Linked List: May 19, 2020

Tuesday, 19 May 2020

Tom Hanks WWII Movie ‘Greyhound’ Moves From Theatrical Release to Apple TV+ ★

Mike Fleming Jr., reporting for Deadline:

In a real shocker, the WWII naval drama Greyhound that Tom Hanks wrote and stars in has abruptly changed course and will berth at Apple. Originally on the Sony Pictures theatrical calendar for Father’s Day weekend, the film instead will become the biggest feature film commitment made by Apple to premiere on Apple TV+. It is the latest in a growing indication that Apple is making its move, and becoming as aggressive as any streamer or studio in auctions for the acquisition of films and TV projects. [...]

It was going to be a major theatrical release for Sony — first slotted for May 8 but then moved into Father’s Day weekend June 19, until the pandemic washed out every studio’s plans and shuttered movie theaters around the world. That’s when the decision was made to alter course. The picture quietly was shopped in stealthy fashion, and it became a bidding battle between the big streamers. I’m told a deal closed in the $70 million range, with the auction brokered by CAA Media Finance and FilmNation.

It’s good to have a bankroll. I get the feeling that the COVID quarantine is accelerating Apple’s aggressiveness in streaming, but when opportunity knocks, you answer the door.

How the FBI Cracked Pensacola Shooter’s iPhone: An Automated Passcode Guesser ★

Kevin Collier and Cyrus Farivar, reporting for NBC News:

The FBI was able to eventually access Alshamrani’s phone not by an unprecedented technical feat, but rather by “an automated passcode guesser,” according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Each attempt at unlocking an iPhone through this sort of brute force technique takes about 80 ms to process; this cannot be sped up externally because the guesses can only be computed on the device’s secure enclave — a limit of about 12.5 guesses per second.

You may recall from earlier this year that these guessers are thus very effective against short numeric passcodes. On average, a 4-digit passcode would take 7 minutes to guess (14 minutes at the maximum, if the last possible combination were the last to be guessed). A 6-digit passcode — the current default — would take on average 11 hours to crack, 22 hours tops.

A 6-character alphanumeric passphrase — A-Z, a-z, 0-9 — would take on average 72 years to guess. That’s just 6 characters. And that’s if it only contains letters and numbers, no punctuation characters or spaces — and if the person programming the automated guesser somehow knows or guesses that the passphrase contains only letters and numbers, and that it’s exactly 6 characters in length. (When your iOS device is locked by a numeric code, the unlock screen shows you how many digits the passcode contains; when your device is locked by a passphrase, the length is not revealed.)

So you can see why the FBI and DOJ are still pressuring Apple to build backdoors into devices — if the Pensacola shooter had used a decent alphanumeric passphrase it’s very unlikely they’d have been able to get into his iPhone.

On the other hand, law enforcement benefits greatly from the fact that the default iOS passcode remains only 6 numeric digits. I suspect Apple is doing this more as a concession to user convenience than as favor to law enforcement, but one shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

’Howard Stern Is Getting Ripped Off‘ ★

Andrew Wilkinson, back in September:

In 2005, Howard Stern shocked the world by leaving terrestrial radio and accepting a $500 million dollar deal to move his show to Sirius satellite radio. In 2015, he renewed with a 5-year deal for $90 million per year.

People were blown away by the numbers. He was making out like a bandit! Had he been a CEO receiving the same pay, he would have qualified as the third highest paid CEO in America in 2014.

As of today, Howard is getting seriously ripped off.

Stern’s deal with Sirius XM expires at the end of the year.

And, presciently, regarding Joe Rogan:

Take a look at Joe Rogan, who currently has the most popular talk show podcast with over 200 million downloads per month. This number comes from Joe himself, but let’s assume he was exaggerating and it’s only 100 million downloads per month.

Assuming he sells ads at a low $18 CPM (cost per thousand listeners) and sells out his ad spots, he’s making approximately $64mm in annual revenue. If he’s on the higher end, at $50 CPM, he could be making as much as $240mm per year. The only factor that would change this is how many free ads Joe gives to companies that he has a personal equity stake in (like Onnit, the supplement brand he co-owns).

That means that Joe makes somewhere between $64-$240 million per year in revenue from his podcast advertising alone — and that’s handicapping his audience by half what he claims to have. That number also doesn’t include any additional revenue generated from his wildly popular YouTube channel, which has over 6 million subscribers.

$20 CPM is a fair ballpark estimate, and while we can’t verify his listener numbers, we know that his show ranks second at iTunes’s podcast directory. We don’t know yet what Spotify is paying him for exclusivity, but his show should have been generating $50+ million per year on its own. It seems likely that Joe Rogan is now the highest paid broadcaster in the world. Depending on the length of the deal, it really could be a billion dollar deal. Spotify’s stock jumped over 8 percent today on the news, which is over $2 billion at their current market cap.

However much Howard Stern was getting underpaid by Sirius six months ago, it’s even more so now.

‘Joe Rogan Experience’ Podcast Will Be Exclusive to Spotify ★

Todd Spangler, reporting for Variety:

“The Joe Rogan Experience,” one of podcasting’s longest-running and most popular shows, will be launching on Spotify exclusively this year. The Rogan-hosted comedy talk-show series will debut on Spotify on Sept. 1, 2020, on a nonexclusive basis — before becoming exclusive to the platform later in 2020 under the multiyear licensing deal. With Rogan, Spotify has landed one of the podcasting biz’s whales. It currently ranks as the No. 2 most popular show on Apple Podcasts (after Barstool Sports’ “Call Her Daddy”), per Podcast Insights.

Exclusive means that come January, you’ll only be able to listen to his show in Spotify. That’s a bit of a gamble, insofar as up until now, his show hasn’t been available at all on Spotify — Spotify’s terms are such that it makes no sense for any show to allow Spotify to play it unless Spotify is paying the show. But if Howard Stern’s fans followed him to Sirius satellite radio — which at the time he made the move required not just a subscription to the service, but dedicated hardware to receive the satellite transmission and an extra subscription specifically for Stern’s show — it seems like a sure bet that most of Rogan’s fans will follow him to Spotify, where all they really need to do is download an app that a lot of them probably already have installed anyway.

(Personally, my second favorite podcast is The Bill Simmons Podcast, and during the NFL season it’s probably my very favorite. But if it went Spotify exclusive (Spotify bought Simmons’s The Ringer website and podcast network a few months ago), I’d probably stop listening. But I’m an outlier.)

A source familiar with the deal said Rogan became sold on Spotify’s ability to build his audience worldwide, after initially resisting distributing the podcast on the platform because he saw it as primarily a music service.

More power to Rogan for what’s surely a massive deal, but does anyone believe that what sold Rogan on Spotify was anything other than money?

“The podcast is moving to @spotify!” he wrote on Instagram. “It will remain FREE, and it will be the exact same show. It’s just a licensing deal, so Spotify won’t have any creative control over the show. They want me to just continue doing it the way I’m doing it right now.”

It’s interesting to me, as someone with (to put it mildly) rather strong feelings on the advantages of publishing on the open internet, that Rogan sees moving to one exclusive app, with invasive tracking, as not exerting any sort of “creative control over the show”. I’m not trying to be coy, I know what he means — the content of the show will remain as-is, with no influence from Spotify. (So they say.) But I’m a big believer in Marshall McLuhan’s axiom: “The medium is the message.” Open podcasts and Spotify podcasts are similar, for sure, but they are not the same medium.