• Comcast Bombast, Busted
  • SpaceX Mobility
  • The Dilemma of Digital Ownership

Comcast Bombast, Busted
This week Comcast announced that it intends to split its business into two separate companies. One company (the one that makes the steady money) will consist of the broadband and mobile entities and the other company will own the media properties NBCUniversal and Sky. When Comcast originally acquired them, cable television was still the king of the media hill. Comcast expected that owning the content and the distribution network would bring all kinds of synergies and benefits. And perhaps, for some unknown amount of time, it did. But the times are shifting away from network television and traditional media. Streaming services of all kinds have become increasingly popular, and original content creation isn't churned out only by big studios anymore. And because content now flows much more freely from more sources, it has become much more difficult to be a traditional media company. It would seem Comcast leadership realized that the consort ship might fare better if cut loose from the flagship. The two sides of the business are increasingly in need of different leadership styles and approaches to success. There are also more political risks in owning networks and producing content than ever before as the United States deals (mainly ineffectively) with an administration that is outwardly hostile to anything and everything it considers even remotely hostile to it, regardless of any rules or laws preventing such behavior. NBCUniversal is profitable and its profitability has been improving over the past few years, but the content-making business continues to be complex and fraught with peril from 360 degrees. And while the theme park segment of the media business is also very profitable, its very success also hinges in many ways on the success of the content business. If no one is interested in Universal Studios content, they won't want to go to the theme parks, either.

In thinking about this story, my mind went back to Netflix's attempt to buy Warner Brothers at the end of last year. Much like Comcast, Netflix has a distribution platform that is need of content. And while Netflix has been at least somewhat successful in producing its own content, it still needs a high volume of stable and rotating content to remain relevant in its market. Owning Warner Brothers probably seemed like a way to ensure that a portion of the available content would always be under their control and they'd have more predictability in their business. They could direct the armada toward new treasure with the confidence that they still had riches back at home should there be struggles on the journey. But the armada never came together and it's very possible that even Paramount's attempts to enlarge their territory will fail. It still remains that one of the most obvious answers for any media company to continue to exist and prosper is to simply make good content. There are thorns surrounding that rose of simplicity, though. It seems to be harder to make good content than it used to be and there is so much more competition for attention than there was when Comcast added NBCUniversal to its arsenal. One cannot simply buy one's way out of the problem. Eventually, new content will be needed, and companies will have to truly try to be successful at producing it. Nevertheless, someone will probably try to buy NBCUniversal in the future. They probably shouldn't.

SpaceX Mobility
For a brief moment in the United States, there was tangible competition among the mobile carriers. Sprint worked hard to offer cheap plans that were often too good to pass up - I signed up with Sprint for a year or two because I was offered a year of service for something ridiculous like $30 without even needing to try to find a Sprint employee to hoodwink into letting me onto a cheap SERO plan and I was able to bring my own phone to the network. And then there was T-Mobile, trying to be the "Uncarrier" and offering crazy options like the JUMP plan, which let you upgrade your phone as often as every six months. Of course, this was back in the days when there were enough different phones in the market that switching every six months didn't mean just bouncing back and forth between an iPhone and a Samsung phone. When the two carriers merged, we not only lost a fourth option, but we also lost the ability for two of the most price-competitive carriers to push the other carriers to do more than sit still. Now for anyone interested in maximizing value, they have largely needed to turn to mobile virtual network operators (MVNO) like Mint Mobile (which T-Mobile also bought), Visible (owned by Verizon), or mobile services from cable companies like Comcast/Xfinity (see how these stories connect?).

It used to be that the mobile networks also offered their own branded phones which were generally made by the big Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturers like HTC, Kyocera, and ZTE. It seems the carriers have always been enamored of having their own phone with their emblem splashed across it and their logo dancing around on the boot screen. Even years later when the telecom companies stopped pursuing their own brands, they still couldn't resist the urge to have the manufacturers insert their carrier logos into the boot sequence, constantly reminding you that your phone is locked to their network and doesn't really belong to you ("you will own nothing..."). With time, some companies that made software that ran on these phones increasingly found themselves frustrated by Apple and Google's infringement on their abilities to get the phones to do whatever they wanted them to do. On iPhones especially, companies like Meta and fitness companies like Garmin complained about limitations Apple placed on messaging and other features Apple kept to itself. The answer always seemed to be to try to create your own phone. Meta did try a couple of weak collaborations to produce phones with deeper Facebook integration and Amazon created its own dedicated 3D phone, but people looked on with (properly placed) skepticism and clung to their iPhones and Android phones.

Not long ago, there was an outcry over SpaceX's Grok and its predilection for creating nude deepfakes more than sufficiently capable of offending a wide swath of humanity. Elon Musk never apologized for that debacle but instead the company worked quietly behind the scenes to try to tamp things down a bit. Apple was given a fair amount of grief for not simply kicking the app out of the App Store, but they never did. I wondered at the time what the outcome would have been if they had. What irresponsible and ineloquent things would Elon have said in response? He has mused in the past, much like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, that owning the device is the only way to have the level of control and oversight of one's destiny that suits an aim to have an Everything App that truly does everything. Neither of them is a fan of the App Store and neither of them has been shy about saying so.

So, what would it look like if one of Elon's brands made its own device? What kind of device would it be? Would it be a smart satellite phone equipped with Grok running entirely on the Starlink network? Or would it run on its own MVNO and augment its connectivity with Starlink as/when necessary? Or would it just be a glorified Humane Pin or Rabbit R1 in a different form factor with its own connectivity and constant access to Grok? Would the device be able to run apps and if so, on what platform? Would there be a developer kit for the creation of new apps and services? What would payment processing look like? And perhaps most importantly, what content creators would they pay to hawk the product?

Depending on who you believe, there is a SpaceX device in existence that runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon (as do many Android phones and tablets) with a proprietary operating system that Elon has/has not been showing to investors. To be successful with an independent device, the features not only need to be compelling and priced competitively, but there also needs to be a strong marketing story that can overcome the personality of Elon Musk, which for many, is toxic, noxious, and odious. Most likely, this device isn't going to make it to production, or if it does, it will likely experience the same fate as other attempts to compete with Android and iOS. It doesn't even really matter how good the device is. WebOS on the Palm Pre was outstanding. Windows Phone had some smart features and a beautiful user interface. Both even had app stores with lots of apps and some motivated indie developers. Then there was the Firefox phone, the Ubuntu phone, the Jolla phone, the Maemo/Meego phones and so many others. It is the circle of life: Without killer apps, mindshare is unattainable. Without mindshare, market share is impossible. Without market share, software development stalls. Elon's only real shot is creating the Everything App. But I do not think that even all the money in the world would get him there. Money can't buy everything.

Money makes you think you can buy everything, though. SpaceX may try to buy Comcast, T-Mobile, or some other telecom company. I think it would spell disaster for the acquired company's brand. Elon has shown some ability/luck in acquiring baby companies started by smarter people and building them into powerhouses, but trying to acquire and steer a set-in-its-ways adult company could very well be his downfall.

The Dilemma of Digital Ownership
Learning that Sony is ending the production of physical media for its games sent my mind on a short jaunt down memory lane. I didn't have to travel far, though. Not even two weeks ago, I found that a group of songs I loved that were in playlists in my music streaming apps were no longer available. I scrambled to buy the CDs so I could own those songs and not ever have them yanked away from me again, but I was not able to find several of them. I was able to buy a CD for one of the albums that had vanished and I made use of my DVD/CD drive for the first time in many years. I had largely stopped thinking about accessing music even though I'd experienced this very scenario before. "My" music was always there when I wanted it because I kept paying for access to it. But now I was once again thinking about how I don't own much new music because with very few exceptions for jazz albums from a few bands whose new music I buy on day one, preferably downloadable in FLAC, I hadn't bought any new music. But music does disappear from services and albums do go out of print. Now I was thinking about all the albums I really needed to buy so I'd always have them. Should I just be using the money I spend on streaming to instead just own music I like? And then I remember I'm a musician who needs access to music for music gigs and I move the mouse away from the cancel button. But it's possible that many people should think more about owning the music they really like and don't want to lose. The kids out there buying vinyl are on to something.

There's so much we often unwittingly rent nowadays, but ownership did mean something once upon a time. I'm not even a casual gamer at this stage of my life, but I have thought a lot over the past few years about games from my childhood and teenage years. I was delighted when many Infocom games recently became available on the internet and I had nostalgic thoughts of old text adventure games and early graphic games like Sierra's King's Quest, The Incredible Machine, and The Adventures of Willy Beamish. I remembered playing the first graphic game from Infocom, Zork Zero, and being a bit underwhelmed (the text adventure games felt more vibrant to me somehow). I think a text adventure game today would be amazing with all that LLMs are able to do, but I know only a few of us old people would play them so it would be a waste of money to create. [editor's note: perhaps this is the vibe-coding project I need to start] Nevertheless, I understand and can empathize with gamers who have paid for "access" to games and in some cases may even believe they "own" the games and are learning the hard way that games, like music, can just go away. So many games are online and are multi-player and there's just no way to own that entire experience. Even for single player games and arcade-style games, ownership may still require online activation or validation. It is becoming very difficult to own any kind of media. The thought of driving down to your local GameStop to buy a game or Best Buy to buy software is just not a thing anymore. Somehow, we've gotten to the place where even buying lifetime licenses to software still relies on the company's lifetime to not end before yours. If the server is shut down, you have nothing to show for your lifetime purchase. And I say this as a person who does her best to try to buy lifetime licenses to software whenever possible and affordable. I hate subscriptions just like everyone else does, and I'd rather not have to continually budget for a thing I want to continually use. I'd like it to be mine.

But this is not the present we live in nor is it the future toward which we are headed. It makes sense to me that at some point most games would cease to be available in an "ownable" format. Games are software, and software is constantly being updated. We pay now for the privilege of having routinely updated software with the reality of no longer having much, if any, sense of ownership of it. It is probably only a matter of time before most things are no longer ownable in any meaningful sense. Today we can still buy some music on CDs or vinyl, some movies on DVD or Blu-Ray, some books in hardcover and paperback, and some art in print or other tangible handmade medium. But these things will slowly fade with time. I don't think the man who said "you will own nothing and you will be happy" meant media, but it applies here anyway. Sony is just riding the bus.