It's Amazon Prime day

It's Amazon Prime day

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Josh, you're seeing anything anything furtheron the breaking news out of Milwaukee outside
the Republican National Convention, Columbus policeofficers shooting and killing a suspect. But
as of right now, what isthe latest that you've seen, because I
the latest I saw is New YorkPost had it. It just said Columbus,

(00:23):
Ohio police officer shoots man with knivesnear aren't like near our NC perimeter,
so they don't indicate Yeah, thatis a guy trying to break the
perimeter or whatever it was, Like, I guess what tube guys that were
fighting. That's the speculation, right, Yeah, that's the speculation. Zach
Attack sent me something with that earlier, so I'm not sure. Again,

(00:46):
it's very sketchy right now. We'restill putting it together, and clearly we're
speculating somewhat because they're all the factshave not come out. But I just
wanted to make sure that if you'relistening to the sound of our voice right
now, that you know that we'reright on top of this and we're following
it. As as more news becomesavailable, we'll bring that to you,
of course. Yeah, let mesee, so let me witness a witness

(01:11):
at the scene told the Post thatthe man was wielding two knives swinging them
towards police just before the fatal shooting. Yep, the victim's brother told the
Post the man was homeless, crazy, homeless guy with knives trice to stab
police officer. That's what happened.Again, needless if that is the way
that it played out, and that'swhat's being reported through what is it?

(01:33):
The New York Post. The NewYork Post just broke that and said the
victims brother told the Post the manwas homeless. A witnesses at the scene
said the man was wielding two knivesand swinging them towards police officers just before
the fatal shot. Right, Okay, yep, again that's what's that's the
latest on that. We will continueto follow it and bring you the updates
as they happen. Joining us nowis Mike Dubuski, ABC News and it's

(01:57):
Tech Tuesday. Mike. It isAmazon on Prime Day and I have not
jumped on because I well, Ihave a problem. My wife tells me
when it comes to Amazon. WhenI open that app, I'm like,
I gotta find something and I canjustify it somehow, some way in my
mind, I could justify whatever itis. But there are a bonanza,

(02:19):
as you put it, of onlinedeals going on today and not just today
but tomorrow as well. Right,Yeah, that's absolutely right. So Amazon
Prime Day, despite the name,is actually two days. It's been a
forty eight hour affair for a fewyears now as the day has kind of
gained prominence over the past few yearsor so. This obviously it's Amazon's annual

(02:39):
summer sales bonanza, extravaganza, whateveryou want to call it. For members
who have Prime subscriptions, that's theonly way you can take part in these
sales on Amazon, and it usuallyis, no surprise, a very big
windfall for Amazon. Last July duringPrime Day, the company raped in twelve
point seven billion dollars during Prime Day. And here's kind of the more eye

(03:04):
opening stat I think is that Primememberships, which again you need in order
to take part in Amazon Prime Day, they now number one hundred and eighty
million in this country. That's morethan half the population. Especially impressive when
you take into consideration that's not acheap subscription. It's fourteen ninety nine a
month. More than half the countryhas one. That is very impressive.

(03:29):
I am one of those people,Mike, do you have one as well?
I do, indeed, yes,And of course it's worth mentioning.
You don't just get the Amazon PrimeDay sales. If you sign up to
be an Amazon Prime member, youalso get Amazon Music and access to their
streaming video channel. I'm watching TheBoys right now, which is kind of
their big original piece of programming.So you get a whole bunch of different
things. But Amazon Prime Day youalso get to take advantage of some pretty

(03:52):
steep discounts on a whole variety ofdifferent things. They really discount stuff across
the website. This year, we'reseeing a lot of like health and beauty
products get some attention as well asand this is true every year, tech
products, everything from headphones and earbudsand portable speakers and that type of thing,
they get a lot of attention.Also, no surprise, Amazon has

(04:13):
its own line of technology products brandedand built by Amazon, and those are
getting some major attention as well duringPrime Day this year. Well, I
definitely need to explore the beauty partof that and see if I can come
up with something to try to helpmyself something something we're on the radio.
We don't need to look at it. I need the joke there. I
will No, No, the jokeis absolutely true. It's a face for

(04:34):
radio. I'm telling you, Iam that guy through and through. Maybe
they'll have something. And well,I'm actually kind of excited. And I
don't know how this got past me, because every time I've opened the app,
it's the big old ad where theit's like this ribbon kind of slides
down the whole length of your phone. It's like Amazon Prime Day coming up,

(04:57):
you know, and all of this. And my wife keeps telling me
because I was like, okay,how about we get this, and she
goes, maybe we should wait toPrime Day. And then, you know,
I've spoken to her multiple times todayand she didn't remind me about anything.
I get to work and I'm like, oh, wait a minute,
that's going on right now. ButI don't think there's any We're We're not
in any danger of them running outof stuff. It seems like they never
run out certainly not. And again, as you mentioned, this is now

(05:20):
a two day affair. We're alsoseeing more than one Prime Day happen per
year now. They've added a secondPrime Day event in the fall, and
this kind of gets us into aninteresting piece of this, right because normally
we wouldn't talk about like an onlinesale, even if it is Amazon obviously
a big company. You know asjournalists, as tec journalists, you kind

(05:41):
of want to stay away from that. But what I think is interesting about
Prime Day this year is that weput so much attention on it and across
the internet. You know, everybodyseems to be writing out guides and lists
and strategies for taking the advantage ofall the deals that they have. But
Prime Day itself is sort of waninginfluence. Obviously, twelve point seven billion

(06:02):
dollars last year not anything to sneezeat. It was up seven percent from
the year prior, so it wasgrowing, but it's growing at a slower
rate than we've seen in years past. From twenty seventeen to twenty eighteen,
Prime Day brought in seventy eight percentmore earnings. That was how much it
jumped between those two years. Nowit's just seven percent. So we're seeing

(06:26):
a real leveling off in its popularity. And you look around the sort of
e commerce world today. Target CircleDays were last week Walmart's July deals with
the sales event that happened last week. Also, new entrants from TikTok and
Temu are hosting sales events both thisweek and throughout the month of July.

(06:46):
A lot of consumers are asking themselvesthe question, if it's always a sale?
Is it ever a sale? Whydo I need to disrupt my day
and get the deals on Prime Daywhen I can just wait next week and
find inevitably some other sales that canget me most of the way there.
Yeah, you have those siphoning offof Amazon. They've watched Amazon just really

(07:09):
kind of corner the market with this, you know, the thing that I
found too, Mike, And look, Amazon's not paying me for an endorsement,
but I'll say it, I don'tknow that anybody they have, they
are at Walmart, target any ofthem. As far as the delivery game
when you're getting a nobody can stackup to Amazon and the way that they
do it. And for the Primesubscription, my main reason was the free

(07:30):
shipping because they can, really theycan. They can just watch you on
the shipping depending on where you anda lot of these other places they might
do it, but it's like,well, you got to order at least
one hundred and fifty dollars well,it's twenty five dollars on some of the
stuff on Amazon, and then someof it you don't even have to get
to that, and they'll they'll bringit to you literally the next day.
But shifting gears here, I didwant to hear about this video the video

(07:54):
game community awaiting this release of thenew game this week EA's College Foot five.
Tell me what's so special about this? Yeah, so this is a
video game where you can take controlof a college football team. You play
as a combination of like a player, but also a team manager and a
coach, so you can make decisionsabout you know, who's going to be

(08:15):
on your team, what players totrade, when to trade them, all
that sort of thing. And it'ssignificant because this is the first game in
its series since twenty thirteen. Thiswas a very popular series of video games
dealing with college sports, college footballin particular, running through twenty thirteen.
But after that time there became thishuge amount of scrutiny being placed on this

(08:37):
game because that was the time whenwe were discussing paying college athletes and how
that was going to work, andwhat do we do with all these companies
that are using the likenesses of thesecollege athletes and not paying them, and
that's exactly what EA was doing withits series of college football games. They
stopped making the game for several years. This case actually went to the Supreme

(09:03):
Court and that resulted in some ruleschanges in the world of college sports.
Back in twenty twenty one, theNCAA became the first league to allow players
to be paid for their names,images, and likenesses. It's the landmark
decision in the world of college sports. And now the world of college football
is getting on board with this newgame. EA is back in the market

(09:24):
college Football twenty twenty five and thereare going to be eleven thousand real life
players featured in this game. They'veopted in and each of them who chose
to opt in got about six hundreddollars plus a free copy of the game.
So it might be a small amountof money, but they are being
paid for the use of their likenessesin this video game. Well that's that's

(09:46):
very very interesting. I'm not abig like, you know, video game
person, but I know that isan enormous market. And then something about
you know, as far as collegefootball goes, there's a huge market for
that as well. And that's prettyinteresting. The way that they're doing this
very very interesting. So yeah,but what say The one coveyat all of
this is that the deluxe version ofthe game is out now. The sort

(10:09):
of standard version releases on Friday.But people who've gotten early access to this
game are actually starting to complain thatthe players don't actually look like the people
who they say they look like.So it's kind of the opposite problem at
this point. Obviously, eleven thousandplayers a lot of people to create,
you know, so says Ea.They used a machine learning algorithm to recreate

(10:31):
them in the game, and yeah, it has caused a little bit consternation
in the gaming community, saying it'slike, hey, this player doesn't actually
look like the real guy that much. But even still they're out there and
at the very least they got acouple hundred bucks out of the deal.
Interesting for Tech Tuesday. Mike Dubuski, ABC News out of New York.
Mike, thank you very much andwe'll talk to you later.