Mobile World Congress is canceled. Now what? (The Daily Charge, 2/13/2020)

So about that Mobile World Congress. Yeah, that's not happening. Stick around for your daily charge. [MUSIC] Hello, good morning and welcome to the Daily Charge and. It's Thursday, February 13th, I'm Meyers Hector. And I'm Bridget Carey, And here's the latest from Barcelona. So the world's largest mobile show is not happening this year. It was originally scheduled to run from the 24th to the 27th of this month. The GSMA, the organization that makes the event happen, announced MWC is cancelled. The CEO of the GSMA said the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak Travel concern and other circumstances make it impossible for GSMA to hold the event. Now prior to MWC being canceled a number of companies announced they would not be at the event, LG, Nokia, HMD. AT&T, Facebook, Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, Sony, Sprint, Vodafone and others were already not going to MWC. So what happened to the coronavirus, also known as kovat at 19 That name is by the World Health Organization. Bridget, what do you make of this? This is this is just fascinating because you never hear something like this really happening. You had 2000 or so, companies planning to attend and now there's all these questions of okay. The big companies, they can have their own press events, they can have their own meetings, but what happens to all the little guys What happens when you know people who wanted to show off the powers of 5G and make these deals you know, how will that shape for the rest of 2020? This is a place where if 2020 was supposed to be the year for 5G Deals and conversations will be made to shape that. What that mean that you won't get a cool phone that makes you want to buy something new that isn't from Apple or Samsung. There you think Barcelona will be decked out with great 5g coverage in the area so that people could demo. All these amazing new phones, all these other products that would be available, but if wireless courier is not coming, and then you don't have phone companies coming, and then you have nobody coming. I mean, deals will still be made but, we are holding on to our phones longer than ever before. We need incentive to see what's new and cool. Cool. So, yeah, a place like MWC is where the new and cool happens. And the weird thing is, the last couple of years, since we've been on LTE, and we're finally getting 5G in a much wider way, this would have been the year where we would see really great phones. So I've been waiting and holding off on phones for a while, because Can't wait for 5g, I don't wanna get stuck in the middle. But it's such an unfortunate time for this stuff to happen. I know it's really cool to have these kinds of tech in one place, but you know what, we do have the internet, we do have phones and Skype and everything. Do you think these conferences are even necessary anymore? Yeah, have a 5g demo in places where there is 5g, from people around and teleconference it in, like Is it necessary what am question everyone's asking. There's worries that if you cancel something like this, companies will reevaluate their budgets and go next year do I even need to go and will that mean MWC isn't as big or as important as it has been in the past because think of all the money Is important to these companies, especially the smaller ones who may be overspending outside their budgets, to plan for it and have a presence there. And then like it's like a week and it's cancelled. So some have even said they are still going anyway so have some side meetings because they already have plane tickets and hotel rooms and what-not. Yep. That sounds pretty crazy that. People who are willing to keep going like forget there's no conference. We are going to go to the Starbucks. And we're going to show you what we got, instead of just going ahead with the conference. Now, we'll talk a little bit about the coronavirus for a second, please do your research before freaking out. We'll have links to the CDC and the Mayo Clinic for information. So let's move to a lighter story, shall we? Netflix is letting people watch to all the Boys I've Loved before for free. It's a movie promotion for the sequel. Now there's no sign up. You didn't need to give an email, credit card or anything. But do you think we're gonna see this happening a lot with all the different streaming services out there? Short answer Yes, I'm also feeling so happy that you don't have to actually give credit card information. Okay, that's refreshing. But there's so much to watch [UNKNOWN]. They're gonna be desperate to do stunts like this to get people to get hooked on something. But will the first movie get you hooked to subscribe to Netflix? If you want to watch the sequel. How else you gonna do it? I guess I mean, I can understand when you see like the first episode of a TV series, you're like, okay, now I want to sign up for the whole TV series, but I'm like, it's just one more movie in the sequel. Its interesting tactic. Nothing it's gonna be free in the US and up until March 9th or so. So it's not gonna be free forever. Did you see the first one? I have not seen the first one. [CROSSTALK] I know of it. There's so much out there that I'm now like that's the movie that's gonna get me to go to Netflix. Like no, I am already on Netflix, but still, it's like that's not the draw thing for me. I had read that Netflix was crowing about how well this movie did on their service in the past and I'm like. People were really connecting to it, and so I'm really glad to be sharing this, of course all that flattering language. I can see lots of companies doing this. YouTube has done this in the past with YouTube Red, and now premium. When they make Cobra Ki free for everybody. Cobra Ki's a great show, watch it. I'm not being paid to say it, I love that show. It's really great- I did not expecting you [CROSSTALK] Season one is really great. Season two is a little ridiculous. But YouTube's been making a move to take the premium content and make it free. That way you get the chance to see it with ads and everything else. I don't think Disney has to do that though [LAUGH] No. They're like, we got Falcon over there, and we got [UNKNOWN] over there. We're all good, we don't need your issues there. I think we're gonna see a lot of this. There's so many different companies that are gonna try this and it's- It's like back in the day when you had that free week of HBO or Showtime and you're like, yeah, I get to finally see something! But it never got my family to actually subcribe, I just tried to binge as much as I could. [LAUGH] The weird thing is Netflix should be putting ads on a free version of itself, which they claim they will never put ads on their service at least as long as you're paying. I can see that they're surprisingly the only ad in this free thing is to subscribe to Netflix. That's it. Yeah, they could do it twist their. So daily charge, I am, [UNKNOWN] I am [UNKNOWN] Kerry. Thank you for joining us. [MUSIC]