Can we switch ALL channels to a subscription model? I only watch 5 channels, and I would gladly pay $5 each for those channels and save myself hundreds of dollars per year.
The subscription model they talk about is not the à la carte model that you are talking about. When they say "subscription model", they mean convert to the current pay-TV system where they would receive a monthly affiliate fee from your cable provider on your behalf. Hence, you automatically become a subscriber and some of your cable bill will get diverted to them.
Sure, but ATG-4 (the Gogo upgrade) is only 3x the speed, so you'll see ~9Mbps for the entire plane. Some international flights are indeed getting satellite service, but it will be Ku band satellite, which isn't much better. Eventually the planes will have Ka band satellite (as much as 50Mbps per plane) but that won't be live until ~2015.
Jetblue, however, will have some pretty nice satellite service. They will be using ViaSat's new Ka band satellite and service is supposed to start launching in the next couple months. And it's free. United's Continental fleet will also be getting this service as they have contracted for it through Jetblue's wholly owned LiveTV.
We all know the Tesla vs. Edison fight and we all know that nothing has been done to correct these mistakes.
I'm actually not familiar with this. I'll have to read up on it but would you mind giving a brief recap of what happened, especially in relation to the topic of this discussion?
Any reason why Viacom or any other such wastewater producer can't just switch to streaming all their shows?...Seems like a revenue source waiting to be tapped.
As someone who covers media companies for an investment firm and spends a lot of my work thinking about things like this, they would lose out on a lot of money if they did that. Content owners currently have a dual stream revenue source. One are the monthly affiliate fees paid by you through the cable provider. The other is advertising. The content owners have been getting filthy rich through this model and have no desire to give it up.
If they were to start going directly to the end users and charging you, chances are they would lose more money than they made under the old model. The first reason is there is no (or little) advertising in the model you are proposing. So your fees would have to cover all the money they make off of advertising. Which will likely never happen. The second is that, in the current model, many people pay monthly affiliate fees for channels they would not purchase on a standalone basis (this is the same reason why you will likely never see à la carte channels) and cable providers would demand lower affiliate fees, or drop the channels altogether, if the content owners started going direct to the end user. So your fee to get the streaming portion would have to be quite high because you are currently being subsidized by advertising and a lot of people who never watch the channel.
I should note that I would love to see à la carte programming, but I'm just explaining why you're not going to see it right now. However, there may come a point when it starts happening. It really comes down to simple economics. If enough people start cutting the cord, or something else disrupts the current model enough, then they will start moving to other models. But right now it's way too lucrative for them to ever give it up.
I agree. I think this being negative for HTC and positive for Apple is a bit overblown. Here's some quotes from some Wall Street research that puts it in perspective:
"Many observers may hastily claim this is a victory for Apple; we believe the exact contrary. HTC and Android won this first battle. This ruling is very disappointing to the Cupertino firm, in the sense that only 2 claims relating to only one patent have been recognised as true by the ITC, out of dozens relating to 10 patents that formed the initial filling of Apple. It is also disappointing in the sense that it won’t disrupt at all, at least in our analysis, HTC’s and Android’s businesses. Much ado for nothing."
" Most interestingly, the ITC stated that the ban will not take effect until April 19th, which in essence means that the ITC gave HTC and US carriers ample time to work around the limited violation.... HTC confirmed to us several months ago that they have a work around ready to ship for this patent. Our own “layman” assessment of the feasibility of such a work around is also very straight forward: it is very easy, best proof being that blackberry users have been able to call a number part of the body of an email since before the iPhone existed"
"This ruling shows that judicial authorities care about market disruption. The time they gave before the ban is enforced, specifically mentioning in their official communication that it was for carriers to organise transition."
Better yet, let's make sure those twelve on the committee aren't re-elected. They're directly responsible for the deadlock.
The names are: Sen. Jon Kyl (R) of Arizona (FY07 -$16603M) Rep. Xavier Becerra (D) of California (FY07 -$168218M) Sen. John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts (FY07 -$4424M) Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) of Maryland (FY07 -$4788M) Rep. Fred Upton (R) of Michigan (FY07 -$616M) Rep. Dave Camp (R) of Michigan (FY07 -$616M) Sen. Max Baucus (D) of Montana (FY07 -$85M) Sen. Rob Portman (R) of Ohio (FY07 -$33407M) Sen. Patrick Toomey (R) of Pennsylvania (FY07 +$242M) Rep. James Clyburn (D) of South Carolina (FY07 +$2014M) Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R) of Texas (FY07 +$6960M) Sen. Patty Murray (D) of Washington (FY07 +$2389M)
I totally agree with this (at least the first part in regards to getting rid of those on the committee). These 12 people collectively failed us. Sure, it could have been just 1 out of the 12 that really held it up, and they think they have this nuclear button to hold up the committee. We the people have the real nuclear button and it's not getting reelected. Congress needs to get the message that they work for us and that they need to work and get along. If these 12 were out, we would send a strong message that they everyone else needs to get their act together.
I had the opposite problem happen on my iPhone in the US. Both yesterday and today my phone was set to go off at 8am and it went off at 7am. I thought I was crazy and my friends didn't believe me, until I saw this.
I'm an accountant. You don't understand deferred compensation. 401(k) plans are almost useless to executives because they max out their contribution limits quickly. Additionally, a corporation may only expense, for tax deductions, salary below $1 million for the 5 highest paid employees (unless it is tied to performance.) Usually, executives are allowed to forego current salary and essentially reinvest it in the company. The executives picks a fund, and the company more or less guarantees to pay the exexcutive the same amount who would have received had he invested the funds in his chosen investment. Normally, these payments are received after the employee retires from working at the company. After retirement, the company is no longer subject to the $1 million compensation limit because the person is no longer an employee.
It's certain he knew yesterday. I heard him on NPR this morning saying that it was very difficult to determine exactly when to go after the people. If they went to early, they might not get everyone and it could provoke those they hadn't found yet to attack sooner. If they waited too long, they could have missed it.
"Correct, but you could also do that with the tracks you buy for $0.99 ($0.79 if you're a subscriber) from Yahoo! Music Unlimited, too. That doesn't differentiate iTunes from us. If paid download/burn is your preferred model, we do that, too, same as iTunes and at the same price or better. Yahoo! Music Engine is not *just* a subscription service, you can purchase burnable tracks, too. Point is, we give you the choice, Apple does not."
Mmmmm.... tasty. I love Kudos. The real milk chocolate chips combined with the wholesome goodness of granola. Your family will love them, and you'll feel good about them too!
I was just out visiting in Provo, Utah and they are just starting to roll this out. The power company, Provo Power, is owned by the city (and Provo has well over 100,000 residents, unlike many of the other cities that are doing this.) (Check it out at iProvo.org)
The thing that is really nice about this is that a very large percentage of Provo is populated by students. Brigham Young University (30,000+ students) is in Provo and Utah Valley State College (~25,000 students) is 5 minutes down the road in neighboring Orem. They're actually going around and putting fibre into entire apartment and condo buildings. If that isn't great enough for college students, they're going to be running everything (power, phone, cable, internet) and all at a very nice price. There's several different options for cable and internet, depending on your requirements, and they are all nicely priced.
One cool thing I read is that if you live in Provo and have a business there as well, you'll be able to connect to your business online at something like 50 Mbps.
There's all sorts of cool things about doing this. I can't wait to get back to school!
Since we're always complaining about copyright, if we donate a ton of the money needed to keep farscape going, do those few people own part of it? Do they get any revenue off of it? It's not like they're the exclusive people who are seeing it. If they were, they would be paying to see it. But to me it seems like they're paying to make it so they and others can see it. Therefore, shouldn't they own part of it?
A couple days before it came out there were rumors and pictures of it... but everyone told how those pictures were fake and it would be impossible to make something like that and that the screws on the top and the cd slot were obviously done in photoshop. Wouldn't this just happen in the case of these moon photos too?
We all got to laugh at those idiots the next day though when Apple released the cube. It was great.
Thanks to Bill Wyman (the rolling stone) all of us on Slashdot who are too young to know (or just simply don't care to know) who any of the rolling stones are, we will now associate the name Bill Wyman with the now popular author.
So, for those of us who don't know enough about this, what can we do to help get everything right with ICANN? Are there resources that might help us in writing a letter to our reps etc?
The 25% was from a study that was done on the reading speeds. I don't recall any of the details concerning who did it or I would try to find a link or more info.
I like having a physical book. I like being able to make marks on pages, put sticky notes on pages that I can feel on turn to, have the book in my hand, take it where I want to and it never needs electricty.
Sure, some people may like it. But that's why a free market is so great. You can use what you like. I also learned in a technical writing class that reading from a computer screen is 25% slower than reading from a book. My own experience tells me this is true as well.
Exactly. Although Half-Life is a great game and many people enjoy it, it's not my type. However, I ended up buying it. Why? Counter-Strike. Think of how many people that would not have purchased HL if it weren't for this and so many other great mods.
Of course, I totally agree with that. I thought khkramer's comment on the laughing was funny (although I don't think that him laughing at that is.) Keeping a bad law intact because it would hurt people who have been taking advantage of it is horrible. That's what pisses me off the most about this. "Oh, we can't get rid of that law. It would mess up too many things." Well, that's the problem with it. It's messing up too much crap already!
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Is hardware the future of TiVo, or should they go and just license their software to all?
They already license their software to other STB makers.
Can we switch ALL channels to a subscription model? I only watch 5 channels, and I would gladly pay $5 each for those channels and save myself hundreds of dollars per year.
The subscription model they talk about is not the à la carte model that you are talking about. When they say "subscription model", they mean convert to the current pay-TV system where they would receive a monthly affiliate fee from your cable provider on your behalf. Hence, you automatically become a subscriber and some of your cable bill will get diverted to them.
Sure, but ATG-4 (the Gogo upgrade) is only 3x the speed, so you'll see ~9Mbps for the entire plane. Some international flights are indeed getting satellite service, but it will be Ku band satellite, which isn't much better. Eventually the planes will have Ka band satellite (as much as 50Mbps per plane) but that won't be live until ~2015.
Jetblue, however, will have some pretty nice satellite service. They will be using ViaSat's new Ka band satellite and service is supposed to start launching in the next couple months. And it's free. United's Continental fleet will also be getting this service as they have contracted for it through Jetblue's wholly owned LiveTV.
We all know the Tesla vs. Edison fight and we all know that nothing has been done to correct these mistakes.
I'm actually not familiar with this. I'll have to read up on it but would you mind giving a brief recap of what happened, especially in relation to the topic of this discussion?
Any reason why Viacom or any other such wastewater producer can't just switch to streaming all their shows? ...Seems like a revenue source waiting to be tapped.
As someone who covers media companies for an investment firm and spends a lot of my work thinking about things like this, they would lose out on a lot of money if they did that. Content owners currently have a dual stream revenue source. One are the monthly affiliate fees paid by you through the cable provider. The other is advertising. The content owners have been getting filthy rich through this model and have no desire to give it up.
If they were to start going directly to the end users and charging you, chances are they would lose more money than they made under the old model. The first reason is there is no (or little) advertising in the model you are proposing. So your fees would have to cover all the money they make off of advertising. Which will likely never happen. The second is that, in the current model, many people pay monthly affiliate fees for channels they would not purchase on a standalone basis (this is the same reason why you will likely never see à la carte channels) and cable providers would demand lower affiliate fees, or drop the channels altogether, if the content owners started going direct to the end user. So your fee to get the streaming portion would have to be quite high because you are currently being subsidized by advertising and a lot of people who never watch the channel.
I should note that I would love to see à la carte programming, but I'm just explaining why you're not going to see it right now. However, there may come a point when it starts happening. It really comes down to simple economics. If enough people start cutting the cord, or something else disrupts the current model enough, then they will start moving to other models. But right now it's way too lucrative for them to ever give it up.
I agree. I think this being negative for HTC and positive for Apple is a bit overblown. Here's some quotes from some Wall Street research that puts it in perspective:
"Many observers may hastily claim this is a victory for Apple; we believe the exact contrary. HTC and Android won this first battle. This ruling is very disappointing to the Cupertino firm, in the sense that only 2 claims relating to only one patent have been recognised as true by the ITC, out of dozens relating to 10 patents that formed the initial filling of Apple. It is also disappointing in the sense that it won’t disrupt at all, at least in our analysis, HTC’s and Android’s businesses. Much ado for nothing."
" Most interestingly, the ITC stated that the ban will not take effect until April 19th, which in essence means that the ITC gave HTC and US carriers ample time to work around the limited violation.... HTC confirmed to us several months ago that they have a work around ready to ship for this patent. Our own “layman” assessment of the feasibility of such a work around is also very straight forward: it is very easy, best proof being that blackberry users have been able to call a number part of the body of an email since before the iPhone existed"
"This ruling shows that judicial authorities care about market disruption. The time they gave before the ban is enforced, specifically mentioning in their official communication that it was for carriers to organise transition."
Better yet, let's make sure those twelve on the committee aren't re-elected.
They're directly responsible for the deadlock.
The names are:
Sen. Jon Kyl (R) of Arizona (FY07 -$16603M)
Rep. Xavier Becerra (D) of California (FY07 -$168218M)
Sen. John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts (FY07 -$4424M)
Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D) of Maryland (FY07 -$4788M)
Rep. Fred Upton (R) of Michigan (FY07 -$616M)
Rep. Dave Camp (R) of Michigan (FY07 -$616M)
Sen. Max Baucus (D) of Montana (FY07 -$85M)
Sen. Rob Portman (R) of Ohio (FY07 -$33407M)
Sen. Patrick Toomey (R) of Pennsylvania (FY07 +$242M)
Rep. James Clyburn (D) of South Carolina (FY07 +$2014M)
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R) of Texas (FY07 +$6960M)
Sen. Patty Murray (D) of Washington (FY07 +$2389M)
I totally agree with this (at least the first part in regards to getting rid of those on the committee). These 12 people collectively failed us. Sure, it could have been just 1 out of the 12 that really held it up, and they think they have this nuclear button to hold up the committee. We the people have the real nuclear button and it's not getting reelected. Congress needs to get the message that they work for us and that they need to work and get along. If these 12 were out, we would send a strong message that they everyone else needs to get their act together.
I had the opposite problem happen on my iPhone in the US. Both yesterday and today my phone was set to go off at 8am and it went off at 7am. I thought I was crazy and my friends didn't believe me, until I saw this.
It's true. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5651802
I'm an accountant. You don't understand deferred compensation. 401(k) plans are almost useless to executives because they max out their contribution limits quickly. Additionally, a corporation may only expense, for tax deductions, salary below $1 million for the 5 highest paid employees (unless it is tied to performance.) Usually, executives are allowed to forego current salary and essentially reinvest it in the company. The executives picks a fund, and the company more or less guarantees to pay the exexcutive the same amount who would have received had he invested the funds in his chosen investment. Normally, these payments are received after the employee retires from working at the company. After retirement, the company is no longer subject to the $1 million compensation limit because the person is no longer an employee.
It's certain he knew yesterday. I heard him on NPR this morning saying that it was very difficult to determine exactly when to go after the people. If they went to early, they might not get everyone and it could provoke those they hadn't found yet to attack sooner. If they waited too long, they could have missed it.
According to ian c. rogers:
"Correct, but you could also do that with the tracks you buy for $0.99 ($0.79 if you're a subscriber) from Yahoo! Music Unlimited, too. That doesn't differentiate iTunes from us. If paid download/burn is your preferred model, we do that, too, same as iTunes and at the same price or better. Yahoo! Music Engine is not *just* a subscription service, you can purchase burnable tracks, too. Point is, we give you the choice, Apple does not."
3 years in prison for trading files? Well, if I'll have to spend 3 years for doing some crime, I might as well drive 59 mph in a 25 mph zone and kill someone riding a bike. At least make it worth something...
Amen. Kudos to you for it.
Mmmmm.... tasty. I love Kudos. The real milk chocolate chips combined with the wholesome goodness of granola. Your family will love them, and you'll feel good about them too!
I was just out visiting in Provo, Utah and they are just starting to roll this out. The power company, Provo Power, is owned by the city (and Provo has well over 100,000 residents, unlike many of the other cities that are doing this.) (Check it out at iProvo.org)
The thing that is really nice about this is that a very large percentage of Provo is populated by students. Brigham Young University (30,000+ students) is in Provo and Utah Valley State College (~25,000 students) is 5 minutes down the road in neighboring Orem. They're actually going around and putting fibre into entire apartment and condo buildings. If that isn't great enough for college students, they're going to be running everything (power, phone, cable, internet) and all at a very nice price. There's several different options for cable and internet, depending on your requirements, and they are all nicely priced.
One cool thing I read is that if you live in Provo and have a business there as well, you'll be able to connect to your business online at something like 50 Mbps.
There's all sorts of cool things about doing this. I can't wait to get back to school!
Since we're always complaining about copyright, if we donate a ton of the money needed to keep farscape going, do those few people own part of it? Do they get any revenue off of it? It's not like they're the exclusive people who are seeing it. If they were, they would be paying to see it. But to me it seems like they're paying to make it so they and others can see it. Therefore, shouldn't they own part of it?
A couple days before it came out there were rumors and pictures of it... but everyone told how those pictures were fake and it would be impossible to make something like that and that the screws on the top and the cd slot were obviously done in photoshop. Wouldn't this just happen in the case of these moon photos too?
We all got to laugh at those idiots the next day though when Apple released the cube. It was great.
Thanks to Bill Wyman (the rolling stone) all of us on Slashdot who are too young to know (or just simply don't care to know) who any of the rolling stones are, we will now associate the name Bill Wyman with the now popular author.
So, for those of us who don't know enough about this, what can we do to help get everything right with ICANN? Are there resources that might help us in writing a letter to our reps etc?
The 25% was from a study that was done on the reading speeds. I don't recall any of the details concerning who did it or I would try to find a link or more info.
I like having a physical book. I like being able to make marks on pages, put sticky notes on pages that I can feel on turn to, have the book in my hand, take it where I want to and it never needs electricty.
Sure, some people may like it. But that's why a free market is so great. You can use what you like. I also learned in a technical writing class that reading from a computer screen is 25% slower than reading from a book. My own experience tells me this is true as well.
Exactly. Although Half-Life is a great game and many people enjoy it, it's not my type. However, I ended up buying it. Why? Counter-Strike. Think of how many people that would not have purchased HL if it weren't for this and so many other great mods.
I'm so excited to have you as a patient. I never had to cut anything open in med school and this is my first chance!
than "Send[ing] Congress Your Comments On DRM Legislation" which didn't make it to the front page today?
Of course, I totally agree with that. I thought khkramer's comment on the laughing was funny (although I don't think that him laughing at that is.) Keeping a bad law intact because it would hurt people who have been taking advantage of it is horrible. That's what pisses me off the most about this. "Oh, we can't get rid of that law. It would mess up too many things." Well, that's the problem with it. It's messing up too much crap already!