So I'm the original source of the article, which got mangled by ValleyWag and has started morphing into a bad game of telephone tag.
My friend was asked to leave when he gave notice. This also happened to three other people I know. However, other friends I know who have left, as well as myself, had two weeks and a farewell dinner or lunch. There was no perp walk or security walking people out the door, but their badge
It's a crappy policy, IMHO. One I don't like at all, and hope they change.
Quite frankly, I wasn't moved by either the previews nor the reviews from CNN and other places, and there was zero word-of-mouth from colleagues about it (and we like to talk about movies a lot waiting for people to show at our weekly staff meeting).
What I saw in the previews was a lot of "Enterprise vs Big Enemy Ship" and this random Picard-like enemy human. Yawn. What I saw from reviews was a lot of "Boldly going where we've gone four or five times before." Yawn.
Timing of the release was actually good; I saw a bunch of movies between Christmas and New Years. But frankly, no matter WHEN it was going to be released, I wouldn't have seen it. Their promotion and execution didn't appeal to me.
Really, all it would have taken for me to go would be to have some kind of interesting story that changed The Universe (not necessarily even the characters, but that would be nice) in a meaningful way. The Remans vs Romulan occupation / Federation mediating / everything going wrong / not the best outcome when we're done could be _extremely_ meaty (and look a lot like Israel / Palestine, as ST VI looked like US / USSR and the USSR's collapse).
BTW: I do like sci-fi and tend to prefer those types of movies to things like Two Weeks' Notice or Julia Roberts fare. My wife differs, but c'est la vie.:)
Yes, but it's not what I'd consider a good user experience. You basically gotta download the Real 8 player, then buy a subscription, and then hunt forever to get to premium links. There are moves to get things not so tied to the RealOne Player (had to for the Mac, where you can't wrap IE the way we did for Windows), but it's slow going as 99% of our audience comes from the Windows world.
It is coming, but it's about a two-year lag IMHO, so we'll probably see something next year or so (note: totally forward looking and could well be BS, and I have a horrible track record for my estimates). They're working on a new RealOne Player mostly for the embedded experience (devices, like the HP recorder we did, the RePlayTVs / TiVOs, Playstation, etc) which is linux based, but it's not our main thrust. Standard party line here: more Windows people willing to pay for the service than Linux people, so we focus on the Windows experience.
Honestly, I don't know. I was actually looking for a decent audio (and video) codec bake-off page about a month back, and totally struck out. M$ has one which (surprise) favors their codecs in slightly unfair ways, and Real has one which just compares M$ in equally unfair ways. Whatever. But a nice blind test across various bitrates would be a nice thing to have.
(figured two sep posts would be easier than one long-winded one:)
Re: adware: RealPlayer is, next to AOL, the most obnoxious ad experience I've ever seen. And I, and many of my colleagues, have told our execs that. At company meetings. And there's some acknowledgement of that; we reduced the streaming ad frequency down to once per 5 minutes last week. That being said, our ad sales group still managed to get tons of cash from Verizon and whomever sells FreeMem Pro (go figure). So we "monetize the free player experience.";)
My advice, in all seriousness: buy a subscription. By paying us for a service, this means (a) it's ad-free (and thus pretty useable:), and (b) you get to bitch at us and we actually have to listen. It's been pretty helpful so far in getting a lot of stuff fixed.
Re: spyware: it is, but we're crappy at spying. Legal is also pretty good about making sure we don't keep what we shouldn't. I know it's annoying, but as per above, creating a service that goes through Real (and thus potentially creates a log entry) is often the fastest way to get something to market. My advice: again, buy a subscription. Then ya get to bitch.:)
PS - you probably may also want to stop using Credit Cards... VISA / MC are much better spies than we are. They sell your purchases to whomever wants 'em. Which means when you want to launch a direct mail campaign to sell your cool subscription service and need names and addresses of people who have purchased similar content before, guess where you get the names and addresses from? Lovely, ain't it?
That being said, here's my view from the trenches:
1) IMHO 64K Real8 sounds better than 128K MP3. 32K is actually pretty close. Just my opinion. (It's a hell of a lot better than WMA, but who reading this listens to anything via WMA?:)
2) One of the big reasons for stations to switch to a lower bitrate Real stream than MP3 is to save $$ on bandwidth, which is a killer. 64K MP3 sucks. 64K Real isn't bad at all, even if you prefer 128K MP3. Still isn't enough to offset the cost. Question for y'all: would you rather have an offer like $9.95 / mo for 128MP3 vs $5.95 / mo for 64 Real? 'cuz I'll give the feedback to the folks who can actually make it happen. The new Helix thing we're doing is actually having some internal effect, and we're trying to surface some other codecs to make the product better.
3) The sad little truth is that most of the folks out there making content don't have a real business model --- it costs them more to make content than people are willing to spend. The internet advertising model is a complete train wreck, and it's worse for radio. Royalty issue aside, local advertiser, who make up the bulk of a radio station's cash, don't like paying for extra exposure to random folks on the Internet, as they don't live locally and thus won't be buying locally.
So what Real is trying to do is package enough of it at a price point that people are willing to spend. That's it. This lets folks like KPIG can actually support themselves for their webcast, and folks like yourselves don't have to subscribe or pledge or whatever to a ton of random sites you listen to off and on.
You have directories corresponding to newsgroups or mail folders or whatnot. i.e. alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork is really alt/swedish/chef/bork/bork/bork
Articles are numeric, i.e. \d+ for Perl types. The raw message is stored in each file.
In each directory, there's a file called.overview, which is just the summary information for all the files.
Thus, you can have zillions of small files, and happily grep and copy them to your heart's content. But you never do a 'ls' on a huge directory, you always just look through the.overview file. Or grep through it, if you like.
So, in that sense, it's very much the best of both worlds. And, on the same box, you can specify rules on who can access the folders, so one file can be read by multiple people. Ooh.
GNUS, an Emacs based mail/news reader, uses a variant of this called nnml, which rocks.
Of course, when you get down to it, JWZ arguments aside, databases start to really look like what you want, especially on a corporate level when you're tossing the same piece of mail around to tons of different folks.
My perspective on this is slightly different. The number of companies that have had successful, long-term partnerships with Microsoft is surprisingly small. IMHO, this is because M$ is now big enough that they don't need to afford any risk --- if a partner making a good enough profit on M$, then likely it could make money for a competitor. So they either re-create the technology in-house and attempt to kill the former partner, or they buy the partner. Either way, they control the technology.
RealNames just happened to fall in the category of "easier to build then buy." Which goes to show you, if you're gonna play at a table with M$, you'd better bring something they can't make themselves.
RealOne has 500,000 subscribers to it's RealOne service, which is NOT exactly the same as MusicPass. Real is also offering other content --- NASCAR and CNN currently, and they had Big Brother 2 and MLB last year. I suspect we'll see MLB real soon again.
It seems to me that, as far as RealOne goes, the music stuff is really just a sidenote to the content offering they're trying to promote. Yeah, PressPlay might look like a better option for digital music, but come on, they both suck. But, if you were to plop down $20 a month for something, it's a better selling position to have more content than just what the labels will let MusicNet and Pressplay have.
I got this beastie... the SL-9000 Home Theater Master. Runs about $100. Also comes with the recent B&K receivers / pre-amps. It's fully programmable, and has a TON of presets for various components (have that weird-ass Nakamichi tape drive? It's there). It's also button-oriented, vs touch-pad, which I prefer. Only drawback is that it shared the arrow functions with the play / ff / rv / stop, which is annoying for the DVD as you then program some of the other keys for that.
I forget the URL, but it's pretty easy to find with reasonable search engines like MetaCrawler (www.metacrawler.com).
Slashdot Mirror
So I'm the original source of the article, which got mangled by ValleyWag and has started morphing into a bad game of telephone tag.
My friend was asked to leave when he gave notice. This also happened to three other people I know. However, other friends I know who have left, as well as myself, had two weeks and a farewell dinner or lunch. There was no perp walk or security walking people out the door, but their badge
It's a crappy policy, IMHO. One I don't like at all, and hope they change.
Quite frankly, I wasn't moved by either the previews nor the reviews from CNN and other places, and there was zero word-of-mouth from colleagues about it (and we like to talk about movies a lot waiting for people to show at our weekly staff meeting).
:)
What I saw in the previews was a lot of "Enterprise vs Big Enemy Ship" and this random Picard-like enemy human. Yawn. What I saw from reviews was a lot of "Boldly going where we've gone four or five times before." Yawn.
Timing of the release was actually good; I saw a bunch of movies between Christmas and New Years. But frankly, no matter WHEN it was going to be released, I wouldn't have seen it. Their promotion and execution didn't appeal to me.
Really, all it would have taken for me to go would be to have some kind of interesting story that changed The Universe (not necessarily even the characters, but that would be nice) in a meaningful way. The Remans vs Romulan occupation / Federation mediating / everything going wrong / not the best outcome when we're done could be _extremely_ meaty (and look a lot like Israel / Palestine, as ST VI looked like US / USSR and the USSR's collapse).
BTW: I do like sci-fi and tend to prefer those types of movies to things like Two Weeks' Notice or Julia Roberts fare. My wife differs, but c'est la vie.
Yes, but it's not what I'd consider a good user experience. You basically gotta download the Real 8 player, then buy a subscription, and then hunt forever to get to premium links. There are moves to get things not so tied to the RealOne Player (had to for the Mac, where you can't wrap IE the way we did for Windows), but it's slow going as 99% of our audience comes from the Windows world.
It is coming, but it's about a two-year lag IMHO, so we'll probably see something next year or so (note: totally forward looking and could well be BS, and I have a horrible track record for my estimates). They're working on a new RealOne Player mostly for the embedded experience (devices, like the HP recorder we did, the RePlayTVs / TiVOs, Playstation, etc) which is linux based, but it's not our main thrust. Standard party line here: more Windows people willing to pay for the service than Linux people, so we focus on the Windows experience.
-e
Honestly, I don't know. I was actually looking for a decent audio (and video) codec bake-off page about a month back, and totally struck out. M$ has one which (surprise) favors their codecs in slightly unfair ways, and Real has one which just compares M$ in equally unfair ways. Whatever. But a nice blind test across various bitrates would be a nice thing to have.
-e
DISCLAIMER: I work for Real.
:)
;)
:), and (b) you get to bitch at us and we actually have to listen. It's been pretty helpful so far in getting a lot of stuff fixed.
:)
(figured two sep posts would be easier than one long-winded one
Re: adware: RealPlayer is, next to AOL, the most obnoxious ad experience I've ever seen. And I, and many of my colleagues, have told our execs that. At company meetings. And there's some acknowledgement of that; we reduced the streaming ad frequency down to once per 5 minutes last week. That being said, our ad sales group still managed to get tons of cash from Verizon and whomever sells FreeMem Pro (go figure). So we "monetize the free player experience."
My advice, in all seriousness: buy a subscription. By paying us for a service, this means (a) it's ad-free (and thus pretty useable
Re: spyware: it is, but we're crappy at spying. Legal is also pretty good about making sure we don't keep what we shouldn't. I know it's annoying, but as per above, creating a service that goes through Real (and thus potentially creates a log entry) is often the fastest way to get something to market. My advice: again, buy a subscription. Then ya get to bitch.
PS - you probably may also want to stop using Credit Cards... VISA / MC are much better spies than we are. They sell your purchases to whomever wants 'em. Which means when you want to launch a direct mail campaign to sell your cool subscription service and need names and addresses of people who have purchased similar content before, guess where you get the names and addresses from? Lovely, ain't it?
-e
DISCLAIMER: I work for Real.
:)
That being said, here's my view from the trenches:
1) IMHO 64K Real8 sounds better than 128K MP3. 32K is actually pretty close. Just my opinion. (It's a hell of a lot better than WMA, but who reading this listens to anything via WMA?
2) One of the big reasons for stations to switch to a lower bitrate Real stream than MP3 is to save $$ on bandwidth, which is a killer. 64K MP3 sucks. 64K Real isn't bad at all, even if you prefer 128K MP3. Still isn't enough to offset the cost. Question for y'all: would you rather have an offer like $9.95 / mo for 128MP3 vs $5.95 / mo for 64 Real? 'cuz I'll give the feedback to the folks who can actually make it happen. The new Helix thing we're doing is actually having some internal effect, and we're trying to surface some other codecs to make the product better.
3) The sad little truth is that most of the folks out there making content don't have a real business model --- it costs them more to make content than people are willing to spend. The internet advertising model is a complete train wreck, and it's worse for radio. Royalty issue aside, local advertiser, who make up the bulk of a radio station's cash, don't like paying for extra exposure to random folks on the Internet, as they don't live locally and thus won't be buying locally.
So what Real is trying to do is package enough of it at a price point that people are willing to spend. That's it. This lets folks like KPIG can actually support themselves for their webcast, and folks like yourselves don't have to subscribe or pledge or whatever to a ton of random sites you listen to off and on.
-e
So NNTP solved this IMHO a rather elegant way...
.overview, which is just the summary information for all the files.
.overview file. Or grep through it, if you like.
You have directories corresponding to newsgroups or mail folders or whatnot. i.e. alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork is really alt/swedish/chef/bork/bork/bork
Articles are numeric, i.e. \d+ for Perl types. The raw message is stored in each file.
In each directory, there's a file called
Thus, you can have zillions of small files, and happily grep and copy them to your heart's content. But you never do a 'ls' on a huge directory, you always just look through the
So, in that sense, it's very much the best of both worlds. And, on the same box, you can specify rules on who can access the folders, so one file can be read by multiple people. Ooh.
GNUS, an Emacs based mail/news reader, uses a variant of this called nnml, which rocks.
Of course, when you get down to it, JWZ arguments aside, databases start to really look like what you want, especially on a corporate level when you're tossing the same piece of mail around to tons of different folks.
-e
My perspective on this is slightly different. The number of companies that have had successful, long-term partnerships with Microsoft is surprisingly small. IMHO, this is because M$ is now big enough that they don't need to afford any risk --- if a partner making a good enough profit on M$, then likely it could make money for a competitor. So they either re-create the technology in-house and attempt to kill the former partner, or they buy the partner. Either way, they control the technology.
RealNames just happened to fall in the category of "easier to build then buy." Which goes to show you, if you're gonna play at a table with M$, you'd better bring something they can't make themselves.
RealOne has 500,000 subscribers to it's RealOne service, which is NOT exactly the same as MusicPass. Real is also offering other content --- NASCAR and CNN currently, and they had Big Brother 2 and MLB last year. I suspect we'll see MLB real soon again.
It seems to me that, as far as RealOne goes, the music stuff is really just a sidenote to the content offering they're trying to promote. Yeah, PressPlay might look like a better option for digital music, but come on, they both suck. But, if you were to plop down $20 a month for something, it's a better selling position to have more content than just what the labels will let MusicNet and Pressplay have.
I got this beastie... the SL-9000 Home Theater Master. Runs about $100. Also comes with the recent B&K receivers / pre-amps. It's fully programmable, and has a TON of presets for various components (have that weird-ass Nakamichi tape drive? It's there). It's also button-oriented, vs touch-pad, which I prefer. Only drawback is that it shared the arrow functions with the play / ff / rv / stop, which is annoying for the DVD as you then program some of the other keys for that.
I forget the URL, but it's pretty easy to find with reasonable search engines like MetaCrawler (www.metacrawler.com).
-e