Peter larson, Vice President of amazon kindle, spoke at the event. What can you watch on fire tv . It has a ton of content. From amazon instant video, primates and video, hulu plus, watch espn, showtime, major league baseball, nba, the disney channels, bloomberg tv, youtube. It is the easiest place to watch netflix. You can catch bloomberg west on there, of course. The move also escalates a rivalry with netflix and other streaming services that are developing exclusive content. Now, the big question is, who will win the battle for your living room . Cory johnson and i spoke with brad stone about what fire tv really means for amazon. Amazon has actually been thinking about a set top boxes the end of 2011. It has been a long journey. The question was always, what are the big ideas going to be . How will it raise the bar on roku, on apple tv . Watch james bond movie and by the watch. Maybe that is coming, but version one amazon does not have it. Apparently fire tv has better search capabilities. Listen to this commercial with gary ducey. Find gary busey. It seems so simple, but is a big deal or is it incremental as you said. To people really want to search . Sometimes you have to go through the keyboard off a bit to do it could we will see how well the technology works. You start to see all these companies coming together with the same kinds of stuff very at i am curious about the game thing. Do you get the sense that games as an afterthought . It is one of the ways they think they can distinguish this product. The Amazon App Store does not have a great selection of games. Does not have the google place door. In typical amazon fashion, theyre creating their own parity bill custodio they build their own studio. Look, hardcore gamers want to play hardcore games. They dont want to play they want to play bio shock, not mine craft. Whether it is on gaming or Something Like imdb, which is a place where you find everything about actors in the entertainment business these days. Jeff bezos made a big push on the idea when youre watching films or finding out who the actors to imdb, i dont know necessarily of people are using those services in a big way. Bezos wasnt there today. Would he think about that . They presented him these things every month. It wasnt even dave limp that handles all the events. It was pete larson. It is not going to get the attention that the kindle fire and the kindle ereaders have gotten in terms of big promotional holiday time launchers. What about the apple closed ecosystem versus this android open ecosystem. How big a difference does that make. Definitely, take a player like netflix, for example. If youre using netflix on a device like a roku device. There are limitations if youre using netflix through apple. I think that is an interesting differentiator between apple tv and roku. Are the content creators changing their focus from whatever they might have been trying to develop for cable into thinking about selling shows to people that will pay a lot of money for it . You saw that showtime is part of this announcement. I think it is really important for them, if they can work out the deals, hbo is not a part of this announcement today. Maybe theres something behind the scenes we dont know about to be on these different platforms, the content players do not want to make their cable friends angry, because they get paid a lot of money to put their content there. They also dont want to get left in the dust. People using these new devices in a big way, they want to make sure they have an app. When you look at the battle for the living room and the different players, is it an equal Playing Field right now . Does somebody have the upper hand . The upper hand is held by the msos, comcast and direct tv. Americans watch more than five hours of the stuff per day. Customers arent really cutting the cord in huge numbers. Programmers still love to bundle their channels together and sell them. So it is still the oscars, still baseball, football and until amazon or apple or google can write a huge check some of these services are nice addon. That set top box will be place on top of the big comcast settop box. But if you ask what happened when Google Chrome cast launched, he said their sales continue to go up. Larson said that one of their advantages they have all these customer reviews of the settop boxes. The best reviews by far are those for the chrome cast. There are these new devices that people stood to hear what theyre all about. They like them, theyre not much money. Chrome cast is 35. Consumer start to learn about these. It is a nobrainer that this market is growing. I want to know what it means for the quality of content, too. It is something of a golden age of tv where we have these great shows in numbers that we havent had before. You have house of cards and sopranos and the wire. You have kids stuff which some say is better than it has ever been. All of these things are happening at the same time. Does this mean more money is going jons way into hollywood . Look at the second batch of pilots. They were so much better than the first batch. You have the shows like mozart in the jungle about the new york city symphony. It was really good. You couldnt say that about any of the other batch of shows. I think chris carter of the xfiles not of the minnesota vikings. You get these guys confused. Maybe not viewers quite yet, but that was bloomberg businessweeks brad stone and our senior west coast correspondent, Jon Erlichman with cory johnson. Fans of the xfiles will soon be able to watch more from creator chris carter. The new show, the after is next. Welcome back to the best of bloomberg west. Im emily chang. Amazon is creating original content, green lighting six new series. One of those shows is the after him cowritten and directed by chris carter, the creator of the xfiles. Jon erlichman and i asked him why he decided to comeback to do something for amazon. I had written something two years ago that i was excited about. It took me two years to ring it to the screen. Amazon was the first person who read it and loved it. That is why i am in business. Did you shop it to the networks, cable, netflix . You give it to your agents and they put it out there. Amazon responded to it immediately. The process has been a lengthy one. Chris, its Jon Erlichman. Lets talk about this idea of having highlights. Amazon is in very public. They are saying theyre putting a few shows out there for people to watch. They are very public about the feedback. As a creator, at a time when you have players like netflix that are willing to do these very big deals, should we assume that the approach of amazon in picking shows is quite different than what netflix is doing . Yes. This is the first time i ever experienced this sort of gladiator approach, which is really putting it out to the audience. They give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. It is the wisdom of crowds. I like to approach. We should highlight that while youre very much going down the amazon road, it is not the only road that you are on right now. Youre working with amc as well. What would you say is the primary difference between working with a player like amazon, and working with one of the very wellknown cable channels or broadcast networks that we know . It is not really different at all. Different personnel, different players, but he approach it has always been the same. It is to do something original, something smart. That is really how i approach my job and how everyone else approaches it, too. How did binge watching, or the ability to binge watch, change how you write or direct a show . This is my First Experience doing it exactly like this, giving people the opportunity to binge watch. Im not sure if amazon is going to put the show out there in exactly a way that you can binge watch it. We havent really talked about that approach yet for me it is the chance to also broadcast on a network. I am really looking forward to that for other reasons, including less restriction on what i can say and what i can show. Do think at all, when you are creating working on a storyline, do think about how people are viewing it . Does it change the nature of the storyline and the special effects, everything . No, it is the same approach. I was mindful when i was choosing an aspect ratio for the size of the picture, that most people will be watching it on a smaller screen. I imagined the ipad, for example, as a place where people i watch my streaming content on one. For me, the images have to be great. No matter what the size of the picture and where people watch it. Amazon has not given the public much information about their audience. I wonder if they have given more information to you. They have been at this original content think for a little bit of time. Not a lot of people can name a single amazon original show. They have not had nearly the success of a house of cards, or orange is a new black. How do you approach that . They are brandnew into the business. We are on the frontier here. I think their approach is really good. I dont know anything about the audience, but that is ok. My job is the same, to create great entertainment. Im happy to have a great patron like amazon. Chris, really quickly, i have to ask you and xfiles question. You said in the past that a movie may be in foxs hands. Will there be another xfiles movie . I dont know. I think everyone is game and everyone would love to do it. What is your favorite show on tv or streaming right now . That is a hard one. Theres so much great stuff third of course i love house of cards. I loved breaking bad. Vince gilligan worked on xfiles. I love it for that reason. It is a great show. I love mad men. Theres so much Great Television right now. There has been for the last over a decade, starting with the sopranos. So much good material has been on cable and is now streaming. Do have a preference between the settop boxes out there . No, just as long as anyone can get what i do. However together, if theres more opportunity, that is great for me. Chris carter, writer and director of the amazon original, after. Arianna huffington runs most one of the most successful websites in the world. Why would she encourage people to disconnect from their technology . The answers coming next on bloomberg west. Youre watching the best of bloomberg west. I am emily chang. Arianna huffington came out with a new book called thrive, calling for a new metric for success outside of money and power. One of the things she suggest we do to thrive is disconnect from technology, from our devices, from time to time. I asked her if it is possible to truly disconnect in a 24hour news cycle. Take a listen. Theres always somebody on. We have email policies. After hours, unless youre on the night shift of the weekend shift, youre not expected to answer a company email. If we need you, we will find you. That gives people the opportunity to really recharge. If you think of it, you dont pay people for their stamina, you pay them for the judgment. We have so many examples of impaired judgment when people are exhausted. Bill clinton is quoted in my book saying the worst mistakes i made are those i made when i was exhausted. The point is, we can all say that. I can say that about my life. I saw one headline about your book less leaning, more sleeping, obviously playing off of Sheryl Sandbergs book, lean in. I know you and sheryl are good friends. Sheryl has given a wonderful endorsement of the book. I think lean in is about me dealing with my own inner doubts, fears, especially fears of failure for women. And daring to dream big. Completely consistent with what im saying. We also need to lean back in order to recharge ourselves and the more effective and more productive and more creative. Especially here, in san francisco, in the valley. What is at a premium is creativity. The first thing that goes when we are burned out is our ability to be creative. Steve jobs famously said that it was after zen meditation that he could hear more subtle things. Some of his best ideas led to his best products after that. What is your philosophy . Can we have it all . First of all, you need to define for yourself what having it all means. That is different for each person. We need to stop just buying into cultural definitions about what is success is, what having it all means. We need to decide for yourself what really makes us happy. When it comes to continuing to build the Huffington Post, what do you want to do there and how do you plan to infuse the things that you have learned in this latest stage of your life . We are definitely making the changes i started describing in terms of the nap rooms, email policy, breathing exercise classes, etc. Also, we are growing globally. We are now at 95 million unique visitors and 45 around the world. Amazing. As we are growing at lunch and country to country, we are Holding Third metric conferences, thriving conferences in each country and looking at where the stress points are and where the new waves of doing things in each country are. Isnt going viral one of the ultimate symbols of success for news article . It depends on the value of the news article. Not just how important it is, but in how entertaining it is. I think it is very important to recognize that virality can become a fetish. Do think a buz feed and others as competition . Are they good or bad for media . I dont see other media entities as competition. Baryshnikov said i dont try to dance better than anyone else, i try to dance better than myself. I saw an interesting study by cisco that by 2017, the Media Business will either double or shrink, because a new content site can come out of nowhere. What do you think of that . It is a very different environment. It is very hard at the moment to create a destination site. Most of the traffic in this new content sites comes through social, from people sharing it and passing it along. We launched in 2005. And we still get a lot of our material through social. Our homepage is very well trafficked as well. Now that aol is sort of evolving its business to more of an ad Services Business and not so much a content business, what does that mean for the Huffington Post . How much will aol continue to support the Huffington Post . Being acquired by aol has been great for both. It is been great for us because we are able to expand internationally. We come onto streaming network. We can launch many new sections around these issues, of how we live our best lives. It has been great for aol because they have a really innovative Media Company that they own, that has been a thought leader. My interview with Huffington Post cofounder arianna huffington. Was facebooks acquisition of oculus a waste of money . We have a new guest to talk about it when we come back. Welcome back to the best of bloomberg west. With facebooks 2 billion purchase of oculus, it appears Mark Zuckerberg has plans to change our everyday experience. Some think the acquisition was not really worth it. I spoke about the deal with george zachary. Listen to what he has to say. The oculus rift is the rift between 2 billion and something of value. We coined the term Virtual Reality in 1989. What has he said about this . His perspective is that it will not really change anything. All of us that worked together at bpl, we knew there were certain problems that were unsolved by commercial companies as well as the military. One of them had to do with the fact that the human brain has evolved for your eyes and ears to be correlated in motion. For example, motion sickness is when your ears are moving or your ears are picking up motion, but your eyes are not. It is simulator sickness we are your eyes are detecting motion but your ears are not. Your brain cannot make sense of what is going on. No one can figure out how to fix this. Youre saying our brain is not ready for Virtual Reality. It is ready for augmented reality. Theyre not really ready for this form of entertainment. So why did Mark Zuckerberg buy it . I think he did note is buying, number one. Then he cut the currency of our stock value aside. The number three thought maybe they couldnt reinvigorate the gaming franchise. Reminds us about geocities. That was quite a phenomenon. It was supposed to transform yahoo into this nextgen portal. No one uses that word any longer. Geocities was an early social network. It was a pile website. It sounded exciting on the front, but it never materialized into a substantial business. I believe oculus will be the same for facebook. How do you see facebook evolving down the line . There are some discussion as to why he is making always acquisitions rather than building innovation from within. Do you see facebook as an enduring thing or is it going to fade . I dont believe anything in life is enduring. In terms of the endurance of Silicon Valley, i think facebook will be around for at least 10 years. Tell us more about the notion that Mark Zuckerberg in particular views stock is overvalued pages by stuff with because he can. Is that what youre saying . It is what i believe. When he stepped into the peak of a shared currency, like facebook, im thinking about individual stocks. In a bubble you have all stocks basically percolating up to their highs. When people get to that point, they start thinking day one use cash or do i want to use my stock . People are thinking they can use stock, because cash is still working is still worth something. What are you investing in now that you think is going to be the next big thing, if facebook is only going to be around for 10 more years. The truth is, i dont know what the next big thing will be after facebook. Almost every company ive ever invested in, when i met the founder, i had no preconceived notion that it was going to be big. After met the person, within 15 minutes i would say i have to invest in the first nine his idea. George zachary. Coming up, hbos taking on tech with its new series, Silicon Valley. We get our hands on an early copy and watch the show with insiders next on bloomberg west. Welcome back to the best of welcome back to the best of bloomberg west worried im emily chang. Hbos launching a new series this weekend on the tech boom called Silicon Valley. We watched the First Episode with some tech executives here in san francisco. Take a look at what som