2026-07-27 22:54:40
As someone who has been writing daily – both professionally and for pleasure – for the past quarter century or so, I'm always trying to dial in the perfect routine. Not writing at all, while obviously the easiest, is also the worst. But writing too much, in my experience, can also be bad. Your brain gets fried and the output suffers – it's not fulfilling for you, the writer, or your audience (if you have one – or hope to keep one).
Anyway, while the Ernest Hemingway method was famously to write first thing in the morning, often around 500 words (which was the inspiration for an old site of mine), and quit while there was still fuel in the tank and then go about his day, I've personally found my natural inclination is to write more words – and more often. So of course when I saw an encapsulation of Ian Fleming's days making the rounds on social media, it resonated.1
To be clear, the image below is a simple schedule recreated from an interview the James Bond author gave to Playboy in 1964.2 I don't know why it's going around again this week other than it's summer time and it's awesome.
It's just about 5pm here,3 I'm just out of the pool, you know what that means...
1 And, of course, the whole "spy" motif as part of the inspiration for this very site. ↩
2 Other accounts of his writing routine and schedule vary slightly. ↩
3 Though I'm in Italy at the moment, not Jamaica (as Fleming often was at his estate, "Goldeneye"), which honestly feels even more like Bond. And, in fact, the opening of the mostly unfortunate Quantum of Solace was filmed right near where I am at the moment [via Daring Fireball]... ↩
2026-07-27 04:29:13
Everyone remembers Steve Jobs’ 'Thoughts on Flash' open letter, written in 2010, because it absolutely eviscerated Adobe and effectively started the long, slow death of one of their key technologies at the time. But a few years before that, Steve Jobs had other “thoughts” — on music, and digital rights management specifically.
The result of 'Thoughts on Music' was a much faster outcome.1 Within two years, DRM vanished from iTunes and the industry at large. It was a masterstroke by Jobs with Apple facing growing pressure — especially in Europe (sound familiar?) – to open up iTunes and cede control over the industry. But with his essay, Jobs shifted the blame and focus to the record labels (many of which were European-controlled!), knowing it was unlikely to dent the all-important (at the time) iPod sales.
Anyway, this is the framing that pops into my head when thinking about the open letter from many of the biggest players in tech calling for 'open weight' models to underpin America’s AI leadership. The situation is far different — obviously, given the geopolitics at play here if nothing else — but this feels a bit like the same type of rallying cry that’s going to be hard for the industry to ignore.
And unlike with DRM, this isn't just one leader of one powerful company calling for change, it's nearly all of them.
In fact, two of the three big players in AI that weren’t initial signatories, OpenAI and Google, almost instantly got on board once they saw the weight behind this movement. Both would point to the fact that they offer “open” models already — in fact, they’re both pointing to that very fact. Still, it’s impossible to ignore their initial absence. Either the other players kept them out of the loop to send a message, or they kept themselves out of the loop to try to avoid the outcome.
There are a few other elephants that seem impossible to ignore in this particular waiting room — notably, Amazon — but the big one is obviously Anthropic.2
While it’s easy to see everyone just getting in line and saying, “yeah of course the US should be leading in open models”, it’s hard to see Anthropic saying the same. Because from Dario Amodei on down, they’ve railed against the notion in the past.
Why? Security, of course.
Critics will say it’s a fig leaf to cover their obvious conflict as the de-facto leader in closed AI models at the moment.3 But it’s still a pretty decent sized fig leaf! Each day seemingly brings new major security risks uncovered (or created) by AI.
Of course, others would use the “offense is the best defense” argument here and they might be right too, if for nothing else than it feels like this genie may already be out of this bottle. So perhaps that’s the notion that causes Anthropic to bend here, if they do. But they’re undoubtedly going to hold out as long as they can.
And they now find themselves with an unlikely ally in this regard: the US government!
Yes, their old nemesis is now the one that seems most aligned with locking down the models rather than going the other way. They have their own reasons, of course. Security is still one of them, but geopolitics and negotiating leverage loom large as well.
Everyone is conflicted here. NVIDIA has been leading the US open weight charge of late because they obviously don't want one (or two) model(s) to rule them all and gain the leverage they now enjoy over the industry. Jensen Huang also undoubtedly believes the "open" route will help remove at least some of the political pressure on their hardware. Is this the path to fully unlocking the Chinese market? Probably not, but if the US fully locks down models, NVIDIA is unlikely to ever grow their business there. (It is worth pointing out that NVIDIA is not open sourcing CUDA, even though that’s exactly what Alibaba is doing in China with their would-be competitor in AI chip software.)
Microsoft now seems all-in on the idea of being a “Switzerland” for models, and Satya Nadella clearly doesn’t want to see OpenAI and Anthropic simply run away with the market — which is more than mildly awkward given the ownership stake Microsoft has in each! I mean, they still own around 25% of OpenAI!
Speaking of awkward, how weird is it that no sooner does Meta spend hundreds of billions of dollars to shift their focus away from open weight models, do such models become ground zero for this debate? They’re signed on to this letter, but their actual actions are mainly in the closed camp for now. Was this another big mistake for Meta?
Perhaps a key thing worth pointing out: the letter doesn’t suggest open weights is the only path forward, simply that the US shouldn’t ban them or even just dissuade the building and use of them. In this world, the closed models still have their place, but the question left unanswered is what that place is relative to the open models and vice versa.
In some ways, this has been the debate in AI from the get-go. Again, Meta bet on open before they switched to closed. Alibaba did the same in China, before they just shifted back to open in light of President Xi Jinping’s recent outlining of China’s stance. That stance is obviously that stance because they’re not at the forefront of the frontier at the moment, otherwise it would probably be a very different stance! So yeah, conflicts all around.
Still, the shift towards "open" has a groundswell, at least right now. But the main reason seems decidedly capitalist: cost.
The price of frontier AI keeps growing more untenable — both to use and to build, as Google can attest this week with the hit to their stock price on the news of yet another jack up in CapEx. Meanwhile, everyone from the biggest enterprises like Microsoft to the smallest startups are feeling the token burn. If someone can come up with the “good enough” open model… unfortunately, it seems like it was a Chinese company, Moonshot, that just did it with Kimi K3.
But even that is not so straightforward! Because these models are only open weight and not fully open source, what exactly goes into making them, and what they’re going to output for certain queries is… largely unknown. And potentially problematic! Further, there’s the fundamental question of just how much they relied on distillation from the closed frontier models. And if those go away, you have a real chicken-and-egg problem.
This is all angling towards a world where frontier models remain closed but are perhaps used to distill open variants that are closer to the cutting edge after some set period of time. Yes, this is essentially what OpenAI, Google, and others have been doing, but if it’s more formalized and streamlined, everyone might feel better. Especially if those models can then legally be used to distill others – at least in the US. It would keep some power in the hands of the frontier, while trickling down more flexibility with some regularity.
But who knows, that’s just a guess this week. After one hell of a week of news.
Still, the vibes right now are clear. Everyone seems to be falling in line quickly behind this notion of not only protecting "open" models, but pushing for the US to combat China to take the lead in their build and spread. Well, everyone except Anthropic.4 And their strange bedfellow here, the US government. And that obviously matters – especially when the stakes are higher than, say, DRM.5
1 It's really weird/sad/annoying that Apple no longer hosts these pivotal posts on their site. You'd think they would embrace the history and importance?! ↩
2 Other notable ones missing include Oracle, Intel, Databricks, Snowflake, and yes, Apple. Though none of those, aside from perhaps Apple (thanks to Google), really make their own large models at the moment. To that end, SpaceX/SpaceXAI (and Tesla) also weren't initially included in the list, though Elon Musk quickly voiced his support publicly as well. (As has Marc Benioff, though Salesforce hasn't officially signed on.) ↩
3 The same rationale Apple turns to time and time again, I might point out. ↩
4 And it's still not entirely clear that OpenAI is fully on board with this given that their apparent actions behind the scenes suggest otherwise! ↩
5 Man, does the industry miss Steve Jobs' voice and gravitas right now... ↩
2026-07-26 20:57:51
I've been on the road this past week-plus and as such, haven't been able to Monitor the Situation™ with AI in real time – which it feels like is needed even more so at the moment given the constant stream of news and reports. Not even about the latest model breakthroughs and products, but just about the ongoing debate over "open" versus closed models, which itself has turned into sort of a proxy war for America versus China.
But it's also not that simple – not nearly. In fact, it's so intertwined and convoluted that it makes the Marvel Cinematic Universe look like a quaint, cohesive narrative. As such, I feel the need to write this out a bit, just to try to wrap my own head around it. To keep things simple and streamlined, let's just focus on the last 10 days:
That's 10 full days with an insane amount of activity – activity that could reshape the world technologically, societally, politically, and geopolitically.
Update: With my mind now reset, some further thoughts on the topic of the push towards "open" models:
2026-07-20 06:32:15
As bad as things may be product-wise (not to mention potentially legally?) at OpenAI at the moment with the stumbling out of the gate of the ChatGPT super crap “Super App”, it could be worse. It could be Google. A company which not only lacks a “Super App” but lacks a true frontier model at the moment.
It wasn't a great look when Google I/O came and went in May without Gemini 3.5 Pro. But far worse was that Sundar Pichai said on stage that the flagship model would be coming next month (which Google echoed in a blog post). That would have been June. It's now the end of July. Google says the model is still in testing but it's now not just "not a great look", it's a bad look. This is a $4.2T company seemingly unable to compete with several far smaller players. But worse is that this is after the company already moved heaven and earth once to get out of their own way to effectively compete in AI. And it worked. They had caught up or perhaps even surpassed everyone else.
The timely analogy would be to England going up 1-0 on Argentina and then... shifting to a defensive strategy and getting run over as Argentina stormed on to the World Cup final.
But whereas a few years ago, the problem seemed to be just as much about timidity – that is, Google had much of the technology ready to roll internally (as you might hope given their central role in inventing the ideas behind LLMs), they were just afraid to release it – now it seems firmly rooted in bureaucracy:
The delay has been a source of frustration for Google engineers, AI researchers and managers, many of whom are concerned the company risks losing an edge in the market as rivals Anthropic and OpenAI produce models that exceed Gemini’s capabilities, according to 10 current and former employees. Google has multiple layers of stakeholders involved in preparing models for release, working to weave AI across a vast product portfolio, including search, maps and YouTube, which can cause delays, said the people, who declined to be named discussing internal concerns.
Of course, that's also nothing new at Google. That's largely what was blamed for the 'Bard' fiasco. You know, Google's first attempt to catch up with ChatGPT. That stumble was seemingly only corrected when DeepMind and Google Brain were united under one leader, Demis Hassabis, with a single, unified vision for AI.
But it seems like, as was the case for OpenAI, coding sort of blindsided them. Pichai said as much after I/O that Google was behind in this regard, which must have been a particularly embarrassing thing to admit for the company. But whereas OpenAI was seemingly able to course-correct quickly with Codex, Google has seemingly not been able to. Perhaps it's as simple as one of those big company versus small company dynamics, where being more nimble actually matters more than pure resources.
Then again, resources also seem to matter here quite a bit:
Google’s popular products are a gateway to generative AI for everyday people, and can yield data that makes their answers smarter. But encouraging leadership of every department to move in the same direction is like trying to boil an ocean, one ex-employee said. When mandates shift or efforts end up duplicated in multiple departments, it gets even more difficult to maintain a cohesive strategy, current and former employees said. It’s also a challenge for any one offering to get the resources it would need to succeed, and to gain traction in the market, they said.
I mean, Google probably should hope it's that simple and not as bad as the Llama situation for Meta, as there are definitely shades here of the "Behemoth" model of Llama 4 which was perpetually promised but never came. And soon, Llama itself was put out to pasture. There are no real signals of that here, but well, there are signs that other things are amiss internally at Google at the moment.
After the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked concerns that Google’s search engine would become obsolete, the company declared a “code red” — a useful tactic for cutting through the layers of bureaucracy and internal competition that often slow Google’s product efforts. But now, racing in AI is the normal state of the company, one employee said.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin and others were advocating for Google to move faster to seize opportunities in AI coding, but their efforts were slowed by competing factions within the company, two former employees said. Cloud computing unit Google Cloud, research lab Google DeepMind and the team behind the Android operating system are all building AI coding tools for developers, with involvement from some consumer product teams, too, people familiar with the work said.
Yeah, this is Highlander, not chat apps, Google. There can be only one. Or, if you prefer another movie analogy, it's clearly time to unite the clans. Again.
Google's earnings report is certainly set up to be interesting this week.
2026-07-17 18:18:29
Let's give OpenAI some credit, once they realize they made a mistake, they act quickly to correct it. Today's case in point: with an update, ChatGPT now features ChatGPT once again. No, that's not a joke, and yes, it does speak to a very obvious self-own.
To quickly recap: the strangest thing about the "Super App" update to ChatGPT a week ago was that they completely buried the actual chat functionality. It was shoved into the sidebar and made into a sub-feature of the service. A service which, mind you, was still called ChatGPT. But instead of that brand front-and-center, the new app launched into something confusingly called 'ChatGPT Work'. As it turned out, ChatGPT Work wasn't ChatGPT for Work, but OpenAI's Claude Cowork competitor. And even though this new app was clearly an extension and expansion of Codex, their Claude Code competitor, that too was now a secondary option.
There were several other UI issues to boot – and many of those remain. But first and foremost, OpenAI just needed to make this new ChatGPT app far less confusing and jarring to actually use. And now they have: gone is 'ChatGPT Work' front and center at start, back is simply 'ChatGPT' with our old, trusted chatbox asking you to simply 'Message ChatGPT'.
To be clear, 'Work' is still there, but it's now a secondary tab in that main ChatGPT area – just as it is on the web, which as I noted last week was the far better UI. Also back are your 'Projects' and 'Recents' (recent chats) in the sidebar. 'Temporary Chats' too! Again, OpenAI basically made ChatGPT ChatGPT again.
Albeit a more bloated and less performant version. Still no GPT-Live. Baby steps.
Codex is here too, in that same main drop-down. You can also set it as the default if you're coming up from the old Codex app (which auto-updated into this app). It's still the same non-native, now-Electron-y app that those users are used to. That still sucks for users of the old ChatGPT Mac app (this version seems to use a shit ton of virtual memory), but you can also still use that for now as 'ChatGPT (Classic)'.
And everything now apparently syncs between desktop, mobile, and web. Why it didn't in the first place, I don't know. This all felt a bit rushed out the door. In case you haven't heard, OpenAI has had one hell of a week.
Anyway, all of that is in a positive direction. But it also begs the question as to why on Earth OpenAI didn't realize all of this obvious stuff before launch? Perhaps beyond being rushed to get the first "Super App" out the door, it seems like a situation where the team was far too focused on simply cloning Claude. Specifically, what Anthropic had done with the Claude desktop app. This new ChatGPT app was – and remains– largely that.
And you could argue it's even more like that now because it actually opens into chat mode, just like Claude does. As I noted, this was perhaps the most confusing thing of all. OpenAI cloned Claude except for this one key bit of functionality. Now they have that too. Clearly, they were too Codex-pilled.
We all get why. Claude Code (and Cowork) has been killing it, rocketing Anthropic into not just a viable OpenAI competitor, but into a more highly valued company bringing in more money. OpenAI's answer, Codex, was clearly showing progress in combating that turning of the tides, so they decided to go all-in, chat be damned.
The problem is that pesky one billion or so ChatGPT users that OpenAI seemingly forgot they had. Obviously they didn't forget, they just view that user base as far less valuable than the ones focused on coding and other agentic angles. And yeah, I mean it is literally less valuable of a user base when it comes to bringing in money right now. I might argue that longer term, if OpenAI really believes they can crack the AI advertising nut, having the widest base of users would be far more valuable, but it's still unclear if that will happen.
In that light, we can see the dilemma. But there were also probably about a dozen better ways to do this roll-out – as highlighted by how fast they're fixing these things – and they just missed the mark. While they undoubtedly knew there would be some backlash, they probably didn't realize there would be this much. Again. All that points to perhaps a disturbing trend where OpenAI doesn't really understand their user base. Which you almost can understand given how they clearly stumbled into ChatGPT in the first place. Still, here they are with those billion users. A problem that all of their competitors would love to have. But still a problem if you want to fundamentally change what you are as a product..
But those are bigger, existential issues. All I wanted was chat back in the ChatGPT app. Front and center. And I got it. It's not perfect. It's still bloated. But at least it's usable again now and not a confusing mess of ideas out of the box.
Update July 18, 2026: Some good/fun pushback from John Gruber who thinks I'm going too easy on OpenAI for quickly fixing some (but hardly all) of the issues:
Two excerpts to call out:
The only good solution is to pretend this last week didn’t happen and go back to calling ChatGPT “ChatGPT” and Codex “Codex”. If they want to give one of them a new name, don’t call ChatGPT “ChatGPT Classic” — instead rename Codex “ChatGPT Codex”. There, done. All problems solved.
This occurred to me after I published, but while Gruber (in another post) analogizes this to the whole 'New Coke'/'Coke Classic' fiasco in the 1980s, what if a more modern analog is when Netflix unveiled 'Qwikster'. The year was 2011, and the company really wanted to go all-in on their streaming efforts and viewed the DVD-by-mail business as yesterday's news. The problem was that to millions of their loyal users it wasn't yesterday's news, it was the service they still knew and loved and used. Worse, they saw it as a ploy to raise prices.
The stock crashed, millions quit, and Netflix had to backtrack, fast.
It was the one huge mistake Reed Hastings made in his tenure as CEO of Netflix and now it's a literal case study in what not to do. That was a worse situation, but mainly because software can be fixed faster than physical/logistics changes to your business. Also, Netflix was a public company at that point, OpenAI, famously, is not (yet). One has to wonder what the market reaction would have been to this ChatGPT shitshow...
But it's also worth noting that overall, Hastings wasn't wrong with the call, he was just too early – which I noted was a possibility here as well in my original post. Regardless, Hastings didn't read his room correctly, just as OpenAI didn't here. That said:
The Codex app is clearly capable of amazing things. But the reason that there are a billion users of ChatGPT but only a few million users of Codex — by OpenAI’s own accounting — is because ChatGPT is simple and focused and based on a single coherent concept: chat. The frustration of the eggheads now running product at OpenAI is obvious: how come these hundreds of millions of morons using ChatGPT aren’t running Codex instead? Somehow they thought they could fix this by giving Codex the ChatGPT name. This is like if Apple had gotten rid of the Messages app on the Mac and replaced it with Xcode, which they renamed to “Messages”. Now they’ve put an “iMessage” tab in the Xcode sidebar and re-released the Messages app everyone knew and loved as “Messages Classic”.
OpenAI separated itself from its competition — especially Anthropic — by being good at product. Now their product decisions are being made by people who don’t understand why Apple makes both iMovie and Final Cut Pro, or GarageBand and Logic Pro.
I'm compelled by the idea that there should be a 'Pro' version of ChatGPT and a simple version for consumers. Which, yes, is how it basically was with Codex! Sure, it's more work when it comes to upkeep, but it feels like we're still a ways away from everyone wanting to use all the agentic capabilities. Especially since it's so bloated and convoluted. Could they even get a billion users had they started here? I doubt it!
I know OpenAI hopes that's not the case, that everyone will want to switch to Codex – aka New ChatGPT – but that's projecting fueled by their own business needs. A very stupid – and dangerous – way to do product development, obviously.
2026-07-17 02:53:44
Help, I've been YouTube-pilled.
I realize this is rather a ridiculous sentence to write. Not because it's absurd to be sucked down the YouTube rabbit hole, but because it's 2026. The service launched 21 years ago. It's old enough to drink. It's the second-most-visited site in the world, only behind that of its parent company, Google. Isn't everyone YouTube-pilled by now?
And it's not like I'm new to the service. According to my profile, I joined on February 18, 2006 – just four days after its first birthday, and almost exactly nine months before it was acquired by Google. But in my 20 years on the service, I've never really gotten into it.
I mean, sure I've used it, even a lot, because again, it's the second most popular site on the internet and has been for years. But largely not in the way that I assume many have been for a long time now. Yes, I've even posted a few videos here and there – creator alert! – but mainly to embed them on TechCrunch back in the day (though only one video is still up – an iPhone 4S test from 14 years ago!).1 But I just never really got into using it as a destination. Most of my consumption came either through embeds on other sites or going there to search for something in particular, like many a 'how-to' video when I first became a father. Anyway, something shifted for me over the past year or so. I'm not really sure why, but now I find myself on YouTube constantly. Consuming, constantly.
To the point where this post has been sitting in the back of my mind for a while now. Because I think about it relative to the other streaming services. It just feels like YouTube has taken over. Again, on some level, I know I'm way late to such an observation – and increasingly, the metrics bear this out. But whereas it used to feel like Netflix was the undisputed king of streaming, it now feels like YouTube snuck up and stole that crown.
And I say "snuck up" because for years, YouTube has been disparaged by Hollywood and those other streaming services as sort of amateur hour. I mean that quite literally. They all scoffed at UGC as just sort of crap that no one actually watches. Obviously that's true for a lot of such content, but it overlooks what YouTube actually is: the perfect vessel for video on the internet. All video. While it started with UGC – well, and perhaps pirated Hollywood fare – it's now the home to pretty much everything.
It's also increasingly the birthplace of not only the next generation of Hollywood content, but the talent as well. Everyone was waiting and watching for AI to disrupt the industry, but it was YouTube that clearly has this year.
Again, it feels silly to write this. I mean, no shit! But whereas Hollywood has long been shitting themselves about Netflix – going as far as to be adamantly (and foolishly) against their thwarted takeover of Warner Bros – it feels like they're now awakening to reality: that YouTube, not Netflix, controls the market.
Netflix, of course, knows this. And they tried to argue this to their advantage in the Warner Bros pursuit. But it largely fell upon deaf ears. And now, having lost Warner Bros, it feels like Netflix is increasingly freaking out about the situation. What started as striking deals left and right for video podcasts has now branched into other shorter-form content that has proven popular on YouTube.
If the old goal was for Netflix to become HBO before HBO could become Netflix, the new goal may be for Netflix to become YouTube before YouTube destroys Netflix.
That's hyperbole, of course. Netflix isn't going anywhere. But they're also, by at least some metrics, no longer growing. Certainly not as they once were. And subscribers aside, the real concern now is about engagement. This not only helps to mitigate churn, but it's also now vital as they ramp up their advertising efforts. This has led the push into more and more live content, including, most notably, sports – a space the company previously said they had no interest in, of course.
But as history has proven time and time again, Netflix loves to backtrack. As they should! Situations change and Netflix should change along with them. Most recently, this includes their stance on movie theaters, which was obviously in part tied to the aforementioned Warner Bros pursuit, but is also continuing even with that now over (as predicted). And soon, it will undoubtedly include UGC too.
I'm not saying they're going to become YouTube, but only because that seems impossible in 2026. YouTube is already YouTube. It's not something Netflix, or anyone else, can just throw money at. Sure, they can throw the money to pick off some shows/creators here and there, but they'll never be able to get the full corpus of content that YouTube now gets – for free, I might add. We're way past that tipping point.
Netflix would undoubtedly say that they don't want all that content, just the best.2 But, if they're being honest, I think they probably would like to swap spots with YouTube right now. Netflix is currently a $300B market cap company, but their stock has been depressed over the past year, down 40+%. And they're actually not far above where they were five years ago. Yes, that's better than Disney, which is actually down 45%+ from where they were five years ago – and flat over the past decade-plus following the comedown from the pandemic streaming surge – but this is not the path towards becoming the first trillion-dollar media company.
YouTube, on the other hand, might be valued at $500B were it a standalone company these days. Thanks to Google now breaking such things out, we know that their revenue is actually higher than that of Netflix – $60B vs. $45B last year. Netflix is growing revenue a bit faster, but that's largely thanks to said advertising ramp. YouTube is already ramped and now coming for Netflix's core business, subscriptions, a business which is growing faster than Netflix's. Have I mentioned that YouTube doesn't have the cost of content that Netflix does?
Google doesn't break out YouTube's actual profits, but given the likely margin difference, it undoubtedly also brings in more profits than Netflix does – perhaps to the tune of $15B to $20B versus about $11B for Netflix last year. And that's with YouTube paying out 55% of revenue to creators, of course.
Anyway, they're both great businesses, but it feels like YouTube is increasingly in a better strategic position than Netflix is. Which is undoubtedly why Netflix keeps encroaching on their territory, even though YouTube isn't really getting into Netflix's core business – at least not yet. Again, yes they're selling subscriptions, but they're not commissioning expensive Hollywood content. They tried that back in the day and it didn't work. Even if individual shows, like Cobra Kai, did work – ironically, eventually on Netflix!
To me, the key to YouTube is now twofold. First, it's the sheer breadth and depth of the content. Again, this was once viewed as a weakness relative to Hollywood, but now it's a massive strength. There is literally something for everyone to watch, even me. Yes, this has long been the case, but in our age of streaming inundation, YouTube's focus on shorter form content I think is helping them differentiate.
Everyone now knows the feeling of being weighed down by choice, but especially if that choice means deciding which two-hour-plus movie to sit down and watch. That was always a massive time commitment – a huge chunk of your actual day. But in our era of abundant choices, it's harder than ever to justify such "spend". TV shows are easier because they're usually shorter. But you know what's usually shorter still? YouTube videos.3
Better yet, unlike when the longer form Netflix content is over, YouTube can offer you other shorter content if you have some more time. Once you finish your movie on Netflix, it seems unreasonable to think that you're immediately going to spend another two hours to watch another movie!
With that in mind, I suspect Netflix's real play with YouTube-like content will be as "filler". That is, content that can fit in the crevices of time between their main content. Maybe you just watched a movie about the Trojan War and want some more content along those lines. How about a video podcast that dives into it? Or just another shorter video on the general topic? This is where YouTube destroys Netflix right now, obviously.
They both have excellent recommendation engines, but only YouTube has the content that truly matters for real-time follow-up content consumption.
The other key aspect of YouTube is even more obvious: the UI. This has been an especially interesting revelation to me since I've long found Google's UI chops a bit lacking. But YouTube has always been pretty strong in this regard, and it feels so honed in at this point that it just makes Netflix feel and look bloated by comparison.
Netflix's UI isn't awful, it's just BIG. YouTube is able to cram in a lot more tiles for content you might be interested in – this is true on the web and on TVs, an area of increasing importance to YouTube, of course. As you undoubtedly know by now, YouTube is actually ahead of Netflix when it comes to viewership on televisions, which is wild because it was Netflix's home turf!
Overall, YouTube just feels faster. It feels like it's built for our current era where you can quickly and easily dip into and out of things. Netflix, for as good as they are with streaming compression and what not, still just feels like it was built for the old paradigm of content. Because it was!
This, in turn, makes YouTube feel like a great home for all types of content, including the more "premium" stuff that usually resides on my "traditional" streamers. That includes both movies – which yes, you can rent through YouTube – and shows, which you can increasingly watch via their "Channels" play, which took a page out of Prime Video's playbook.
Again, while YouTube isn't paying for their own content anymore, it increasingly feels like they won't need to thanks to these Channels. I've long wondered who would end up winning the battle to be the main streaming hub, with Apple the most obvious choice given their position in the market and previous success with iTunes. But their Apple TV set top box strategy continues to move in the wrong direction, and they're clearly not going to make an actual television set anytime soon (sadly), so it now feels like a fight mainly between Prime Video, YouTube, and Netflix.4
The latter clearly – clearly – is going to start their own "Channels" strategy sooner rather than later. It's low-hanging fruit from a retention and engagement perspective. And given their size, everyone will obviously be willing to work with them – though maybe Apple only if they agree to reciprocate and finally allow Netflix content to be surfaced by the Apple TV UI. Something which Netflix really should do! Again, engagement!
It's also clear that we're going to see Netflix strike more deals to take over the front-end of various cable TV services around the world. The early returns with TF1 in France seem very positive and again, this helps lock Netflix into that position as the main TV UI. And it's hard for YouTube to do this because they have their own, competing service in the form of YouTube TV (though yes, it remains US-only).
At some point, YouTube TV is going to get rolled into YouTube itself. Presumably the current cable deals preclude that from happening, but it's getting more and more muddled as YouTube itself takes on the Oscars, BBC, Mister Rogers, perhaps the next World Cup rights, more NFL, etc.5
I mentioned this the other day, but it long has felt like Netflix was not the new HBO because they ended up being far larger than that: the new cable TV. But actually, it now feels like this notion is almost veering a bit negative, that Netflix is akin to basic cable. It's something everyone has, but no one really loves anymore. The best content is on Apple TV and Disney+ and yes, HBO Max, as the new "premium" cable channels of the day. Meanwhile, YouTube is the new TV. The service that's free that has everything and by far the largest reach – akin to the big networks of old. All of them. Combined.
To that end, it also feels like Netflix needs to go free sooner rather than later. With the ad-tier in place, they can offer up the ultimate FAST service. It won't be for me and perhaps not for you, as the subscription tiers would obviously remain, but it can kickstart growth once again.
And that would be a hell of a lot easier and cheaper than say, buying Disney or even Lionsgate. All options should be on the table to shake things up once again, but if we all can agree that YouTube is the real rival, it's becoming increasingly clear how to best combat them.
In a way, the two are on a collision course just coming from opposite ends. Netflix from the premium side, YouTube from the UGC side. Both have been hugely successful in their own lanes, but those lanes are converging. And seemingly out of nowhere – at least to me – YouTube would suddenly seem to have the clearer path...
1 While we had deals with other video providers, I can't tell you how much faster it was to use YouTube to get a video up and live back in the day. This mattered at the speed of blogging... ↩
2 Are they a good judge of "best"? I would argue not... ↩
3 Yes, yes, TikTok and Reels shorter still! And that's perhaps why they're working too! And why YouTube has Shorts. ↩
4 Especially with Roku now going to Fox... ↩
5 Where Google TV, a service which has pivoted about a half dozen times over the years but is currently the software that can power smart TVs, as well as their own set-top box, fits is another matter. I guess it continues as-is to try to be more of a "Switzerland" where YouTube is just one option, but if YouTube really does take over TV... ↩