is about to kickoff? The ability for private equity to buy into teams. It's interesting how restrictive the league is going to be with it though, allowing only certain firms to be whitelisted. And notably, that doesn't include RedBird Capital right now, an obvious would-be participant, because of their role in taking over Paramount, which owns NFL-partner CBS... [NYT]

🤖 Anthropic has published Claude's 'System Prompts', which are basically the instructions which tell the chatbot how to “behave”. Sort of weird, sort of fun, sort of fascinating, but overall, this seems like a great step towards better AI transparency (and understanding). [TechCrunch]

👻 Snap just rolled out support for the iPad – 13 years after it launched on the iPhone. Perhaps there's hope for Instagram yet... [9to5 Mac]