Got into a twitter “fight” this morning with someone who tweeted that it was time to start binge watching netflix because of this piece:
The CEO of Netflix warned consumers that the popular video-streaming service plans to expand services—and raise prices—in coming years. “We want to take it very slow,” Reed Hastings said. “Over the next decade, I think we’ll be able to add more content and have more value and then price that appropriately.” One of the initial crackdowns may be on password sharing. The announcement came as Netflix topped 65 million subscribers this quarter. The cost of third-party content, however, still outpaces its net revenue.
I noted that alternately, people could stop stealing and instead pay the massive seven bucks a month, and was informed I was stingy, didn’t know how to share, needed a metamucil, needed to mind my own business, etc. A couple thoughts:
1.) If massive theft of services i going to cause my price of netflix to increase, it is my business.
2.) If massive theft of services also means that my product is inferior, again, also my business.
3.) I have no doubt lots of people think they are doing nothing wrong when they share, and let’s be clear- people in your household all using the same account to watch tv isn’t what they are talking about. They’re talking about someone paying, then giving their info to others in different locations to use.
4.) The only way artists and actors and writers and directors and gaffers and cameramen and the people who serve them lunch and build the sets get paid is if you pay for their product. We’ll not get way too far into the economic model of netflix and how much actually trickles down to them, but suffice it to say, if everyone is watching netflix for “free” those people are not going to get paid.
5.) The only way artists, musicians, game developers, etc. know you like something is if you pay for it. Then they know to make more of it.
6.) It’s only seven fucking dollars, people.
Botsplainer
My only Netflix pass shares are with my youngest and middle daughters, who had it from when they still lived at home, and I bought into the zillion devices subscription for $13 a month.
If they raise prices, it is STILL a bargain.
JPL
Chattanooga has an active shooter situation. One police officer has been transported to the hospital and there might be more victims at different locations. The news is sketchy though.
Chet
Assuming this is an open thread?
It’s being reported that there’s an active shooter at a USN recruitment center in Chattanooga.
Jerry
Hulu and Netflix are both worth every penny of the seven bucks per month.
I love that people accused *you* of being stingey in this scenario.
kc
Why do you waste valuable time arguing with people on Twitter when you could be posting pictures of Steve here for his many fans?
Omnes Omnibus
@kc: Steve ate the camera.
Anonymous At Work
Totally agree. This isn’t like sharing MP3s of live tracks or refusing to buy the full CD for a one-hit-wonder where 99% will go to the studio executives.
And soon, I’ll be relaying/relating what Netflix is to parents on retirement. Won’t share password, though.
Linnaeus
It’s on of the downsides of easy information exchange on the internet – people have come to expect that they should be able to get anything they want on the internet free and they forget (if they even bothered to think about it) that it takes labor to produce the content you see online.
pacem appellant
I used to work at Netflix. I left with bitterness in my heart, so a part of me says f- them. Their corporate culture is a sick glibertarian joke. However, their original content is better than network fare, it’s a bargain at ANY price (Netflix’s business model is to NEVER MAKE MONEY, so they’ll never raise praises just to increase profit), and the technology to prevent account sharing already exists; they’re just being nice about not activating it at scale. Suck it up moochers, right now, you’re Hastings’s btich, get used to it.
Belafon
I hate it when I hear about people watching a movie from some bootleg site on the internet for the reasons you describe.
And I know we all have gripes with things we’re hearing about the TPP, but one of the sections I think is worth it is making other countries enforce standard copyright laws.
I’ve also heard that the most copied digital book on the internet is the Bible.
NotMax
Have been more and more seriously considering getting Netflix, so a congenital sense of free-floating guilt makes me feel at least partially culpable for any price increases.
;)
JPL
When my son comes over we sometimes watch Veep at my house. He does have HBO though. I will plead guilty to watching Newsroom though.
Rex Tremendae
6.) It’s only seven fucking dollars, people.
I thought it was $8 a month.
gene108
The problem with Netflix is right there John.
The copyright laws did not keep pace with digital media.
You or your local library can buy a book / DVD / CD and they pay the one time fee to the content provider. You or your library can then loan it out as many times as you like, without paying any other fees to the content provider.
Digital media does not work this way.
Netflix has to keep paying royalties for every download or in some cases every subscriber, since they are all potential users.
In the beginning of digital streaming, the content charges were not that high because it was just an after thought to the content providers business model, but when content providers realized there was real money to be made, they started jacking up the prices for distributors, such as Netflix.
Sharing passwords is the least of Netflix’s issues to stay competitive.
JPL
CBS is saying that the suspect is dead in Chattanooga.
Four marines and a police officer shot.
KXB
I’ve been a Netflix subscriber since 2006. It is one of the few companies that I actually boost to friends to try it out. My place includes the 1 DVD at a time, and it’s only $15.98 per month. Less than 2 movie tickets. A couple of years ago, when they were planning to spin off the DVD business into “Qwikster” with a separate log-in and queue – the backlash was so great they backed down. Rather than try to force an unpopular change down customers throat, management responded to customer demands. How novel.
gene108
@pacem appellant:
Care to elaborate further?
I thought Netflix was trying to be a sustainable business.
Patrick
It’s beyond me how someone could actually take the other side of that argument.
raven
I just got Dish Network and it has Netflix (You still have to subscribe). So now I have a blu-ray player, apple tv, iPad, macbook pro smart TV and satellite all that get it!
samiam
Wr0ng Way Cole continues to be perplexed by basic human nature interacting with technology.
If there is a way for people to avoid paying for something then they will do that regardless of the amount.
The solution is to design the technology so they cannot do that. So the onus is on Netflix to make it difficult or impossible to share passwords. Not to browbeat people over it. If that is your solution I guarantee you are wasting your time.
And it’s not stealing as far as perception. You can give intelligent logical legal explanations on the verbage till you are blue in the face. At the end of the day the human perception of taking signals out of thin air or an internet connection vs breaking into someones home or business and physically stealing objects…is NOT the same.
kindness
Isn’t this like those who think content (ie – music, video) should be free just because they have been stealing it since they were children?
I don’t download songs any more. I buy the CD. Before you cast me to the volcano though let me explain. I have 6 devices I load up from my iTunes library. 3 iPods, 2 iPhones and an iPad (yea I own a bit of Apple stuff). They aren’t all mine, they are my households stuff. Buying a download would only let me load a song on to one device. Used to drive me nuts when after reloading a device it would come back and tell me X number of songs couldn’t be copied because they are already in use on another device (my original iPod which died before I could transfer the ‘rights’). So I erased all those songs and added CD’s to my collection, A couple I never did because I only wanted the one song but they were a large minority.
Give artists your money. If you want their stuff they deserve to be paid for it.
@samiam: You kinda skimp out on morals there buddy. You know?
Tree With Water
Just give me football and baseball broadcasts, and the rest of the cable/streaming world can go hang.
Here’s something interesting posted at Deadspin.com. Thanks, Mr. Wizard. Think baseball-curveball as you watch it:
http://io9.com/the-magnus-effect-is-why-a-ball-with-a-bit-of-backspin-1718092647
Cacti
“But digital content, like, belongs to everybody maaaaan!”
“Information wants to be free!”
“Intellectual property isn’t real!”
“Copyright laws are unfair!”
Have I missed any of the millennial-speak for why they shouldn’t have to pay for the creative works of others?
Randy P
I’m so upset and angry I feel like throwing up. Can’t easily post a link from my phone, but Google the name of Sandra Bland, a young African American lady who just died in police custody after being in jail for 3 days for changing lanes without signaling. She was on her way to a new job at Texas A&M
srv
@Cacti:
Omnes Omnibus
@Randy P: There has to be a tipping point. I keep thinking that we are going to reach it, but we never quite do.
sigaba
I work in a below-the-line trade in Hollywood. I will only say:
1) “Jacking up the prices” is really just a battle between Netflix and the studios over rents. Either way the actual actors and artists are royally screwed, though I am much more sympathetic to the plight of the copyright owners (“the studios”) because they actually put up some of the money to make these things, and they’re contractually bound to split profits and royalties with the guilds and union members. Netflix (and the studios) have used streaming as an excuse to demolish the Hollywood artist/business equipoise established by the unions in the 1930s, and replacing it with the sort of neoliberal hell-scape so many other industries now “enjoy.”
2) Most journeyman actors and directors, when they get older and go into retirement, depend on royalty payments for shows they did 20 and 30 years ago to supplement paltry gigs they get in their 60s (or 40s if they’re female), whatever pension and bennies they have, it’s usually the difference between buying the camper and working at the In ‘N Out at 66. Netflix distribution of old syndicated TV is basically rotting-out a lot of middle-class actors and director’s retirement plans and lifetime earning potential, which if Netflix’s corporate culture is a “glibertarian joke,” I’m sure this is seen as a feature, not a bug. That the studios have used Netflix as a pretext to renegotiate is lamentable but these are huge multinational corporations, you can’t account for their behavior.
3) Either way, wether we’re talking about Netflix, or The Pirate Bay, or anything else, the corps are clearly getting the last laugh, as the conglomerates that own “the studios” have all moved aggressively into last-mile Internet service provision. If Warner Bros. or Sony don’t get you to buy the Blu-Ray, Time Warner or Comcast will make you pay out the nose for privilege of torrenting it. Torrenting and streaming have enabled, to an incalculable extent, a transfer of wealth from artists to corporations. Free content advocates and Internet Glibertarians have really been the patsies of the large internet utility providers; they fight for the freedom of artists, but mostly the freedom means the freedom to go broke and starve in a garret.
DonBoy
I especially liked, in the twitter fight, the explanation that it was “sharing” because one person contributes the Netflix password, one contributes the HBO Go, etc. So if you’re in the circle, the accounts are valid property and you’re sharing, but when considering Netflix’s property rights, well, fuck them.
JPL
@Randy P: It does sound suspicious and hopefully, there is a real investigation.
fidelio
Thanks, Cole. I have friends at the content producing end of the business, and they need to eat, wear clothes, pay their utility bills and all the rest of it.
Cacti
@JPL:
A real investigation of police brutality in Texas?
Unless it’s the Feds doing it, I’ll put it in the “not bloody likely” column.
JPL
@Cacti: I know. Even if the fed became involved at this point, evidence would probably be lost.
Martin
@Anonymous At Work:
This is exactly like sharing MP3s of live tracks or refusing to buy the full CD for a one-hit-wonder where 99% will go to the studio executives.
boatboy_srq
I blame MPAA/RIAA and Napster for this.
If the recording industry (audio and video) weren’t so horrifically greedy and spiteful to its consumers, there wouldn’t be a market for “free” content. Napster exploded because the music biz sold us on 8track as “more portable and durable” than vinyl, sold us on cassettes as “more convenient” than 8track, sold us on CDs as a “better and cheaper” medium over all of the above, and cranked the pricing with each new format; then when digital became a potential solution, studios slapped DRM on their overpriced discs instead of embracing a new distribution channel. Napster took off for two reasons: 1) free content is a great attractor; and 2) scr3wing a record industry too eager to grift every last cent from its rubes (whether overcharging for product, underproducing for the demand, or blocking access due to some vague copyright rule) had a certain appeal, and getting exactly what you wanted only made that sweeter. Napster/LimeWire/WinMX and the rest halfway to killed the physical-media music business, and it took Apple and Amazon to even attempt to halt the slide. After that, anything that requires a fee – one-time or recurring – seems “expensive” and will meet resistance – and given that we’ve now had over fifteen years of content-sharing, that genie is BLEEPing difficult to get back in the pay-for-content bottle.
Randy P
@JPL: Aside from the suspicious death, why was she even in jail? Let alone for 3 days!
kped
@Anonymous At Work: That’s a BS comparision. If you refuse to buy the CD because “99% of it goes to the executive”, you are stealing. I don’t care what high minded BS you use to sooth your conscience. It is stealing, and stealing from the artist.
If you don’t want to pay, then accept that you don’t have a right to own it. Anything else is stealing.
boatboy_srq
@sigaba: RE: your #3. Interesting take on broadband. Something we should make more noise about.
gene108
@sigaba:
Can the unions renegotiate their labor deals with the studios?
I think the Screen Writers union went on strike a few years ago, in order to get money for digital content, but I’m not sure how successful that was.
Matt McIrvin
@Randy P: Supposedly for kicking an officer when they pulled her over. There was apparently video of the stop; don’t know if it shows that.
raven
@boatboy_srq: I never downloaded anything off napster that I didn’t already have on vinyl.
Belafon
@boatboy_srq:
Recording companies are, in the end, distributors. Remove that, and they really don’t have much else.
A Ghost To Most
@Randy P:
According to the article I read (TPM?), she kicked the officer in the shin. Definitely worth dying over, at least in TexAss.
kped
@Randy P: They claim, as always, that she assaulted the police. I don’t know if the bystanders video shows the whole thing, so it’s their word vs…no one, now that she’s dead. But really, this escalation of such trivial things has to stop. I’ve gotten tickets driving, police never forced me out of my car. Just write a ticket and be done with it.
LongHairedWeirdo
@DonBoy: well, I’ll give one thing. If a friend and I decided to trade an hour of Netflix for an hour of HBO Go, I wouldn’t see the lack of ethics there. They’re using my Netflix, I’m using their HBO, but *we are allowed to do this*. If I’m making supper and they’re watching “my” Neftlix without me, that’s not wrong. And if I’m in the kitchen, watching “their” HBO while they’re not in the kitchen with me, that’s not wrong.
And I’ll go *this* much further: if I’m just barely scraping by (and I’m not) and my friend is just barely scraping by, and this is the only way we can both watch the things we like, and we really are “trading” like this (“You can have the HBO tonight, I need to finish Daredevil!”) – I don’t see there being a moral issue, so long as we’re both going to buy full subscriptions to both services when we can afford it. (But in my case, if a friend was so hard up, I’d just buy them a few months of Netflix or something. Because I *can* afford it, and Netflix deserves to get paid good money for a good service. I’d never seen (more than a few episodes of…) ST:NextGen and I can stream it as part of the service – way cool!)
If I just shared out my Netflix account , because I can pretend my wife/son/daughter is using it, that would be stealing. No excuses.
Not trying to defend any particular twit(ter user) – it’s just in my nature to poke around the edges of ideas.
fidelio
@Randy P:
Here’s a piece from the Chicago paper, and another from VOX, and one from The Root.
The first page on Google shows results from the NY Daily News and television stations as well. I saw reports on Twitter this morning that one of the people involved had been previously fired from a police position for bad behavior.
For those with a taste for grim irony, today’s Google tribute is to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_B._Wells"Ida B. Wells, who brought a lot of sordid things about American race relations to light in her time.
Belafon
@sigaba: I’ve belive it was Dave Matthews who makes all of this money off of tours.
Anonymous At Work
@gene108: If they generate a lot of profit from showing non-original content, then the various studios who sell them content will either demand more for the content or leave Netflix to start their own independent streaming service. It’s a semi-private public utility in some ways.
fidelio
I’m in moderation. Over-linkage, I suspect.
JPL
@A Ghost To Most: How many people get pulled over for not signaling a lane change? Of course, I drive while white so maybe that’s the difference.
Tomas
Just a quick economics point: netflix is not a non-profit company and will charge what the market will bear. If netflix thought that it could charge 9 bucks and increase profit, it would. If it got more subscribers and fewer people used pirated movies (due to for instance harsher enforcement or some moral epiphany), does that mean that it would lower its prices? Not if it behaved like a profit maximizing company. If anything the pirates are keeping you subscription down (but perhaps limiting the amount of content being produced).
RSA
@Cacti:
Good summary. I’d add, “It’s not hurting anyone” and “It only affects big corporations” and a blank stare of incomprehension.
Laertes
The guy you twitfought with is an idiot and an entitled prick.
Pay the goddamn fee, do without, or be a fucking loser schmuck and steal it. There is no fourth option.
catclub
This sounds easy if two IPs are using the same password at the same time. Which one to kill
might be a problem. Both!
boatboy_srq
@Randy P: Given that DWB is in many places a capital offense by itself, I’m surprised they actually cooked up a semilegitimate charge. I do hope somebody is able to throw the book at the b#st#rds.
Tree With Water
@Cacti: No one wants to pay for anything anymore, that’s the trouble. Maybe there’s a Marvin Miller waiting in the wings to insure one day artists get a fair shake… Miller being an attorney who ultimately engineered major league baseball players being paid their fair share of the pie, after having been badly exploited by the owners from the beginning.
ET
Why is it that people think noting of stealing from the creative class but have no problems for paying for coffee, new tires, clothes, computers, shoes, jewelery, food, curtains, cell phones, cars, bicycles, airplane tickets, pet food, hair care products, make-up, doctors visits, medicines, hair cuts, manis/pedis, etc, etc. etc. I know they don’t consider it stealing and that the amount of free via the Internet has deluded/habituated people into thinking that if it is via the Internet it is free, but does that really account for all that is going on or is there something else.
Davis X. Machina
@boatboy_srq: Changing lanes without signalling gets you locked up? No wonder in Massachusetts the roads are empty and the jails are full…
Fair Economist
@sigaba:
Is this really true? My impression is that torrenting and streaming have hurt the corps at least as much as the artists. Certainly that’s the case in music. Music sales revenue is down by about 2/3 since the online music era started. Artists are not much affected because they have always made the overwhelming majority of their money by touring.
JPL
This could change but supposedly a white guy driving a silver mustang, shot 4 marines and a police officer. There are no reports on the conditions of the marines.
How soon before he is labeled mentally disturbed?
Roger Moore
@Patrick:
Selfishness. They think about what’s good for them and ignore the big picture. Imagining that they’re the only people doing this, and how just one person cheating a giant corporation can’t possibly hurt helps to rationalize it further.
Sherparick
@JPL: If this is some lonely, right wing nut, it will be a one day story and become part of the background noise of gun violence in this country. If it is some lonely, mentally ill, nut who “converted” to Islam and joined ISIS in his mind, it will be a 14 month story about how Obama’s appeasement of Iraq is causing mayhem in America, because..Benghazi!!!!
Regarding original Post, the Internet is great because of all this “free” information and entertainment, but it also terrible because it appears “free,” we forget someone had to spend time to create the content and put it on the web with the infrastructure that allows us to access, use, and enjoy it. These someones also need to earn a living. If you like a band, or a group, or actor, or site, you should you do your best to provide tangible support.
Roger Moore
@Tree With Water:
I don’t know what the NFL charges, but MLB streaming costs about $130/year. I think it’s good for the game, too, since Bud Selig, in a rare display of forward thinking, made sure that all revenues from “advanced media” is shared equally.
JPL
@A Ghost To Most: How did she kick him in the shin?
After he (an officer) pulled her out of the car, forced her and tossed her to the ground, knee to the neck, and arrested her.” link
Feathers
@Tomas: Not so sure on the Netflix details, but one of the huge problems of the “new” economy is that allegedly for-profit companies operate in the red for years and years, making their money off of Wall Street. So Amazon didn’t make a profit until 2009, and to this day doesn’t break even every year, but has put many, many profitable small and large competitors out of business.
Never, ever, believe that profit is the motive of business.
jheartney
In the (dark) days before Netflix, I used to download TV series episodes to an iPod and play them on a little tube TV while I exercised. It was, frankly, a PITA; you’d have to locate all the separate parts of the episode you wanted, spend hours downloading them, recombine them (and hope they were all complete), use Handbrake to convert them to iPod format, then place them on the iPod. Even then, you could be screwed if the original encoder didn’t include the English soundtrack, or if sound and video wandered out of sync, or various other problems.
The old saying is that widespread piracy is a sign of a service problem. Piracy may be “free,” but it usually includes a deeply sucky user experience. I was so glad to start watching many of the same shows using Netflix that I used to pirate. The monthly fee was nothing compared to the alternative. If lots of people are pirating content, it means that the price to get it, or the user experience of getting it, is so sucky that pirating is preferable.
One of the most-pirated TV shows has been Game of Thrones. For a long time, there was the idiotic requirement that to stream GOT, you had to have a[n overpriced] cable subscription on top of your HBO subscription. The result was piracy. An last, with the advent of HBO NOW, you can stream HBO without a cable subscription (thought they still have the idiotic requirement that you use an Apple streamer).
Randy P
@JPL: Mayor of Chattanooga gave a press conference and said shooter and one other person are dead.
Another Holocene Human
This.
sigaba
@gene108: The unions can renegotiate deals going forward, but there are some limitations.
Mainly, it would only affect deals on new projects and deals yet to be done. When Julie London contracted to do her 4th season of Emergency! everybody assumed that the only revenue streams for a TV show were air, first run syndication and (possibly) subsequent runs, so she’d only have royalties from that. New deals take into account new revenue streams. This is why, for example, all of the cast of Star Trek were in poverty through the 70s, because they only got residuals for the first run syndication, mainly because prior to that time a TV show never made money in reruns and the amounts were so paltry no actor ever bothered to try to grab them (except Shatner!)
Also the unions and guilds are still two steps away from the point of sale, so Netflix takes his cut, the distributor takes his, and the residual is exactly that, a residual. And everyone on the creation side is in agreement that, for what Netflix actually does (ie. has a lot of hard drives and an internet connection) it’s not clear they really deserve to be the “principle” in the revenue deal. It doesn’t make sense to me, they’re a middleman for other middlemen.
@Belafon:
Yes, Dave Matthews may make a living of live performance. And Harry Nilsson never did a live show in his life, and if the Beatles only got paid for live shows, we’d never have Sgt. Pepper’s. If you just want to press the reset button and return us to the way the entertainment business worked in 1910, then destroying recording arts may look appealing.
Just to go back to Star Trek, I suppose they could do a live show of that, and some of the fan-produced projects are pretty slick, but if we didn’t pay people for recorded television, the production values of the Kickstarter/Patreon fan-produced product would pretty much be all we’d have. I think the world is better off with Star Trek, and MASH, and Lawrence of Arabia, and pretty much all animation as something people have to pay for and pay to see. And I’m not sure we’re better off in a world where these things “can” be made but nobody can afford to.
Roger Moore
@Belafon:
They’re a bit more than that. In a lot of cases, they also provide the studios, producers, and engineers who make a huge difference in the overall sound of a studio album. It’s usually not as important as the performers, but it’s far from nothing.
JPL
@Randy P: The local news is saying four military personnel were killed.
Randy P
@Randy P: Sorry that was a state legislator who said that. Not clear why he has any more facts than anyone else.
I’m skimming a CBS article which is sketchy for obvious reasons, and being periodically updated. As usual, there probably won’t be firm facts for many hours
Davebo
@Matt McIrvin:
The video I saw only shows her on the ground being cuffed. We’ll see if the entire video is released but I’ve got to think it will be.
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Relatives-question-death-of-woman-found-hanging-6388529.php
pacem appellant
@gene108: Every dollar that nflx makes above its costs is shoveled back into R&D. Since they turn no profit, they pay no taxes on corporate profit. As for sustainable, they are. They don’t necessarily lose money, just that they have an open active policy of never making money (as a company). They certainly generate a lot of wealth for the share holders, though!
Fair Economist
@Cacti:
Part of the problem is that the current eternal copyright laws ARE unfair. It is getting impossible for works to pass meaningfully into the public domain now. A lot of old content is unusable because nobody even knows who might hold the copyright, so you can’t even negotiate for its use. New content might easily remain out of the public domain for almost 125 years.
Much more reasonable, in the current environment, would be a copyright duration of about 33 years. Content providers would get rewarded for what they do, and somebody that did something not successful at the time but later recognized as worthwhile would get benefits in the 2 decade later nostalgia boom. But, people would be able to see broad cultural contributions to the art of their youth. Is the world a better place because nobody will be able to do something like “Wicked” with the Star Wars characters until sometime after 2100, depending on how long Lucas lives?
Another Holocene Human
@Cacti: A millennial did not coin the phrase “information wants to be free”
*insert eye roll here*
boatboy_srq
@LongHairedWeirdo: Trouble with your position is this progression:
1) Live performers
2) Paid live performers on a stage with tickets and reserved seating
3) Live street performers working for tips
4) broadcast
5) commercial broadcast with advertising
6) paid subscription broadcast without advertising
… You see the next step here? It’s called “become an artist and entertain yourself” aka do-it-yourself free entertainment. It’s what happens when the established commercial product becomes unaffordable. It’s happened repeatedly in the history of the arts. Bored? Pick up a guitar or violin; find a piano; read; do something yourself.
You admit you’re scraping by, but rather than save your subscription pennies and crack a book, go to the library for freely available A/V entertainment, or simply avail yourself of what’s still on the airwaves, you’re handing over a subscription you paid scarce pennies for to someone else and taking one that person paid for for his/her own use. The problem here is very simple: you aren’t entitled to being entertained exactly as you wish at any time. What you are entitled to is ready access to information, which access could be at a public facility or over publicly-subsidized broadcast. There are some of us without the nickels to rub together who’ve cut their cable/dish lines and hooked up the rabbit ears and dealt with what was on the air or on the ten-year-old VHS tapes when it was necessary. You’re doing a less-bad thing than some (tit-for-tat sharing with a friend), but you’re still buying into the idea that the content is yours and the producers there of can suck it. And you’re buying into the Millenial “Me” mindset that what’s out there should be available to you personally just because.
Don’t get me wrong: I applaud you for minimizing the damage. What bothers me is that you’re still not seeing the professionals responsible for what you’re watching or listening to as valuable, and you’re ignoring the fact that the content you’re consuming is in fact a privilege.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: Did Cacti say that a millennial coined the phrase or did Cacti say that the phrase was one of several used as a justification by millennials?
Mark B.
My next door neighbor was a long time member of Dan Fogelberg’s band and a successful musician in his own right He’s still active in the music biz, occasionally touring and writing music for other bands. But he gets really upset when he gets checks from streaming music services for a couple of pennies. I suppose it’s always been tough for aging musicians to make a living, but it seems excessively cruel these days when nobody actually pays for music any more. Since he has had recent health issues that messed with his singing voice, he’s probably not going to be able to tour again or even make music for commercials, which was him major income in recent years. I don’t know how he’s going to keep his career going except for writing. And that doesn’t pay nearly as well as it used to.
Another Holocene Human
@boatboy_srq: Agreed. RIAA and MPAA would have these Snidely Whiplash like spokesbots and lawyers threatening to throw Granny in jail. Add to the fact that they wanted to sell digital music but NOT pay the artists a red cent because that wasn’t in the contract, and fans decided a collective fuck you was in order. Hollywood wasn’t anywhere near as bad as the record companies (parasites) in my mind, but for a while they had an MPAA head honcho who was determined to make their name as mud as the RIAA.
And so many stupid decisions. Oh no, we can’t sell DVDs when the movie comes out. Lets just arrest anyone who tries. (Funny, those urban entrepreneurs are still in business anyway.) Oh no, we can’t release a movie the same time world wide. Let’s DRM the fuck out of the media to try to stop anyone who tries. Sony sucks so much for this, no, you can’t play those only-sold-in-Germany DVDs until you give the keys to your computer over to Sony and give up the ability to play a US DVD ever again. Sony should have never been allowed to sell media, media players, and own content creation as well.
Another Holocene Human
Don’t forget the online streaming packages instead of buying mp3s one by one that you own was a music industry idea, the same great idea that is causing artists basically to not get paid for the content they create.
The record companies fought like hell against Steve Jobs’ iTunes and there’s still some very famous music that’s never been available there.
raven
@Mark B.: Did he play on High Country Snow? I’m from Urbana and, even though Dan was from Peoria, he got his start playing in and around Champaign Urbana. I didn’t know him well but many friends did.
boatboy_srq
@Davis X. Machina: DRIVING WHILE BLAH/BROWN gets you (sometimes) locked up or (often) shot. “Changing lanes without signaling” is a piddling excuse for locking someone up, but it is less bad than actually citing someone for DWB. I’ve had non-pale friends pulled over and seconds from cited/searched for pulling into their own driveways because some redneck wahoo with a badge thought they didn’t belong. Ennis Cosby is the classic, but hardly unique, example of how DWB often works.
raven
@Mark B.: Always loved Sutter’s Mill
Tree With Water
@Roger Moore: Thank you very much for that information. My cable subscription is lapsing, and it’s info I’ve been wondering about and meaning to check out. That is a very reasonable price. Quick question: who broadcasts the games? That’s important, because if it’s not the Giants own broadcast team, I’d likely pass. To each his own, but I consider them the Beatles of baseball broadcasting teams.
Tom
@Jerry: I’d like to add HBO Now to that list as well. We used to have a $110/month cable subscription that didn’t give us the value that these three services do.
Roger Moore
@Feathers:
A huge part of that is that Amazon has plowed every penny that might have been turned into profit and then some into expanding their business. Their goal is still to make money, but they’re thinking long term. After they’ve driven everyone else out of business, they’ll be able to charge monopoly rents and make real money.
Another Holocene Human
@ET: The kids doing a lot of the stealing don’t have any money of their own. Or at least not the money to buy whole seasons of anime, etc, etc.
And the people who buy their DVDs from urban entrepreneurs do find the cash. They paid a dollar! (Sometimes two!)
Mike J
@JPL:
If he did it because he converted to Islam, he’s a terrorist. If he hates the federal government because of the confederate flag and gay marriage, then he’s just a crazy guy, nothing to look at here.
Mark B.
@raven: Robert McEntee. I believe he was with Fogelberg’s band for most of the time it was active. It’s not my kind of music, but Robert is an amazingly talented musician. Since Fogelberg has writing credit for most of the music the band performed, the other musicians don’t get paid royalties for their work with the band. Robert had his own solo career, not nearly as successful, but still impressive.
kc
@Fair Economist:
Hey, Disney paid for those laws fair and square.
Bobby Thomson
@boatboy_srq: tl; dr – those record companies were asking for it wearing that short dress. You’re a fucking thief. Don’t try to make it pretty.
sigaba
@Fair Economist:
Some corps sell media. Some corps sell internet service. There exist corps that do both, and corps that do one or the other have relationships with each other. One group of people that belongs to neither group is artists.
There has definitely been a decline in overall revenues for content, but people pay $50-$100 a month for access to downloadable content, and exactly 0% of your Internet bill goes to creators or artists, the people that make downloadable content worth downloading. It’s just an astonishing case of rentierism.
@Belafon:
Okay so this is really complicated, and it’s my day off so I can break this down a bit.
First we have to distinguish between distributors and producers. A distributor makes copies of media, sells it, moves units to retailers, markets it, and administers the copyright and other paperworky things. This is a huge job for certain product. Justin Bieber is a creation of marketing, as far as I’m concerned some record company should be strip-mining every last cent that kid made because the actual artist was basically redundant, all of the brilliance and creation was in manufacturing the social phenomenon. And this is not to take away from the Bieber phenomenon, kids like certain things, entertainment is a product, if they can sell it and people want to buy it someone should make it. Saturday morning cartoons would be another example of this.
So, apart from distributors are producers. Producers actually make the product, they supervise the creation, they hire all the artists, actors, collaborators, technicians, they are often also the “director” on film projects, they’re the “show runner” on TV shows, they’re the authors. Producers usually enjoy a share of the profits from creation of media products, but they also make a lot of money just making them, by getting financiers and, more often, governments to front them the money. Actors often co-produce their own movies as well, through their own corporation.
In the middle, in the film and TV industry at least, are things called “studios,” which combine a lot of producer functions with a division or corporate relationship with distributors. Studios, like Fox or Sony (the old Columbia Pictures) and Universal have huge physical plants with studio space, equipment, and they also have large staffs of technical crew on call, either freelance or on contract, and the facilities for them to do stuff like editing, sound mixing, music recording, all that jazz. They’re huge installations and if Los Angeles or New York didn’t have them, a lot of the filmmaking (and TV) the US is known for wouldn’t exist.
So, the large corps that actually bankroll or facilitate the production of movies we call “studios,” but they’re really so closely aligned with their distribution organizations that we can regard them as about the same. Paramount (and everyone else) has creative and development executives, writers and directors and agents pitch ideas for movies at them, eventually they hear about one they like and they line up the money, either using their own or partnering with other distributors or investors, in exchange for territorial rights, distribution rights, video game rights, whatever. The “studio” then hires the producer to make the movie, and the producer spends the money.
The actual financing comes from all over the place, nowadays from hedge funds like Media Rights Capital and a lot from state tax incentives. The “studio” and talent agencies do the job of lining them all up with projects they want to spend money on –a very complicated and delicate task– and making sure they all get paid back like they expected.
You really can’t talk about “the corps” as one thing. Some corps are closely aligned with the interests of artists, some with financiers, and some are just leeches.
Roger Moore
@Tree With Water:
You get your choice of the two teams’ broadcasts. Unfortunately, it looks to me as if their blackout rules are pretty strict; they’ll blackout essentially all the games you could get on your local cable package. That’s great if you’re living outside your favorite team’s home territory (as I am) but sucks if you’re trying to bypass cable.
Another Holocene Human
@sigaba: I think Nimoy never anticipated what the show would become or how it would affect his career. Not long after the sets were broken down for the canceled Star Trek he was back in the same trailers working for Mission Impossible. I think he and his wife saved that Star Trek money, too, so he didn’t have to go back to driving a cab. He did a couple of different creative projects, which my horrified self stumbled upon (Thanks, internet!).
boatboy_srq
@Bobby Thomson: Englisch, bitte?
Mike J
@Roger Moore:
Recording studios are banks that charge usurious rates. Studios, producers, equipment, promotion, tour support are all paid for by the artist. After they split proceeds 90-10 with the studios, all of those expenses come out of the artist’s 10%. The studios don’t “provide” anything other than an advance to rent all of the things needed to make an album.
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s not fair to point the finger when a) GenXers popularized it and b) a Boomer coined it
The generational trolling is lame, and also factually incorrect.
Dave C
I pay for a Netflix streaming account, and I have shared my password with a couple of people. Does the EULA signed by Netflix users prohibit this? If not, I don’t see how password-sharing could be reasonably interpreted as stealing.
raven
@Mark B.: If you are interested in a look at the business read “So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful Of Record Executives and Other True Tales from a Drummer’s Lifer” by the Semisonic drummer Jacob Slichter (also from C-U). It’s a real eye opener, the dude is not bitter but he lays it out pretty well. Their lead guy wrote most of their music and went on to win Grammy with the Dixie Chicks. Cool book.
raven
@Mark B.: Here’s a nice video with him from a Dan tribute/fundraiser.
Another Holocene Human
@Dave C: I thought they were talking about anonymous sharing a la BugMeNot.
Germy Shoemangler
@Mike J:
There was a time years ago when the artist was dependent on the studio producer. But nowadays some of the best music I’ve heard has been self-recorded.
jl
@sigaba: @Fair Economist: I think you folks make good points. The basic economic point is that once the content has been created, the price should be the cost of distribution, which if not free, it nearly is. So in that sense, yes, information should be for free.
Problem is that charging the cost of distribution for copies of content won’t cover the fixed costs of creating the content in the first place. So, there is a tension between the efficient price that should be charged for distribution of existing content (which should be almost nothing) and reimbursing the creator for the fixed costs of the initial creation.
I’m not technically savvy enough to know for sure, but the basic problems is as old as writing. Eighteenth century composers were in same position as artists today, what with publishing houses getting a copy of sheet music, setting up the type and underselling the original publishing house that paid the composer.
There is a gray area here. What is the dividing line between lending some friends sheet music/vinyl/CD/digital file, and going into business republishing mass quantities?
To the extent that Netflix and other distributors are sharing revenue with artists and technical people who help create the content, they are just grabbing rents and we should not care that much about how much they make.
Distributors are like bankers, they have the cash to influence legislation and regulations to make themselves appear very important and irreplaceable, but they are really some of the most easily replaceable agents in the economy. Until there is reform of copyright and distribution system, audiences and artists will be caught in a lose lose situation.
Cole might want to reflect on that while the metamucil is working its magic. Reform of copyright, royalty and distribution system would be like a little metamucil for the industry: more flow through system of valuable content at an efficient rate, more nutrients heading off to organs that create valuable content.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Holocene Human: And that’s moving the goalposts.
Another Holocene Human
@Omnes Omnibus: Whatever.
Another Holocene Human
@jl: What do you think about the Canadian model?
Dave C
@Another Holocene Human:
Oh, perhaps. I didn’t read the twitter argument.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“act of domestic terrorism”
can not and will not share facts of the investigation at this time
/TN US Atty
jl
One difference is with digital formats and replay systems is that distributors have potentially much more control over re-use. I remember reading about e-book and digital music distributors wanting libraries to pay royalties for every time a work was lent out to a another patron. I don’t believe they got what they wanted. Anyway, I can’t be particularly concerned about distributors rental profits. Though as long as they can control content for long periods of time through unreasonable and inefficient copyright laws, they have the power to control distribution and have to be placated to some extent.
Germy Shoemangler
Mike Gerber had some interesting things to say on the subject:
Gimlet
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/wisconsin-supreme-court-ends-john-doe-probe-into-scott-walkers-campaign-b99535414z1-315784501.html
the Wisconsin Supreme Court in a sweeping decision Thursday ruled that governor Scott Walk’s campaign and conservative groups had not violated campaign finance laws in recall elections in 2011 and 2012.
The ruling dealt with three pieces of litigation, and the justices split 4-2 on the campaign finance laws that were at the center of the probe.
Joining Gableman in the majority were the court’s three other conservatives — Prosser, Chief Justice Patience Roggensack and JusticeAnnette Ziegler.
Court records have shown those fighting the subpoenas included Walker’s campaign; the state’s largest business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce; and WMC’s political arm.
The Wisconsin Club for Growth, Johnson and another club adviser, Deb Jordahl, filed a lawsuit challenging the probe on technical grounds.
Weiner’s center filed a brief in the case supporting a February motion by the special prosecutor asking that one or more justices drop out of the cases, presumably because they have benefitted from spending by the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.
The Wisconsin Club for Growth is estimated to have spent $400,000 for Ziegler in 2007; $507,000 for Gableman in 2008; $520,000 for Prosser in 2011; and $350,000 for Roggensack in 2013.
WMC spent an estimated $2.2 million for Ziegler; $1.8 million for Gableman; $1.1 million for Prosser; and $500,000 for Roggensack.
In addition, Citizens for a Strong America — a group funded entirely by the Wisconsin Club for Growth — spent an estimated $985,000 to help Prosser. The spending estimates come from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks political spending.
The justices did not give a reason for why they don’t view that spending as a conflict, but court rules say political spending on its own is not enough to force a justice off a case.
jl
@Another Holocene Human: I don’t know what the Canadian Model is. Give me a link and I surely will read it. Thanks in advance.
Germy Shoemangler
Piracy Means No New Beatles?
How would a group like the Beatles do in today’s economy?
jl
@jl:
I meant to type:
‘ To the extent that Netflix and other distributors are NOT sharing revenue with artists and technical people who help create the content, they are just grabbing rents and we should not care that much about how much they make. ‘
Sorry for typo.
boatboy_srq
@Another Holocene Human: Interesting footnote: I have a hand-pressed autographed CD from an artist I know – whose same album I found on a Napster search. When I told her, she was flattered that somebody liked her music enough to share it.
Tree With Water
Way Off Topic
I’ve always suspected that Eisenhower was THE driving force behind the censure of Joe McCarthy. I recently stumbled on these two entries, and believe my suspicions are lent weight by them. Ike and Zwicker were both West Pointers, and Ike was, of course, intimately familiar with his war record. I submit the following to anyone that might be interested:
NY Times: “..In the ultimate action the Senate voted to condemn Senator McCarthy for contempt of a Senate Elections subcommittee that investigated his conduct and financial affairs, for abuse of its members, and for his insults to the Senate itself during the censure proceeding. Lost in a day of complex and often confused parliamentary maneuvering was the proposal to censure Senator McCarthy for his denunciation of Brig. Gen. Ralph W. Zwicker as unfit to wear his uniform..”.
From Zwicker’s Wikipedia biography: “..During World War II Lt. Colonel Zwicker participated in the Normandy landings on D-Day with the 29th Infantry Division. Going ashore pre-first wave with roughly 100 soldiers as Forward Observer / Beachmaster in the Easy Red Sector of Omaha Beach, sending back intelligence on enemy troop movements, placement of enemy artillery et cetera to the Commanding General Headquarters V Corp. For his actions on D-Day he was awarded the Bronze Star with arrowhead, Silver Star, Distinguished Service Order from Great Britain and was promoted to full Colonel soon thereafter.
Due to fortunate circumstances Colonel Zwicker took command of the 38th Infantry Regiment on July 5, 1944. Less than one week later on July 11, 1944, Major General Walter M. Robertson commander of the 2nd Infantry Division gave the order to take Hill 192. Hill 192 was a major German defensive stronghold that was covered with ancient hedgerows and thick old-growth tree clusters. Taking Hill 192 took the full force and might of the 2nd Infantry Division along with 9 battalions of artillery using a tactic called “Moving Barrage”. During the day roughly 25,000 rounds of artillery consisting of 50% H.E. and 50% W.P were levied on the hill before it was taken. This was the only time during the war a moving barrage was used. Now the gateway was open for the battle of St. Lo and the beginning of what was to known as “the breakout.” For his actions on hill 192 Colonel Zwicker was awarded his second Silver Star.
During the Battle of Brest elements of the 38th Infantry Regiment were the first Americans to enter the city. The port of Brest was captured after 39 days of combat on September 19, 1944. Sometime during the battle of Brest Colonel Zwicker was awarded his second Bronze Star.
On October 11, 1944 Colonel Zwicker was transferred to Headquarters 2nd Inf Division and promoted to the position of Chief of Staff (G-3) of the 2nd Infantry Division until the end of the war. Out of the 25 Legion of Merits awarded by the 2nd Infantry Division during the war Colonel Zwicker was awarded two..”.
sigaba
@jl:
This would only be true for excludable and rivalrous physical goods. A movie ticket or a netflix subscription are “club goods,” which are excludable but non-rivalrous.
My pet solution is to make the Internet full recipient-pays, so when you go to Balloon-juice.com, John has something set on the server that says “everyone who downloads the index must pay me $0.10 per download”, and the ISP records this info and puts it on your bill at the end of the month, like an old 1-900 number. Combined with streaming this would put a huge dent in piracy and advertising (including “sponsored content”) in one fell swoop. I think I got the idea from Jaron Lanier, but proposals like this have been around since the beginning of the public internet.
But the ISPs would hate it, because it would severely curtail what they could charge for the cables, they’d be fighting for that $100 a month people have for Internet along with all the content providers. Also obviously there’d be a lot of rejection from the Slashdot set, since pretty much all Open Internet advocates are convinced that freedom equals everything is free all the time, except for your Internet bill, which we suspiciously don’t talk about, unless we’re talking about Net Neutrality, in which case we sycophantically toe Google’s line.
JPL
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Since military recruitment centers were targeted, would it automatically be called domestic terrorism?
raven
@Tree With Water: Oh no the “Indianhead Division”!
JPL
@JPL: There’s some clarification on whether or not it really is terrorism. The Tennessee atty might have misspoke.
They are explaining that if the shooter were motivated by an outside source, then it would be. Actually I think that if you target the government like Roof and apparently this shooter did, that’s terrorism.
Calliope Jane
I have relatives who think it’s perfectly normal to share passwords/steal Netflix – wealthy, republican (big contributors to w bush, love Limbaugh, etc). They suggested that I share my password with a (wealthy) cousin because…I have no idea. They think it’s the thing to do. I don’t understand that mentality but I did say “so you’re the reason the price keeps going up.” They didn’t like that response, for some reason.
Death Panel Truck
Well, it’s $8.68 here in Washington state. I guess there’s a $1.68 discount if you live in West Virginia. Otherwise I agree with you completely, Cole.
Germy Shoemangler
@JPL:
JPL
@Germy Shoemangler: As soon as the Tennessee atty. spoke terrorism, CBS broke in with special report. Unfortunately, they didn’t know they were suppose to hear the entire conference first.
raven
<blockquoteCNN)[Breaking news alert, posted at 3:07 p.m. ET Thursday]
Four people were killed in shootings in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Thursday morning, Mayor Andy Berke said. The suspected shooter is also dead, he said.
Authorities are treating Thursday's shootings in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as an “act of domestic terrorism,” U.S. Attorney Bill Killian told reporters.
Steeplejack
@Germy Shoemangler:
For this, and the stuff you quote in general, can you provide a link? It would be helpful for those who would like to read more or evaluate the source.
Germy Shoemangler
@Steeplejack: Yes, here is one link:
http://www.heydullblog.com/bootlegs/most-pirated-group-beatles/
Also, see my comment #112 for other comments from the same author.
jl
@sigaba: Note sure you are applying idea of ‘club goods’ that precisely here, since I don’t see how congestion costs enter into movie showings in theatre and digital files in same way. At industry level, not sure it makes any difference since seems to me things like movie showings are very easily scalable. So, at least the original theory of club goods I am familiar with, there are three components, fixed cost of creating original content, marginal costs of distribution of existing content, and an externality cost of optimal groups size of collective consumption. So an added complication, not a change in the fundamental nature of the problem.
But if I am missing something, please explain or give a link.
Your pet solution sounds interesting. Send a link on that approach if there is one.
gene108
@ET:
We reproduce music all the time. We get “ear worms”, we hum songs, the more talented among us sing songs we here in movies and the radio.
We all drew pictures, when we were kids.
“Art” as being something we create or others create is something we’ve been exposed to and have done from a very young age.
Being good enough at Art to get people to pay for your work is another thing entirely, but I think because the barrier to entry to (bad) Art is pretty low, people may have lower expectations as to what they should pay for creative work.
There’s a grey area to me between stealing and borrowing. I buy a book and loan it to a friend to read. The friend borrowed the book from me and is not stealing.
The digital age has made it tough to manage this, in some respects because the “borrowing” can be so much more widely disseminated.
But in some respects the mindset is the same.
I buy a product. I share the product.
I borrowed a book from a friend. I never gave it back and then gave it to someone else to read and the book goes around like this from person to person.
Same sort of thing can happen on YouTube but you end up sharing with a million people you do not know.
Peale
Yeah, I’m opposed to cheating Netflix. That’s easy I guess. I while I get the point that file sharing is theft, and that most downloaders are freeloaders, there is a small corner of piracy that involves people working around the inefficiencies of global distribution and/or local censorship laws that prevent movies from either being shown, shown anywhere else but that time at a film festival (censorship laws usually are slightly relaxed in other countries for film festivals) and small markets that may be globally substantial but too niche in individual countries to get around the stranglehold that established distributors place on content. I know, I’m jumping from the US where $3.99 for a Google Play rental and $7.99 for a netflix subscription is and hour and a half of work, but it doesn’t work that way globally. I wonder if pricing for these services globally reflects that.
I don’t want to make pirates and their customers out to be some kind of heroic anti-censorship cinephiles. I mean, most of the piracy is going to be of big Hollywood releases and popular movies that are widely available for legal streaming. But it does exist, especially outside the US where distribution is even more tightly restricted and controlled than it is here.
JPL
@raven: It was probably Iran, now that they can build a bomb
The FBI is not calling it domestic terrorism yet, and four marines died.
weasel
I think they have started to take some steps to address the ‘password sharing’ issue. Even though all Netflix account usage takes place in my household, I recently got a new tablet for my daughter and then tried to start watching a movie and needed to upgrade my account so that I could stream to 3 or more devices at once. Still a great bargain, but now I’m paying $13 a month.
retr2327
@Davis X. Machina: That depends. Do I really have to tell you what it depends on?
sigaba
@jl:
A club good depends on a lack of congestion, a club good is artificially scarce. It’s when a club good becomes congested that it ceases to be that.
Club goods are not naturally scarce, we can make them over and over and over again and sell them over and over, by definition a club good is infinitely reproducible for zero cost, in the limit. We make club goods scarce by convention and law, in the same way we make private goods excludable by convention and law. We make a law that says “you can’t sell a movie a hundred times on Megaupload” in the same way we make a law that says “you can’t take a car without the title or the permission of the owner.”
chopper
@JPL:
wait, he’s white? well then, “boys will be boys”, right?
Gimlet
More Wisconsin News
The Wisconsin Senate voted 21-10 to approve $250 million in public financing for a new arena for the Milwaukee Bucks.
Just a few days ago, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed a state budget that includes cuts of $250 million to the University of Wisconsin system, among other cuts to public education funding.
Marc Lasry, a Bucks co-owner, is estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.87 billion, while co-owner Wesley Edens was worth $2.5 billion in 2007 before suffering a downturn (though not so big of one to prevent him from owning an NBA team) in the Great Recession. Together, they will pay just $150 million towards the arena.
JPL
@chopper: Nope .. CBS just said his name was Muhammed…………………………….
Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez
rikyrah
they keep on saying that he is ‘ the smart one’.
doesn’t he get that the only thing left unsaid by Trump about immigrants is ANCHOR BABIES?
Texas won’t even issue birth certificates TO AMERICAN CITIZENS.
And, he says this?
Germy Shoemangler
@chopper:
I remember a few years back, during election season, receiving the usual campaign literature in the mail. One of them was from a conservative guy running for a judgeship. He pledged to be reasonable, not to be too harsh on young people who have made a simple mistake.
While at the same time being tough on real criminals.
I remember thinking at the time that he most likely based his decisions on race. “You’re white, from the suburbs? Just a good but confused kid. You’re black, from the (gulp) city? You need to be taught a lesson.”
Linnaeus
@jl:
This is one reason why, even though I have an e-reader, I’ve been reluctant to invest much in e-books (about the only ones I read are those that I borrow from my public library). From what I understand, when you “buy” an e-book, you’re not actually buying the book outright, as you would a paper copy. You’re buying a license to read the book, which can be revoked at any moment. You can’t loan the book (except under specific and generally proprietary circumstances) or sell it. I can’t even sideload a book I “bought” from my reader to my computer.
Not to mention technological obsolescence issues, but that’s another discussion.
Booger
@ET: To pile on to Boatboy’s point: I bought ‘X’ in vinyl; I bought ‘X’ on eight-track; I bought ‘X’ on cassette and I bought ‘X’ on CD. Why shouldn’t I be able to download everything I’ve already purchased for free? If the record companies wanted me to pay the marginal cost of the new medium fine, but if I’ve got the album I should be able to have the digital no questions asked.
But we were never even given that option, so screw the labels…I’ve played fair, why can’t they?
Germy Shoemangler
@Linnaeus:
And an important one.
I have a ton of files on a zip disk. I’ll never see them again.
Linnaeus
@Gimlet:
And it may not end there. Let’s also see how revenue from the arena is distributed – I wouldn’t at all be surprised if the team owners get pretty much all of it.
Mark B.
@Linnaeus:
There’s a product out called ‘Shelfie’ that exists just for that purpose. I’m not sure how they verify ownership of the book you’re sideloading, but it does exist.
burnspbesq
@samiam:
Perhaps not for you, but those of us with more than eleven functioning brain cells actually get the distinction.
JPL
The verdict has been reached in the James Holmes case. I think they just got the case so quick. There is no doubt that he murdered and maimed the individuals but I hope they consider his mental illness.
jl
@sigaba: yes, I get that. I just don’t understand how it plays into the conflict between creation versus distribution costs, at least as a first approximation. For example, I don’t see how the congestion cost of club goods plays into your idea for download pricing.
Gimlet
@Linnaeus:
It’s the ongoing cost of utilities and nights without paying events. If it’s a good investment they would eagerly make it without any help.
Linnaeus
@Germy Shoemangler:
Me too. Hell, I’ve got stuff on 3.5″ floppies, even. Most of it is stuff I really don’t need, so it doesn’t bother me that I can’t access it anymore, but some years ago, when I noticed that my university’s computers with floppy disk drives were being phased out, I made sure to get my MA thesis copied somewhere where I could get it in the future.
Seanly
@Jerry:
RE: Hulu – I could never find anything I wanted to watch. We got it for my wife when she was going to be stuck in Nashville for her cancer treatments. We did watch some Modern Family, but they only had the current season. I think we paid for for 9 months and watched maybe 10 hours of shows.
Even Netflix is wearing thin on me – very limited selection for streaming movies. Still a good bargain.
chopper
@JPL:
oh, then he’s fucked.
boatboy_srq
@gene108: I suspect 3D printing (prototyping) is likely to change a lot of that. When your computer can only handle images, sounds, video and printed matter that’s what you pull down from the ‘Net. As soon as your computer can make coffee or clothing, though, look out. There’s a lot to be said for the human interaction involved in the other transactions: the moment a computer or smartphone gets in between and becomes the “face” of the transaction, though, those activities will go the same way. Consider: shopping from Amazon; how often does anyone pay for shipping? Who declares the purchases for state sales tax? etc etc. The “borrow v. steal” balance is worth considering too – but a lot of that relates directly to physical media: until the CD-R it was very difficult to copy physical media (vinyl was especially hard to clone but tape had its issues as well) so “borrowing” was tolerated because a single item could only be “borrowed” once. Digital media makes “borrowing” possible for every Internet-connected individual: it’s possible for a billion people to “borrow” the exact same item (not just Album X by Artist Y, but TRACK2.M4A from Album X, hosted on machine X.X.X.X, in storage location \\X.X.X.X\C$\StealThis and originally purchased by A. Smith and uploaded two hours ago) at one time.
@Bobby Thompson: if I’m interpreting your comment correctly, my point is that the “theft” became a lot easier and less unacceptable when a) the labels resorted to digital wankery to protect their copyrights (can’t rip a CD you bought legally to your own PC because you MIGHT share the MP3s? WTF?); and b) what started as an undergrad hobby project to “share” material (as gene108 describes regarding books) suddenly attained global attention. The scale of the change moved too fast for anyone to properly assess, and got perpetuated long enough to approach cultural norm, especially as companies like Apple enabled it with players for the legal-or-not tracks (iPods preceded buying direct through iTunes by several years). FWIW my library contains things like the $60/CD Japanese import versions of Buggles’ Adventures in Modern Recording and Kim Wilde’s Love Moves, the $45/CD Hubert KaH’s Ten Songs and Sandra’s A Secret Land, a handful of individually-burned-and-signed discs directly sourced from smaller artists, all purchased legally, plus about 20 GB of DRM-hamstrung stuff tied to five-computers-and-one-iDevice; I buy my stuff, so take your “effing thief” comment and spindle it.
Linnaeus
@Gimlet:
I agree – I’m just saying that in a lot of these deals, the owners make out like bandits even after the initial subsidy from the state.
Linnaeus
@Mark B.:
Thanks for the tip. I’ll check it out.
Peale
@Germy Shoemangler: easy as pie. 1) Claim that you’ve committed a notorious unsolved crime and that the proof is on your zip discs. 2) After the authorities recover your files, admit that you’re just crazy and ask for those word perfect files to be uploaded to the cloud.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@chopper: gonna be an ugly couple of weeks. Open your windows and you may hear the shrieks of Lindsey Graham coming from the east.
Peale
@chopper: As he should be.
Gimlet
@Linnaeus:
They will get revenue from game-night and not cover nongame-night costs.
Mark B.
@Mark B.: Sorry, Shelfie is for getting digital copies of books that you own in paper form. I’m not sure how you get books from your reader to your computer … unless you can convert them to pdf. Then it’s easy.
Germy Shoemangler
@Linnaeus: I’ve been saving files since the mid-1980s. I’ve got old floppies. The machines that can read them don’t last forever. I can’t bring myself to throw the old storage units away, even though I know I will never access their content. I have a ton of music on cassettes that my friends and I created (amateur weekend musicians) and for the first time in my life I don’t even own a cassette player!
Meanwhile, I have several books that are over a hundred years old, I bought from a used book store. I can read them whenever I wish.
I’ll bet in fifteen years I probably won’t even be able to listen to my music CDS, after my players wear out and the stores stop selling them.
sigaba
@jl: I just like download pricing because I think it’s a good idea and maximizes the revenue with the people who actually make the content, and it also destroys things I don’t like :) Anybody can start a website and it’s pretty easy to get a streaming service on it’s feet with AWS and other services.
I think if J. J. Abrams just had a website instead of having to get ABC and Netflix and Disney to fund him that’d be sortof ideal. It might still have the potential to cut out actors but then the negotiations would be with producers and actors directly, and not with Netflix and TPB giving some 800-pound gorilla distributor a club he can use to beat down wages and pay-throughs. It’d be a win for Netflix and Amazon too, they’re ideally positioned to see their own original content.
Also it’d eliminate the vagaries of the donation-based system of production, which has been and continues to be a total pipe dream, though I happily support some people through Patreon.
Linnaeus
@Gimlet:
Okay, that’s less bad than it could have been.
Linnaeus
@Germy Shoemangler:
I’m going to hold on to my desktop computer for as long as I can, and one reason for that is that it has a built-in CD-ROM/DVD drive so I can still listen to my CDs and watch DVDs (I don’t have a TV). The newer version of my computer no longer comes with the combo drive, so I’d have to buy an external one if I were to update.
boatboy_srq
@Booger: Not only that, but tape was marketed as “better” than vinyl (it wasn’t) and CD was marketed as both “better” (which to some extent it was) and “cheaper” (which it has only become with the reappearance of new vinyl). We’ve been repeatedly sold new formatting as an improvement over the preceding generation, and rarely has the pitch been more than hype. Amazon at least has begun the “buy the disc and get the digital download free” approach, but that’s still very new. I’m not so upset about the multiple purchases: four copies of X is still four copies of X, just like the 1st edition LOTR hardcover is different from the Nth edition paperback, though the point is valid. The part that bugs me is that in their zeal to “prevent piracy” RIAA hobbled an entire format without touching the others: in 2002 you could still dub cassettes, record vinyl to cassette or R2R, and listen to the copy without violating copyright – but just try to rip your CD to your laptop so you could take an album with you and WHAM. The real villians were the folks dropping MP3s on servers with phat bandwidth and letting half the planet swipe copies – but RIAA was getting LEOs to bust little Susie, who happened to find “Like a Prayer” somewhere on the Web and save a copy, and lost her lunch money for a month because of it.
Southern Beale
Also, the only way artists, musicians, etc. GET FUCKING PAID SO THEY CAN EAT AND LIVE SOMEWHERE is if you pay for it.
You fucking pampered millennials who want everything for free: offa my goddamn lawn.
rikyrah
Yeah to Tatiana, Taraji and Viola on their Emmy Nominations.
Gavin
John,
Just because you think Netflix is good does not mean it’s a sustainable business.. or that there is any value in the firm’s stock.
This company is a cash furnace; it has an accelerating burn rate on free cash flow and has been demonstrating that for the last four quarters with the last two ramping up at a ridiculously increasing rate. Last year Netflix had positive free cash flow even if only 1.4% of revenue; sequentially free cash flow in terms of revenue has been +1.4%, -6.1%, -6%, -11.6% and now -15.6%.. and the company has said that it intends to continue this increasingly-outrageous cash burn acceleration into the indefinite future!
In other words the CEO has announced that he intends to literally burn money to “make content” at a rate that dramatically outstrips revenue gains even as he is approaching (if not having reached) saturation in the one market (US) that has a positive operating margin.
I don’t use Netflix because I don’t expect it to be around long enough to matter.
different-church-lady
Dude, NEVER get into an argument with people who think content should be free — it wastes your time and the pigs enjoy it.
different-church-lady
@srv:
I know you were using the ironic voice, but in actuality it’s more like 50% goes to the retailer.
jl
@sigaba: Thanks. I think I get your thinking now. Maybe you are thinking about congestion costs of distribution? I didn’t think about that aspect, which is a bigger issue in internet distribution systems that others.
different-church-lady
@Southern Beale:
No, you don’t understand, musicians make music because they LOVE MUSIC! And they get paid from selling merchandise at live shows.
/actual_argument_with_idiot_years_ago_on_this_very_blog
jl
@Linnaeus: I always look for a flat text file for written content. Project Gutenberg is good for a lot of public domain stuff.
JustRuss
@JPL:
I have. Twice. The first time I actually had signaled and argued my way out of the ticket. The second time was late at night and I’d been up since 4 AM to climb Mt. St. Helens, and probably shouldn’t have been driving. Trooper gave me a warning and sent me on my way. In both cases it was in heavy traffic and the cops had legitimate concerns that I’d endangered other drivers. I’m usually pretty conscientious about signaling.
boatboy_srq
@JustRuss: Failure to signal (turns as well as lane changes) is so bad in both FL and NoVA that I’ve taken to pulling up alongside non-signaling cars and politely telling the driver that the respective taillight is out (good concerned citizen that I am). People are so gracious and appreciative of the information – and the looks on their faces when it registers what I actually meant are just priceless.
boatboy_srq
@Linnaeus: Tower chassis. CD-R/CD-RWs and BD-Rs aren’t likely to go anywhere for a while, and the latest gen are SATA3 which is very fast and industry-standard nowadays. I’m replacing my tower, but ‘porting over the surprisingly-fast drives I bought for the old one in ’10. I’m having a similar moment with my player: Apple has officially p!ssed me off – first with their FUBAR DRM, then with “high resolution” (translation: 256-bit AACs) content for a premium price (over the 128-bit version); and now with dropping the iPod Classic (which had the best DAC of any iDevice) with no replacement in sight. Next player is going to have to be high-resolution compliant just to handle the library, expandable to handle the fact that libraries grow, and solid state because I’m BLEEPed if I’ll purchase another HDD-based portable device. There are moments I think Apple is destroying the digital download ecosphere just as they helped create it.
Full metal Wingnut
Currently sharing a Netflix account with my wife. If we have to buy two I would be mildly irritated but I like the service. I think more reasonable would be a family sharing plan. If my wife and I were charged the price of 1.5 accounts to share I would be ok with that.
different-church-lady
@boatboy_srq: If you’re so ‘phile why are you even listening through consumer-level DACs?
different-church-lady
@efgoldman:
MUSIC INDUSTRY: “Crap! They’ve figured it out!”
sigaba
@boatboy_srq:
You have to understand, the principle crisis that the recording industry was dealing with was, they couldn’t compete with car radios. They invented the 8-track and compact Phillips Cassette (aka “cassettes”) because you could use them in a car and portably in a boom box — these make 8-tracks and cassettes significantly better than records, considering the use case and the market demand (the Sony digital minidisks were invented for similar reasons). They sound a bit worse but in a car the acoustics only permit about 40 dB of dynamic range anyways, they’re quite sufficient for the purpose. The 70-80dB afforded by the best records is in excess of most people’s living rooms noise floor anyway, there’s really only a small sliver of the population that has the means and the patience to tell the difference between a cassette, a phono record, a CD and an MP3.
Cassettes and CDs also wear much better than records (8-tracks tend to stretch out).
The Other Chuck
I haven’t followed this whole thread, so this is probably repeating what someone else said, but: if they raise prices, isn’t that going to result in more people sharing passwords? I mean sure, I do see where they’re coming from, but if this is the tone they want to take with their customers, I don’t see it helping the bottom line if people start regarding Netflix like their phone or cable companies.
EthylEster
@Roger Moore wrote:
And REALLY screw their workers.
The Other Chuck
@sigaba: Cassettes also stretch, they stick, they catch and get “eaten”, and generally have a pretty lousy sound quality, which is why you don’t see anyone using them anymore. Hell, just try to find a cassette walkman outside of a rummage store or garage sale. That said, 8-tracks were even worse in the reliability department…
different-church-lady
@sigaba:
I would argue against cassettes wearing better — every pass of the tape over the heads erodes the high end ever so slightly and smears things a bit. A well-cared-for hunk of vinyl underneath a quality cartridge I think has a higher chance of sounding good on the 500th spin than a cassette does. But that’s only true if you treat the vinyl really really well.
chopper
@boatboy_srq:
tape was better than vinyl in a whole bunch of ways. and i love vinyl.
different-church-lady
@chopper: Not at 1 and 7/8th ips it wasn’t.
chopper
@different-church-lady:
neither of which were popular when it came to the common schmuck.
in the real world, i generally figure it’s a wash in terms of playback quality. the average joe scratches the fuck out of his records over time.
chopper
@different-church-lady:
first off, you can record on a tape. ever make a mix tape for someone on a record? if you’re in a band and have no money to have a record pressed cassettes were a fucking godsend.
second, they were portable. you could play them in a car. you could play them in a walkman. you could walk down the street listening to music! that was fucking crazy! you could pop one in a boombox outside with your friends. that was a huge change in the way music was listened to.
i love vinyl. i do. most of my music collection is vinyl still. but cassettes were a big fucking deal when you think about it.
different-church-lady
@chopper: Yes, I confess I can only see the media world through the lens of the connoisseur. It took me forever to figure out that different people “consume” music in different ways. For many people music is disposable — they listen to it until they’re bored with it and then they don’t care about it anymore. Others (like me) treat it more like each song or album is an artifact to be respected and treated well, even in the instances where the content itself doesn’t measure up. The music industry on the whole will always cater primarily to the first type.
Peale
@different-church-lady: As they probably should. Customers who are easily bored are much easier to convince that they need new artists and new records than those who want to cherish each song.
different-church-lady
@chopper: I was only making comments on sonic quality. Cassettes were tremendously useful and I myself made hundreds of them for various reasons (all of which continue to clutter up my physical life). But other than recordability and portability, there was very little about them that was superior to vinyl. And I say that as someone who spent a lot of time trying to eek every drop of performance I could from the things.
different-church-lady
@Peale: I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Connoisseurs are just as eager to find new music that lights them up. It’s just that the masses are much more massive. If 98% of the overall music market is made up of people who can’t tell the difference between a MP3 and a 96k/24 bit, and most of them are going to listen on earbuds anyway, then the music industry is always going to take the path of lesser resistance, even if any given individual from either camp spends the same amount of money.
gnomedad
I have long been perplexed when people who wouldn’t shoplift can’t understand that stealing services is wrong.
Will Reks
@Full metal Wingnut: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sharing a Netflix account to any number of devices in one household. Netflix already caps devices and profits from this. They have the ability to cap sharing beyond one’s household via IP. Indeed, both HBO and Netflix benefited from this when building their streaming brand. We’re blurring the lines between acceptable sharing and stealing here and its up to Netflix to clarify which is which. It’s almost pointless to try to shame people about this.
sigaba
@The Other Chuck: I personally prefer cassette to vinyl for a lot of 80s punk and metal, they mixed that stuff to fry transformers and cassettes have a more forgiving headroom than vinyl, the noise floor don’t matter. CDs better than both but we’re talking one-on-one comparisons here, and anyway once the mastering engineers had the CD headroom all that did was initiate the Loudness Wars proper.
boatboy_srq
@The Other Chuck: Ayuh. I had a car stereo that ate tapes once a year like clockwork. Thank FSM for four year warranties.
@chopper: Audio quality suffered badly on anything less than 4track R2R. Part of it was the width of the track, part of it was the material used in the smaller formats. As The Other Chuck points out 8track and cassette stretched, wore, snagged, tangled and generally raised a ruckus, all for improved portability and at the expense of fidelity. As marketing they were genius; as audiophile platform they sucked out loud with feathers. But in the early days of digital they were a remarkable back door: you could mix anything from any media to cassette, where you couldn’t for a lot of CDs: the discs were encoded so that CD-R computer drives couldn’t read them. Vinyl, and you and DCL hashed out, was marvelous – IF you had the right recording and the right equipment. If not, then an LP could wear beyond playability in one season. It’s interesting to watch Pro-Ject taking the vinyl world by storm: their turntables look like they rival classic Thorens equipment, and they’re at entry-level prices (in adjusted dollars). Something else here that’s worth mentioning: the digital revolution is as much about the hardware as the content: with the higher-quality audio possible on CD came higher-quality audio in general (notice that stereo/surround TV happened AFTER CDs) and the stuff used to play CDs and then MP3s sounds significantly better than the cassette predecessors at lower prices and smaller sizes. I’d put a Sansa Clip against a gen1 Discman or almost any Walkman any day, and it’s (again in adjusted dollars) half the retail of the cassette player and <10% the cost of the CD player. The same thing has happened in all audio: home and mobile have jumped leaps and bounds because of digital and because of the computing advances that went alongside. Part of the struggle with digital content is that while it may not be as "high fidelity" as audiophile-grade vinyl pressings, it's much better than the equivalent from a quarter century ago for significantly less money so more people have better sound (and video) available than before, whether what they play is digital or analog.
A guy
Lol. Anybody who gets into a twitter fight has f’in problems
different-church-lady
@boatboy_srq:
…and if the mastering engineer knew what they were doing. There’s a reason Bob Ludwig’s name was on damn near everything towards the end of the vinyl era. Plus there is a significant amount of manipulation that goes into fabricating that little squiggle (Try researching the concept of tracing pre-distorition on a day when you want your head to hurt and your gods to die.)
The way I put it is that analog has the capacity to sound better than digital, but at the average consumer-level price point the odds of digital sounding better than analog are huge.
different-church-lady
@A guy: Thank you for reeling the conversation back to the fundamental issue.
gian
@Cacti:
Fucking boomers failed to teach ethics to their millennial kids.
different-church-lady
@gian: Bah… back when I was their age you had to sing a song in order to steal it…
Steeplejack (phone)
@A guy:
Says a guy who’s a third-rate troll on a second-tier blog.
different-church-lady
@Steeplejack (phone): Wait, when did we get upgraded to the second tier?
Applejinx
@Mike J:
…
Mike, what the fuck? I’ve never heard anyone say it quite as baldly as that.
I have a lot of friends who don’t even have livelihoods to fall back on, other than that ‘studio engineer’ thing you think you can just rent gear and do. I at least get to starve while selling audio DSP plugins to people who would rather download a thing than even rent gear. Got started doing that because I couldn’t get even slightly close to what I liked, using the computer.
Fine. I’ve put together my little studio because it genuinely is what I love. Currently it’s making me six bucks a month on Patreon, and I’m spending upwards of fifteen bucks pledging to other people because I care about them more than I care about actually getting the check for six bucks (actually $4.60 after processing, because of course it is)
Do NOT give me anything, because of course you won’t. Instead, just go here https://www.patreon.com/crushallboxes and click on the playbutton on the freaky classic-prog-rock logo (which I also did myself, because of course I had to).
Now, please rent some gear, and do that.
*grumble* years of studying the ways people did this stuff, increasingly a lost art, and it’s ‘rent some gear’… I swear, like some tumblr person, I’m fucking triggered…
Steeplejack (phone)
@different-church-lady:
I may have exaggerated for rhetorical effect.
different-church-lady
@Mike J: Best as I can tell, you’re using “studio” in the sense that the movie industry uses it — an organization that produces a motion picture as well as provides the facilities to film one.
The music industry hasn’t worked like that in about 50 years. Recording studios — those that still exist at this point — are mostly independently owned. The things you’re talking about are done by record “labels” or companies, not the “studios”.
different-church-lady
@Steeplejack (phone):
Do they have that as a plug-in?
A guy
I don’t not have a twitter acct. I have a lap top. I frequent it for fun although not lots. I repeat, anybody admitting a “twitter fight” whatever that is, has issues. And probably ain’t helping our economy. Is a twitter fight the same as passing mean notes in school.
different-church-lady
@A guy:
Exactly the same, except the whole world gets to see the notes!
samiam
@burnspbesq: Haha. Tune in next time when burnspesq explains why any salmon with half a brain swims downstream.
Steeplejack
@different-church-lady:
Requires a hardware dongle.
boatboy_srq
@different-church-lady: Discussing “high fidelity”, what I was referring to was the advance in equipment (amps, speakers, etc) that strode hand-in-hand with digital media. Amps today are more responsive and more powerful; speakers are faster and more transparent; and audio processing tech (Dolby/DTS) is lightyears from 80s/early90s equalization. A manufacturer can, in the same chassis that used to hold basic circuitry, add a thousand-band EQ, a decent DAC (or two, or six), multiple audio decoders/processors etc, for less than the basic unit of a couple decades ago. Digital reaps disproportionate rewards from all that, but there’s a better sound coming from cheaper equipment regardless of the source being played. And even as high as pricing for vinyl is these days, the equipment pricing isn’t much different (that Pro-Ject Debut Carbon is cheaper in adjusted dollars than the one-step-up-from-entry Technics ‘table I took to university, and the includes a good Ortofon cartridge where the P-mount AT for the Technics was extra). Still and all, mastering is the key, and you’re absolutely right that consumer-grade vinyl was worse than anything but the most basic low-bitrate digital.
John Cole
@Steeplejack (phone):
Wait a minute- when did this blog get promoted a tier?
different-church-lady
@John Cole: I was right! You don’t actually read this blog!
sigaba
@boatboy_srq: Hmmmm… I’m not sure the amps we have now are the best they’ve ever been. They can beat the old ones on a pure numbers basis but they actually cut a lot of corners, particularly on the power supply and the large caps and inductors. The sort of thing that burns out after 5-10 years and leads to a lot of thermal instability. If you open up the old consumer receivers from the late 70s they used better power components. I won’t even get into the whole tube thing.
See this is the kind of crap that makes modern receivers sound horrible. People like the idea of having kewl knobs all over their amplifier chain like a “thousand band graphical EQ” but the phase response of an amp like that would be atrocious! And the manufacturer probably uses some cheap-o DSP that does the multiband through a FFT/resynthesis cycle…
mclaren
Sorry, no. Your conclusion is 100% utterly totally wrong.
Netflix is the latest example of a company that used to provide a great service and is now turning to shit. America churns out companies like this by the bushel.
Microsoft used to make a good solid operating system and each OS got better. Then, in 2005, Microsoft jumped the shark and started churning out shite OSs and larding on DRM and generally acting like a monster.
Apple used to make really good computers. Then they churned out iPhones and starting loading DRM into their machines and neglecting their core busienss of desktop computers and now their OSs are unstable pieces of shite and their hardware is made in China by Foxconn, the worst hardware manufacturer in the world, and the typical Apple iPhone is designed to last a maximum of 18 months, the typical Apple laptop has a failure rate of 70% after 3 years.
And so it goes.
Netflix used to be a great company and then it got big and greedy and turned into a quasi-monopoly and now it’s going down the toilet. Prices will skyrocket, service will turn to crap, Netflix will start loading on DRM and their quality will dramatically degrade. It’s the same old story.
Every company in America that makes a good product soon becomes huge, greedy, dumb, and their product turns to shite and the company turns into a group of socipoathic monsters who view customers as the enemy and their stratospheric prices the natural right they were born to extort just because the company exists.
Too bad.
Netflix used to be a good company.
mclaren
@different-church-lady:
Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Explain how to get rid of tape hiss when you’re recording on analog reel-to-reel tape. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
Then you can explain how to eliminate inner groove distortion on LPs. Hint: it’s baked in because the cutting arm of a record lathe moves radially, not laterally.
And to top off, you can show us how the RIAA equalization curve makes music sound “better” than a flat frequency response.
LPs and analog reel tape suffer from serious problems. Flat PCM digital recording and reproduction largely avoids those, especially now that oversampled digital brickwall filters have removed phase distortion from the output.
@sigaba:
An excellent example of gross ignorance combined with extreme arrogance to produce the perfect Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Let me explain it to you simply and clearly:
Today, arbitrarily complex EQs can be made phase-neutral by deconvolution. The idea comes from physics instrumentation but is now being applied to audio. To get a typical EQ today with (say) 1024 bands, you merely perform a 2048-point FFT on the signal. Then you measure the phase distortion and deconvolve that from the signal by taking the inverse of the phase response and combining it with the magnitude of the original FFT output. Result? The signal’s frequency components are changed but the phases aren’t. This is trivial today.
The phase of the resulting signal isn’t disturbed by the brickwall filter because you oversample the signal by, say, 32x and then use an FIR filter with a slope so mild that it introduces negligible phase distortion but still eliminates all the wraparound negative frequencies.
Nowadays, the use of homomorphic deconvolution and wavelet transforms greatly speeds up the DSP and eliminates phase or frequency distortion. For a specific example, see for example:
“A versatile real-time deconvolution DSP system implemented using a time domain inverse filter,” Patrick Gaydecki , Measurement Science and Technology, Volume 12, Number 1, 2001.
The system described can “perform deconvolution of audio-bandwidth signals in real time, enabling separation and precise measurement of pulses smeared by a given impulse response. The system operates by convolving a time-domain expression of an inverse filter with the original signal to generate a processed output. It incorporates a high-level user interface for the design of the inverse filter, a communications system and a purpose-designed digital signal processing environment employing a Motorola DSP56002 device. The user interface is extremely versatile, allowing arbitrary inverse filters to be designed and executed within seconds, using a modified frequency sampling method. Since the inverse filters are realized using a symmetrical finite impulse response, no phase distortion is introduced into the processed signals.”
And that’s relatively old technology.
Read a book sometime, guy — learn something.
LongHairedWeirdo
@boatboy_srq: nod. And the trouble with your
position is not reading the item you are responding to. But I must confess that it is a nice takedown of a non-existent straw man. Oh, wait – no, I don’t.
different-church-lady
@mclaren:
There are these things called “Dolby A” and “Dolby SR”. They’ve been around for quite a long time. You can look them up. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
You can’t eliminate it because it’s physics — less material per second moves under the stylus as you get towards the label, and the stylus needs to move through a sharper curve. It has nothing at all to do with the linear tracking of the cutting stylus vs. the pivot of a typical playback turntable; that’s tracking error, and it can be eliminated with the use of a linear tracking turntable.
It doesn’t. Maybe you can explain how the Nyquist limit helps music sound “better”.
Analog has qualities and limitations. So does digital. Taken on the whole, digital is going to add up to an easier path to quality. But thousands of successful, high quality musical recordings have been made on analog, by people who knew how to maximize the advantages of the good qualities, and tens of thousands of crappy recordings have been made purely in digital by people who didn’t know what they were doing with low-quality gear. And vice versa.
I think in the end what your statements prove is that you, at heart, are a blowhard. Nothing so wrong with that, as many people are (myself included at times). It’s the fact that you’re a compulsively belligerent blowhard that kicks you over the line into insufferability.
There are books out there that teach people how to stop being assholes. Maybe you should read one of them.
dianne
Netflix is the best 8 dollars I’ve ever spent. We like it for the series that we missed the first time around and get the opportunity to see later. It’s good for the series too, since they get exposure for excellent work that becomes more than a one time gig vanishing into the ether. Try binge watching “The Killing” for an example of that. I had never even heard of it before we came across it on Netflix.
Now, if I-tunes would just restore the shuffle option all would be well.
boatboy_srq
@LongHairedWeirdo: I read, and I understand: I just don’t buy it.
I’ll repeat: entertainment is not an entitlement. Or, more simply: your boredom is not a justification for piracy. End of story. if you were describing food, shelter or some other need it would be different. You’re trying to justify skirting the law for Game of BLEEPing Thrones. This is what public libraries are for – and before you whinge about “elitism” and “access”, if you’ve got the bucks for the subscription you’re bartering then you’ve got the bus fare, and if you’ve got the time to watch then you’ve got the time for the bus ride, and the library card is covered by taxation so there’s no fee assessed to get one. And there’s always ink and paper for you to write your own material. You’re describing a very 21st-century “all-video-all-the-time” mindset which until the last couple generations had no reason to exist and didn’t destroy society through its absence. And you’re pretending this is a need and that the exchange is therefore justified. Wrong and wrong.
boatboy_srq
@sigaba: Below a certain point, you’re absolutely correct that modern electronics are cr#p. And all the bells/whistles I mention aren’t a replacement for quality circuitry. ABSOLUTELY AGREED. But you can pick up a decent AVR nowadays for less in adjusted dollars than a Radio Shack receiver, and it’ll sound better than that did to the average ear, in part because it was designed for the inherently more accessible fidelity of digital media. Modern products have planned obsolescence baked into the design: true for cars, clothing, dishwashers and audio: it’s not something we can get around. My point was that technology has made better sound more accessible – which it largely has although at a price. It takes getting past consumer-grade to get to the really good stuff, but it always has, and audiophiles will always be on the hook for higher spends. Joe Consumer isn’t buying that stuff; he’s picking up the Sony theater-in-a-box at Target – which while hardly a true high fidelity device, still sounds orders of magnitude better than the equivalent Soundesign package of a quarter century ago.
The Other Chuck
@mclaren:
…through the main dish in order to modulate the deflector shield phases, Captain!
sigaba
@mclaren:
I wouldn’t generally consider an 2048 sample window size to be acceptable for 48k or even 96k sample rates, you’re liable to hear drums and explosions flam. I agree you can construct an arbitrarily adequate convolution if you have a window big enough, but this can’t get around the basic limitations and lossy nature of time domain to frequency domain conversion.
The deeper question is why the eff does Joe Onkyo Buyer need a thousand filter with a Q of 36?