The **AAs are/were a promotion and marketing mechanism, as well as a content distribution mechanism. That was, for a long while, a pretty good plan: they ginned up interest via marketing, which was expensive, and then made up their expenses on the content distribution side.
Content distribution is no longer a viable model; there is revenue but nowhere near what's needed to match the promotion and marketing required to generate nation-scale interest. What they really object to is the fact that they have been spending money on the promotion and marketing anyway, while other content distributors undercut their revenue.
As you say, it's broken and it's not coming back. For the RIAA, it's easy to see how they should abandon the whole thing: content creation in music is cheap. We can live just fine without them serving as promoters; between Pandora and America's Got Too Much Free Time, promotion gets done.
It's a bit harder for the MPAA. Home-grown movies still don't match what can be done by a real studio, and there really are seven-figure up-front investments. Losing control of the content distribution is a loss not just to them but to everybody, since it means certain kinds of movies can't be made profitably. They're still profitable, but it seems pretty unlikely that they'd continue to be if the MPAA gave up trying to control distribution and went for a "pay what you want" model.
I'm still not crazy about using Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead as a model. Their studios had already spent big bucks promoting them. For the average Garage Band garage band, they have a hard time giving stuff away. A better example is, of all things, Fifty Shades Of Gray, which really took off for reasons nobody can figure out except that word of mouth really spread. Do not, however, expect that to happen often. The real model is eight zillion apps languishing in the iTunes and Android stores, one of which might be awesome if only somebody got all Fifty Shades on it. But you just can't do that for a movie.
I assume she didn't run continuously. She ran a few miles a day, then rested. I assume she peed then.
I can tell you as a marathon runner, though, that a lot of runners who don't want to wait for the porta johns just drop trou and let fly. Many men, and a surprising number of women.
Most of them stop running first, though a few at the front don't care what they smell like and they'll be done in a couple of hours anyway. They'll take a shower and change after they get the prize money. But that's a few people up front, not the 20,000+ people behind them. We stop, momentarily.
I'm not sure if there really is an alternative for *everything* iTunes does. It exists to support a particular proprietary device. But that doesn't mean that the application can be slow, unresponsive, and clunky, as it is in Windows.
I assumed that "slow" and "unresponsive" were due to a mismatch in the threading model, and that "clunky" was just "unfamiliar to a Windows user". (For a long time it was also crash-prone, though that's been fixed, at least for the ways I use it.) But I've heard from multiple Mac users that it's no more familiar to them; it has idiosyncratic ways of doing things that don't match up with their expectations from other Mac software.
I use it because it does the one thing I rely on it to do very well: it downloads podcasts and automatically (more or less) syncs them to my iPod. But it remains slow and unresponsive, and the iTunes Music Store interface for seeking out new podcasts remains barbaric.
Part of the problem may well be that it does *everything* that it does, and that the whole thing needs to be refactored into orthogonal applications. But that's up to them; I don't use most of its features.
That's depressing. Apple usually puts so much effort into its software. iTunes is a key user interface, not just for the music store but also for the iPhone, its big money-maker.
I knew the Windows version sucked. I thought it was because they didn't want to put too much effort into porting it. But it's weird to think that such a crucial piece of software isn't better on its home turf.
The Internet Kill Switch died in committee. Even if it had passed, that's not really what they're talking about here. It would (potentially) have shut America off from the Internet, but that's only degrading the enemy's capability in the sense that shooting yourself denies them the chance to kill you.
The fact that this is being done in the Air Force is a little surprising, but there's a remarkable amount of redundancy between our branches. All of the branches do computer work of various kinds. That redundancy is expensive, no doubt, but it also creates diversity which makes it more robust.
Whether we actually need that robustness or if it's just more make-work for Congressional districts... I won't touch that. Let's just say that it's complicated.
I wonder if the European safety standards make a difference. I gather that Americans have put a fair bit of extra steel in their cars.
Certainly something seems to be different. On that chart, they give the Smart Fortwo 69 MPG. The US smart is EPA rated at 38. Some of it may be differences in calculations (though they do describe it as "mileage mpg US", whatever that means), but I gather that they also had to fiddle with the Smart to get it legal in the US.
In fact, 38 seems awfully low. I get nearly that in my Honda Fit, a much bigger car. It sounds to me as if they need to cleansheet the Smart to suit different rules for the US, and that we're seeing a mediocre retrofit.
Good question. Sadly, the riaa is very good at its job: making a small number of artists very popular. People like what they are selling. If pandora can coax its users to develop wider tastes they can get a huge win, but it's easier said than done. As long as listeners like being dictated to, the dictator will clean up.
Some people are already more eclectic but that word automatically makes them harder to market to. The riaa grabs a lot of low-hanging fruit.
I don't think you're going to get long at 60W. A good LiIon battery might give you 600 kJ/kg. If he gets to put up one kilogram, he'll get about three hours out of it, and that's a really optimistic estimate.
Nocebo is a perfectly reasonable name. "Placebo" is from a Latin root meaning "to please". "Nocebo" means "I will harm". It may sound like a silly portmanteu, but "nocebo" has roots of comparable authenticity that give rise to how the word is used today.
It would be a real stretch to make "placebo" refer to all psychosomatic effects. That would differ both from its Latin roots and from its common usage, which connotes positive effects (or at least, sought-for effects).
It is a bit late for the New York Times to be figuring this out. "Nocebo" is more recent in English than "placebo" (it only took off in the 1980s), but it's not news to science.
I'm in much the same position, though having paid for it I did take the trouble to plug it in for the Olympics. I find the commercials aggravating and the coverage as bad as it ever was, and I'll be unplugging it again as soon as the games are over.
I don't even think they were really planning to raise the bill in that deal, though they were using it to hide a (separate) substantial rate increase. As streaming gets more content, people switch to lower disc programs. I'm paying about as much for more viewing-hours than I used to get.
Still, splitting the company would have been an enormous hassle to me. Maintaining two queues, paying two bills, trying to figure out which service offered what... that would have been a serious degradation in service. And Hastings should have been able to avoid it: Netflix is surely big enough that it can renegotiate deals that weren't intended to scale like that. At worst, that kind of split should have been a threat, "I could do this so cut your damn rates", but clearly if it was the threat backfired.
I never figured out why he wanted to split the business. Yeah, I can see wanting to push the streaming over the snail mail version, but I couldn't figure out what the business case was for separating the companies. If you want to eliminate it, eliminate it, and deal with the wrath of consumers who know that a lot of things can be had only on DVD. Some kind of tactic to push the studios to release more via streaming?
It seemed like nothing but loss with no upside. But the PR fail was so strong here that I had a hard time identifying any business case for any of it.
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The **AAs are/were a promotion and marketing mechanism, as well as a content distribution mechanism. That was, for a long while, a pretty good plan: they ginned up interest via marketing, which was expensive, and then made up their expenses on the content distribution side.
Content distribution is no longer a viable model; there is revenue but nowhere near what's needed to match the promotion and marketing required to generate nation-scale interest. What they really object to is the fact that they have been spending money on the promotion and marketing anyway, while other content distributors undercut their revenue.
As you say, it's broken and it's not coming back. For the RIAA, it's easy to see how they should abandon the whole thing: content creation in music is cheap. We can live just fine without them serving as promoters; between Pandora and America's Got Too Much Free Time, promotion gets done.
It's a bit harder for the MPAA. Home-grown movies still don't match what can be done by a real studio, and there really are seven-figure up-front investments. Losing control of the content distribution is a loss not just to them but to everybody, since it means certain kinds of movies can't be made profitably. They're still profitable, but it seems pretty unlikely that they'd continue to be if the MPAA gave up trying to control distribution and went for a "pay what you want" model.
I'm still not crazy about using Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead as a model. Their studios had already spent big bucks promoting them. For the average Garage Band garage band, they have a hard time giving stuff away. A better example is, of all things, Fifty Shades Of Gray, which really took off for reasons nobody can figure out except that word of mouth really spread. Do not, however, expect that to happen often. The real model is eight zillion apps languishing in the iTunes and Android stores, one of which might be awesome if only somebody got all Fifty Shades on it. But you just can't do that for a movie.
No kidding. The things I learn around here. Thanks!
As this decade-old comic strip puts it, it's only double taxation when it happens to rich people:
http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2003/03/08/
So what do they do? I can't imagine the pitcher-of-water solution is all that pleasant up there.
I assume she didn't run continuously. She ran a few miles a day, then rested. I assume she peed then.
I can tell you as a marathon runner, though, that a lot of runners who don't want to wait for the porta johns just drop trou and let fly. Many men, and a surprising number of women.
Most of them stop running first, though a few at the front don't care what they smell like and they'll be done in a couple of hours anyway. They'll take a shower and change after they get the prize money. But that's a few people up front, not the 20,000+ people behind them. We stop, momentarily.
For anybody who wants to see what the thing looks like, there were numerous pictures from when she "ran" the London Marathon.
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/898507-paralysed-claire-lomas-completes-london-marathon-in-bionic-suit
(Not exactly running, since it took 17 days, but it's still a hell of a feat. One that deserves a few freaking pictures.)
I'm not sure if there really is an alternative for *everything* iTunes does. It exists to support a particular proprietary device. But that doesn't mean that the application can be slow, unresponsive, and clunky, as it is in Windows.
I assumed that "slow" and "unresponsive" were due to a mismatch in the threading model, and that "clunky" was just "unfamiliar to a Windows user". (For a long time it was also crash-prone, though that's been fixed, at least for the ways I use it.) But I've heard from multiple Mac users that it's no more familiar to them; it has idiosyncratic ways of doing things that don't match up with their expectations from other Mac software.
I use it because it does the one thing I rely on it to do very well: it downloads podcasts and automatically (more or less) syncs them to my iPod. But it remains slow and unresponsive, and the iTunes Music Store interface for seeking out new podcasts remains barbaric.
Part of the problem may well be that it does *everything* that it does, and that the whole thing needs to be refactored into orthogonal applications. But that's up to them; I don't use most of its features.
That's depressing. Apple usually puts so much effort into its software. iTunes is a key user interface, not just for the music store but also for the iPhone, its big money-maker.
I knew the Windows version sucked. I thought it was because they didn't want to put too much effort into porting it. But it's weird to think that such a crucial piece of software isn't better on its home turf.
Ah, that makes sense. Lower octane, lower compression ratio, lower mileage.
To feed the pony. Damn things are freaking expensive: shoeing, feed, stabling, vet costs, ...
Interesting. Thanks.
If we had helium fuel, we could have helium-fueled fusion energy, if we had a fusion reactor.
Any idea why, exactly? Clearly it is, but I'm not up on the details, and I'm curious.
The Internet Kill Switch died in committee. Even if it had passed, that's not really what they're talking about here. It would (potentially) have shut America off from the Internet, but that's only degrading the enemy's capability in the sense that shooting yourself denies them the chance to kill you.
The fact that this is being done in the Air Force is a little surprising, but there's a remarkable amount of redundancy between our branches. All of the branches do computer work of various kinds. That redundancy is expensive, no doubt, but it also creates diversity which makes it more robust.
Whether we actually need that robustness or if it's just more make-work for Congressional districts... I won't touch that. Let's just say that it's complicated.
I wonder if the European safety standards make a difference. I gather that Americans have put a fair bit of extra steel in their cars.
Certainly something seems to be different. On that chart, they give the Smart Fortwo 69 MPG. The US smart is EPA rated at 38. Some of it may be differences in calculations (though they do describe it as "mileage mpg US", whatever that means), but I gather that they also had to fiddle with the Smart to get it legal in the US.
In fact, 38 seems awfully low. I get nearly that in my Honda Fit, a much bigger car. It sounds to me as if they need to cleansheet the Smart to suit different rules for the US, and that we're seeing a mediocre retrofit.
Yeah, I'd kinda like to follow it up with a few questions:
* Did you vote for somebody last time?
* Did you vote for somebody of the same party the time before that?
* Do you expect me to seriously believe that you're not going to do the same this time?
* On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is "Not even the slightest bit independent" and 7 is "A raging partisan hack", where do you fall?
Boy, wouldn't it be nice if more people who talked about economics read, you know, actual economics? Instead of partisan blogs?
Thanks for that. You'd get mod points, if I had any. Instead, you are alienated from the fruits of your labor.
Good question. Sadly, the riaa is very good at its job: making a small number of artists very popular. People like what they are selling. If pandora can coax its users to develop wider tastes they can get a huge win, but it's easier said than done. As long as listeners like being dictated to, the dictator will clean up.
Some people are already more eclectic but that word automatically makes them harder to market to. The riaa grabs a lot of low-hanging fruit.
Wow. I didn't realize anybody else had read that book. I
Interesting analysis. Thanks.
I don't think you're going to get long at 60W. A good LiIon battery might give you 600 kJ/kg. If he gets to put up one kilogram, he'll get about three hours out of it, and that's a really optimistic estimate.
Nocebo is a perfectly reasonable name. "Placebo" is from a Latin root meaning "to please". "Nocebo" means "I will harm". It may sound like a silly portmanteu, but "nocebo" has roots of comparable authenticity that give rise to how the word is used today.
It would be a real stretch to make "placebo" refer to all psychosomatic effects. That would differ both from its Latin roots and from its common usage, which connotes positive effects (or at least, sought-for effects).
It is a bit late for the New York Times to be figuring this out. "Nocebo" is more recent in English than "placebo" (it only took off in the 1980s), but it's not news to science.
Oh, it's all so 2011.
I'm in much the same position, though having paid for it I did take the trouble to plug it in for the Olympics. I find the commercials aggravating and the coverage as bad as it ever was, and I'll be unplugging it again as soon as the games are over.
That makes some sense.
I don't even think they were really planning to raise the bill in that deal, though they were using it to hide a (separate) substantial rate increase. As streaming gets more content, people switch to lower disc programs. I'm paying about as much for more viewing-hours than I used to get.
Still, splitting the company would have been an enormous hassle to me. Maintaining two queues, paying two bills, trying to figure out which service offered what... that would have been a serious degradation in service. And Hastings should have been able to avoid it: Netflix is surely big enough that it can renegotiate deals that weren't intended to scale like that. At worst, that kind of split should have been a threat, "I could do this so cut your damn rates", but clearly if it was the threat backfired.
I never figured out why he wanted to split the business. Yeah, I can see wanting to push the streaming over the snail mail version, but I couldn't figure out what the business case was for separating the companies. If you want to eliminate it, eliminate it, and deal with the wrath of consumers who know that a lot of things can be had only on DVD. Some kind of tactic to push the studios to release more via streaming?
It seemed like nothing but loss with no upside. But the PR fail was so strong here that I had a hard time identifying any business case for any of it.