Shares of Netflix cratered more than 20% on Tuesday after the company reported a loss of 200,000 subscribers during the first quarter. This is the first time the streamer has reported a subscriber loss in more than a decade. From a report: The company also said it expects to lose 2 million subscribers in the second quarter. A loss of 200,000 compared with 2.73 million adds expected, according to StreetAccount estimates. Netflix previously told shareholders it expected to add 2.5 million net subscribers during the first quarter. Analysts had predicted that number will be closer to 2.7 million. The company said that the suspension of its service in Russia and the winding-down of all Russian paid memberships resulted in a loss of 700,000 subscribers. Excluding this impact, Netflix would have seen 500,000 net additions during the most recent quarter.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A federal class-action lawsuit involving Maple Heights and 2,000 other U.S. communities against Netflix and Hulu took a detour Wednesday through the Ohio Supreme Court, with Maple Heights officials asking state justices to define the streaming giants as "video service providers." If the Supreme Court agrees, the streaming services would be subject to the same video service provider fees paid by cable companies. Those fees in Ohio are 5% of the companies' gross revenues they earn in the city and go directly into city coffers. The streaming companies argued they are instead "specified digital products" under state law. Therefore, they pay state sales taxes, and Ohio would lose money if the court determines they owe the local franchise fees since they would be exempt from state sales tax under Ohio law. The Ohio Supreme Court will determine whether Netflix and Hulu are video service providers, among other legal questions, in the coming months. After the Ohio Supreme Court issues an opinion, the case in federal court in Cleveland can resume. That case involves around 2,000 cities, but U.S. District Judge James Gwin directed the Ohio Supreme Court to answer legal questions first.

Privacy is one of the selling points of Apple products. But for employees who develop these products, it can be a pain. The Information: Apple doesn't collect a lot of customer data from its services, including Apple Maps, the Siri voice assistant and its paid video-streaming service, according to more than a dozen former employees. And the customer data it does collect from products like the App Store and Apple Music aren't widely accessible to employees who work on those and other products, these people said. That makes it difficult for Apple to mimic popular features developed by its competitors, which collect more data and have fewer restrictions on employee access to such information, they said.

Look at Apple TV+. The paid video-streaming service, unlike its bigger rivals, doesn't collect demographic info about customers or a history of what they have watched, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation at Apple. That means Apple TV+ employees can't analyze how customers move from one piece of content to another, making it next to impossible to recommend more videos to them based on their preferences -- a contrast to Netflix, Disney and other streaming services, which use such data to get customers to watch more videos. [...] From Apple's app recommendations to new features for Siri and the company's Goldman Sachs-backed credit card, Apple engineers and data scientists often have to find creative or costly ways to make up for the lack of access to data. In some cases, as with Apple TV+, employees simply have to accept limitations on what they can do.

"Enabling developer productivity has become a key vector in every organization's success," writes Matt Asay at InfoWorld — not a nice-to-have feature but a must-have.

"Which is why, perhaps ironically, the best way to set your developers free may actually be to fetter their freedom." The more developers mattered, the more everyone wanted to cater to their needs with new software tools, new open source projects, new cloud services, etc. This meant lots of new developer choice and associated freedom, but that wasn't necessarily an unalloyed good. As RedMonk analyst Steven O'Grady noted in 2017, "The good news is that this developer-driven fragmentation has yielded an incredible array of open source software. The bad news is that, even for developers, managing this fragmentation is challenging."

Can one have too much choice? Yep.

It's long been known in consumer retail, for example, that when there is too much choice, "consumers are less likely to buy anything at all, and if they do buy, they are less satisfied with their selection." Turns out this isn't just a matter of breakfast cereals or clothing. It also applies to developers building enterprise software. InfoWorld's Scott Carey writes that "complexity is killing software developers." He's right. But what can be done?

In a conversation with Weaveworks CEO Alexis Richardson, he related how self-service development platforms are reemerging to help developers make sense of all that open source and cloud choice. By giving developers "a standard, pre-approved environment in which the effort to create an app from an idea is minimal," he explained, it allows them to "focus on innovation not plumbing."
"Done right, a little bit of constraint goes a long way..." Asay argues, touting the benefits of PaaS (platform as a service) self-service development platforms. ("Enterprises that want to give their developers the freedom the cloud affords can couple it with just enough constraint to make that freedom useful....")

Asay argues that "However you approach it, the point is to stop thinking about freedom and control as impossibly opposed. Smart enterprises are figuring out ways to enable their developers using self-service platforms. Maybe you should, too."

Apple, looking to address criticism of its competitive practices by the European Union, developers and U.S. lawmakers, pointed to a report showing that third-party apps are thriving on the iPhone and other devices. From a report: In a study published by Analysis Group and touted by the iPhone maker, analysts said that Apple's own apps are infrequently the dominant option and only account for a small share of app usage. "We found that Apple's own apps, while used by many, are rarely the most popular of a given type and are eclipsed in popularity by third-party apps for nearly every country and app type we considered," the report said. In the U.S., the report found that Spotify is 1.6 times more popular than Apple Music, that Google Maps is used 1.5 times more than Apple Maps, and that Netflix is 17 times more popular than Apple's service. The Amazon Kindle service, meanwhile, was 4.5 times more popular than Apple's Books app.

Ben Thompson, making a case for why Netflix should sell ads: Here Netflix's biggest advantage is the sheer size of its subscriber base: Netflix can, on an absolute basis, pay more than its streaming competitors for the content it wants, even as its per-subscriber cost basis is lower. This advantage is only accentuated the larger Netflix's subscriber base gets, and the more revenue it makes per subscriber; the user experience of getting to that unique content doesn't really matter. All of these factors make a compelling case for Netflix to start building an advertising business. First, an advertising-supported or subsidized tier would expand Netflix's subscriber base, which is not only good for the company's long-term growth prospects, but also competitive position when it comes to acquiring content. This also applies to the company's recent attempts to crack down on password sharing, and struggles in the developing world: an advertising-based tier is a much more accessible alternative.

Second, advertising would make it easier for Netflix to continue to raise prices: on one hand, it would provide an alternative for marginal customers who might otherwise churn, and on the other hand, it would create a new benefit for those willing to pay (i.e. no advertising for the highest tiers). Third, advertising is a natural fit for the jobs Netflix does. Sure, customers enjoy watching shows without ads -- and again, they can continue to pay for that -- but filler TV, which Netflix also specializes in, is just as easily filled with ads. Above all, though, is the fact that advertising is a great opportunity that aligns with Netflix's business: while the company once won with a differentiated user experience worth paying for, today Netflix demands scarce attention because of its investment in unique content. That attention can be sold, and should be, particularly as it increases Netflix's ability to invest in more unique content, and/or charge higher prices to its user base.

Plex has an audacious plan to become the daily go-to app for everyone's streaming needs: The media center app rolled out new universal search, watchlist and discovery features Tuesday that are designed to help people find and keep track of all of the shows and movies available across a growing universe of streaming services. From a report: "The app dance, going from app to app to find something to watch, just doesn't make any sense," said Plex's senior product and design director, Jason Williams. Instead, Williams hopes that people will just open Plex to browse everything that's new on various streaming services, and then follow deep links to directly launch playback on Netflix, Hulu or anywhere else. "You're going to open up Plex every day," Williams said. "It's going to be your trusted source." Universal search and discovery have long been a holy grail for the streaming industry, but efforts by platform operators to integrate these types of features directly into the smart TV home screen have been held back by industry power struggles. Plex hopes it can avert some of those issues, and is betting on the ingenuity of its power users to help out along the way. In addition to universal search and a universal watchlist across multiple streaming services as well as personal media, Plex is also launching a dedicated discovery section in its app that highlights new titles on Netflix and other services.

Neowin notes growing support for the "very efficient, potent, royalty-free video codec" AV1, including Microsoft's adding of support for hardware acceleration of AV1 on Windows.

But AV1 even turned up in Intel's announcement this week of the Arc A-series, a new line of discrete GPUs, Neowin reports: Intel has been quick to respond and the company has become the first such GPU hardware vendor to have full AV1 support on its newly launched Arc GPUs. While AMD and Nvidia both offer AV1 decoding with their newest GPUs, neither have support for AV1 encoding.

Intel says that hardware encoding of AV1 on its new Arc GPUs is 50 times faster than those based on software-only solutions. It also adds that the efficiency of AV1 encode with Arc is 20% better compared to HEVC. With this feature, Intel hopes to potentially capture at least some of the streaming and video editing market that's based on users who are looking for a more robust AV1 encoding solution compared to CPU-based software approaches.
From Intel's announcement: Intel Arc A-Series GPUs are the first in the industry to offer full AV1 hardware acceleration, including both encode and decode, delivering faster video encode and higher quality streaming while consuming the same internet bandwidth. We've worked with industry partners to ensure that AV1 support is available today in many of the most popular media applications, with broader adoption expected this year. The AV1 codec will be a game changer for the future of video encoding and streaming.

About one-third of U.S. subscribers to Netflix share their login credentials with others, according to new data from Leichtman Research Group. From the report: The research firm's online survey of 4,400 consumers confirms the company's own conclusions in recent years. While 64% of respondents said they pay for and use Netflix only in their own household, 33% indicate some form of sharing. (The remaining 3% are households whose Netflix comes packaged via other subscriptions.) Netflix has about 74 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada and has penetrated nearly 70% of U.S. broadband homes. With subscription growth flattening in the region of late, Netflix has recently phased in rate increases in order to continue funding its $18 billion in annual programming spending. Earlier this month, Netflix announced a test of monthly fees for password-sharing in three territories outside of the U.S. The rise of password sharing between households, a blog post explained, is âoeimpacting our ability to invest in great new TV and films for our members.â

Dune won six Academy Awards tonight — the most of any movie — at this year's Oscar's ceremony, taking home Oscars for its cinematography, visual effects, film editing, original score, production design, and "achievement in sound."

But the movie's Oscar-winning crew were surprised there was no Oscar nomination for the film's director, Denis Villeneuve, reports IndieWire: "I was very confused when Denis was not nominated for directing. It's as if the film directed itself and all of these craft categories magically did great work," sound designer/supervising sound editor Theo Green said. "Seeing the sweep that Dune is having tonight makes me very proud for Denis."

Green and other below-the-line winners painted a production picture where Villeneuve orchestrated a kind of cross-department collaboration that allowed each craftsperson's work to shine and work in concert with every other piece. Re-recording mixer Ron Bartlett said it all started with Villeneuve's deep study of the book. "It's better than the sum of its parts," Fraser said. "We are the culmination of Denis Villeneuve's combined group effort to make a movie, and that's what I'm most proud of." Several winners also called out editor Joe Walker as a key piece of the creation of Dune.
Besides the six Oscars it won, Dune had also been nominated for four other awards, including Best Picture.

Tonight's ceremony featured a tribute to 60 years of James Bond movies — and the franchise's most recent film also won the "Best Song" Oscar (for the song "No Time to Die" by Billie Eilish). This marks the third consecutive time that a James Bond movie's theme song has gone on to win the "Best Song" award.

And Apple TV+ became the first streaming service to ever win the prestigious Best Picture award for their movie CODA. NBC News calls this "a major moment for a film industry that has been dramatically transformed by the rise of direct-to-consumer streaming platforms and the growing popularity of at-home entertainment." (The film also won Oscars for best adapted screenplay and for best supporting actor.) In the days before the Oscars telecast, the best picture race came to be seen as a proxy battle between Apple and Netflix, the streaming giant that has been angling for Hollywood's marquee prize for at least the last half-decade, spending heavily on splashy promotional campaigns. Netflix was a double best picture contender this year, recognized for Jane Campion's haunting Western The Power of the Dog and Adam McKay's doomsday satire Don't Look Up.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Thirty five years after Andy Warhol's death, the NY Times reports on a new wave of Warhol-Mania as the famed pop artist is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series (The Andy Warhol Diaries), an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works. The documentary revisits the 1985 launch of the Commodore Amiga, where Warhol demonstrated the Amiga's then-unparalleled graphical power by 'painting' Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry's portrait. Even as the flood-filling goes bad, Warhol does his best to put on a brave public face ("This is kind of pretty. Oh, it's beautiful."), but reveals his true thoughts in his demo day diary entry.

"The day started off with dread as I woke up from my dreams and thought about my live appearance for Commodore computers," Warhol recalls in the documentary (in an AI-generated voice). "And how nothing is worth all this worrying, to wake up and feel so terrified. Commodore wants me to be a spokesman. It's a $3,000 machine that's like the Apple thing, but can do 100 times more. The whole day was spent being nervous and telling myself that if I could just get good at stuff like this, then I could make money that way, and I wouldn't have to paint. The drawing came out terrible. And I called it a masterpiece. It was a real mess.

"I said I wanted to be Walt Disney and that if I'd had this machine ten years ago, I could have made it."

Five NFT versions of Warhol's recovered Amiga artwork were sold for $3,377,500 last May to benefit the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Sony is preparing to introduce a new video game subscription service for the PlayStation as early as next week, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the plans. From the report: The service, which has been in development under the codename Spartacus, is Sony's answer to Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass, a sort of Netflix for video games that has amassed more than 25 million subscribers. Sony's will debut with a splashy lineup of hit games from recent years, said the people, who requested anonymity because the plans are private. Sony's new service will combine two of its current offerings, PlayStation Now and PlayStation Plus. Customers will be able to choose from multiple tiers offering catalogs of modern games and classics from older PlayStation eras.

If Netflix follows through with its test to charge an additional fee to users sharing passwords, it could rake in $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, according to a new Wall Street analysis. Variety reports: Last week, Netflix said it was launching a test in three Latin America countries (Chile, Costa Rica and Peru) to address password sharing. Customers will be able to add up to two Extra Member accounts for about $2-$3/month each, on top of their regular monthly fee. According to estimates by Cowen & Co. analysts, if Netflix rolls the program out globally it could add an incremental $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, or about 4% upside to the firm's 2023 revenue projection of $38.8 billion. The firm's estimate assumes that about half of non-paying Netflix password-sharing households will become paying members; further, the model predicts that of those, about half will opt to sign up for their own separate paid account.

Variety takes a long look at Halo, the new nine-episode TV show on Paramount+ adapting "Microsoft's crown jewel Xbox franchise": When the show premieres on March 24, it will be the culmination of 17 years of false starts and dogged striving, including a Peter Jackson-produced feature film that fell apart in the 2000s, more than six years of development by Amblin Television in the 2010s, and a pandemic-split production in Hungary for the nine-episode first season that lasted nearly two years....

On June 6, 2005, in a stunt that instantly became the stuff of Hollywood legend, Microsoft sent a small platoon of actors dressed in full Master Chief armor to the major film studios (other than Sony Pictures, naturally). They were armed with a "Halo" screenplay written by Alex Garland and take-it-or-leave-it deal terms heavily weighted in the company's favor. The result was a movie co-financed by Universal and 20th Century Fox and produced by Peter Jackson, who hired up-and-coming director Neill Blomkamp to make his feature debut with the film. According to Jamie Russell's book "Generation Xbox: How Video Games Invaded Hollywood," Microsoft was an uneasy and at times overbearing creative partner, and the project ultimately fell apart in October 2006. (Blomkamp and Jackson instead made 2009's "District 9," which was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture.)

By 2011, Microsoft had parted ways with Halo's original developer, Bungie, and created an in-house studio, 343 Industries, to keep the franchise alive. As part of that effort, veteran Microsoft executive Kiki Wolfkill began exploring anew how to expand the game into a live-action adaptation — or, in Wolfkill's words, "linear entertainment...." Don Mattrick, then the head of Microsoft's Xbox unit, called his friend Steven Spielberg, himself a passionate gamer and a Halo fan. Soon after, 343's executives found themselves pitching Amblin Television presidents Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank. "They asked for permission to get in before we came into the room, and they covered a large conference table with the canon of Halo," says Falvey. That canon — a vast science fiction saga that spans hundreds of millennia and involves ancient aliens who created colossal, ring-shaped structures called the Halo Array — comes as much from dozens of tie-in novels, comic books and exhaustive guides and encyclopedias as from the games themselves. "It was aisles deep," Falvey recalls. "It was incredible."

Everyone who spoke with Variety, actually, cited Halo's expansive mythology as the factor that differentiated the series from other video game fare and made it so attractive as source material for event-size television.... [W]hen Kyle Killen ("Lone Star") came on board as showrunner in 2018, he hit upon a shrewd narrative path that embraces the video game DNA: Master Chief starts as a complete cypher, engineered to be so devoid of individuality that he literally has no sense of taste, and the rest of the season slowly fills out the void. "We're going to tell a story about a man discovering his own humanity," says Kane, who joined the show as co-showrunner in 2019. "In so doing, he's invited the audience to discover that guy's humanity too."

Eventually, Levine says, "we got the script to the place where we said, 'You know, this is a deep dive into character. What are the costs of turning human beings into killing machines...?'"

Kane estimates he wrote upwards of 265 drafts of the first nine episodes, balancing everything from the needs of the expansive production to story notes from 343 and Spielberg to the desire to fold in as much from the Halo mythology as possible.
The article calls the show the strong argument yet from Paramount+ "that it belongs at the big kids table with Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max."

The article notes Paramount+ already has five ongoing Star Trek series (including Discovery and Picard). And Variety also reported earlier that South Park will stream exclusively on Paramount+ starting in 2025, joining the streaming service's 14 exclusive South Park "specials" (hour-long episodes like 2021's "South Park: Post COVID").

Netflix will soon launch a test letting primary account holders pay an additional fee for users outside their households -- a new attempt by the company to address illicit password-sharing. From a report: According to the Netflix terms of service, a customer's account "may not be shared with individuals beyond your household." After years of turning a blind eye to password-sharing behavior that falls outside that requirement, the company last year ran a limited test prompting users to enter their account credentials as a way to nudge freeloaders into paying for their own accounts. Now, in an upcoming test launching in three countries -- Chile, Costa Rica and Peru -- Netflix will let members who share their accounts with people outside their household do so "easily and securely, while also paying a bit more," according to Chengyi Long, director of product innovation at Netflix. The new options will roll out in the next few weeks in the three countries (and may or may not expand beyond those markets).

According to Deadline, Prime Video is turning PlayStation's mythology-themed game franchise God of War into a live-action TV series. From the report: I hear the series adaptation comes from The Expanse creators/executive producers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby and The Wheel of Time executive producer/showrunner Rafe Judkins as well as Sony Pictures Television and PlayStation Productions, which collaborate on all TV series based on PlayStation games. This would mark the latest big deal for a TV series based on a popular video game title in a red-hot streaming marketplace for gaming IP. Peacock just landed another SPT/PlayStation property, Twisted Metal, with a series order and Anthony Mackie starring. HBO has coming up the high-profile PlayStation game-based series The Last of Us, starring Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey. Netflix has a Resident Evil TV series in the works, while Paramount+ is about to debut Halo.
[...]
The God of War franchise from Sony's Santa Monica Studio spans a total of seven games across four PlayStation consoles. The action game series launched in 2005 on the PlayStation 2, with the first God of War. At the center is ex-Spartan warrior Kratos and his perilous journey to exact revenge on the Ares, the Greek God of War, after killing his loved ones under the deity's influence. After becoming the ruthless God of War himself, Kratos finds himself constantly looking for a chance to change his fate. Following several titles on various PlayStation consoles including the PS3 and the handheld PSP, Santa Monica Studio brought new life to the franchise with the 2018 game on the PlayStation 4. In it, Kratos comes to the Norse wilds where he gets a second chance at fatherhood with his son Atreus. The installment a slew of honors at the 2018 Game Awards, including Game of the Year. An eighth God of War installment, God of War: Ragnorok, is in the works for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 and is set to drop this year.

A new finding suggests Samsung is throttling the performance of thousands of Android apps on Galaxy smartphones, including Google and Samsung's first-party apps. XDA Developers reports: Samsung has an app called Game Optimization Service that comes preinstalled on many Galaxy phones. Although the name suggests the app helps improve gaming performance, it's apparently being used to limit the performance of non-gaming apps. Users on the Korean tech forum Meeco have posted a list of affected apps that are subject to performance throttling. The list includes 10,000 popular apps, including Instagram, TikTok, Netflix, Microsoft Office, Google Keep, Spotify, Snapchat, YouTube Music, and more. Samsung's own apps such as Samsung Pay, Secure Folder, Bixby, and others are also on the list. Notably, there are no benchmark apps on this blacklist.

A video posted by Korean YouTuber shows how blacklisted apps are subject to inferior performance while benchmark apps are given a free hand. In his test, the YouTuber changed the package name of the 3DMark benchmark app to Genshin Impact, one of the apps on the blacklist. The unmodified version of 3D Mark scored 2618 points in the Wild Life Extreme test. When he ran the same test with the spoofed version, there was a significant drop in the score -- 1141 points. In other words, the spoofed version performed 56% worse than the unmodified version. It's not immediately clear if the Game Optimization Service app is installed on every Galaxy phone. Samsung is reportedly aware of the issue and conducting an internal investigation. "While Samsung hasn't clarified why it's throttling Android apps, it's likely in an attempt to improve battery life," notes XDA.

Sony Pictures Entertainment is consolidating its anime businesses under the Crunchyroll banner to better compete in the growing streaming market for Japanese animation. From a report: The company is adding hundreds of hours of programming and dozens of titles, including "Cowboy Bebop," to the Crunchyroll streaming service that were previously available through its Funimation outlet, the company said Tuesday. Culver City-based Sony Pictures, the film and TV entertainment arm of Tokyo electronics giant Sony Corp., made a big bet on the anime market last year when it bought streaming service Crunchyroll from AT&T for $1.175 billion. The problem was that Sony then had two subscription streamers focused on the market for Japanese animation. Fans had to subscribe to both Crunchyroll and Funimation to get everything they wanted, in addition to Netflix and other services, said Colin Decker, who runs Sony's anime businesses.

Protocol reports that Qualcomm will finally jump on the AV1 video codec bandwagon next year. Ars Technica reports: AV1 is the web's next open, royalty-free video codec, and widespread adoption will require hardware support from the world's chip vendors. Qualcomm's 2022 flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip, doesn't support AV1. Samsung's Exynos 2200 managed to ship the video codec this year in international versions of the Galaxy S22, while the MediaTek Dimensity 1000 SoC has been shipping in phones for over a year now with AV1 support. Apple is a founding member of the AV1 Alliance, but its devices also don't support the codec yet.

The report says Qualcomm's "upcoming flagship Snapdragon mobile processor" -- model number "SM8550" -- will support AV1. That would probably be called the "Snapdragon 8 Gen 2" SoC, due out in 2023. Wide adoption of AV1 seems inevitable, though it is taking a while. The codec is a successor to Google's VP8 and VP9 codecs and is being built by the Alliance for Open Media. The alliance's lineup is a who's who of tech companies, with founding members like Amazon, Apple, ARM, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, and Samsung. Netflix and Google's YouTube are both making AV1 support "a requirement" for future products that want to support either video service. That should motivate just about every hardware and software vendor out there to get the job done. Aside from being open source and royalty-free, the report notes that the newer AV1 codec also has the benefit of being 30% more efficient than H.265.

YouTube topped Netflix in terms of quarterly revenue, with the Google-owned video platform delivering $8.6 billion in advertising revenue in Q4, the company said Tuesday. The Hollywood Reporter reports: For fiscal 2021, YouTube delivered $28.8 billion in advertising revenue. In the same quarter a year earlier, YouTube delivered $6.9 billion in advertising revenue, underscoring the continued explosive growth of the platform. For comparison, Netflix delivered $7.7 billion in revenue in Q4 in 2021, compared to $6.6 billion a year earlier. Overall, Alphabet, Google's parent company, reported $75.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, and $257.6 billion for the year, with Google search advertising still making up the lions share of revenue.

With regard to YouTube, the executives cited commerce as a potential growth area for YouTube, with CEO Sundar Pichai calling it "a whole other layer of opportunity." "Podcasts, gaming, learning, sports, across all of these areas we will take a vertical specific look and find out how we can support creators better," he said. "While pretty early, there is a lot of pilots under way," he added, noting that they were "super early" into testing how shopping could be baked into YouTube Shorts, its TikTok-esque shorts platform, which Pichai said now has more than 5 trillion views. The executives also called out YouTube's connected TV opportunity.