While Netflix's subscriber base looks set to expand, changes at the United States Postal Service in regards with higher fees and elimination Saturday mail delivery could deliver a serious blow to the fine tuned Netflix's business model.

Netflix is in many ways the epitome of the 21st century company: It's based in Silicon Valley, it sells its services exclusively online, and it employs a hip bit of Web-speak in its name. But even as it boasts many of the trappings of a New Economy juggernaut, Netflix is still almost entirely reliant on that most 19th century of institutions: the United States Postal Service. Indeed, Netflix is the Postal Service’s biggest corporate customer. Read more


While it makes a perfect sense to charge for content, I am afraid that public is already spoiled enough and expects all content to be Free.

The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their websites in June, owner News International (NI) has announced. Users will pay £1 for a day's access and £2 for a week's subscription. Read more


Contrary to the claim on Apple site, I found MOV container incompatible with iPod Touch Browser. I had no problem with MOV on iPhone. They share the same OS, but browsers are different.


Internet, Tech Buzz
UserpicCisco unveiled new Internet technology CRS-3
Posted by Moxietype

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Cisco unveiled a new Internet technology Tuesday that it says will provide the ultra-fast data speeds necessary to stay ahead of users' rapidly growing online video demands.

The new technology, known as "CRS-3," is a network routing system that will be able to offer downloads of up to 322 Terabits per second, according to the company.

Translation: Well in Cisco terms, the router will be able to provide download speeds of 1 Gigabit per second for everyone in San Francisco, download the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress in 1 second and stream every movie ever created in less than 4 minutes.

Full article


E-Commerce
UserpicHulu Is Facing Hard Choices
Posted by Sasha

Hulu's days as a free online video site could be ending soon.

Comedy Central's decision to yank two of the most popular shows on Hulu — "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" — in a dispute over splitting ad revenue is the latest blow to the entertainment industry's attempts to make money off ads that run with free video.

Chase Carey, chief operating officer of Hulu co-owner News Corp., has said that the site would have to start charging for some video eventually, though he and other officials have been mum about when that would happen and what aspects would remain free.

Read more


 The Tribeca Film Festival, according to the article at NYT, has aspirations to distribute films digitally and in theaters under the Tribeca name.


An Italian court has convicted three Google executives in a trial over a video showing an autistic teenager being bullied. The video showing an autistic teenager being bullied was posted on Google Video in 2006 shortly before the firm acquired YouTube.

Prosecutors argued that Google broke Italian privacy law by not seeking the consent of all the parties involved before allowing it to go online.

Read more

 


The QuickTime Player for Windows makes it possible to view and listen to many different types of media, including audio and video "embedded" in web pages. Firefox and other Mozilla browser users often ask why they are told that additional plugins are needed for content that QuickTime can handle, when the QuickTime Player is already installed. In most cases, it's just a matter of enabling the QuickTime browser plugin for a particular MIME type

Read complete instructions


Contrary to the previous reports, Ferran Adria of El Buli announced that the restaurant, considered by many to be the world’s greatest, will close permanently in part after losing nearly 500,000 euros per year.


Apple, Business, DRM, E-Commerce
UserpicHollywood and the Internet
Posted by Sasha

DVD sales have fallen from $12 billion in 2004 to $8.7 billion in 2009. It appears that consumers have embraced the cut-throat rates of Redbox, which poses a threat not only to Hollywood, but also to another rental darling, Netflix. Hence the inspiration and hope of online sales. "This week the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), a consortium that includes five of the six big studios as well as technology firms and retailers, agreed on a format for digital films and named a single outfit to keep track of purchases," according to the Economist from January 9th, 2010. One small problem, though. DECE is not keeping Apple in the loop and trying to carve out their own way of distributing media. Needless to say, anybody who is slightly familiar with Apple, iPod or iPhone and particularly its growth with the younger segment of population should notice some very serious flaws on the behalf of big studios. It does seems that history repeats itself if one would think back to the not so recent past with the advent of copy protected CDs and various other formats to keep the music out of people's iPods.


Apple has been floating a $30 per month television subscription service. It remains unclear if it will be all-you-can-eat service or if television companies will insist on metering. It also remains unclear  if content providers who remain resistant to change will be willing to open up to a wider audience instead of making lucrative deals with service provers such as Time Warner, AT&T and Comcast.


Hard pressed to find an alternative revenue stream due to the global advertising recession and reported thirst for more venture funding, Facebook is ready to devote an entire team to Facebook Payments Operations.

The social network is seeking a "Payment Operations Strategist" to "work cross-functionally with the Product and Engineering teams to design tools and systems to serve our hundreds of millions of users and our ever-growing base of advertisers," as well as a risk management specialist to be based in its Dublin, Ireland, office to handle billing, payment, and security operations in European and Middle Eastern countries.

"Projects driven by Payment Operations team members will potentially contribute millions of dollars to Facebook's business, as well as enable the company to scale and expand its operations in the coming years," the careers site explained.


Lindsay Robertson gives a list of DOs and DONTs in online publicity. A must read. Below are my favorite DONTs.

1. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE means FOR IMMEDIATE DELETE to any blogger with any influence. Period.

4. Don’t Lie Part 2: Stop Being Days Behind on Your Own Announcements, And Don’t Try to Cover it Up

Don’t wait on announcing new content - the blogosphere will find it on its own (we have these things called google alerts). Or worse, for the love of god, do not EVER send an email saying that something has just been posted (like a movie trailer, for example - this happens daily), when it’s actually been on the internet for more than, say, an hour. If you’re sending it to anyone with any idea what they’re doing, they saw your trailer (and, often, posted it on the blog you’re trying to court) DAYS AGO. And if for some reason they, I don’t know, took one day off from the internet and actually BELIEVE you that something is new and post it when it’s not, they will hate you and your company forever. Forever.


Faux pas revealed during the interview with an anonymous Facebook employee, such as master passwords, keeping data after it has been deleted and eye tracking are all business as usual for anybody ever involved in developing social media platforms. Yet, master password sounds really redundant since all the data is stored on the back end. Indefinitely. At least for now.

Employee: It’s really hard to judge exactly the way users are going to react. We just didn’t have a good enough beta-testing system in place. When you have a group of twenty engineers working on a project, they think it’s the most beautiful, immaculate thing in the world, and then they build it, and a project manager approves it. Initially, when that was the case, we just pushed it, and if users didn’t like it we pulled it back. That was just our philosophy, one of trial and error. Whereas now we’ve started running psychological analysis, starting to…

Rumpus: Oh really?

Employee: Fuck yeah. Are you kidding me? We do eye-tracking to see where your eyes move while you browse Facebook.


While Blockbuster stock is in jeopardy of being delisted by The New York Stock Exchange and web site 27/7WallSt.com listed Blockbuster among the 10 most likely brands to be extinct in 2010, Blockbuster has no intentions of going away quietly.

According to Home Media Magazine "Blockbuster Inc. — the venerable brand some believe to be as relevant as the pager — is about to reinvent itself as a one-stop shop for home enetertainment." Blockbuster will unveil additional Consumer Electronics partnerships, including high-definition televisions that feature an internal Blockbuster widget, which is supposed to enable consumers to rent or buy movies electronically. For example, consumers who download a Blockbuster rental will be able to pause the movie and play it later on other connected devices.

It appears that Blockbuster still doesn't understand the shifts in the technology, which enable consumer to break their dependance from the devices such as TiVo, etc. and play a movie on one single device, such as their computer or iPod for viewing on demand.


Mobile Internet
UserpicDigital TV Goes Small
Posted by Sasha

It is not a novelty for iPhone or iPod users, but now it is becoming a mainstream. Digital TV goes from big to small.

Now that most of us have our digital big-screens TVs, it's time to go the other direction: Mobile digital TV means small is beautiful, and maybe more importantly, ready to go when and where you do.


Netflix U.S. Patent No. 6,584,450. is definitely a fascinating read for a technology aficionado:

4. "MAX OUT"

According to one embodiment, a "Max Out" approach is used to manage the number of items that may be simultaneously rented to customers. According to the "Max Out" approach, up to a specified number of items may be rented simultaneously to a customer. Thus, the "Max Out" approach establishes the size of an inventory of items that may be maintained by customers. The specified number of items may be specific to each customer or may be common to one or more customers. In the present example, if the specified number of items is three, then up to three items may be rented simultaneously by provider 104 to customer 102. If the specified number of items are currently rented to customer 102 and the specified item delivery criteria triggers the delivery of one or more additional items, then those items are not delivered until one or more items are returned by customer 102 to provider 104.

According to one embodiment, in situations where the specified number of items are currently rented to customer 102 and the specified item delivery criteria triggers the delivery of one or more additional items, then the one or more additional items are delivered to customer 102 and customer 102 and a surcharge is applied customer 102. The specified number of items may then be increased thereafter to reflect the additional items delivered to customer 102 and increase the size of the inventory maintained by customer 102. Alternatively, the specified number of items may remain the same and number of items maintained by customer 102 returned to the prior level after items are returned to provider 104 by customer 102. When used in conjunction with the "Max Turns" approach described hereinafter, the specified number of items may be unlimited.

Keep reading the rest of Method and apparatus for renting items at US Patent and Trademark Office.


E-Commerce
UserpicDigital Piracy Hits E-Books
Posted by Sasha

On Amazon.com, Dan Brown's blockbuster novel "The Lost Symbol" sold more digital copies for the Kindle e-reader in its first few days than hardback editions. Within days, it had been downloaded from file-sharing sites such as Rapidshare and BitTorrent for free more than 100,000 times. In interview with CNN Ana Maria Allessi, publisher for Harper Media at HarperCollins told that

"we have to be vigilant in our punishment ... but much more attractive is to simply make the technology better, legally."

E-book technology offers so many positives for both the author and the consumer that any revenue lost to piracy may just be a necessary evil, she said.

"Consumers who invest in one of these dedicated e-book readers tend to load it up and read more," said Allessi. "And what's wrong with that?"


Advertising, Offbeat
UserpicFree Broadcast Might Go the Way of VHS Tape
Posted by Moxietype

NEW YORK - For more than 60 years, TV stations have broadcast news, sports and entertainment for free and made their money by showing commercials. That might not work much longer.

Read more


Offbeat
UserpicThe Year 2009 in Media Errors
Posted by Sasha

The top prizes are going like usual to the British publications.

British Medical Journal:

During the editing of this Review of the Week by Richard Smith (BMJ 2008;337:a2719,doi:10.1136/bmj.a2719), the author’s term “pisshouse” was changed to “pub” in the sentence: “Then, in true British and male style, Hammond met Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, in the pub and did a deal.” However, a pisshouse is apparently a gentleman’s toilet, and (in the author’s social circle at least) the phrase “pisshouse deal” is well known. (It alludes to the tendency of men to make deals while standing side by side and urinating.) In the more genteel confines of the BMJ Editorial Office, however, this term was unknown and a mistake was made in translating it into more standard English. We apologise for any misunderstanding this may have caused.

Daily Mirror (U.K.):

ON 17 July 2008 in our front page article “Ron the Lash” we falsely reported that whilst recovering from an operation to his ankle Cristiano Ronaldo had “gone on a bender” at a Hollywood nightclub where he splashed out pounds 10,000 on champagne and vodka and threw his crutches to the ground and tried to dance on his uninjured foot. We now accept that Cristiano did not “go on a bender”, did not drink any alcohol that evening, did not spend pounds 10,000 on alcohol, nor throw his crutches to the floor or try to dance.

Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.

The Sun (U.K.):

IN a report on May 5, 2009, headlined “Riddle of Boruc, the brunette and his hair straighteners”, we claimed that Artur Boruc had brought two girls to the house he shares with partner Sara Mannei and had sex with one of them. We published a picture which we said showed him straightening one of the girls’ hair. We now accept the picture was in fact of Mr Boruc and his younger sister Paulina in Poland some years earlier, and that neither did Mr Boruc invite back nor have sex with either of the girls in our story. We apologise to Mr Boruc and Ms Mannei for any embarrassment caused.