>> from the heart of where innovation, money and power collide, in silicon valley and beyond, this is "bloomberg technology" with emily chang. caroline: this is bloomberg technology. bitcoin is pushing towards record highs again. this is the highest level since

may. we discussed the momentum from the latest surge. plus, facebook in defense mode. shares continue to fall as the social platform's whistleblower meets with lawmakers in europe and the facebook oversight board in the united states. what this could mean for consumer trust. everyone is talking about it. "squid game," the south korean phenomenon, makes waves and could be the biggest original hit for netflix. why foreign films could be there streaming service's secret weapon going forward. we'll get to that in a moment. let's get to the markets. kriti gupta, welcome. kriti: carolyn, thank you. a lot of red on the screen today. if you look at the numbers you wouldn't think the day started that way but it did. you saw tech outperforming for most of the session. until the last 30 minutes, a nailbiting last 30 minutes until apple, amazon, microsoft dragged the market down. look where we wound up. the s&p 500 down 0.7%, the faang

index down half a percent, taking related even some of the chinese adrs, flat on the session. they actually wound up doing pretty well during the entire trading day. i want to show you a terminal chart. one of the highlights of today was a pretty interesting call from siri. ditch tech, get into banks michael aurora coming out and sayingditch tech, get into banks instead. ,this ahead of earnings season kicking in this week. over the last couple weeks you can start to see a bit of a pickup in line with yields. people saying the way to play this lift-off that everyone knows is pricing in, that everyone knows is coming, is to slide back into banks and get out of tech. the culprit behind the selloff in the recent weeks. i want to end with good news, that, of course, cryptocurrencies, all in the green in today's session. crypto, bitcoin ending up flat on the session, but actually pretty strong, up as high as 4%. taking with it all those crypto

stocks. even robinhood. of course, we know that the platform gets a lot of revenue from crypto. that was a concern but right now, a positive. caroline: that is good news if you are on those markets. thank you so much, kriti gupta with market news. bitcoin, as she said, 57,000 dollars, first time since may. in past rallies there is often a search for reason. the cofounder of open money initiative. first and foremost, congratulations on the marriage and the change of name. secondly, talk to us about these numbers, the push higher. what is behind it? jill: it has been an interesting climb out of the depths we saw back in august and september. now eclipsing i think it was levels we last saw in may. it seems to be happening on fairly sizable volumes, which would normally in these markets

indicate that it is institutions coming back into play. there have been a few headlines that i think have lent themselves as tailwinds to these markets. most notably in the last few days, gary gensler, the head of the sec saying he does not in , fact aim to ban all cryptocurrencies. some people interpreting his remarks as being bullish for the possibility of a bitcoin etf. so, a few tailwinds to point to. but as ever in these markets, there is a lot of mystery to the movements as well. caroline: talk to us about the overall flows you are seeing or hearing of that are happening between bitcoin and ethereum and other protocols. bitcoin and ethereum have always been dubbed as the gold and silver. how much are we seeing institutional and retail money take more protocols more seriously? jill: when i speak to institutional flows, that does center around bitcoin and ethereum specifically, bitcoin

most of all, still being the blue-chip, or the gold, as you put it, caroline. but increasingly, we are seeing interest from institutions in moving sort of down the ranks of the crypto ecosystem to get access to other layer-one protocols, many of which are coming and nipping at ethereum's heels in terms of developer adoption and end-user adoption and so forth. there you have the likes of solana, slow ventures is a major investor in . solana. you have things like polkadot, avalanche, coming for ethereum, and all those tokens have written those tailwinds. you also have app coins, applications that have been developed on ethereum the have -- that have their own tokens so your own ways of expressing views, not only on ethereum as a whole but of course on these specific de-fi applications and

so forth. and finally, it wouldn't be a crypto segment if we didn't touch on nfts, and the new models we are seeing people take as they approach investing in those new types of assets. caroline: talk to us about solana. this has been dubbed the ethereum killer. as you say, slow ventures, and investor. what took you with that particular protocol? what is it about solana and the growth profile that you like? jill: solana, from the get-go, has been solving problems. -- has been all about trying to solve developer problems, and they have done a great job in terms of targeting developer acquisition. they have run a series of hackathons and grant programs and so forth that have been very successful. they have over 1000 active developers in the ecosystem, and that has translated to the growth of end-users in the ecosystems of the applications on the platform. when you see within the ethereum

decentralized finance ecosystem, which has been around longer and is more well-established in many ways, there is about $90 billion in total value in that ecosystem. now you see the rise of solana applications that have about $10 billion locked in there. and the same trends hold true as you look at the user base, as you look at wallets, which is a good proxy for the number of users in any of these ecosystems while it downloads. solana is seeing about 100,000 new wallet downloads per day. that is a rough proxy for the type of growth they are seeing in that ecosystem. caroline: and you just mentioned the googled non-fungible tokens, nfts. i felt it was a bubble-icious area a couple of months ago, but now people are seeing the long-term possibility of creating real value and real returns particularly for artists , in the making. solana is based in nfts. how much of that is a shift?

for people being able to create? jill: solana has been investing heavily in the nft ecosystem. ftx, one of the major crypto exchanges, ftx u.s. just announced their own foray into the nft space, so a competitor to the likes of opensea, which is more ethereum focused. ftx will be basing this marketplace on solana, so that is another bullish signal around the protocol. so that is exciting. it comes back to what developers want, what end-users want which , at least relative to ethereum, is increased scalability, increase in through-put and the ability to get transactions to the system, and also, of course, as ever, lower fees which is always a hot topic of conversation whenever these things take off within ethereum. caroline: of course. the ftx ceo has liked solana for

a little while as well. jill, great to have time with you. stay well. cofounder of the open money initiative pennsylvania shows principal. meanwhile, let's talk about robinhood. it is feeling the heat. there is a looming share sale by early investors. also, remember, the whole regulatory environment for crypto is becoming more transparent. is that a headwind to the stock? remember, this is the darling of the u.s. retail trading mania. kriti gupta here to talk more. first and foremost, crypto regulation. is that positive, negative on robinhood? sonali: normally it is positive for a lot of the folks in the crypto community but for robinhood, let's see what it means in terms of them being able to offer more products to their customers. that is what this is about. the ability to create wallets, compete more heavily with coinbase now that more users are adopting crypto. there is also payment for order flow, as we have been talking about how your long, to what

extent does this start to weigh on their revenue-generating abilities? and even more than regulation, which has been something that resurfaced today in a filing for selling stockholders, trying to sell more stock as early as this week, is the idea that the numbers might be going down as well. what will the next quarter look like in terms of earnings? we know that j.p. morgan had pointed out that app downloads have gone down quite a bit. a topic i can't wait to cover more, as more people moved to things like sports-bedding instead, and retail activity starts to change in the stock market. caroline: my husband works at coinbase, full disclosure. what do you think in terms of the share sale? this is what happens, when a company goes public many have , lockups then they expire and you start to see selling pressure. is that something to worry about? sonali: it is funny because part of this is perception. the idea that people are getting out just after the ipo, but the reality is, it is very common for early stockholders to be selling some stock. folks like d1, which reduced

did later rounds, also releasing their exposure. they are not selling out completely. people think they are selling at the high, but they are actually selling quite closer to its listing price, at about $35. so it is not like they are just cashing out of the all-time highs. caroline: not calling the top. sonali: exactly. it is not calling the top, but with that said, we follow the big money. you want to see people buy and hold for as long as possible, though we will see where this goes from here. there earnings period will be the next big catalyst. caroline: sonali basak, thank you for your time. we continue to see celebrities flocking to #cryptotwitter to announce their participation in nfts, as we were just discussing with jill. the latest, none other than reese witherspoon, who caught my attention. she tweeted about her first purchase about and fts, adding she would like to know about the women creating nonfungible tokens.

jill gunter should get over to her. meanwhile facebook shares , continue to fall as the whistleblower, frances haugen, gets ready to meet with u.k. and e.u. lawmakers. we will talk about that next. this is bloomberg. ♪

caroline: just one week after testifying to congress, facebook whistleblower frances haugen has just announced that she will now meet with a facebook oversight board, tweeting she is looking forward to sharing the truth with them. this is in addition with meeting

yea and u.k. lawmakers. our correspondent has been all over the ongoing fallout that from what initially was focused upon perhaps facebook understanding the ramifications of their products have on mental health, particularly those of the younger, and choosing what frances haugen calls profit over people. kurt, the main test always is whether or not this hurts the share price, whether this really hurts the business model of facebook, because time and time again when we have had these crises of pr, it hasn't always happened, the business proposition because businesses are dependent on it. kurt: this time does not necessarily feel different, but we will learn at the end of this month, because facebook will have earnings. of course, by the time they report these earnings, most of the drama has happened at the end of the quarter. so we actually have to wait longer until we have a full quarter of this news being out there. the stock price is down.

i do feel like there is some concern that in d.c. in particular, there is more cohesion between democrats and republicans about actually implementing some type of data privacy law. so it's clear that people are a little spooked here that this might have a long-term impact on the business. caroline: a long-term impact on engagement? on usage? on the consumer? kurt: i think it is more on facebook's data business. so i guess if someone were to come out with a law that said, hey, we're going to kind of restrict what types of data you can use to target people, or, hey, we will force you to expose the technology behind your algorithm or maybe get rid of the algorithm in some way, that is the kind of thing that would really hurt facebook's business , and i think that's where if you are an investor, you have to be worried because that directly impacts facebook's moneymaking ability. caroline: what about facebook's response to this crisis vis a vis others?

kurt: it does feel more aggressive this time around. in the past, for example the cambridge analytica two years ago at this point, we saw mark zuckerberg be a lot more active, we saw him out speaking a lot more often. now it is nick clegg, the head of policy and communication, doing most of the talking. and we have seen some of their pr folks on twitter being more aggressive and sharing the company message and even countering journalists and things like that, so it does feel like facebook is being more aggressive this time around in this crisis than they have been in previous issues. caroline: talk about what is happens next. we know that frances haugen is going to the u.k. we know the mp has been very focused on these issues. we know that the e.u. wants to speak with her as well. what next in terms of the story from your perspective? kurt: we have to keep an eye out for even more stories to come. we know that frances has given

thousands of documents maybe , tens of thousands of documents, to the journal, regulators. she hinted in her testimony, she brought up some issues that were important including the january 6 riots in d.c. as issues she saw with facebook, and we haven't really seen a lot of stories touching on that. i would have to imagine some of these documents contain things we haven't seen. this is not necessarily the end of the data dump, in my opinion. from that, you will continue to see a lot of bad press for facebook, i am sure. caroline: we will keep a close eye on how valuation reacts. and indeed, the users. kurt wagner, thank you so much. coming up, promising studies from merck on a covid-19 pill. but will the fda fda approve it? and how could it change the future in fighting the virus? that is next. this is bloomberg. ♪

caroline: let's talk biotech. let's talk about the potential breakthrough in the treatment for covid-19. merck is looking for emergency use authorization from the fda for a pill that it says could cut hospitalizations in half. >> this little pill is molnupiravir merck's new , antiviral pill. the medication has been shown to reduce the risk of hospitalizations or deaths by about half. it is the promise of a drug that is easy to get and take home, that has people excited. >> you could potentially have it at home, which is the thing. if you can keep people out of hospital, particularly when they are infectious, they are infected, you can give them

something that reduces their risk by at least half, even in high-risk groups, potentially under 20% of people in hospital. as evening seven out of 100 people end up in hospital. -- suv that seven out of 100 people end up in hospital. reporter: so, how does it work? by inhibiting the replication of covid, from a mechanism that reproduces the virus's genetic material to make mistakes. >> it is about catching people and they have an infection and they don't have the overwhelming immune response. you have to catch them before that point. testing and identification is really critical. then you have the way of catching people that don't respond to medication. reporter: a course of mono peer review will cost -- molnupiravir will cost $700 per patient according to media reports. are there side effects? interim analysis found no increase adverse effects, only 1.3% of participants taking the drug quit the therapy due to an

adverse event, compared to three .4% in the placebo group. still, mono peer review will need to be --molnupiravir will need to be assessed in a larger group of patients to properly determine safety. merck plans to make 10 million treatment courses available by the end of the year. with more to say is slated for 2022. still, it will not replace vaccination, which remains the most effective shield against covid. caroline: great intro. let's discuss more as they hope to get fda clearance by halloween. less than three weeks to go. about lancaster is with us, bloomberg's health reporter. the likelihood of getting it in this timeframe -- talk to us about the prospects of this bill. >> the fda, the u.s. food and drug administration is having a busy few weeks, looking at booster shots from moderna and johnson & johnson, looking at

pediatric vaccines with the pfizer vaccine and now they have this application from merck, the first potential anti-covid pill, potentially a big advance because really, it is so much more convenient and easier to take a pill for a virus than what we have right now, which are either remdesivir, which is where gilead drug, or monoclonal antibodies that you have to go and get infused. that is more difficult. the problem is, a fast-moving highly infectious virus, you need to treat people right away. so having a pill that you can take it home that is in every drugstore, eventually, that could make things much, much easier. ultimately, what they are gunning for, think of tamiflu, the influenza drug. they are gunning for something like that. but for covid. merck is likely to be just the first. caroline: the mental image of it being available in any pharmacy, it cost a lot of money. how will they be able to square that circle?

robert: it is not clear what the market is going to look like in the long term. that cost is not a commercial cost, that is what the u.s. government is paying for the first initial batch of doses, $1.2 billion in supply, one -- $1.2 billion in the supply deal provided by the u.s. government in one point 7 million courses. how it would look like in the long term as commercial product is not clear, but if the price stays the same in the commercial market long-term, that could in theory hinder broader use. there are others coming out potentially. we are waiting results from a pfizer pill that they are testing in large-scale trials. there is another pill, others that could potentially be coming soon. this could be the first. it could be a significant new market. right now, this merck pill was tested in unvaccinated patients , with the potential for the broader market long-term, you

could even use this as a prophylactic. if someone gets sick in your family or in your household, say your three-year-old child gets sick with covid, you don't have to be quarantined, everyone in the family could quickly be prescribed these pills. that has to be shown as a potential future market. caroline: really interesting take. robert langreth, thank you for the analysis. we will look at the future of gaming coming up. this is bloomberg. ♪

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caroline: this is "bloomberg technology." i am caroline hyde in for emily chiang. today's market movers, kriti gupta has the breakdown. kriti: earnings season is upon us. it kicks off this week. something to keep in mind, on a macro level to watch is those earnings revisions levels. 89% b rate in the last earnings season. can we keep that up? so far it seems like we are losing some of that upward

momentum to revisions. this week will be crucial for banks, in terms of what kind of tone they set as we eventually get to some of those biotech and tech companies we are waiting for. the intraday action, looking at subsectors in particular, a negative day. i want to highlight the last-minute move over the last 30 minutes of trading. nasdaq biotech and the golden dragon with chinese adrs were pretty positive for the majority of the trading day. the golden dragon index hasn't had that great of a time but a lot of that had to do with the meituan food delivery company in china, really getting a lesser than expected fine from beijing on some of their antitrust practices. interesting to see if that momentum continues. i want to end with a subsector that was actually my first beat, video games. we remember last year when the videogame stocks were surging

because people at home, people were spending more time and more money towards some of these platforms. we had seen the trendline come down. i want to compare it to ubisoft, lagging. the likes of activision and take2. caroline: interesting moves. kriti, fantastic. thank you. we will talk more about gaming and playing in the meta-verse. axios infinity coupled with blockchains, there are real rewards for playing. now the popular korean show, "great game." -- the popular korean show "squid game," you can experience the gut wrenching twist yourself on roadblocks. -- on roblox.

it is expanding into the meta-verse. our guest is a gaming ceo. it is great to have time with you. talk to us about the transition of 2d entertainment into 3d, ar. how much does this link the entertainment world and the gaming world? ann: thank you for having me. i used to run marketing for thousands of retail locations around the world, and if i could fast-forward to the current person i am today, the message would be loud and clear. i think any brand out there, if you don't have a meta-verse play happening, you need to think about it. it is the one way you can connect to this young audience of gamers right where they are with their passion in inorganic and natural way, and create a relationship around your brand, one that carries over from digital to physical. it is really the kind of modern ad model that is at play.

caroline: ok, so if i am playing "squid games" on roblox, you just made an acquisition in an ad platform. you must be thinking about how you make the experience organic. ann: absolutely. there is a company we purchased that has relationships with 75 of the top roblox game titles. reaching 25 million monthly players. so it is just a massive footprint inside the roblox metaverse. there are two primary ways we interact with those brands and connect them. the first is if we have added units embedded in the game. just like if you are playing the game and you are running outside inside the universe, you will pass a billboard, right? just like if you were driving in your car down the road. but we can take it a step further. so recently, we did an activation with nickelodeon for a new tv show they were launching and we did a 10 day takedown of the game where we read the game around the characters in the new nickelodeon show, and in those 10 days, we drove 50 million players to that game, and that a

creditor about 164 years of game play in that 10-day period, all around those who love nickelodeon characters. caroline: talk about advertising inherently within gaming. there has been a lot of pushback about advertising within social media and the ethics that are involved. how are you taking that, thinking ahead of the game? ann: absolutely. a big piece of super league has always been about the market democratizing good gaming. we have a high bar on code of conduct. we have about 5 million strong registered young players on some of our owned and operated properties so we take compliance seriously. we are not pushing products in these games from these brands. we are integrating the experience and enhancing the experience. when i talked about the nickelodeon example, there were ways you could unlock cool game modes and you got benefits through that experience we created around the characters.

caroline: talk about super league gaming. it brings alive experiences directly to gamers out there. i'm interested in how that is looking live e-sports, bringing , crowds together, what we were seeing in its early innings, put on ice. is it coming back? ann: i have talked openly to investors about this on earning calls. in the early days, we ran e-sports tournaments as one way to aggregate players and create content around them. but super league is so much more than esports. now i had said before on bloomberg that the notion that e-sports is just a 3 billion-dollar industry for the next couple years, i jokingly said i wouldn't get out for bed for that, and i wouldn't. i think there is so much more potential for esports, but it is only days in this scenario. what you will see super league doing with the roblox acquisition is lining up with that. when we told investors is that we would increasingly take on a

bigger share of the meta-verse. we would have an underpinning of creator economies, so we are thinking more broadly beyond e-sports and when our roblox game designers participate in the ad model, they get the action for that. democratizing as well as monetizing the content is a big step for the company. and the other thing, this is a modern app. we are talking about $25, $30 cpm and deep engagement. those are the three lanes i told investors, if we do inorganic growth, you will see us lean into those. luckily for us, the company we had partnered with previously checked every one of those boxes. caroline: deep engagement from an inclusive audience. use it here as a female ceo,

many have been shining a light on how little women are winning some of these big e-sports competitions, or even playing in them. they are not often places to go to for people who aren't basically white guys. how are you opening that up? ann: that is what drew me to super league. i needed to go through my own education of who a gamer is these days. gaming is beautifully diverse. it is a level playing field on the gender side of things, even with the furloughs, a physically -- even with the right peripherals, a physically-challenged player can level up and play against people who don't have those challenges. so there is something that is very fair and exclusive about it, and we saw an opportunity to build a brand that actually stood for that. and also, frankly, it is just a smart business model, because there are 3 billion gamers on the planet just in the united states alone, 45% of those players are women. we want to speak to the widest audience of players and creators and streamers who use our tools and work with our platform because we want to reach the , biggest pro-sumer dollar base out there as well, so that we

can really scale the company. caroline: super league ceo ann hand, really great to have some time with you. meanwhile, more content. the new james bond movie opened as the number one film in north america in theaters. still "no time to die" smashed , pandemic opening records, taking in an estimated $56 million at the box office. not as strong as some were predicting. coming up, making employment leave less messy. we speak with xyz venture capital partner, and a startup ceo about how they want to help you take paid leave. this is bloomberg. ♪

caroline: have you ever tried taking leave from work, whether it be parental, medical, caregiver, even bereavement? quite often, you might have found things are pretty tough and complicated. the process to deal with, requiring you to navigate company, the government, the insurance laws. this is where cocoon comes in, a new employee leave platform. it wants to supply all of it. i am pleased to say that cocoon ceo is with us, mahima chawla, , and the xyz venture capital partner chauncey kerr hamilton. i want to talk about expansion plans and the ways in which you are raising funding at the moment. what birthed this company? why did cocoon have to be made? >> thanks for having us. cocoon got founded when we saw a lot of our friends and coworkers go through really tough leave experiences. as you pointed out, whether it is medical leave, caregiver

leave, parental, bereavement, the process is so complicated for the individual going on leave, navigating different leave laws, figuring out how to get paid, filing different claims. also really complicated for the employer navigating a lot of leave claims for employees spread across the state, the country, even other countries, and figuring out complicated payroll calculations. after we heard how difficult it was to take leave and how much went into the admin of leave, instead of focusing on the reason you are taking leave, we realized there had to be a better way to do that especially in this day and age. and so we set out to rebuild that experience that makes it simple and straightforward for the individual and easy for the employer as well, to allow their employees to take leave. caroline: and of course, chauncey how much do you see the , demand going for this? how much do you see the necessity particularly in the u.s.?

shockingly, it is the only developed nation that doesn't have a mandatory paid leave, but the administration is shining a light on this, and maybe we'll see some change at the government level. >> i certainly hope so, caroline. when i first met mahima and lauren and amber and what they were building, i immediately wanted to work with them. this was not only a product that i knew needed to be built first hand, i met her when i was five months pregnant with my second child and i had already taken parental leave. any new how opaque the process is. i could see the demand on the employer side. i think it is table stakes for employers to offer competitive leave packages, whether it is parental, medical, bereavement leave and when we went to go do due diligence on this investment, there was immense pull and it was something we needed to be involved from the first day.

caroline: mahima, when people are working from home partially and when there is also such a need that we have seen in the covid crisis, the caregiving crisis basically, whether it be mother with children unable to go into school, or the father looking after elderly loved ones or those who fell ill from covid, how have you managed to adapt to that? how much bigger is the market becoming, day in, day out? >> i think leave is not a new problem. it has always been challenging for somebody to take a leave, but doing covid, two things happen. one, there was a lot more distributed workforces. so when employers thought about, i have an employee in california taking caregiver leave and one in washington taking an organ donor leave spread out across the country and even other countries, i think the process of administering a leave policy got more complicated. that was one huge factor. the other, covid actually changed employees' mindset.

it made employees realize what they really want is for their employers to step up in this really big life moments. these moments may happen infrequently but when they happen, you need that help and support. i think the expectation of the role that an employer plays really changed in covid. caroline: what are perhaps some of the challenges? we talked about the opportunities but the challenges about growing these businesses, scaling them and ensuring that companies want to enroll them and help iron out these difficulties. >> i haven't seen any of those challenges yet. i mean, there is immense full pull for this product in the middle market, which is where cocoon is selling into. i think the only challenge we might foresee in the days to come is how many companies can we onboard, and how quickly can we onboard them? because a truly, i think that the perspective around benefits has shifted so significantly since the pandemic, that

companies know that in order to retain and attract talent, they really need to have a competitive benefit offering, and that it has to include a better grade family and medical -- better-paid family and medical leave. caroline: what tends to be the biggest pain point? obviously the nature of it, but sometimes it is filling your role when you leave, ensuring that you leave the company in a strong place when you are exiting. for the employer, what are key pain points? >> for the employer, a lot of it boils down to compliance, being compliant with the many, many changing leave laws at the federal and state level, a huge component is pay for employees can come from a lot of different sources. some pay might be coming from the state of california or washington, some may be coming from me disability provider. the company is then trying to figure out, what is our pay policy, how much do we owe this employee, what does that mean

for taxes? there is the administrative output that becomes hard for an employer and when their time get sucked into that, there is less room for empathy around leave in terms of supporting that employee who is going out or supporting the manager making sure the team is set up for success. with cocoon we are trying to take away the admin and the headache and stress so that for the employee, it can be straightforward and they can focus on the leave, and the employer, can focus on supporting the employee in the ways they needed roast. caroline: can you see the federal landscape making things easier in any way, or will it always be difficult on a state-by-state level, let alone international businesses? >> no argument. i think as the u.s., compared to our peer countries has one of the worst leave policies. because we don't have one. and so i am really hopeful that our policymakers can get something passed that would offer every american the opportunity to have paid family

and medical leave. i think it is table stakes. after this pandemic, people are tired. we want to take care of our loved ones and have the space to take care of our own health, the space to take care of our children. so i am really, really hoping that we see some action on this front soon. caroline: fascinating conversations, cocoon ceo mahima chawla, and xyz venture capital partner chauncey kerr hamilton. amazing the steps being taken and the intricacies they go into building the product. how squid game is taking over the world. what that means for netflix. that is next. ♪

>> the apple watch is here with a bigger screen and full keyboard.

but unfortunately, you still can't use the device without an iphone. a decade ago, steve jobs outlined that every major apple device should be standalone and synced directly with the cloud instead of another hub device. as anyone with an apple watch notice, you still can't buy one, set it up from the product itself and download all your data from the cloud. that limits the potential user base of the apple watch and it, of course, who may want to just own and applewatch plus an ipad or mac and even one day, people who want to use an apple watch as their only computing device. with much larger screens, independent apps, faster processors, new developer tools and the ability to connect to cellular networks, the time is now for apple to allow customers to buy an apple watch and set it up without connecting it to an iphone. making the watch a completely independent device could make the product a bigger part of apple's product portfolio, increase sales, and expand to customers outside the apple ecosystem, even those with

phones that run android. i am mark gurman. this is "power on." ♪ caroline: and you can sign up for mark's weekly "power on" newsletter at bloomberg.com. let's talk about the biggest pop culture trend in the last couple weeks that i haven't yet viewed, "squid game." the korean show is on pace to be the biggest hit in the history of netflix. it is the most popular show in over 90 countries unprecedented , for any television show ever. our reporter joins us now to talk about this phenomenon, and a phenomenon it is, i think i have seen it more on social media than on tiktok. but i haven't viewed it on netflix yet. what is it about the scale, the network effect that netflix can bring international hits? >> with netflix, they have over 200 million paid subscribers, and they are scattered all throughout the world. when they have a show that

really catches on, they are able to reach so many people in so many countries in a way that almost no other media company can, because media is often localized. netflix has a global network that allows it to become an international phenomenon. caroline: i think of the one i reviewed for a bit, but i didn't love it as much as everyone. "money heist" came on and that was a spanish-speaking. it became incredibly popular, scarlet fu loves it and tells me about it. how do they pick these winners? are they picked to a certain extent? does it just rise through the algorithm naturally or do they shine a spotlight on the ones they think will have cross-country international winning formula? >> it happens both ways. with shows they spend a lot of money on, like "stranger things," they do spotlight and market it heavily to try to get the viewer metrics. but with "squid game" it didn't

seem like they did that, it was more random. it caught onto the algorithm and people watching it, people sharing on social media and all of this word-of-mouth contagion. sometimes you get surprise hits because they have so many shows and one catches five. "squid game" didn't have as much money spent on it as "bridgerton" did, for example. caroline: to that end what about , from a bottom-line perspective? ross: with international shows, that is great for netflix because they are trying to diversify the revenues. right now, 40% of their revenues come from the united states and only 10% from asia. so getting a big hit from a , south korean studio is great for them because in the future, they want to have more than 10% of the revenue coming in the

-- coming from the asian market. caroline: "the great british bakeoff" has caught the attention of my american colleagues. of course, i have been watching it for years in the u.k. how much does this stop people from jumping somewhere else? can disney plus and amazon repeat the formula? ross: with these shows, i think a lot of them are to reduce churn. netflix in the u.s. has so many subscribers, they aren't adding many. they want to focus on stopping people from canceling and having more international hits increases the time people spend on the platform or reduces their likelihood of canceling. but it also allows them to expand in those markets where they have a small share of their revenue. now, if other countries can repeat that formula, i am not sure. netflix has been good about giving local producers and directors autonomy to create the shows they want for those markets. if a media company is very

heavy-handed and one stinks to conform to a pre-existing intellectual property, that can be a tougher sell internationally. caroline: good point. ross benes, great to heavy on, emarketer analyst. that does it for this edition of "bloomberg technology." tomorrow, we will talk all things crypto. i'm caroline hyde in new york. this is bloomberg. ♪

manus: this is bloomberg daybreak medalist. asian stocks click on concerns about elevated inflation. we are joined by the ceo for his vith