Tech News 2Night 71 (Transcript)

[Top TN2 Animation ] Tonight, Aereo faces the Justices, AT&T wants to be Netflix, Apple opens OS X testing to all, and robots that prepare and serve food. Tech News 2Night is Next! [TWiT Open] [Main TN2 Open] This is Tech News 2Night Episode 71, for Tuesday April 22, 2014 This episode of Tech News 2Night is brought to you by lynda.com. Learn what you want, when you want, with access to over 2,400 high-quality online courses--all for one low monthly price. To try it free for 7 days, visit lynda.com/tn2. That’s L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash T-N-2. I'm Sarah Lane, let's get right to the top story, Aereo makes its case to the Supreme Court Joining me now is David Spark, founder of the brand journalism firm ""Spark Media Solutions" The Supreme Court heard oral arguments for about an hour today in the case some say would change TV as we know it. -Based on the questions the justices asked what do direction do you think they are leaning? Were there any questions that stood out to you? -Chief Justice Roberts told Aereo attorney David Frederick ""There's no reason for you to have 10,000 dime-sized antennas except to get around the Copyright Act."" What did Aereo say to that? -The Cloud was mentioned by Justices Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer. How could companies like Dropbox and Google be stuck in the middle? [AD] This episode of Tech News 2Night is brought to you by lynda.com. lynda.com offers thousands of online video courses in software, creative, and business skills—whether you want to learn about the latest software applications like Lightroom Mobile, how to protect yourself from the Heartbleed bug, or get started with 3D printing. With a lynda.com subscription, members receive unlimited access to the entire course library. lynda.com works with software companies to provide you updated training the same day new versions hit the market—so you’ll always have the very latest skills. You’ll learn from top experts, and all of the courses are high quality productions--not like the homemade videos you’ll find on YouTube. Whether you have 15 minutes or 15 hours, you can learn at your own pace, on your own terms. [[Call to Action/Offer (Verbatim]] It’s only $25 a month for access to the entire lynda.com course library. Or for $37.50 a month, you can subscribe to the premium plan, which also includes exercise files. And you can try lynda.com right now, with a free seven-day trial. Visit lynda.com/TN2 to access the entire library—that’s over 2,400 courses—free, for 7 days. That’s L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash T-N-2. And now straight into the Tech Feed / AT&T, the US's second largest broadband provider and wireless company is creating a Netfix-style streaming video service, because we don't have enough of those. A $500 million joint venture with the Chernin Group, a producer of a variety of television and media content will get the ball rolling. The Chernin Group's majority stake in Crunchyroll, a subscription video on demand service, will be at least one asset to the project, but as of now it's not clear what other content will be available at launch. / Amazon's smartphone isn't expected until later this spring, though reported handset prototypes have already started circulating on the net. Now Boy Genius Report cites sources that say the reported multiple camera and sensors that power 3D effects and track user movements will be present in several stock Amazon apps, and gesture controls would power navigation without the need to tap or type anything. By tilting the handset in different directions while the device is in use, Amazon’s interface will display additional information on the screen without the user having to touch or tap anything, in apps like Yelp, IMDB, and a calendar app. Rounding out the rumors, sources say the new phone will have optical character recognition (or OCR) which can recognize text taken on a sign or other real-life object with a built-in camera and convert it to a note or contact entry. / Pavel Durov, the founder of V-kontak-te (or VK)—Russia's largest social network—says he was forced out of the company and then fled the country because he felt threatened by Kremlin officials. Durov claims he refused to share user data with Russian law enforcement, but that the network is now effectively under state control, and he has been fired from the board, based on a technicality involving his resignation on April 1st. He tells Techcrunch “I am out of Russia and have no plans to go back. Unfortunately, the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment.” / Back in my day, you needed a developer account to help test Apple’s upcoming software releases before they were officially released, which cost $99 per year. Times are a changin, though. Apple just introduced its OS X Beta Seed Program to make pre-release Mac software available to anyone who wants to help try it out. As long as you have an Apple ID, you can test out Mavericks pre-release builds and submit feedback to Apple to help it iron out the kinks before general launch. The program comes with its own special utility software for installation on your Mac, which makes pre-release versions of OS X visible in your Mac App Store’s Updates tab. You’ll also need to agree to Apple’s Beta Seed and Confidentiality Agreement to participate, but there's no fee. / After testing among a select group of users, Twitter's new profile pages are officially official for all users who visit the web-based version, which now include an option to pin tweets, highlights best tweets, even filtered tweets. A Pinned Tweet is a single tweets that stays stuck to the top of your profile page until you un-pin it or decide you’d like to pin a different Tweet. The Filtered Tweets will help you filter by Tweets, Tweets and Replies, or Tweets with photos/videos, and Best Tweets will show your most-engaged Tweets as larger than the rest of your feed. And if you use a 3rd-party Twitter app like I do, nothing has changed. / [Kicker!] And for the robot portion of Tech News 2Night, let's head on over to the Robot Restaurant in China's Hei-long-jiang Province, where all the food is prepared and served entirely by 20 robots with very little human oversight. The BBC took a tour of the restaurant and found that Cabinets are pre-loaded with the necessary ingredients, then a human presses the button that corresponds to the dish being prepared, and one of the four chef robots start assembing dishes. One of the server-bots will take the food to the table, and then a singing robot provides entertainment while the food is being enjoyed. According to Amusing Planet, each of these robots costs between $31,500 and $47,000, but will still save the restaurant money on labor fees in the long-term. [good bye] That's it for this edition of Tech News 2Night. Subscribe to this show at Twit.tv/tn2, and write us at tn2@twit.tv Don't miss our morning news program, Tech News Today, tomorrow and every weekday at 10am Pacific, 1 pm Eastern. I'm Sarah Lane, thanks for watching. [Close, Cache Fly BB, Credits] [Bandwidth Billboard]