Meta Connect 2024, Meta’s Orion Prototype, Mark Zuckerberg Is Gaslighting Us
Hello everyone. My notes from Meta’s Connect 2024 came out to a few daily updates worth of discussion. After much editing, today’s update does a good job of capturing my views and perspective. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s jump right in.
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Meta 2Q24 Earnings, Thoughts on Meta HW Sales
We will continue our 2Q24 earnings reviews with Meta. Within Big Tech, Meta may be the most interesting from a competitive standpoint relative to Apple. Let’s jump in.
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Eddy Cue on Apple’s Sports Strategy, Apple’s Challenges With Sports, Meta Layoffs Hit Custom Silicon Unit
Hello everyone. Let's jump right into today's discussion.
Eddy Cue on Apple’s Sports Strategy
In a 3,900-word GQ Sports profile titled “Inside Apple’s Plan to Change the Way We Watch Sports,” here’s Sam Schube:
“The man leading Apple’s push into the wild, lucrative world of live sports broadcasting is Eddy Cue. Cue has worked at Apple since 1989, and cuts an interesting figure at a company defined by its low-key, minimalist culture. He is plainspoken, and quick to joke. He is also an enormous sports fan, frequently popping up at the biggest games on the planet. Perhaps most importantly, he is the guy Apple has tasked with an increasingly important piece of its future: as the senior vice president of the company’s services division, his portfolio includes just about everything Apple sells that isn’t a piece of hardware…
One critical part of Cue's portfolio is Apple TV+, the company’s entrant in the streaming wars. And in this war, sports have emerged as a vital weapon. In our ever-more-fractured entertainment landscape, live sports represent perhaps the last best way for distributors—both tech companies like Apple and cable stalwarts like ESPN—to convene a large, reliable audience. Per Nielsen, 94 of the 100 most-watched US TV broadcasts in 2022 were sporting events, with NFL accounting for 82 of those, and 19 of the top 20.
It is Cue’s belief that sports represents an enormous opportunity for the company—and that, with a few tried-and-true Apple tweaks, the right sport can be made to feel more like a rounded-edges, design-forward Apple product. ‘We spend a lot of money, a lot of time on finding the best unscripted drama in the world. That's what we try to create in some of our shows that we do for TV+,’ he told me in the first of a few conversations this spring and summer. ‘Sports is that in spades. It's the greatest unscripted drama there is.’”
GQ offers the most in-depth look to date into Apple’s thinking regarding live sports programming. Much of this is due to the writer relying on Apple’s $2.5B 10-year deal with MLS (U.S. soccer) for examples of how Apple is approaching sports. The article, somewhat inadvertently, also raised some warning signs regarding Apple’s sports play. We will get to those shortly.
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Meta 3Q22 Earnings, Meta’s Fragile Bridge, The Big (Meta) Picture (Daily Update)
In today's update, we will go over Meta’s CY3Q22 results which ended being just as much about industry developments as it did Meta’s performance. In particular, we go over Neil’s thoughts on two problems found with Mark Zuckerberg’s plan on funding future bets and the ultimate bet Zuckerberg is making here.
Happy Wednesday.
Late last week, Apple released its 2022 10-K (58 pages). The tentative plan is to go through the key takeaways from the financial filing tomorrow.
In today's update, we will go over Meta’s CY3Q22 results which ended being just as much about industry developments as it did Meta’s performance.
Let’s jump right in.
Meta 3Q22 Earnings
Last Wednesday, Meta reported 3Q22 earnings.
Here is an earnings recap table comparing Meta's numbers to those of Apple and Alphabet:
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