Meta Can’t Clone Twitter In Peace

Plus: Amazon’s Hollywood dream isn’t over, just cheaper, probably. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

July 6, 2023

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TOGETHER WITH

Good morning.

We place a lot of trust in airlines, enough to let them herd us into big metal cylinders and propel us through the sky. But do we trust their fashion sense?

Japan Airlines, whose own dress code calls for navy blue suits and white shirts, is planning a clothing-rental program aimed at passengers looking to travel light. The idea is you’d pay the airline to ship rented clothes to your hotel room or Airbnb, and at the end of the trip you’d hand them back to be washed. Passengers can select outfits according to formality, color scheme, and season. If it goes well, who knows, maybe we’ll start to see some airlines debut their collections at Paris Fashion Week.

Morning Brief

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Amazon audits its Hollywood dreams.

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Meta’s Twitter clone hits an early roadblock.

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Moderna slips under the US-China trade war frontlines.

Media

Amazon Scrutinizes Spending in Studio Unit

(Photo credit: Nathan DeFiesta/Unsplash)

You can expect fewer TV shows with sweeping panoramic vistas and all-star casts.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has asked execs at the company’s studio division to provide granular budget breakdowns for its biggest shows, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. This comes amid a general cooling-off in the streaming industry, as the golden age of seemingly endless content (some good, some… less good) arrives at its inevitable sunset.

The Rings of Purchasing Power

Amazon Studios has taken some big swings in recent months, and they haven’t necessarily paid off. Its attempt at a Lord of the Rings fantasy epic, The Rings of Power, cost a cool $715 million according to The Wall Street Journal, $250 million of which was just to buy the rights to J. R. R. Tolkien’s story. Unfortunately, it seems the Tolkien connection didn’t guarantee a baked-in audience, as company sources told The Hollywood Reporter in April that less than 50% of viewers watched the series all the way through.

Now it seems Jassy wants to look at the books, unsurprising given he has enacted sweeping cuts across Amazon, including 27,000 job cuts so far this year. But Amazon isn’t the only company suffering from prolonged and engorged spending on its streaming offerings:

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Traditional media companies with streaming platforms including Disney, Warner Bros., and Comcast have reported a combined $20 billion in losses on their streaming businesses since 2020, the WSJ reported on Wednesday.

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Like the wider tech industry, investors are now keener to see profitability than growth. Add into that the ongoing writers strike upending productions in progress, and you have a recipe for some very reticent commissions for new projects.

Mission Anti-Repetition: Netflix is managing to eke out a profit unlike many of its legacy-media competitors, but it’s also trying to plump up its profit margins. Its recent crackdown on password-sharing enjoyed some mild success, and on Monday the Financial Times reported that the company is looking to spruce up its advertising offerings — less than a year after it launched its ad-supported subscription tier. The FT reported Netflix execs are touting a new “episodic” approach to ads. Translation: they’ll make sure that when you binge 30 episodes of Seinfeld in a row, you won’t see the same ad over and over again. And another thing, you won’t get shown the same ad over and over again. And another thing…

– Isobel Asher Hamilton

Social Media

Meta’s Twitter Clone May Bypass Europe

With Twitter in a complete, um, meltdown, it’s only natural to wonder which upstart clone will become its consensus replacement. For habitual scrollers in Europe, the answer won’t be Meta’s new “Threads” platform.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s new bluebird imitation app launched in the US and UK yesterday, but its EU launch has been stymied, for now, due to the bloc’s more stringent privacy and data-collecting laws, according to the Irish Independent. That’s certainly not the type of launch-day press Meta was looking for.

Threading the Needle

The launch of Threads is the ultimate story for Meta’s Facebook platform, featuring the two most essential components of any narrative about the social-media giant. First, it’s a textbook example of Meta’s patented clone-and-kill strategy, copying and repackaging the key features of a rival platform in hopes of siphoning its users (see: ‘Stories’ copying Snapchat, Reels copying TikTok, and Facebook copying Myspace, Friendster, and ConnectU-née-HarvardConnection). For all its warts, Twitter, according to a New York Times report earlier this week, has long been a white whale in Zuckerberg’s crosshairs — a competitor that, despite a relatively small user base, has in practice become a far more relevant hub in the internet information ecosystem than the Facebook mothership could ever hope to be. With Twitter on the ropes, now is finally the logical time to strike.

Secondly, like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram — and really all social platforms — it’s an out-and-out data play, a mechanism for mass surveillance of potential consumers, and micro-targeted advertising masked behind posts and likes and shares. So of course Zuck loves it! But compliance with EU rules is forcing him to hold off on launching there entirely:

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At the heart of the matter is Meta’s desire to use the data — including financial information, health data, location data, and search history — it’s already collected on users from Facebook and Instagram to sell micro-targeted ads on Threads. Such data intermingling is allowed in the US and the UK, but its legality is murkier in the EU.

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Citing a lack of clarity in the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Meta has preemptively refrained from launching Threads in the EU, sources told the Irish Independent. It is now unclear when or if the service will launch in the bloc, where roughly 100 million users log in to Twitter each month.

“Meta have informed us that they have no plans to roll out the service in the EU at present,” Graham Doyle, deputy commissioner of Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, told Bloomberg on Wednesday.

Shouts and Murmurs: Meta has been at work courting A-list celebrities, such as Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama, to sign up for Threads, according to a report from The Verge. “We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run,” Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, reportedly told staff in a not-so-veiled shot at Elon Musk and the chaos over at Twitter. “Thank goodness they’re so sanely run,” Musk sarcastically retorted earlier this week in a tweet featuring a screenshot of Threads’ data collection policies. Call us when he finally enters the cage match with Zuckerberg. Actually, on second thought, just call us when the fight is over.

– Brian Boyle

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Pharma

Moderna To Develop mRNA Vaccines in China

The US and China may be taking jabs at one another over trade and other stuff, but that isn’t stopping Beijing from inviting an American company to produce a new jab for the nation of 1.4 billion.

Moderna announced Wednesday it’s struck a deal with Chinese officials to let it develop messenger RNA (mRNA) drugs in the country. It’s a win that could pave the way for more Western vaccine producers looking to break into China.

Shoot The Messenger (Into Your Arm)

The utility of mRNA vaccines became obvious over the course of the covid pandemic. Instead of the traditional method of introducing a dead or weakened version of the virus they’re defending against, mRNA vaccines essentially carry instructions that tell your cells how to build the little spikes you can see on microscopic images of the coronavirus. Nifty, we know.

Moderna and Pfizer both developed mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, but these were not administered in China. The two most common vaccines given out in China were called CoronaVac and Sinopharm, which were developed more traditionally and were less effective.

China is currently experiencing something of a COVID-19 wave, but it’s not inducing the same levels of panic as during the months of zero-COVID policies. And Although China has opened its doors to Moderna, there are some conditions:

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The drugs that Moderna develops won’t be for export and will be available only in China. Given the size of that market, however, we’re guessing Moderna’s good with that.

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Local Chinese outlet Yicai reported Tuesday that Moderna is looking to invest $1 billion in China, and it’s almost certainly not going in alone. China’s Ministry of Commerce also announced it’s been holding meetings with a number of Western drugmakers including COVID starlets Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

Obviously: The ministry also said it had met with Novo Nordisk, the company behind Ozempic, the diabetes-treatment-turned-weight-loss-miracle-drug. If there’s one thing that can duck and weave through US-China geopolitical tensions, it’s the promise of getting thinner.

– Isobel Asher Hamilton

Extra Upside

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Wait a minute: The Fed’s rate hike pause was not a unanimous decision, apparently.

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New cooks in the kitchen: Major League Pickleball undergoes c-suite overhaul.

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Just For Fun

U-Turn.

Moving the goalposts.

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