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- [00:01]
A
No longer a far off abstraction, quantum computing is becoming top of mind for businesses, and the exploration of how it can be used within industries is expected to increase significantly over the next five years. At the break, join Katie Pizzolato, Vice President, IBM Quantum Platform, to learn how companies are beginning to discover how quantum computing could one day solve their biggest challenges.
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B
Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Friday, November 14th. I'm Peter Ciampelli. For the Wall street the cost of Netflix, Disney and most other streamers has gone up and up since the early days of streaming, and the number of options for what services to use keeps going up too. But even though the costs have risen, customers seem to be sticking around. We'll dig deeper into why that is, and then creating genetically modified babies is highly controversial, with countless ethical concerns and safety issues. We're diving into a Wall Street Journal investigation that looked into a Silicon Valley startup that's been trying to create one anyway. But first, the state of streaming is vastly different from the early days when just one plan was offered by a streamer or two. The Wall Street Journal's deputy media chief, Melissa Korn, delved into the state of streaming, dissecting the different plans, their costs and the rising prices, and whether customers will stick around for the long haul. Melissa, your reporting shows that costs keep going up and up, but customers aren't leaving. Why is that?
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C
Yeah, we seem to be stubbornly committed to our streaming subscriptions these days. And even though the prices have risen in some cases quite significantly over the past few years, research shows that people are still subscribing to multiple plans, paying in some cases 20, 30, 40 plus dollars a month for their various subscriptions because they want the content. And in some cases, maybe they forget that they even have certain subscriptions so they just roll over month to month or they've found bundles so they get multiple subscriptions at a discount price. There's all these different permutations, but streaming is kind of running our lives right now.
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B
The pricing itself has also gotten so much more complicated since the early days. What have those changes been and have they had major effects on customers experience?
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C
Yeah, so there's all these different tiers of service now for a lot of the different streaming platforms, you have Ad Free, you have Ad Supported in some cases you have Ad Free Premium, you have Ad Free Basic, and they all have their different names, but essentially the two main versions are Ad Free and ad supported. Do you see commercials during your shows or not? And there's been a shift, at least for some platforms, more toward the ad supported, so you pay a little less, but you do have to watch commercials.
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B
When it comes to profitability for the companies themselves, Netflix is one of the only companies whose charts are not in the red. How do they differ from the rest of these companies?
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C
I mean, Netflix got into this so much earlier than many other companies. They also were building off of their DVD by mail subscription service. So they had such a massive subscriber base to start a lot of the other streamers. When they launched their streaming platforms, they were building nothing. Right. They were very much more kind of startup units within bigger media and entertainment companies. So we've seen a lot of the streaming platforms or the streaming segments of these bigger companies get closer to profitability, pare their losses quarter over quarter, or in some cases start to actually post profits. And that says a lot about their pricing strategy. It says a lot about the growth in subscribers. These are becoming bigger platforms with more customers, which means advertisers want to spend money on them. So directionally speaking, they're heading in the right direction.
- [03:55]
B
So the streaming arena is rife with competition and prices continue to go up and up. Is there going to be a point when customers will say, okay, I've had enough, and what do you think that the companies might do if that did happen?
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C
It's funny, we haven't seen this ceiling, we haven't seen this price fatigue yet. But just based on reader response to the story I just had about this, there are certainly people who are frustrated and who are saying, this is it, I'm going to drop subscription X. I'm going to get rid of this one. I need to pare back. You know, when people do kind of an audit of their subscriptions, they're sometimes shocked to see how many things they subscribe to. So occasionally we'll see some push toward that and people trimming down. But at the same time, people want to be able to talk about whatever the hot show is that their friends are watching. So they don't really want to walk away from all of it. So you may see what more of a push toward the bundled plans, more of a push toward the ad supported plans, and more and more. We've already started to see this and reported on it. Pausing, right? So you pause your subscription for three months and then you rejoin it when the new season of the show you want comes back. So you're kind of dipping in and out of these subscriptions more actively versus just holding them long term.
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B
That was the Wall Street Journal's deputy media bureau chief, Melissa Korn. How many streaming services do you use? If you're a listener on Spotify, let us know in this episode's poll. Coming up, Silicon Valley billionaires, including the CEOs of OpenAI and Coinbase, are backing a startup that has a secretive plan to create a genetically modified baby, an area of tech that's banned in the US and many other countries. That's after the break.
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A
Quantum computers are poised to help businesses drive innovation through more expansive and multidimensional computations, says Katie Pizzolato, vice president, IBM Quantum Platform, which sees a roadmap to these use cases. By 2029, they unlock a new set.
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Of mathematics and algorithms to tackle applications outside the reach of classical computers. Working alone. It really is a fundamentally different way to process information.
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Different but not impenetrable.
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It does feel more complex. For sure it is, but it is much more accessible and the barrier to injury is much lower than people anticipate.
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B
Editing genes in embryos for the purposes of creating a genetically modified baby is banned in the U.S. in many countries, and it raises ethical and safety concerns, with scientists calling for a global moratorium on the practice until these questions are resolved. But a small startup in San Francisco called Preventive, with investment from some of the biggest names in tech, has been using loopholes to secretly work on that exact goal. Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Long is here to tell us more. Catherine, tell me about this company and their secret plan. What is Preventive and how did it come about?
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E
Preventiv is a small company. It's backed by Sam Altman's family office as well as the Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong. Preventive says that it's interested in doing preclinical research to prove the safety of embryo editing.
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B
So what are the scientific criticisms and the safety concerns that some groups have about this area of science?
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E
Gene editing technology is advancing rapidly. It's becoming much more safe and efficient. Nevertheless, every single time we edit genes, there's still a possibility that we might make a mistake. And if you're editing an embryo, that mistake could be passed down through the generations. So there's a safety concern there. There's also ethical concerns. Do we need to edit embryos? Could there be other ways that people could have healthy babies apart from embryo editing? And some people have raised the specter of eugenics. Leading scientists have said that embryo editing is not safe enough to use. And scientists, patient advocates, and even biotechnology companies as recently as May called for a year moratorium on embryo editing.
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B
What do Preventive and its high profile investors say to criticisms about safety and ethics.
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E
Preventive says that they are moving transparently. They don't plan to advance to human trials until they've proven this technology is safe to use. They also say, wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world in which we could prevent heritable diseases rather than trying to fix them after a child had already been born? What our reporting found is that in recent months, executives at the company privately said a couple with a genetic disease had been identified who is already interested in participating in their research, according to people familiar with those conversations.
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B
And your piece also notes that there's been one example of a child being born from genetically modified embryos. What was that story and what kind of precedent did that set on this area of science?
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E
In 2018, a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, announced that he had modified three embryos to make the children who would be born from them resistant to hiv. That set off a firestorm of criticism. He was effectively ostracized from the scientific community, and he was sentenced to three years in prison in China for the illegal practice of medicine. And recently the Wall Street Journal reported that he is back in action, trying to launch a new startup to do more embryo editing, either in the US or another country abroad.
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B
What does it mean that Silicon Valley companies are getting into genetic editing tech now?
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E
I think the concern that's raised by Silicon Valley's choice to get into gene editing technology is that tech elites who have been known to apply, move fast and break things rationale to technology could now be working in a similar way when it comes to gene editing. And that's a prospect that frightens a lot of scientists in this space.
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B
And where could this tech go from here?
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It's too early to say where this might go in the future. We spoke with Jennifer Doudna, who shared the Nobel Prize in 2020 for her work on developing gene editing technology. And what she told us, more or less, was that the field will be watching to see whether preventive and companies like it will be moving forward safely.
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B
That was the Wall Street Journal's Katherine Long. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. If you listen to the show on Spotify, be sure to answer this episode's poll and leave us a comment telling us what you'd like to hear about on the show. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang. I'm your host, Peter Ciampelli. Jessica Fenton and Michael Lavalle wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Katie Ferguson. Jessica Fenton is our technical manager. Our development producer is Aisha Al Muslim Chris Zinsley is the deputy editor and Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. We'll be back later this morning with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.
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A
The time to develop strategies around quantum computing is now, says Katie Pizzolato, vice president, IBM Quantum platform, just like AI.
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Was experimental in its early days and is now foundational, Quantum is moving through a very similar arc. So building quantum literacy is important. Educate leaders and technical teams on the basics and implications of the technology and run experiments and identify where you define value.
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Quantum, she says, should be seen as a new part of your ecosystem, not a substitute for it.
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Think about how this technology is going to integrate with AI and classical systems. Quantum is not going to replace those things. It will augment them. We got to find the parts of the workflow where quantum is Most valuable.
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Visit IBM.com to learn how quantum computing will accelerate business innovation and growth.
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Custom Content from WSJ is a unit.
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Of the Wall Street Journal Advertising department. The Wall Street Journal news organization was.
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C
Not involved in the creation of this content.