Author name: Shannon Garcia

netflix-minus-1m-users-in-spain-over-no-password-sharing-policy

Netflix minus 1M users in Spain over no-password-sharing policy

Fintech and ecommerce, Next Featured, Startups and technology / /
Netflix minus 1M users in Spain over no-password-sharing policy

Ioanna Lykiardopoulou

Story by

Ioanna Lykiardopoulou

Ioanna is a writer at TNW. She covers the full spectrum of the European tech ecosystem, with a particular interest in startups, sustainabili Ioanna is a writer at TNW. She covers the full spectrum of the European tech ecosystem, with a particular interest in startups, sustainability, green tech, AI, and EU policy. With a background in the humanities, she has a soft spot for social impact-enabling technologies.

Netflix’s password sharing crackdown has cost it one million users in Spain during the first quarter of 2023, a new study by market research group Kantar has found. This translates to an approximately 15% decrease of its total users.

The streaming platform introduced the new measures in Spain in early February, asking for a €5.99 monthly fee from users sharing their passwords with other households. According to Kantar, this is directly linked to the decline of the country’s user base.

Out of the one million users who opted out of Netflix, two-thirds were benefiting from password sharing. One-third were actually paying for the account, meaning a loss in subscribers which results in a negative impact on revenue.

At the same time, the study found that subscription cancellations nearly tripled in this year’s first quarter compared to the previous period. Furthermore, 10% of Spain’s remaining subscribers plan to cancel their plan in the second quarter of 2023.

Meanwhile, competition in the country is increasing with Amazon Prime Video accounting for the majority of new subscriptions at 34.4%, followed by the newly-launched Sky Showtime at 32.6%.

“There are of course inherent risks with clamping down on password sharing, particularly when back in 2017 Netflix was seen to be actively encouraging it,” said Dominic Sunnebo, Global Insight Director at Kantar’s Worldpanel Division. “Some users were expected to be lost in the process, but losing over one million users in a little over a month has major implications for Netflix and whether it decides to continue with its crackdown globally.”

Love is sharing a password.

— Netflix (@netflix) March 10, 2017

Alongside Spain, the streaming platform has so far implemented its new password policy measures in Portugal, Canada, and New Zealand, following testing in several countries in Latin America. According to Neftlix’s estimates over a 100 million households are sharing a password.

“We’ve got folks that are watching Netflix who aren’t paying us as part of basically borrowing somebody else’s credentials,” Gregory Peters, the company’s COO and CPO, said during the latest earnings call.

“Our goal is over this year to basically work through that situation and convert many of those folks to be paid accounts, or to have the account owner pay for them,” Peters added, noting that “a cancel reaction” to that is to be expected in the beginning.

And while Netflix has fallen off its targets for new subscribers in the first quarter of 2023, the company believes that the new password policy in combination with cheaper add-based subscriptions will boost growth in the second half of the year.

It remains to be seen whether Spain’s user decline is just an anticipated short-term pitfall, or a clear indication that Netflix’s plan will cost it even more subscribers.

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UK splashes £100M on designated AI taskforce

Deep tech, Government and policy, Next Featured / /
UK splashes £100M on designated AI taskforce

Ioanna Lykiardopoulou

Story by

Ioanna Lykiardopoulou

Ioanna is a writer at TNW. She covers the full spectrum of the European tech ecosystem, with a particular interest in startups, sustainabili Ioanna is a writer at TNW. She covers the full spectrum of the European tech ecosystem, with a particular interest in startups, sustainability, green tech, AI, and EU policy. With a background in the humanities, she has a soft spot for social impact-enabling technologies.

The UK will splash an initial £100m in funding to establish a government-industry AI taskforce, dedicated to boosting the country’s sovereignty and competitiveness in the field.

The taskforce will develop foundation models — systems that train on large amounts of data such as ChatGPT and Google Bard — with the aim to benefit from their applications in public services and across the UK economy.

According to the government, the technology is estimated to contribute billions of pounds to the country’s GDP, which based on the predictions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is expected to drop by 0.3% this year.

“Harnessing the potential of AI provides enormous opportunities to grow our economy, create better-paid jobs, and build a better future through advances in healthcare and security,” said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. In healthcare, for instance, the government sees AI’s potential to accelerate diagnoses and drug discovery and development.

To increase business and public trust in artificial intelligence, the taskforce will work together with the sector to ensure the “safe and reliable use” of foundation models, both on a scientific and commercial scale. This will be implemented in accordance with the guidelines set out in the AI Regulation Paper published in March.

The taskforce will report directly to the Prime Minister and the Technology Secretary, and will be led by a Chair who will be appointed during summer. Meanwhile, the first pilot projects targeting public services are expected to launch within the next six months.

The £100m fund follows a £900m announced investment in a new exascale computer and a dedicated AI Research Resource to provide the UK with the processing capability required for the next generation of AI.

With several countries across the globe increasing their AI spending, the UK doesn’t want to miss its chance to stay ahead of the game. “We need to act now to seize the opportunities AI can offer us in the future,” said Science, Innovation, and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan.

“We’re backing our expert taskforce with the funding to make our ambitions for an AI-enabled country a reality and keep the UK at the front of the pack in this emerging technology.”

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VCs invested €60BN in climate tech last year — here’s where it went

Investors and funding, Next Featured, Sustainability / /
VCs invested €60BN in climate tech last year — here’s where it went

Linnea Ahlgren

Story by

Linnea Ahlgren

Despite the tech startup funding landscape appearing gloomier than in many years, there are a few potential bright spots. Long-term climate targets in Europe and beyond are creating new opportunities for cleantech developers and investors. 

While there may be a recent dip in activity, funding has practically catapulted in the past couple of years. In order to recover from our addiction to fossil fuels, it is going to take a fundamental shift of the current paradigm. And there are significant amounts of money being thrown at the problem. 

As reported by Bloomberg, the total global investment into the energy transition, private and public, reached $1.1 trillion in 2022. This was up from a mere $214 billion ten years prior, and the numbers have positively skyrocketed since 2020.

Graph showing climate tech investment from 2004 until 2022
The last couple of years have seen an unprecedented investment in climate tech. Credit: BloombergNEF

Specifically, the total of VC funding in climate tech last year hit $70.1 billion – a rise of 89% compared to 2021 in an otherwise bleak year for investments. 

While the US leads the global climate tech VC investment race with $26.8 billion, Europe sits firmly in second place with $17.9 billion, which represents an increase by over 100% from the year before. 

Most of European climate tech investment is local

A report put together by Dealroom and Talis Capital late last year found that in 2021, the European climate tech ecosystem was worth over $100 billion: a value that has also more than doubled since 2020. The majority — 70% — of European climate tech investment stems, thus far, from local investors. 

Graph displaying value of European climate tech ecosystem in 2021
The overall value of the European climate tech ecosystem more than doubled between 2020 and 2021. Credit: Dealroom.co

“What we find fascinating about climate tech companies is that – as opposed to the great venture stories of the last decade like Uber and Airbnb – they aren’t creating new markets,” said Matus Maar, co-founder and managing partner at Talis. “Instead, they’re approaching some of the largest existing markets and reinventing them with sustainable alternatives.”

Energy storage tops the list for cleantech investors

Meanwhile, it is not a matter of simply throwing more money at already existing clean technologies. Previously, venture capitalists may have chosen to mostly fund startups in, for instance, solar power and EVs. As these technologies have matured, the trend is shifting towards other innovations such as decarbonising food production, or carbon capture and sequestration. However, energy storage technologies, including batteries, are seeing the highest levels of investment. 

According to Bloomberg, mobility funding still ranks high on the list of total amount invested globally with ($11.4bn), but has been surpassed by storage ($18.4bn), and is closely followed by food and agriculture ($9.5bn). The other main sectors are renewables ($8bn), circular economy ($6.2bn), carbon markets ($5.4bn), built environment ($4.9bn), resources ($4.7bn), data and finance ($1bn), and biosphere ($0.6bn). 

When looking at the top five of number of deals closed, mobility only came in as the fifth sector (334), beaten by storage (559), food and agriculture (537), circular economy (508), and renewables (417). 

In the words of the authors of the Bloomberg report that presented the figures, for early-stage investors, “solar panels and electric vehicles are so 2011.” 

However, according to fresh data, even the climate tech sector is not immune to the diminishing investment trend. VC and private equity flows fell 12.8% in Q1 compared to the rolling four-quarter average.

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Spanish surgeons perform world’s first fully robotic lung transplant

Corporates and innovation, Deep tech, Next Featured / /
Spanish surgeons perform world’s first fully robotic lung transplant

Siôn Geschwindt

Story by

Siôn Geschwindt

A Spanish hospital has successfully completed what is believed to be the world’s first fully robotic lung transplant. 

Surgeons at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona used a four-arm robot dubbed ‘Da Vinci’ to carry out the procedure. The patient was a 65-year-old man called Xavier, requiring a lung transplant due to pulmonary fibrosis, a life-threatening lung disease.  

Typical lung transplants are highly invasive: a 30 cm incision must be made in the chest and multiple ribs broken. This allows surgeons to access a patient’s lung, remove it, and replace it with a healthy lung from a donor. 

But thanks to Da Vinci, the surgeons were able to cut a much smaller access route in the chest without having to break any bones. The new lung was deflated so that it could enter through the tight incision, which was only 8 cm wide. Smaller cuts were made in the side of the ribs to accommodate the robot’s arms and 3D cameras — which give surgeons a 360-degree view inside the lung.   

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How Large Retail Brands Are Using Augmented Reality

augmented reality, e-commerce, featured, Guest Post, Retail / /

Over 83 million people in the US alone used augmented reality on a monthly basis in 2020. By the end of 2023, it is projected that the number will grow by over 30%, to over 110 million people.

With the pandemic having accelerated the evolution of digital shopping, retail and e-commerce brands are looking for new ways to engage with their consumers and to bridge the online-offline experience gap that exists today while shopping.

How Big Brands Leverage Augmented Reality

Immersive AR experiences are increasingly being leveraged in stores, to create memorable and personalized relationships between the brand and its customers. Through augmented reality, retailers can not only engage the otherwise passive customers but also provide the context needed for them to make a decision and significantly improve the likelihood of the customer making a purchase.

Lego, for instance, used an augmented reality digital box in its stores for parents/kids to put up the physical boxes in front of the screen and see different scenes being built and come to life. This allowed parents and kids to find the right set and also proved to be a fun way to engage with consumers.

Other retailers use augmented reality to specifically drive sales for products that typically need the in-person context to make a buying decision. Houzz’s AR-powered app offers consumers the ability to view their rooms from their phone camera and ‘drop in’ true-to-scale 3D furniture items superimposed on their physical reality, for them to make a more informed buying decision.

Converse’s AR app lets consumers try shoes at home by simply pointing the camera at their feet. They can then evaluate multiple models with varying colors within minutes from the comfort of their home. The app is also integrated with their e-commerce platform, creating a seamless flow from discovery to intent to making the final purchase.

The Future of Retail Is 3D

While all these examples use AR in slightly different ways, they all have one commonality: the buyer is at the center of the experience and the camera has become the new home page. Replacing 2D images with interactive 3D products gives the shoppers the context through visualizations that they need, to be confident in their decisions.

The experience boosts consumers’ confidence, allowing them to make the right choice because AR provides the level of real-life context missing from a flat, 2D product image online. It’s a win-win for the customers and the retail brands, who experience a big increase in conversion rates and a lower product return rate by leveraging augmented reality.

Consumers are coming to expect this experience. Augmented reality adoption is following a similar pattern to mobile phone adoption of the 2000s. And as the mobile-first Gen Z cohort continually gains more buying power beyond the $360 billion they already have in disposable income, we will see large retailers transforming their traditional online and in-person shopping experiences into more immersive, 3D retail experiences to reshape online browsing and buying behavior as we know it.

Guest Post

About the Guest Author(s)

Aluru Sravanth

Aluru Sravanth

A technology enthusiast and a student for life, Sravanth started Avataar in 2014, with a vision to uncover untapped potential from the confluence of self-learning AI and computer vision.

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