Industry Shockwaves: Technicolor's Fall & The Battle for Tax Incentives

Joey and Addy tackle the breaking news of Technicolor's potential collapse and what it means for the 15,000 employees worldwide at iconic VFX houses like The Mill and MPC. They analyze how the future of VFX might shift toward smaller, specialized teams and discuss DNEG's strategic acquisition of Metaphysic AI. The conversation shifts to the escalating tax incentive battles keeping productions away from L.A., with the U.K. raising its relief to 40% and Netflix investing $1B in Mexico. Plus, they examine several AI products recently laid to rest, including the Humane Ai Pin and Skyglass's virtual production app. A sobering but essential episode on the rapidly evolving state of the film and tech industries.

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In this episode of the Denoised Podcast, we're going to talk about turmoil at Technicolor, the tax incentive battles to keep production here in LA, and a look at some of the AI products that have recently hit the product graveyard. Let's get into it. Welcome back everyone to the Denoise podcast. I'm Joey Daoud. I'm Addy Ghani. Welcome back. Welcome, Addy. Good to see you. Good to see you. How was your weekend? Pretty good. I went to Santa Barbara for a quick trip. It's always a pleasure to be there. I think the most pleasant part of California. It's such a yeah, and I understand too why people like, you know, once you get a ton of money, why you want to live in Montecito near Santa Barbara, because you're like luxury. And then you can just hop into LA because it's so close to do your LA stuff. That's it. On a more bummer note, um, there's a lot of crazy news happening over the weekend. Uh, with Technicolor with The Mill, one of their VFX houses, which initially there was post going around saying that The Mill was going to shut down in the US. Yeah. Today on Monday. So we're recording this on Monday, the 24th, and this is changing. Quickly. So some stuff could change by the time this comes out. It initially was like that The Mill, there's a notice going around to all of the employees of the U.S. on The Mill saying that if they don't get enough money, they're going to have to shut down. And then that expanded to potentially all of technicolor around the world, which is thousands of employees. Yeah. Technicolor is massive. As you know, it's a over a hundred year old company, you know, started with film and early golden era Hollywood, and then eventually acquired a bunch of companies. So MPC, The Mill, the gross animation are the big. Big three blocks and the technical serves as a overarching umbrella company that provides infrastructure and support to these three individual companies. I think all in all 15,000 employees around the world. Yeah, that's crazy. That's a lot of people, M&E people. And, uh, just overnight. In the blink of an eye, 15, 000 people no longer have jobs. Yeah, that's awful. I haven't seen this massive of a layoff in our industry yet. I mean, I feel like it's rare too that there's like so few companies that, aside from like a big studio. That have so many employees to where then if they hit financial strain or something, I mean, was this out of the blue? I mean, they've been right. It wasn't struggling. Yeah, that's that's very true. So I know for a fact when Technicolor had a reevaluation of their stock, I think this was a couple years ago in '22 or '23. At that point, we sort of knew Technicolor was in trouble. But perhaps they were able to restructure, they were out of it. Some companies are able to manage that. Turns out, no, they couldn't. Are we just entering a reality to where like large VFX houses that kind of rely on big blockbuster films to pay the bills are just not going to be sustainable anymore? Yeah, I mean, let's, let's even take a couple steps back. I mean, how many hundred million plus movies will be produced currently in the world today versus 10 years ago versus 20 years ago, right? And so if there is a very limited number of 100 million plus movies, then there is a very limited number of 10 million plus contracts that go out to VFX companies and giant corporations like Technicolor rely on those massive deals to keep them afloat. That's the most recent for like scope of project, Mufasa, The Lion King films. Those are the kind of movies they recently worked on big. Yeah. These huge hundreds of millions of dollar budget films that are few and fewer. Yeah, and I don't foresee a world where we're going to go back to more hundred million plus dollar movies. The number is only going to shrink and the overall volume of movies won't shrink, but the budget per production It's shrinking and this is the new reality we live in. So I think if you deduce that into what a VFX company, the future looks like to me, it's not Technicolor or The Mill or MPC, it's smaller companies, maybe 50 employees, a hundred employees, max remotely distributed around the world to take advantage of talent everywhere in India or here in, or in Vancouver. And that is the future. You gotta be small, nimble, agile. And take on movie productions with 50 million budgets, 25 million budgets, 10 million budgets. That's been possible for a little bit. We're like to have a nimble remote team. Part of me wonders too, how much of the decision of a studio was to go with the big established safe company? Right. Kind of reminded me of like the quote of no one gets fired for hiring IBM or something like that, where like it's maybe there's other companies could do it better or cheaper, but you're like, I'm gonna go with the safe bet. Yeah. And know they'll deliver. But that reality is changing. Well, Mufasa was done by MPC because I believe MPC did The Lion King with Jon and Jon Favreau like, what, almost 10 years ago now? The first live action one. The movie landscape back then was completely different. And You know, they were just making sure that there was continuity in the technology and the look and feel of the movie. So they went again, I'm guessing a lot of new, I mean, where they were the ones behind the new technology of the, that was like the kind of the original quote virtual production with a virtual camera in a virtual environment, not the led wall version, but you nailed it. That was the very first one that did. Yeah, that was a pivotal moment for the VP industry. Yeah, not necessarily ICV effects, but. Um, location scouting, virtual camera moves and everything Jon Favreau did with VR glasses and motion capture and things like that. So, uh, I know for Lion King 2 or Mufasa, they did replicate the same workflow all over again. And again, that stuff is just so massive and such a giant engine to spin up. It's like Avatar production. Yeah. And as we just pointed out, that's one every 10 years. Yeah, I mean, it's not enough to keep a huge machine like this running. Yeah, I mean, if you can keep a track of how many big summer big blockbusters come out every year, you can kind of sense where the total volume of 100 million plus dollar movies are going. You know, five, six years ago, pre pandemic, uh, there was so many summer movies coming out, the big ones that you'd be like, Oh my God, I can't wait to watch like 15 of these. And now there's like maybe three or four that are just going to be like the big headline movies. And also how much was disrupted by COVID and the strikes and everything sort of disrupting the pipeline of production. Yeah. And keeping that cash flow coming in if you were reliant on big budget movies kind of continuously coming through to pay for your operations. Yeah, I mean box office is like a fraction of what it used to be. And you adjust it for inflation, it's even less. And I don't see box office numbers going back up. So, the only way you generate revenues now is through streaming. And it's unclear if, you know, 100 million plus dollar movies can be justified from a streaming revenue business. Right, and there was that big boom of like Netflix and everyone else kind of throwing content production budgets to like just make content in 2022, 2023. And that's gone down a bit. Adjusted for. Yes. The other thing that stood out to me too, and I don't, this is kind of just speculation, but obviously like AI is rising too, and we're seeing more and more potential, like I don't think AI, it's not the level yet where you could do this caliber of effects, but it's getting there. And the thing that stood out to me as well was a lot of the kind of, Common refrain with AI is, uh, when it comes to visual effects, it's like, Oh, no one likes doing rotoscoping or those automated tasks and stuff. Um, and true, but in a large company like this, how many of the people actually are the entry level kind of doing when you had to throw a lot of people, thousands doing thousands, tedious rotoscoping, pixel, even in unlike the, uh, MPC, the male Bangalore India side of. Things or DNEX India studios. That's, that's where it's done because it's tedious labor and, uh, you know, rate per hour is much cheaper. So, yeah, look, uh, going forward, we won't see a transition into AI VFX overnight, but a lot of the tool sets will fundamentally change how a VFX pipeline is set up. And so this is perhaps a renewal of the industry, you know, in a weird way. And a lot of these people. People will, I guarantee you, transition over to VFX 2. 0 or VFX 3. 0, right? Smaller, nimble teams. Yeah, we saw a VFX crisis in the late 90s with, you know, when Rhythm Hues went bankrupt and Digital Domain in its first version was under a lot of trouble. And the industry kind of innovated their way out of it. And now we're going to maybe see another chapter of that. Yeah, there's just a painful transition point. It's a lot of people. It's just the sheer volume of people and lives affected. That's the most tragic part about all of this. Yeah. I know several Technicolor employees here in L. A. who were impacted. I'll just do a mention too. Like, on VP land, we do have a job posting, so we kind of post anything we find. Okay. In the VFX related realm. Uh, so. Have a link to that. It's vp land. com. We put try to source any job postings and stuff. We find amazing. Yeah, so great What hopefully could be a resource to yeah We'll we'll continue to cover this over the next few episodes I think this is this is going to develop and we're going to get more Analysis and uh sort of just a better predictor of where the industry is heading Yeah. Speaking of sort of indicator of where industry's heading, there was another story. DNEG acquired Metaphysic AI. One of the co founders was the original guy behind the Tom Cruise deepfake, and they've kind of refined and developed the deepfake technology for here which de aged, uh, Tom Hanks and, um, Robin Wright. Yep. So yeah, what do you see, what do you see about this with this kind of push into AI for visual effects? Yeah, this is an interesting one because this is where you are altering the replica of an actor, which is, uh, protected by SAG and all those things and all those AI clauses that were controversial. The fact that You know, A. I. is in such a sacred space and is able to have a company acquired by a giant VFX studio shows me progress in that mainstream adoption of A. I. in content production. So this is a huge indicator that A. I. is here and it's ready and it's being used. Yeah, I mean, that's why it's a very practical use case of, I mean, I'm thinking back to, it was a practical use case of de aging or altering actor appearances while still obviously maintaining their performance. The essence of being an actor but I'm thinking back to when some of this process like the de aging process was kind of first Coming out with the Irishman. Yeah, and they had to shoot with like three cameras and it was like a very yeah, complicated process like physically on set and Now here, they're able to do it almost real time. Yeah, I think, uh, kind of like, um, like a Snapchat face filter, sort of like, not like in that kind of behavior where like to be able to be on set and like, the director monitor locks into the actor's face. And, uh, I think it doesn't do the neck and the ears. There was a video that I saw, uh, Kevin Bailey from Scanline. He was in it and he was saying something like, yeah, you can get a pretty good enough representation in real time that's running on a viewfinder. But then we go back and we get the pixel perfect thing, right? They clean it up. But at least when you're working on set, kind of same idea with like virtual cameras and all of that, where it's like, well, you can kind of see, at least get a good idea of what you're looking at in real time and then you acquire it. And then you go back and refine it. Yeah, just a couple of things to note here that and just really taking a step back, you know, connecting with characters in a movie is the number one goal. For filmmakers, right? And connecting with character faces enables us to connect with those characters. So this is like much bigger deal than just face swapping. This is like fundamentally how story is going to be told. And if you go back to Tron Legacy, I think this was what, 2013? With the, uh, de aged, um, Jeff Bridges. Jeff Bridges. So if you see that shot where Jeff Bridges comes up from the elevator and his face is just like kind of floating around, it's looking super uncanny valley. Like we've come a long way for that. Yeah. And, and this is only going to get better from here. Yeah. Yeah. To have this improvement of being able to still work with real actors, capture the performance and, but just change the appearance. Yep. Speaking of which, uh, the next Tron is supposed to come out soon and it's also going to have a deaged Jeff Bridges in there, I think. Probably an improved looking deaged Jeff Bridges. Yeah. I'm curious about the next Tron. I mean, I kind of forgot about that movie, but I know they've like still been banking on it because that rollercoaster that came out. Yeah, they just finished shooting, uh, I forget what the Neutron is called, but it was shot in Vancouver over the course of the last two years. But yeah, it's supposed to be coming out this summer if I'm not mistaken. Okay. Yeah. There's a hundred million plus. I mean, if they, I don't think, uh, if they could bring back Daft Punk to do the soundtrack again, I'd be all for that. I don't think they're going to bring them back. Get Daft Punk out of retirement for another soundtrack. Yeah. The other thing to note here is Prime Focus or DNEG also acquired Ziva earlier, I believe. Ziva was Previously owned by unity. They're a muscle simulation technology, not AI, uh, more, you know, procedurally generated muscles for accurate, um, not just humans, but animals and stuff. So this company with metaphysic AI is not very much playing in the digital twin digital human space. So that's, that's the space I'm really curious. It feels like a good future, not future proofing, but future, like a good acquisition to get into the AI and kind of where the future is going with. Uh, VFX technology, different applications, but in a very kind of forward thinking way, I think going back to our technicolor coverage in the future, I think instead of seeing massive giant umbrellas of VFX, you're going to see small lanes of VFX where It's more like a specialty. Yeah, you have a digital human expertise or volumetric expertise or environment expertise, and this plays into that. I think VFX company, if they do it all, then they do it for 50 million. But if they do this one thing, they do it for 5 million. There's a lot more business in the smaller contracts. Yeah. Do you see any kind of hiccups in that with like managing the entire post pipeline? If you have so many vendors? Oh, that's where open source USDC and material X and all these open source formats come in. Data has to be able to travel across studios, across pipelines, uh, much more easily. And I think innovation is the mother of necessity. So when we get to a more decentralized VFX ecosystem, perhaps that plays into that. Yeah. More open standards. Yep. All right. The next story, the sort of tax incentive battles. to partly there's a campaign stay in L. A. campaign to keep film production in L. A., especially after the strikes after the wildfires, um, the town still kind of hurting. And a big issue has been the tax incentives in Santa California are just not competitive enough. That's an understatement to combat against. Uh, states like Georgia, uh, where a lot of production and studios have gone to, uh, Atlanta and other states, other countries. Uh, California's tax credits currently taps at 330 million annual tax credit. I believe that is for all production. Everything. Yeah. That's a drop in the bucket. Georgia has no limit, I believe, uh, which makes them a lot more competitive. There was talk, I believe, of doubling California's tax credit. But that still feels possibly not enough. And then to tie to this dilemma here, did you see the United Kingdom just upped it to 40%? I did see that. Yeah, so they upped to a 40 percent tax rebate. Or tax relief. And then, uh, not to, so, on that vein of thought, I think there is an arms race in Europe because now you have Czech Republic and Austria and, uh, Spain as well. And they offer more incentives. Yeah, so now everybody's playing above 30%, so it's between 30 to 40. And then in the Middle East, you have Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai at 50%. Well, they just have a lot of money, a lot of resources. So like, this is a game that's impossible to win. And you just have to keep playing in order to have some competency. And California at this moment is relying on the fact that they have been the industry leader for the last hundred years. Clearly that's not enough to keep productions here. I feel like a lot of stuff in California is resting on the laurels. Yeah, resting on the laurels. A variety of things that worked really well for it 20, 30, 50 years ago. Has stayed stagnant and, um, not updated with the times. Uh, yeah, so what do you think, what are you, I'm sorry, there's a proposed increase for the California to go up to 750 million dollars. Uh, again, tax incentives, which still, I mean, Georgia has no cap and I'm not a financial analyst, but I feel like we should be playing in the billions, not or just uncapped, uncapped, just, yeah, yeah. What do you predict is the future of L. A. and California as I remember this was like our very first episode to sort of talk after the fires were like, is, is this, you know, is this the end of L. A. is the film hub? I mean, production going down. Yeah. So is it going to be the. The soundstage film production capital shoots everywhere. Probably not, but I still don't see it not being still the hub of. Production is one part of like everything else, the studios, the meeting, the script development, the writers, maybe, well, post production is probably getting more and more remote because that's out of all the stages, maybe besides writing is easiest to move to the cloud or remotely. But just the, the people, the face to face, I feel like, I feel like we'll always kind of need a geographic hub. Yep. And I don't see. That not being LA. Okay. I have an analogy for you. It's kind of grim, but it's, it's fitting for the time. This is pretty grim episode, not a cheerful, you know, but that's, that's the state of our industry, right? Like we're just, we're seeing some glimpses of hope. And at the same time, there is this massive, uh, weight of the reality. Uh, so the analogy I'm going to make is LA and Detroit. I've been hearing that lately. Like LA is the new Detroit. Okay, let's not get started on that. But what happened in Detroit was in the 50s and 60s post World War II, we had the big boom, right? All the automakers were doing amazing. Detroit was a massive city. Motown, music, you know. The big three, Ford, uh, Chevy, Ford, GM and Dodge were making cars there. And then globalization hit, NAFTA hit, and then the car manufacturing went to Mexico, Canada. Is this when Japan came in too? Yeah, so that's when Toyotas were coming online and Detroit was in trouble. And so Detroit went through kind of a dark period and now it's reviving again. But how the auto industry shifted is the Talent and the brainpower never went away, like the automotive designers are still there, the people that actually, you know, predict the industry 10 20 years ahead are there, and um, the R& D is done in Detroit. The high end cars are built in and around Detroit, so like, if you look at the Hummer EV or the Chevy Corvette that's built in Bowling Green, Kentucky, not too far away, but the manufacturing, quote unquote, of like, the four tours, like, the generic Um, Everyday card that that went that went away. Yeah, so I think La will go through a similar thing like the brain trust and the decision making the executives The tastemakers and the future forward thinkers will stay here. Netflix has a big office here You know Amazon does too like I don't think those that are going yeah, even I remember like when Apple You know started investing in content like they open a huge office in Culver City like Did you know that Apple redrew the lines, uh, where Culver City and Inglewood end? So they could have more office in quote unquote Culver City. No, but that doesn't surprise me. I mean, I remember the story when like Steve Jobs went to the Cupertino like town hall to like Convince them to like let him build his spaceship office. Yeah. Uh, yeah, no, that does not surprise me. So I, I think look, we're, we're never going to be able to keep productions here anymore. I think this is a tire with a bunch of holes. The air is just going to keep coming out. Having said that, that's not a bad thing. Uh, if you want to play in the The top pyramid side of the industry where all the decision making happens, all the cool stuff, the technology, the creative development happens, the branding happens. This is the town for you. Yeah, there's no other just spot with all of the central brainpower and knowledge. Uh, I mean, again, like similar to Technicolor, you know, it hurts the just like. Regular kind of like working like class the VFX artists, but in this case, the BTL people like the camera teams grip crew, like all of the like production support people who are just below the line below the line that are just working, um, you know, just regular kind of middle class, like just working in the industry. It hurts that and that sucks again sucks. But yeah, I mean, it. Going back to like LA not losing it, I'm thinking back to just when even 10, 20 years ago when the sort of tax incentives would bounce around. And so I remember there were a lot more incentives in Florida, film incentives in Florida. And that was when like Burn Notice was shooting there. Um, Dexter season one was shooting there, uh, the Mighty Vice movie. And, and then the state. Canceled the tax incentives. And then New Orleans had tax incentives. And then it was just like, okay, then everything just kind of moved there. And there were like some new shops that opened up and like the below the line crew kind of moved there. And then New Orleans was booming for like a few years and then they stopped their credits and then just, and then it moved to Atlanta and Atlanta and Georgia have been kept it going. But it's really just like, as long as they keep the incentives going, then stuff happens there. But as soon as these legislators were like, Why are we funding Hollywood stuff? Why are we making movies? And then it just bounces somewhere else. And it's just like a little kind of a game of Hopscotch of who has the tax incentives. But like L. A. ups and downs, but it's still, it's always the hub. It's always the capital. It's gonna be the hub. Yeah. The offices, the infrastructure, the cameras, all that stuff. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a teamster and I was like, Hey, how's it going with you? Because Teamsters are very much, you know, active in the LA area. They're like, no, everything's fine. We're, we're, we have work. We're just traveling more. So that's the reality. Yeah. The tax incentives for shooting in another country or state. is worth it to ship everyone there. Yeah. To a limit. Cause also I know some of these tax incentives, you are required to like have a certain amount of crew that's local. Cause they don't want to just give you free money. They want to Australia boost their local economy, Queensland and Australia. Those are those places remind me of that. And then speaking of large investments, uh, but not in America. Uh, so Netflix was just announced that they're going to invest a billion dollars in Mexico, uh, For production over the next four years, it is their investment means that they have to make at least 20 films or series that will be produced in Mexico every year through 20 films a year, every year through 2028. It includes they're also building or improving existing studio infrastructure. Okay. This is right after Netflix proposed a four billion dollar spend in New Jersey. Do you remember that a couple years back? They're still converting an old army base into a giant studio complex. Oh, it's the end in Jersey. Yeah, and then they just launched and opened Albuquerque So Albuquerque was the first outsource, if you will, then Jersey for Netflix and now it looks like Mexico. Albuquerque because New Mexico also has pretty good tax incentives. Yes. Yeah. And which I think one of the reasons they filmed there was because of the tax incentives. Uh, but they also did a really great job of making Albuquerque part of the show. Can't really imagine that show like, I know, right. They did such a good job. Beautiful. The Netflix is investing 2 million to upgrade facilities at Mexico city's historic Churubusco studios. One of Latin America's oldest film studios. So I see this, but my biggest question is, is this just part of investing in Spanish language content? Because like, I think we also forget like Netflix is a massive global studio. They're not just making us content. They've really cracked the global. I mean, look at squid games, like, yeah. And, but I mean, squid games is something that has transcended language and become a global hit, but there are so many shows that. Are popular in their native language in their native country that we're just not aware of like, because it is popular for that country were Americans living in L. A. So it's hard to just kind of get a sense of what's going on in the world. I, you know, fortunately, I've been to enough VP stages around the world and. I could tell you the VP scene, the virtual production scene in Mexico is thriving. Mexico City has quite a few stages, uh, Malak is one of them. What kind of content are they, are they producing? Uh, it's local content, so Like TV shows? TV shows, they'll, they'll shoot Netflix content, Amazon content. Yeah, a lot of that. I mean, those are high throughput shows, right? Yeah, that's probably perfect that you just literally download set. That's, I don't know what their bad department is like, but like, I just pull in, like, give me, give me house sets. You forget how many hundreds of millions of people speak Spanish around the world. And so you shoot something in Mexico, it's, it's good to go for a lot of other markets. I mean, yeah, my biggest question with this was like, is it just investing in something that we're going to already because they're already invested because they're going to be producing more Spanish language content or is this to move things that would have shot in the US to Mexico? I don't think it's that impression. I'm not getting that impression. Netflix diversifying their portfolio. Yeah, I mean, they have a huge South Korea office and operation. Oh, yeah. They're a global company. Yeah. You know, so like they produce stuff all over the world. Yeah, they have an increasingly larger presence in India now for Indian language content. And of course, in Europe, the Barcelona and stuff there's, uh, because that Spanish is a different type of content, European Spanish. And then Latin America is a different type of Spanish. Even in Latin America, there are a lot of different types of Spanish. Uh, growing up in Miami, but not speaking Spanish, but I'm aware that there are a lot of dialects and different types of Spanish. The nuances. Yes. Yes. I know that. Yeah. Obviously you want to see. Netflix also invest in the U. S. But I feel like this is probably just another way of something they're gonna invest in anyways. Um, from before, I think they probably just acquired from like content studios would produce the content, but it's probably better. And definitely Netflix is best interest to produce the stuff themselves and just invest in making that stuff. Yeah. And I would imagine if a Netflix comes into Mexico to you. Ask for studio space. The other students would be like, let's work together. You know, that's like, that is, that is the sweet check right there. All right. And last grouping, uh, are, I don't have a good, clever, catchy name for this, but our product, our product graveyard segment, just, uh, to pin bone of a moment of silence to, uh, some recent AI companies that have, or products that have shut down. The first one, actually, though, I'm kind of bummed about this, not as a jokey way, but this one was, um, over the weekend, I saw Skyglass, uh, describe it to me. iPhone. Yeah, I've talked about them a couple of times. They are, they were a iPhone app that would basically a virtual production iPhone app. You could generate a scene or environment or load one, or you could actually if you paid for the higher tier, you could bring in an unreal engine scene into your phone. And it would do real time AI segmentation on the person. And you can film people. In a virtual space. Yeah, I use this for like pre pro a lot and I used it for AI short film that I did last year and I kind of use that as the acquisition and no way ran like video to video on, um, on the stuff that I recorded. Yeah. Yeah, it was a good, it was a really good app. Uh, but I feel like I think Who they were targeting their customer base always was a little confusing to me. Um, it seemed like they're kind of targeting more like content creators. That's, I was just going to say the, the thing that's been so difficult with virtual production is breaking into B2C into the mainstream consumer market. Yeah. And what are they going to use it for? That they still don't see the value in digital environments and digital characters for user generated content. Like we haven't been able to break that through. Yeah, it's cool. It doesn't, it doesn't look real enough. Um, so it was good for, I mean, the tech is good. I hope they find, I don't know, footing or somewhere, maybe re, re envisioning it. Like it was, it would be good for previous. It'd be good for more like the entry level of higher end workflows. But, um, yeah, it's, yeah, it's one of those things where it's, it's too low end for us professionals and then it's too complicated for an average consumer. Yeah. Or just not enough of like worth the 10 bucks a month or whatever that, that consumer, that their consumer plan was targeting. Sure. So yeah, kind of bummed to see, cause there were, there were some cool guys and kind of bummed to see that, uh, that went down, but there's also, um, I've talked about them a lot to a Jet Set Cine, which is another kind of similar ish app, but they're definitely targeting more high end workflows because you can use their app and strap it onto a professional cinema camera and use your iPhone as a tracker. That's it. Or you could also record inside your iPhone. And they've been talking about doing stuff where they could load gauze and splats straight into the phone. That's it. They run a lot faster. They run. So that's more professional oriented. I haven't just been targeting the professional. And then if you change that license to a thousand dollars a month, all of a sudden you'll have more revenue, right? Because then you, you know, companies looking at licenses and stuff and something that's a hundred dollars a month and like, Oh, what's the. End user agreement there, and that seems problematic. It's a consumer thing, but then you have an enterprise license model at 1000 a month, and it's way easier with pill to swallow. Ironically, yeah, all right. Other product that shut down. Not much of a surprise, but that's one of the Humane AI Pin. Do you remember this pin? Oh, it was going to change the world. Dude, I was skeptical from the beginning. Like projected on your hand or something. I was skeptical from the get go, especially when that founder was up on stage and I think it wasn't working right on one of the presentations. Possibly. There was this and there was the rabbit, which was the other device that came out at the same time. Yeah, it's a handheld device. I think. Yeah, it has a scroll wheel. I think it's still technically operating, the rabbit. I don't know. You know, I think the rabbit got acquired or something happened to it recently. I think humane was acquired by HP, but they're gonna, yeah, it's shutting down. And also if you bought the device, it's going to stop working in like a week or two. So if I guess that's the, the pain of being a early adopter, HP bought them for their IP first. Well, 116 million. Well, I could see HP rolling out that technology into every laptop and PC they make. Yeah, I'm sure there's some good underlying stuff there, but to have a separate device, I don't think anything's going to beat a smartphone, aside from possibly the only thing that has a fighting chance, I think would be once like, uh, AR glasses. Oh, so you do believe in Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the future? I think if they can crack it to like, It doesn't like you don't look like a glass hole with like the Google Glass kind of thing. And it just looks like regular glasses, but it's like if you can get the Vision Pro. Experience in something that looks like regular glasses. I think that's the only thing next kind of tech device that could actually disrupt or beat like, um, smartphone, maybe not be smartphones, but be as compliment the smartphone. It's like, you know, the watch and the air pods compliment the smartphone really well. So I think the glasses will too, if it's, you know, integrated, right? And once it gets powerful enough where it looks like regular glasses, but how would you type? You can't voice to text everything. I mean, yeah, it would have to be for similar to like the watch where you can't really type on that thing. You can look at things or navigate things. Um, yeah, but a separate, like a pin that you're going to wear here. Never. Yeah. Didn't see that. Take it off. Uh, Nicola, the other electric car. They were going after like electric trucks. Yeah, I used to have Nikola stock man when it was hot. Yeah. This is not a financial advice podcast. Clearly. Yes. Uh, yeah, do, do ignore my maybe you could do it. Maybe you could be the Jim Cramer and people can like do the opposite bet against like the Addy pics. I think that would be great actually. Uh, so they have declared bankruptcy. Yeah, that never took off. I mean, that's a hard sell to build, like, Yeah, even Rivian was, Yeah, Rivian and Nikola came online at the same, around the same time, and Rivian was struggling for a bit before Amazon put in that major chunk of change. Volkswagen's also invested in them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they're okay now. And the company that's in trouble at the moment is lucid, even though they have the best electric cars out there, like 500 miles of range and everything. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's tough to wake. Also, if you're a consumer to be like, Oh, do I get this electric car when? I mean, if the company goes up that it's like, well that's, that's a car that's happens. Gonna support your car. What? Right. Like the Fisker, uh, when they relaunched, they sold a few fisker entry level SUVs. Now all those owners are like, how do I get it fixed? Right. What do you do? Like when you can see one thing when it's a a pin and it's like, well, I'm an idiot. I burned $700. But now it's like, yeah, this is my car. This is my car, like a car loan start. Who do I call to start at my car? Yeah. Yeah. I dunno. Maybe one day the podcast will get big enough where we review a car company. With a bad review video, we will destroy the entire company, not saying Marques destroyed Fisker, but, uh, you know, that was a powerful video chime. So Amazon shut down Chime. Did you ever hear chimes? Me either. Describe it to me, please. I don't even, I mean, I only found out that it was a Zoom alternative, uh, a voice, a video chat. Alternative that Amazon built called Chime. I didn't even know it existed. What was the differentiator? I have no idea. I don't know. I think they're just maybe, I don't know if this was built during, um, the COVID, the COVID boom. And they're like, let's get in on this. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't even know it existed. And I guess if it paired it with your prime subscription. 2017 with a focus on business usage, Chime had little adoption outside of Amazon. Well, you can put it with the, uh, the fire phone. I don't know. Okay. Okay. Maybe there, it was like an ecosystem play. I could see that. I mean, it probably wasn't that much. But if you think about like Google hangout, you know, Microsoft teams and zoom, like those are the big three. Why wouldn't Amazon want a piece of that? Yeah, I guess it was worth a shot. Yeah. You can throw some ads in there, make billions of dollars. You can pay for the, uh, chime plus experience without ads in between your call. Stuff like this is why I'm always hesitant. When a big company comes out with a new product that seems cool, and I'm like, Oh, let me go in on this. But then it's like, it's a, it's a, it's a footnote in their so small rapport. And, um, they can just kill it. And that has happened to me many times with Google. Amazon shut down Drive recently, which was their Google Drive. And, uh, yeah, it was a thing too. I had some photos on there. I was like, yeah, deleted. Go ahead, man. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Google. I used to use Google notebook. That was like their Evernote thing. They shut that down a long time ago. I used to use Google, um, RSS reader. Yep. Uh, they killed that. Um, Google domains. They used to register my domains there. They killed that. It's a moving target. Yeah, it's always right. I don't blame them. I mean, they're shifting in an ever changing environment. Yeah, but it's It's tough when you're known to kill these things. Well, how are you, how are people going to like shift their systems over? If you're, it's at the risk of, uh, you might just kill the whole thing. It doesn't check the box on your, on your quarterly report. I mean, are you playing in the Apple ecosystem? You are, right? I'm yeah. All in on Apple. So Apple is probably the most consistent out of all like iCloud's been around forever and iTunes is still around in some. I'm trying to think of anything that they haven't killed. No, they've rebranded. I'm always a mobile me. I mean, they rebranded that to iCloud, but they don't really kill anything there. Yeah. So I think maybe Google is the most transient. Google, Google. Yeah. I mean, there was an image of just like the Google graveyard that was like all of the products they have killed throughout the years. But, uh, Yeah. Yeah. It makes it risky. Uh, Google Wave. I never use that one. But remember that was supposed to be their like email killer. It was like a complete reimagining of email. And it was like this like bizarre like thread conversation. Thing, I don't even know how to describe it. Uh, Google Plus, their social network. Google Plus, yeah, that was supposed to be huge, right? Yeah. Because that was around the time when Facebook was just starting to grow. Yeah. Well, anyways, that's the recent graveyard stuff. Alright, well, uh, what a great episode. RIP to Skyglass, RIP to Skyglass. Skyglass I'm bummed out about. The other one's, uh I understand why they didn't make it. Fair enough. But, uh, I'm sure this won't be the end of product graveyard coverage in our show. No, we'll revisit this when there's a new slew of products that didn't make the cut. Sounds good. It's actually good for the company to kind of trim things that don't work and focus the energy on innovation. Yeah, for sure. And it's good to kind of talk about too, because you can kind of see like what didn't work. So you can see what didn't work someone else. And you can learn from that. And if you're building products, you can apply it to your own. That's it. And just take advantage of someone else's like mistakes to apply to your own knowledge. That's it. Yeah. Uh, well, cool. This is it for the episode. All right, guys. Thanks, everyone. Uh, as always, show notes and everything are at denoispodcast. com. Thanks for watching, and we're still in an early phase, so every support follow is super appreciated. Go on Spotify, go on YouTube, go on Apple Podcasts, wherever you consume this, and please give us a little bit of support. Thank you. All right. Thanks, guys. We'll see you in the next episode.