There is a new series starting early next year. In the US you can only get it if you subscribe to the CBS streaming service. In other countries Netflix is getting it, and if your country doesn't have Netflix... BitTorrent.
This is not uncommon for the Star Trek franchise. The original series was on... CBS, I think, but the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine were fully syndicated. After that, Paramount started pulling back, because they were starting their own television network, UPN, and they needed a big draw to help prop it up, so Star Trek Voyager was one of the first UPN-only TV series. At my house we only barely got UPN. The picture quality was so poor it was almost unwatchable, after years of watching TNG and DS9 with no problem.
Streaming has killed Netflix. They're at the mercy of other companies who despise them, unlike the DVD business that built them, where they held the cards.
That has to be an American thing. I have never ever seen a DVD release at the same time as a cinema release here. To make things even worse - usually the American DVD release is about the same time that we can see it in cinemas here.
It's not an American thing either -- it's extremely rare for a -major- studio to release DVD/streaming versions of a movie here while it's still in first-run releases in this territory.
Make television and movies like music with compulsory licensing? Say anything five years and older gets put into the pool of things that can be broadcast/streamed as part of your service as long as you pay the base royalties. Have the same sort of setup as music does but with a much finer grained reporting. That way everyone that should get paid, is paid.
That's nice, but it doesn't seem like such a thing would pass a constitutional challenge. You can't force content studios to sell. I can't figure out where the legal rationale for that would be.
Netflix is becoming "just another TV network", becoming less of what everyone wants and more of what some people will pay for. Very depressing.
What's worse is that no one actually likes TV networks, and no one wants TV networks. They want to watch their favorite shows. The whole "we want a la carte cable plans!" discussion totally missed the point, because people want specific shows anyway. They don't want to watch "another great Netflix show!" Or "another Bravo winner!" They want one or two from here, one or two from there. Not an outdated concept like a TV network that exists for corporate organizational reasons.
There definitely needs to be a way for Netflix to purchase a license for any movie that exists and just stream it as much as they want, provided they only use a license for a single stream at a time
They do, but the movie studios hate that method. Sure, it brought them billions, but they still think that they got a bad deal. The reason this WILL NOT happen, and the reason Netflix's content has gotten squeezed, is the content studios are in love with pay per view. They don't want you to pay a reasonable fee for a show or movie and watch it as many times as you want. IE, you are not allowed to own a copy of a movie. They couldn't get pay-per-view with DVD.. it just wasn't technically feasible. But it is with online services.
They had already bought the movies. Storage for flat discs with no cases is somewhat cheap. If those discs are wearing out and need replaced it's because they're being used.
I think both of those assertions are not as correct as you think they are. Storage for flat discs is not that cheap when you have as huge a number as you do -- you need distribution centers, and you need staff to actually do the work. And the discs are not necessarily wearing out from use. They might be wearing out due to age. I think we overestimate the longevity of the average pressed disc, and the number of discs I've gotten recently that are unplayable but look pristine has risen. But most people I've found don't take good care of their discs. They leave them sitting out on a table without a sleeve, let their kids handle them, they get scratched and fingerprints, and it doesn't take much to make a DVD skip or unplayable.
But more than that, if a disc breaks or goes bad and its a disc that was on loan to subscribers most of the time, well that tends to be a net win. But if you have a disc sitting around for awhile and it finally goes out to someone and that someone reports it is broken, well you just took a big hit. The DVD subscription only works for them when the scaling happens on a massive level. But if they lose lots of DVD subscriptions, then the overhead costs for maintaining a massive catalog start to rise above the subscription fees and they have to find ways to cut back.
Some of us adults have children though. With a family of 5 is more challenging with the DVD service with only 3 DVDs at a time.
You can get more than 3 at time, but of course you have to pay for it. The current age is all about charging you a pretty high price depending on the amount of content you want to watch.
And your kids aren't like everyone else's kids, in that they want to watch one movie 20 times rather than just once?
But they are not united in the common goal of providing a great experience for consumers. They are united in the goal of bilking us out of as much money as possible.
The content creators are the same people who are on record as saying, for instance, that the DVD era was a disaster for the movie studios. That they charged way too low a price, and companies like blockbuster and netflix could just rent them out. They truly believe that that was a horrible time, and they aim to "fix" it by charging exorbitant rates for streaming.
yes indeed netflix MUST carry ALL content because why??? so what if you have to surf somewhere else to watch tv shows?
Because I don't want to pay $xxx/month for Netflix, of which I'll only watch a small portion. And I don't want to also pay $yyy/month for Amazon Prime when I only want to watch a few titles from there. And $zzz/month for Hulu. And more for HBO. I just want one streaming service and have all the things there.
Don't you realize that no one service is ever going to even possibly approach that?
Netflix does. But only in the DVD-by-mail business. Online streaming, you can't have this, because that's controlled by the content companies, and they will never not have their heads up their asses.
He hardly did any good movies since Happy Gilmore, aside from 50 First Dates. Most of them are soiled by his bizarre bathroom humor - like Big Daddy
I thought the Wedding Singer was ok. And Punch-Drunk Love was excellent. But that's a Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) movie, not an Adam Sandler movie. It's more a deconstruction of Sandler's previous characters. Punch Drunk Love was 14 years ago though. What of worth has he done since then? Spanglish, maybe?
Translation: Our library is really shitty and it's not going to get better.
Netflix has some good original content, but I didn't sign up for it to be the next HBO. All of that are steps in the wrong direction. I signed up for Netflix because of what it was: the best place to find almost any DVD I wanted. Look at the DVD/Blu-Ray selection versus their streaming selection. The streaming selection is pathetic. Online streaming SUCKS, and it's because the power was put back into the hands of the content owners, where it shouldn't belong. They will screw it up every time.
A whole bunch of California companies (Google, Intel, Disney, etc) recently lost a lawsuit when it was revealed that they colluded to not hire each others' employees.
On the other hand, some specific contracts are enforced -- I worked for a consulting company as a consultant at a client firm, and was not allowed to join that client firm as one of their employees until a full year after the consulting contract expired. Apparently that doesn't count as a "non-compete agreement."
Apparently you have read the article. Musk knows how to get to mars with colonists.
Musk can't figure out how to repeatedly launch SpaceX's rockets with them blowing up on the launch pad. Getting to Mars, hell, getting to the moon is a bit out of his reach.
Getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction is an economic no-brainer,but it's a political third rail
Of course it's a political third rail -- remove the mortgage interest deduction and you force millions of Americans out of there homes within a year. No one wants to be saddled with that level of boneheadedness. Most people were sold mortgages that carefully calculate what they can afford, and they decide whether a home is affordable or "too much" based on that.
The only way it could work is if it affects new mortgage purchases only -- and not refinances. But I can see a ton of ways to exploit such a system already.
The mortgage credit is a progressive deduction, so it positively affects low and middle income folks, since the mortgage interest deduction is likelier to be a higher percentage of their take-home interest. Eliminate those deductions and just lower taxes across the board, and those are the folks who will feel the pain.
Fake Downloads is a time tested tactic, but putting viruses, malware, etc into fake downloads opens them up to legal liability. So I'd say.. "unlikely."
Oh, you mean that checkbox (Block dangerous and deceptive content) any sane persons unticks after installing?
I've never unchecked that option and the few times it's ever blocked a site, it was actually a malicious site. Why not keep it checked, unless you're going to compromised sites?
I hear the anger in your voice, I can only imagine at what drives that, but I think an understanding of how a business works is missing from your stance here.
"without bias" I think everyone can agree to, excepting the ISPs
I think the ISPs can still be a private enterprise. I do NOT think that the pipes to the house should be privately operated, at all, because the system has a clear conflict of interest and destroys the competition that makes private enterprise work. The end pipes should be a utility like water and electricity.
"if, you, a provider faces congestion issues, it's your own fucking fault for overselling your resources too much." This is exactly what you are demanding they do.
I think it's fair to hold ISPs accountable to what they claim to be selling. If they have "unlimited access," then it should absolutely be unlimited access. Not "We said unlimited, but it's capped," or "well, you used up your hidden cap for the month so now your connection is getting slower," or even "we said 'unlimited,' but our fine print says we can put limits in anyway."
It's not about the users. The whole reason ISP's want to give preferential treatment to traffic is specifically so that they can force content providers to pay them for access to their customers. They want to pick the winners, punish competitors, and make money doing it. Anyone that thinks this is about improving the end user experience isn't paying attention.
It's also about simultaneously boosting their offerings and degrading anything "unapproved." One of the boons of the non-priority system is that anyone can create a "disruptive technology" and it will be on a similar footing with the established offerings. Think of, say, the Wild West Internet versus Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, and the other proprietary systems where the tools you used were approved by those networks. They were stagnant from day one.
Now the ISPs are looking to make their own offerings fast, their "partners" fast, and everything else slow. Of course, they won't say they're slowing down access for everything else, but having a "Fast, faster, fastest" scale is the same thing as having a "slow, medium, fast" scale.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a new series starting early next year. In the US you can only get it if you subscribe to the CBS streaming service. In other countries Netflix is getting it, and if your country doesn't have Netflix... BitTorrent.
This is not uncommon for the Star Trek franchise. The original series was on... CBS, I think, but the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine were fully syndicated. After that, Paramount started pulling back, because they were starting their own television network, UPN, and they needed a big draw to help prop it up, so Star Trek Voyager was one of the first UPN-only TV series. At my house we only barely got UPN. The picture quality was so poor it was almost unwatchable, after years of watching TNG and DS9 with no problem.
Streaming has killed Netflix. They're at the mercy of other companies who despise them, unlike the DVD business that built them, where they held the cards.
That has to be an American thing. I have never ever seen a DVD release at the same time as a cinema release here. To make things even worse - usually the American DVD release is about the same time that we can see it in cinemas here.
It's not an American thing either -- it's extremely rare for a -major- studio to release DVD/streaming versions of a movie here while it's still in first-run releases in this territory.
Make television and movies like music with compulsory licensing? Say anything five years and older gets put into the pool of things that can be broadcast/streamed as part of your service as long as you pay the base royalties. Have the same sort of setup as music does but with a much finer grained reporting. That way everyone that should get paid, is paid.
That's nice, but it doesn't seem like such a thing would pass a constitutional challenge. You can't force content studios to sell. I can't figure out where the legal rationale for that would be.
Netflix is becoming "just another TV network", becoming less of what everyone wants and more of what some people will pay for. Very depressing.
What's worse is that no one actually likes TV networks, and no one wants TV networks. They want to watch their favorite shows. The whole "we want a la carte cable plans!" discussion totally missed the point, because people want specific shows anyway. They don't want to watch "another great Netflix show!" Or "another Bravo winner!" They want one or two from here, one or two from there. Not an outdated concept like a TV network that exists for corporate organizational reasons.
There definitely needs to be a way for Netflix to purchase a license for any movie that exists and just stream it as much as they want, provided they only use a license for a single stream at a time
They do, but the movie studios hate that method. Sure, it brought them billions, but they still think that they got a bad deal. The reason this WILL NOT happen, and the reason Netflix's content has gotten squeezed, is the content studios are in love with pay per view. They don't want you to pay a reasonable fee for a show or movie and watch it as many times as you want. IE, you are not allowed to own a copy of a movie. They couldn't get pay-per-view with DVD.. it just wasn't technically feasible. But it is with online services.
They had already bought the movies. Storage for flat discs with no cases is somewhat cheap. If those discs are wearing out and need replaced it's because they're being used.
I think both of those assertions are not as correct as you think they are. Storage for flat discs is not that cheap when you have as huge a number as you do -- you need distribution centers, and you need staff to actually do the work. And the discs are not necessarily wearing out from use. They might be wearing out due to age. I think we overestimate the longevity of the average pressed disc, and the number of discs I've gotten recently that are unplayable but look pristine has risen. But most people I've found don't take good care of their discs. They leave them sitting out on a table without a sleeve, let their kids handle them, they get scratched and fingerprints, and it doesn't take much to make a DVD skip or unplayable.
But more than that, if a disc breaks or goes bad and its a disc that was on loan to subscribers most of the time, well that tends to be a net win. But if you have a disc sitting around for awhile and it finally goes out to someone and that someone reports it is broken, well you just took a big hit. The DVD subscription only works for them when the scaling happens on a massive level. But if they lose lots of DVD subscriptions, then the overhead costs for maintaining a massive catalog start to rise above the subscription fees and they have to find ways to cut back.
Some of us adults have children though. With a family of 5 is more challenging with the DVD service with only 3 DVDs at a time.
You can get more than 3 at time, but of course you have to pay for it. The current age is all about charging you a pretty high price depending on the amount of content you want to watch.
And your kids aren't like everyone else's kids, in that they want to watch one movie 20 times rather than just once?
But they are not united in the common goal of providing a great experience for consumers. They are united in the goal of bilking us out of as much money as possible.
The content creators are the same people who are on record as saying, for instance, that the DVD era was a disaster for the movie studios. That they charged way too low a price, and companies like blockbuster and netflix could just rent them out. They truly believe that that was a horrible time, and they aim to "fix" it by charging exorbitant rates for streaming.
yes indeed netflix MUST carry ALL content because why??? so what if you have to surf somewhere else to watch tv shows?
Because I don't want to pay $xxx/month for Netflix, of which I'll only watch a small portion. And I don't want to also pay $yyy/month for Amazon Prime when I only want to watch a few titles from there. And $zzz/month for Hulu. And more for HBO. I just want one streaming service and have all the things there.
Don't you realize that no one service is ever going to even possibly approach that?
Netflix does. But only in the DVD-by-mail business. Online streaming, you can't have this, because that's controlled by the content companies, and they will never not have their heads up their asses.
He hardly did any good movies since Happy Gilmore, aside from 50 First Dates. Most of them are soiled by his bizarre bathroom humor - like Big Daddy
I thought the Wedding Singer was ok. And Punch-Drunk Love was excellent. But that's a Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) movie, not an Adam Sandler movie. It's more a deconstruction of Sandler's previous characters. Punch Drunk Love was 14 years ago though. What of worth has he done since then? Spanglish, maybe?
Translation: Our library is really shitty and it's not going to get better.
Netflix has some good original content, but I didn't sign up for it to be the next HBO. All of that are steps in the wrong direction.
I signed up for Netflix because of what it was: the best place to find almost any DVD I wanted. Look at the DVD/Blu-Ray selection versus their streaming selection. The streaming selection is pathetic. Online streaming SUCKS, and it's because the power was put back into the hands of the content owners, where it shouldn't belong. They will screw it up every time.
Jason Statham is good, but he doesn't have Bruce's sense of comedy, which was essential for (some of) his action roles.
2) Tokyo will explode with the force equivalent of solar flare.
Probably something like this.
I'd like to poach some Fox executives.
Fox executives are the Most Dangerous Game...
A whole bunch of California companies (Google, Intel, Disney, etc) recently lost a lawsuit when it was revealed that they colluded to not hire each others' employees.
On the other hand, some specific contracts are enforced -- I worked for a consulting company as a consultant at a client firm, and was not allowed to join that client firm as one of their employees until a full year after the consulting contract expired. Apparently that doesn't count as a "non-compete agreement."
Apparently you have read the article. Musk knows how to get to mars with colonists.
Musk can't figure out how to repeatedly launch SpaceX's rockets with them blowing up on the launch pad. Getting to Mars, hell, getting to the moon is a bit out of his reach.
I've heard enough people on Slashdot who thinks SSI is a Ponzi Scheme to know that almost no one on Slashdot knows what a Ponzi Scheme actually is.
Getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction is an economic no-brainer,but it's a political third rail
Of course it's a political third rail -- remove the mortgage interest deduction and you force millions of Americans out of there homes within a year. No one wants to be saddled with that level of boneheadedness. Most people were sold mortgages that carefully calculate what they can afford, and they decide whether a home is affordable or "too much" based on that.
The only way it could work is if it affects new mortgage purchases only -- and not refinances. But I can see a ton of ways to exploit such a system already.
The mortgage credit is a progressive deduction, so it positively affects low and middle income folks, since the mortgage interest deduction is likelier to be a higher percentage of their take-home interest. Eliminate those deductions and just lower taxes across the board, and those are the folks who will feel the pain.
Fake Downloads is a time tested tactic, but putting viruses, malware, etc into fake downloads opens them up to legal liability. So I'd say.. "unlikely."
Oh, you mean that checkbox (Block dangerous and deceptive content) any sane persons unticks after installing?
I've never unchecked that option and the few times it's ever blocked a site, it was actually a malicious site.
Why not keep it checked, unless you're going to compromised sites?
I hear the anger in your voice, I can only imagine at what drives that, but I think an understanding of how a business works is missing from your stance here.
"without bias" I think everyone can agree to, excepting the ISPs
I think the ISPs can still be a private enterprise. I do NOT think that the pipes to the house should be privately operated, at all, because the system has a clear conflict of interest and destroys the competition that makes private enterprise work. The end pipes should be a utility like water and electricity.
"if, you, a provider faces congestion issues, it's your own fucking fault for overselling your resources too much." This is exactly what you are demanding they do.
I think it's fair to hold ISPs accountable to what they claim to be selling. If they have "unlimited access," then it should absolutely be unlimited access. Not "We said unlimited, but it's capped," or "well, you used up your hidden cap for the month so now your connection is getting slower," or even "we said 'unlimited,' but our fine print says we can put limits in anyway."
It's not about the users. The whole reason ISP's want to give preferential treatment to traffic is specifically so that they can force content providers to pay them for access to their customers. They want to pick the winners, punish competitors, and make money doing it. Anyone that thinks this is about improving the end user experience isn't paying attention.
It's also about simultaneously boosting their offerings and degrading anything "unapproved." One of the boons of the non-priority system is that anyone can create a "disruptive technology" and it will be on a similar footing with the established offerings. Think of, say, the Wild West Internet versus Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, and the other proprietary systems where the tools you used were approved by those networks. They were stagnant from day one.
Now the ISPs are looking to make their own offerings fast, their "partners" fast, and everything else slow. Of course, they won't say they're slowing down access for everything else, but having a "Fast, faster, fastest" scale is the same thing as having a "slow, medium, fast" scale.
Wooosh...
Which was the sound the rocket was supposed to make, instead of "kaboom!"