The rise in streaming has been matched by a fall in understanding of what people are watching, and for how long. CC-licensed photo by Stock Catalog on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Bears watching. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Chegg sues Google, explores sale after AI search summaries hit revenues • FT via Ars Technica
Maxine Kelly:
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Chegg is suing Google parent Alphabet over claims the search engine’s artificial intelligence summary tool has hit its revenues, leading the US-listed educational technology group to weigh up a sale of the business.
California-based Chegg, which provides study tools for students, filed the complaint on Monday claiming that Google AI Overviews, which presents users with summary answers to their queries, serves to keep users on Google’s own site.
Chief executive Nathan Schultz said the search giant’s AI search changes had “unjustly retained traffic that has historically come to Chegg, impacting our acquisitions, revenue and employees.”
He added this was “materially impacting” revenues, leading the company to instigate a strategic revenue in which it would explore “a range of alternatives to maximize shareholder value, including being acquired, undertaking a go-private transaction, or remaining as a public standalone company.”
Google said: “With AI Overviews, people find search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web, and AI Overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites. We will defend against these meritless claims.”
Chegg’s move comes as developments in AI shake global industries, from health care to education and the automotive sector. The fast development of generative AI since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 has upended demand for edtech companies’ paid-for online learning tools, leading their valuations to plummet.
The company’s shares were down 22% in premarket trading on Tuesday. Chegg’s stock is down more than 80% over the past year.
Edtech businesses are grappling with how to harness the benefits of generative AI, often integrating some of the tools into their own products, while also being wary of AI companies establishing rival platforms, such as OpenAI’s recently launched ChatGPT Edu and Google’s LearnLM.
…Chegg reported on Monday that total net revenues for the three-month period to the end of December dropped nearly a quarter to $143.5m compared with the previous year, while the number of service subscribers fell 21% to 3.6 million.
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Probably the first of many.
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Universities must embrace AI or face extinction • Chris Kanan
Chris Kanan is a professor of computer science at the University of Rochester in the US, where he leads an AI initiative:
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Before World War II, American higher education was not about job training—it was about intellectual and personal development:
• Intellectual Rigor – Students engaged deeply in philosophy, rhetoric, and interdisciplinary scholarship.
• Moral and Civic Leadership – Universities shaped ethical, community-minded leaders.
• Broad Knowledge – Curricula encouraged cross-disciplinary exploration over narrow specialization.
After WW2, this emphasis diminished. The GI Bill expanded access, and universities became focused on preparing students for jobs rather than personal or intellectual growth. While this shift was beneficial for economic mobility, today’s AI-driven world demands a return to foundational skills that AI cannot fully replicate: critical thinking, reasoning, and adaptive problem-solving.
Meanwhile, higher education faces a double crisis: a projected 13% enrollment decline by 2041—likely an underestimate if AI disrupts white-collar job markets even faster than expected.
AI has advanced dramatically in just a few years. Today’s best AI systems can achieve “B” or better in nearly all college courses. A Frontiers in Psychology study found that ChatGPT can even surpass humans in perceived emotional intelligence—a domain once thought uniquely human. Meanwhile, many AI experts, myself included, predict that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could arrive within the next decade. Once AGI emerges, it will displace many of the jobs people attend college to obtain.
This trajectory is an existential threat to universities reliant on the promise of career advancement. If employers can access AI that is faster, never fatigued, has mastered every discipline, and even competent in emotional intelligence, the economic rationale for college weakens.
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UK universities face similar challenges, but with the added problem that their budgets are under gigantic pressure.
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Facebook boosts viral content as it drops fact-checking • ProPublica
Craig Silverman:
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Meta has made debunking viral hoaxes created for money a top priority for nearly a decade, with one executive calling this content the “worst of the worst.” Meta has a policy against paying for content its fact-checkers label as false, but that rule will become irrelevant when the company stops working with them. Already, 404 Media found that overseas spammers are earning payouts using deceptive AI-generated content, including images of emaciated people meant to stoke emotion and engagement. Such content is rarely fact-checked because it doesn’t make any verifiable claims.
With the removal of fact-checks in the U.S., “what is the protection now against viral hoaxes for profit?” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the nonprofit Integrity Institute and a former Meta data scientist.
“The systems are designed to amplify the most salacious and inciting content,” he added.
In an exchange on Facebook Messenger, the manager of NO Filter Seeking Truth, which shared the false ICE post, told ProPublica that the page has been penalized so many times for sharing false information that Meta won’t allow it to earn money under the current rules. The page is run by a woman based in the southern U.S., who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she said she has received threats due to her posts. She said the news about the fact-checking system ending was “great information.”
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A completely predictable outcome, given that it has already happened on what used to be Twitter.
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Solar, battery storage to lead new U.S. generating capacity additions in 2025 • U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
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We expect 63 gigawatts (GW) of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity to be added to the U.S. power grid in 2025 in our latest Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory report. This amount represents an almost 30% increase from 2024 when 48.6 GW of capacity was installed, the largest capacity installation in a single year since 2002. Together, solar and battery storage account for 81% of the expected total capacity additions, with solar making up over 50% of the increase.
…Battery storage: In 2025, capacity growth from battery storage could set a record as we expect 18.2 GW of utility-scale battery storage to be added to the grid. U.S. battery storage already achieved record growth in 2024 when power providers added 10.3 GW of new battery storage capacity. This growth highlights the importance of battery storage when used with renewable energy, helping to balance supply and demand and improve grid stability. Energy storage systems are not primary electricity sources, meaning the technology does not create electricity from a fuel or natural resource. Instead, they store electricity that has already been created from an electricity generator or the electric power grid, which makes energy storage systems secondary sources of electricity.
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Install a lot of renewables, and the way to get past their intermittency is to add batteries. (And build nuclear power stations.)
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Amazon shuts down Chime, its Zoom alternative • TechCrunch
Sarah Perez:
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Amazon Chime, the tech giant’s underwhelming alternative to Zoom and Google Meet, is shutting down for good. The company on Wednesday confirmed it will end support for Chime, including its Business Calling features, on February 20, 2026.
As part of this transition, Amazon stopped accepting new Chime accounts as of February 19, 2025.
From now until Chime’s end of life, existing customers will still be able to schedule and host meetings, add and manage users, and take advantage of features in the Amazon Chime administration console, a company blog post explains. The Amazon Chime SDK, however, will not be impacted.
Customers are advised to delete their data before the shutdown and make the move to another web meetings service. Amazon recommends other solutions like AWS Wickr, Zoom, or Salesforce’s Slack.
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But launched in 2017, rather than (say) late 2020 as you might otherwise guess. Basically used only inside Amazon, and it looks like even they tired of it.
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Two people in US hospitalized with bird flu, CDC reports • The Guardian
Melody Schreiber:
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Two people, in Wyoming and Ohio, have been hospitalized with H5N1 bird flu, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a routine flu update on Friday.
The person from Wyoming is still in hospital, while the Ohio patient has been released, according to the report. Both patients experienced “respiratory and non-respiratory symptoms”, the report said, without detailing those symptoms.
“This shows that H5N1 can be very severe and we should not assume that it will always be mild,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.
The news comes amid one of the worst seasonal flu outbreaks in 15 years – raising the potential for the emergence of a more dangerous virus that combines bird flu and seasonal flu in a process called reassortment.
“I am very worried about H5N1 in patients that are being treated in hospitals where there are also many seasonal flu patients because this creates opportunities for reassortment, which could potentially produce a pandemic-capable H5N1,” Rasmussen said.
These are the first human H5 cases detected in Wyoming and Ohio.
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Watching brief (still). (Thanks Joe S for the link.)
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Who’s watching what on TV? Who’s to say? • The New York Times
John Koblin:
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People now watch so many programs at so many different times in so many different ways — with an antenna, on cable, in an app or from a website, as well as live, recorded or on demand — that it is increasingly challenging for the industry to agree on the best way to measure viewership. In some cases, media executives and advertisers are even uncertain whether a competitor’s show is a hit or something well short of that.
The scramble to sort out a suitable solution began nearly a decade ago, as Netflix rose to prominence. It has only intensified since. “It is more chaotic than it’s ever been,” said George Ivie, the chief executive of the Media Rating Council, a leading industry measurement watchdog.
For decades, there was no dispute — Nielsen’s measurement was the only game in town.
But things started to go sideways after the emergence of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. Nielsen had no ability — at least at first — to measure how many people clicked play on those apps. The streamers, of course, knew exactly how many people were watching on their own service but they either selectively disclosed some data or did not bother releasing it at all.
Over the past two years, as nearly all the major streaming services have introduced advertising, they have released more data. But the data they release makes apples-to-apples comparisons difficult.
Netflix discloses what it calls “hours viewed” and “views” for its shows. Prime Video and Max prefer to describe how many million “viewers” watched a hit of their choosing.
The disclosures can be helpful to compare one show with another on the same streaming service. Yet those figures, too, can lead to disagreements.
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“Nobody knows anything”, as Samuel Goldman famously said about Hollywood’s inability to figure out what would make a film work or not; now the not-knowing is spread far and wide, with no reliable way to know what might happen. Are there streaming sleeper hits, as the film The Shawshank Redemption (not big in cinema, became a hit on DVD) was? We don’t know. Nobody knows.
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Large majority of Taiwanese oppose transfer of cutting-edge TSMC tech to US • Taiwan News
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Nearly 85% of Taiwanese respondents oppose transferring TSMC’s 2nm technology to the US, according to a poll released Monday, as former US President Donald Trump continues to push for relocating semiconductor manufacturing through tariff threats.
Deputy Legislative Speaker Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) shared the poll results at a press conference, urging the government to prepare for potential trade negotiations under a second Trump administration, per CNA. The poll, conducted by the Foundation for the People (啟思民本基金會), found that 85.6% of respondents expect Trump to impose tariffs on Taiwan, while 62.4% believe the US holds the upper hand in trade talks.
Taiwan recorded a record-high trade surplus of US$73.9bn (NT$2.41 trillion) with the US last year. Chiang speculated that Washington may pressure Taiwan to reduce the surplus by increasing purchases of American weapons, fossil fuels, or agricultural products.
Regarding Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, 83.8% of respondents agreed that companies like TSMC are Taiwan’s “sacred mountain.” Additionally, 62.5% viewed the semiconductor sector as Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” believing that its strategic importance would prompt Western intervention if tensions with China escalated.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that Taiwan “stole” the US semiconductor industry, a statement 88.4% of respondents disagreed with. Furthermore, 84.8% opposed transferring TSMC’s advanced 2nm process technology to the US.
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One has to think that the remaining 15.2% don’t know what TSMC is, but the simple principle that Taiwan is important to the US only as long as it has cutting-edge chip technology is obvious to everyone, far and wide.
The fact that Trump wants the technology transferred to the US tells you something else. That around one-third think Taiwan might actually have some leverage in trade talks does too: what if Taiwan’s chip shipments to the US were, oh dear, unavoidably delayed?
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Sonos speakers and soundbars are 25% off for existing customers • The Verge
Sheena Vasani:
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Since its app fiasco last year, Sonos has been busy slowly rebuilding its reputation with customers. This latest sale, which is exclusive to existing customers, seems to be a part of that strategy — and we’re not complaining, because the deals are solid. Through March 2nd, Sonos is taking 25% off one select Sonos product up to $2,500, though you’ll have to sign in (or create an account) to see the discounted prices. To qualify, you must have registered a Sonos product by February 19th, 2025.
The Sonos sale includes a wide range of audio gear, many of which are down to new all-time low prices. For example, the Sonos Ace is cheaper than ever at $336.75 ($112.25 off). Along with delivering good sound and noise cancellation, the Ace supports TV Audio Swap so you can pair it with Sonos soundbars for private listening. That includes the latest Sonos Beam and Sonos Ray, both of which are also on sale for some of their best prices at $374.25 ($124.75 off) and $209.25 ($69.75 off), respectively.
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Not happening (yet?) in the UK. Sacrificing profits for revenue to shift product ahead of the end of the quarter on March 31. Meanwhile, no hint of when a release of the app that actually works (and can be used to set up those new speakers) will be forthcoming. The company’s current market capitalisation is about $1.6bn – about one year’s revenue. (It also announced a $150m stock repurchase program on Monday. Was there really no better use for that money?)
It’s a company still in trouble, and no obvious sign of a buyer.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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