Stop hiring humanoids as servers and have everything delivered by robot. It's what they want, obviously. Then the robot can be directly programmed to move faster. Faster dammit!
In the meantime, I am prohibiting internet access to my refrigerator, microwave, coffee pot or other items with no need to connect to anything but a damn power source.
They can be relied upon to serve the interests of their customers, who are defined as the party that provides the money that keeps them in business.
So, in every situation, ask yourself: am I the party that gives this corporation money to keep the lights on? If not, then you are not the customer. You are the product. Be very wary of situations where you are the product. Inanimate objects like products are not generally given much consideration.
When signing up for anything, ask yourself: where is this company getting their money from?
Is it like Netflix, and they get their money from you? Or is it like Twitter and Facebook: free, but where does the money come from?
If the former, you are the customer. If the latter, you are the product and the advertiser is the customer (ie, the source of the money that keeps the servers humming and the lights on).
In both cases, the customer's interests will be served. Don't have anything to do with situations where you are not the customer, or if you choose to, be very freaking careful.
You mean theaters? They've already adapted to the competition posed by streaming, by being the place where you see the big budget eye candy that really needs the big screen and booming sound system for the full effect. That means Avatar, not The Irishman.
Further afield, theaters could continue this trajectory to offer stuff you simply can't get from Netflix at home because theaters can afford the technology and by the time it percolates down to the home level, the theaters have new tech to offer.
I'm thinking, VR is the next step here. One day, Avatar in theaters will mean riding a pterodactyl through the jungles of Pandora while Avatar on Disney+ is a more traditional story-based series with characters and all that. And eventually there will be home VR tech so you can ride pterodactyls at home, by which time the theaters better have invented something else...
Yeah this is good old fashioned capitalism. Movie theaters and streaming have different capitalistic business models, and that results in a demand for different products to be made and sold via these different distribution methods.
Movie theaters have a lot of burdensome brick & mortar overhead: rent, taxes, insurance, power, payroll for people to take tickets and clean theaters. They have to maximize each movie showing and fill theaters to the max, and that's best accomplished with the most mass of mass market entertainment, the big-budget franchise blockbuster. This is especially imperative when making money globally. Big brands are how you overcome the problem of a world filled with different tastes. Create entertainment big and broad enough, and it appeals to all tastes.
Streaming is a much leaner and meaner business model. Set up shop on the internet and get your content out to the world. No need for much in the way of overhead other than a few offices with a handful of employees for a global business. This leanness is the only reason why Netflix can fund billions in content while charging peanuts, which in turn allows them to fund a far wider range of content to compensate for Netflix's biggest problem, that they have no big global brands and must do something very difficult: build them from scratch. And also depend on niche tastes to a large extent. Making content for niche tastes is far less efficient than churning out big mass market franchise content.
The movie theater business model gets you Avengers: Endgame; the streaming business model gets you Stranger Things but also everything from Adam Sandler schlock to The Crown to Scorsese flicks and a lot of foreign-language content too.
Now that Disney is getting into streaming, with the big brands Netflix lacks, they might change the equation all over again but that's still to be seen.
Everyone is just acting in their self-interest in this scenario. Some are more rational than others; some are fully delusional but apparently their self-interest is based on perpetuating a delusion.
Scorsese wants to make the movies he wants to make, and get an audience for them. His rational approach was to do a deal with Netflix.
Netflix is going to be battling some heavyweights in streaming soon. They need to bulk up a huge range of content to appeal to everyone (they need to appeal to a far wider audience than movie theaters do). This includes everything from Adam Sandler schlock to Scorsese art movies. Netflix is being rational in establishing a good working relationship with a legendary director.
Movie theaters may not be truly threatened by Netflix's willingness to fund The Irishman - the reason Scorsese had to do a deal with Netflix is because Paramount wouldn't fund the movie, knowing it wouldn't make the money back at theaters, becuase the audience doesn't go to theaters for movies like that anymore. But they have no reason to make life easier for Netflix, so they are acting in their rational self-interest to throw up barriers.
Just to add them to the discussions, Oscars or Cannes also have no loyalty to Netflix. They have powerful constituents among theatre owners and will fall in line with their wishes, even as the awards-worthy movies increasingly are funded by streamers, who have more motive to fund arty movies for their own purposes, while theaters get rich from Disney comic book flicks.
The rational parties who are not delusional are filmmakers like Scorsese, and the streaming services. Theaters and the awards ceremony people are acting in their rational self-interest but their understanding of what their interest is, is based on a delusion that movie theaters have anything to do anymore with storytelling or art.
Scorsese was right on the money to say that theaters just show amusement park style movies. Audiences go to theaters for sensory overload and eye candy, basically the same appeal as amusement parks and video games. Theaters will keep going in that direction and diverge more and more from storytelling and "art." We'll get the storytelling and art at home on streaming, along with a plethora of other things. Streaming is all about range; movie theatres offer a narrow experience having to do with zap pow and boom.
Companies? Nah, that might eat into their profits.
Government? Since when does government regulate anything.
Customers? They still have passwords like password1234.
Stay far far away from all this IoT crap. This is a replay of what I thought about Facebook about 5 years ago, this is going to end badly, get out now...
After watching that video for 4 minutes until it started to bore me...naw. He comes off as a self-important moron who would be easy for the next guy to tear to shreds if he ever become worth tearing to shreds by having any power or money. He should stick to a career of making silly YouTube videos.
Dumshit, it's so easy to defuse something like this. Just make yourself a t-shirt that says Fatty McFuckhead, make a bunch more for a bunch of strippers who wear them in a wet t-shirt contest and then film a YouTube video with you and the strippers dancing around like morons, maybe throw in some random passers-by, donkeys, etc. Then put it on YouTube. Now you've owned that nickname and defused it because who the hell is going to try to top that? But if they wanted to try, that's just in your favor too. These corporate dickwads really need me to do their PR for them.
Forgetting or not is in someone else's head. You have the right to forget things (I certainly do, more than ever all the time) but what happens in someone else's head is their business, not yours. Just worry about your own damn head and leave others' alone.
AT&T has jumped into the Streaming Wars, and for that they need big brands like Disney has, so they bought Time Warner. It's not a bad idea. Netflix has destroyed entertainment distribution and the whole global industry is coalescing into a new form, where most stuff is delivered by streaming and a small amount of specific movie types - franchise blockbusters, kids animation, horror - still survive at the multiplex.
Consumers just want a few huge services so the money will end up going to a handful of global behemoths that can get above a high cutoff bar for success. I figure maybe four. That's Netflix, Amazon, Disney+Hulu (really, think of it as one service) and one other. Could be HBO Max, could be Apple+. CBS and Comcast also think they can make it.
So AT&T has placed a very large bet on a competition where it's very far from being a sure winner, but they do have a reasonable expectation of success and then the benefits will flow to them while many competitors face carnage. The main problem with AT&T, is that unlike Disney, they aren't making very good decisions. Using the premium HBO brand as a catchall for any old crap is a poor decision. Why spend billions to grab the HBO brand and then turn around and destroy it?
AT&T should be able to make this work but if they blow it, I'm with the activists. Heads should roll.
IoT is a disaster waiting to happen. Who's minding the store? The government doesn't regulate worth shit, corporations are only interested in short-term profits and consumers don't understand the risks or how to change a password. I'm staying far away from this cluster. It's only a matter of time before IoT causes some serious catastrophe.
Consumer electronics that need the internet aside, my appliances are going be staying like they are now: dumber than the President. That's my gold standard. I don't need lightbulbs or refrigerators to be connected to anything but a power source.
Netflix will cancel creative shows like The OA with no help from Nielsens. The only thing that's changing is that we won't have Nielsens to blame. There's no way to say Netflix is wrong, since only they have the data, and I bet The OA's viewership did crater since S2 was so sucky.
Or maybe the viewership was still strong but Netflix realized, nobody is signing up for The OA so screw it, let's go hire the guys from Game of Thrones instead. That should get some buzz. The second quarter results were weak and the stock tanked. Gotta do something to turn that around.
Nielsens' customers were advertisers and I don't see those guys as being naive or easily misled. If they suspected Nielsens' data was wrong, why did they continue to pay for it, or pay broadcasters/cable for their ad slots that aren't delivering the goods?
The system continued along until technology rendered it obsolete. The audience decamped for ad-free streaming and the advertisers decamped for Google and Facebook, where there is no need for Nielsens. Nielsens is not collapsing because it had "bad data" but because their services are no longer required to make the system work.
Advertisers should have refused to accept logbook data then. The broadcasters are the foxes (Foxes?) guarding the henhouse. They can't be expected to advocate against their interests. The advertisers were the ones being overcharged, why did they meekly continue to pay? Their fault. Nielsens is just a referee between broadcast/cable and advertisers.
Well in the brave new world of streaming where Netflix sees everything we do, where we pause to go to the bathroom and when we come back, shows still get cancelled. Just ask the fans of The OA.
I won't miss that one, I agree with Netflix, it's stupid and they gave it enough time to shape the hell up.
You work in marketing? You shouldn't be part of marketing surveys then. You know too much (cue ominous music). No seriously, people like you do skew the sample. Nielsens should ask if you work in TV or marketing and then screen you out.
Some companies can be faulted for rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while they lose their business, but I'm not sure Nielsens is one of them. Their business was providing a mediator between broadcast and cable on one hand and advertisers on the other, to verify that the inventory advertisers were buying from broadcast/cable was, in fact, being watched by the demographic that the advertises wanted.
We can all quibble over whether Nielsesn was correct but we're not the people buying the data. Advertisers are. And as long as they believe the data, Nielsens stays in business.
But now the audience has gone to ad-fre streaming and advertisers are going to Google and Facebook, where the measurement is built into the product. I've bough ads from Google and I can just buy clicks rather than impressions. I see the clicks on my website and I see what the users are doing, so I know nobody is fibbing too terribly much. Nielsens has no role because nobody needs their verification. Not sure what verification they could have provided if the advertisers and the ad space providers are working together just fine?
Nielsens went thru a phase where they tried to find a new business model reporting Netflix numbers to Netflix's content suppliers - the people making content for Netflix, who maybe Netflix was fibbing to, about how popular there shows were? If Netflix downplays the popularity, then the content makers are being cheated when they negotiate a renewal. But that never seemed to get off the ground.
There's a lot more to that sort of negotiation than just dollars and cents. There's also the relationship, whether Netflix thinks the content creators will do good work for them in the future, so let's hang onto this somewhat weak show from them for now, and also the whole issue that sheer viewing numbers don't mean as much for Netflix as they do for ad-supported broadcast. With Netflix, I'm sure there's some metric that gets at how well a show or movie helps attract and retain subscribers. Something like Friends probably underperforms like that compared with their sheer viewing numbers. A nichey show like, say, GLOW probably overperforms. But that's a number Nielsens will never know because they can't see subscriber trends that only Netflix has access to.
Digital stuff tends to be winner take all, doesn't it? Streaming is going to work the same way. Households opt for 2 or 3 paid ones, ignore the rest. Ends up hammering it all down to about four survivors. Whoever is biggest fastest.
On the post: Steak With A Side Of Surveillance: Outback Restaurants Adding Employee-Tracking Analytics To Its Cameras
why not cut to the chase
Stop hiring humanoids as servers and have everything delivered by robot. It's what they want, obviously. Then the robot can be directly programmed to move faster. Faster dammit!
On the post: Whirlpool Left Appliance Data, User Emails Exposed Online
IoT is a disaster waiting to happen.
In the meantime, I am prohibiting internet access to my refrigerator, microwave, coffee pot or other items with no need to connect to anything but a damn power source.
On the post: Whoops, Twitter The Latest To Use Two Factor Authentication Phone Numbers For Marketing
Re: corporations are predictable
They can be relied upon to serve the interests of their customers, who are defined as the party that provides the money that keeps them in business.
So, in every situation, ask yourself: am I the party that gives this corporation money to keep the lights on? If not, then you are not the customer. You are the product. Be very wary of situations where you are the product. Inanimate objects like products are not generally given much consideration.
On the post: Whoops, Twitter The Latest To Use Two Factor Authentication Phone Numbers For Marketing
simple rule of thunb
When signing up for anything, ask yourself: where is this company getting their money from?
Is it like Netflix, and they get their money from you? Or is it like Twitter and Facebook: free, but where does the money come from?
If the former, you are the customer. If the latter, you are the product and the advertiser is the customer (ie, the source of the money that keeps the servers humming and the lights on).
In both cases, the customer's interests will be served. Don't have anything to do with situations where you are not the customer, or if you choose to, be very freaking careful.
On the post: 'The Irishman' Ban Once Again Shows Hollywood's Disdain For Netflix is Stupid & Counterproductive
Re:
You mean theaters? They've already adapted to the competition posed by streaming, by being the place where you see the big budget eye candy that really needs the big screen and booming sound system for the full effect. That means Avatar, not The Irishman.
Further afield, theaters could continue this trajectory to offer stuff you simply can't get from Netflix at home because theaters can afford the technology and by the time it percolates down to the home level, the theaters have new tech to offer.
I'm thinking, VR is the next step here. One day, Avatar in theaters will mean riding a pterodactyl through the jungles of Pandora while Avatar on Disney+ is a more traditional story-based series with characters and all that. And eventually there will be home VR tech so you can ride pterodactyls at home, by which time the theaters better have invented something else...
On the post: 'The Irishman' Ban Once Again Shows Hollywood's Disdain For Netflix is Stupid & Counterproductive
Re: Re: Re:
Yeah this is good old fashioned capitalism. Movie theaters and streaming have different capitalistic business models, and that results in a demand for different products to be made and sold via these different distribution methods.
Movie theaters have a lot of burdensome brick & mortar overhead: rent, taxes, insurance, power, payroll for people to take tickets and clean theaters. They have to maximize each movie showing and fill theaters to the max, and that's best accomplished with the most mass of mass market entertainment, the big-budget franchise blockbuster. This is especially imperative when making money globally. Big brands are how you overcome the problem of a world filled with different tastes. Create entertainment big and broad enough, and it appeals to all tastes.
Streaming is a much leaner and meaner business model. Set up shop on the internet and get your content out to the world. No need for much in the way of overhead other than a few offices with a handful of employees for a global business. This leanness is the only reason why Netflix can fund billions in content while charging peanuts, which in turn allows them to fund a far wider range of content to compensate for Netflix's biggest problem, that they have no big global brands and must do something very difficult: build them from scratch. And also depend on niche tastes to a large extent. Making content for niche tastes is far less efficient than churning out big mass market franchise content.
The movie theater business model gets you Avengers: Endgame; the streaming business model gets you Stranger Things but also everything from Adam Sandler schlock to The Crown to Scorsese flicks and a lot of foreign-language content too.
Now that Disney is getting into streaming, with the big brands Netflix lacks, they might change the equation all over again but that's still to be seen.
On the post: 'The Irishman' Ban Once Again Shows Hollywood's Disdain For Netflix is Stupid & Counterproductive
business as usual
Everyone is just acting in their self-interest in this scenario. Some are more rational than others; some are fully delusional but apparently their self-interest is based on perpetuating a delusion.
Scorsese wants to make the movies he wants to make, and get an audience for them. His rational approach was to do a deal with Netflix.
Netflix is going to be battling some heavyweights in streaming soon. They need to bulk up a huge range of content to appeal to everyone (they need to appeal to a far wider audience than movie theaters do). This includes everything from Adam Sandler schlock to Scorsese art movies. Netflix is being rational in establishing a good working relationship with a legendary director.
Movie theaters may not be truly threatened by Netflix's willingness to fund The Irishman - the reason Scorsese had to do a deal with Netflix is because Paramount wouldn't fund the movie, knowing it wouldn't make the money back at theaters, becuase the audience doesn't go to theaters for movies like that anymore. But they have no reason to make life easier for Netflix, so they are acting in their rational self-interest to throw up barriers.
Just to add them to the discussions, Oscars or Cannes also have no loyalty to Netflix. They have powerful constituents among theatre owners and will fall in line with their wishes, even as the awards-worthy movies increasingly are funded by streamers, who have more motive to fund arty movies for their own purposes, while theaters get rich from Disney comic book flicks.
The rational parties who are not delusional are filmmakers like Scorsese, and the streaming services. Theaters and the awards ceremony people are acting in their rational self-interest but their understanding of what their interest is, is based on a delusion that movie theaters have anything to do anymore with storytelling or art.
Scorsese was right on the money to say that theaters just show amusement park style movies. Audiences go to theaters for sensory overload and eye candy, basically the same appeal as amusement parks and video games. Theaters will keep going in that direction and diverge more and more from storytelling and "art." We'll get the storytelling and art at home on streaming, along with a plethora of other things. Streaming is all about range; movie theatres offer a narrow experience having to do with zap pow and boom.
On the post: Yet Another Study Shows The Internet Of Things Is A Privacy Shitshow
this again
So who's minding the store?
Companies? Nah, that might eat into their profits.
Government? Since when does government regulate anything.
Customers? They still have passwords like password1234.
Stay far far away from all this IoT crap. This is a replay of what I thought about Facebook about 5 years ago, this is going to end badly, get out now...
On the post: What's Australian For Streisand Effect? Perhaps It's Fatty McFuckhead
Re: Lets wait..
After watching that video for 4 minutes until it started to bore me...naw. He comes off as a self-important moron who would be easy for the next guy to tear to shreds if he ever become worth tearing to shreds by having any power or money. He should stick to a career of making silly YouTube videos.
On the post: What's Australian For Streisand Effect? Perhaps It's Fatty McFuckhead
I'm a PR Genius, Pay Me!
Dumshit, it's so easy to defuse something like this. Just make yourself a t-shirt that says Fatty McFuckhead, make a bunch more for a bunch of strippers who wear them in a wet t-shirt contest and then film a YouTube video with you and the strippers dancing around like morons, maybe throw in some random passers-by, donkeys, etc. Then put it on YouTube. Now you've owned that nickname and defused it because who the hell is going to try to top that? But if they wanted to try, that's just in your favor too. These corporate dickwads really need me to do their PR for them.
On the post: Should The Media Voluntarily Embrace A 'Right To Be Forgotten'?
forget that
Forgetting or not is in someone else's head. You have the right to forget things (I certainly do, more than ever all the time) but what happens in someone else's head is their business, not yours. Just worry about your own damn head and leave others' alone.
On the post: Rep. Ro Khanna To Introduce Bill To Study Impact Of FOSTA On Sex Workers
AT&T has jumped into the Streaming Wars, and for that they need big brands like Disney has, so they bought Time Warner. It's not a bad idea. Netflix has destroyed entertainment distribution and the whole global industry is coalescing into a new form, where most stuff is delivered by streaming and a small amount of specific movie types - franchise blockbusters, kids animation, horror - still survive at the multiplex.
Consumers just want a few huge services so the money will end up going to a handful of global behemoths that can get above a high cutoff bar for success. I figure maybe four. That's Netflix, Amazon, Disney+Hulu (really, think of it as one service) and one other. Could be HBO Max, could be Apple+. CBS and Comcast also think they can make it.
So AT&T has placed a very large bet on a competition where it's very far from being a sure winner, but they do have a reasonable expectation of success and then the benefits will flow to them while many competitors face carnage. The main problem with AT&T, is that unlike Disney, they aren't making very good decisions. Using the premium HBO brand as a catchall for any old crap is a poor decision. Why spend billions to grab the HBO brand and then turn around and destroy it?
AT&T should be able to make this work but if they blow it, I'm with the activists. Heads should roll.
On the post: Rogue 'Smart' Ovens Again Highlight How Dumb Tech Is Often The Smarter Choice
IoT is a disaster waiting to happen. Who's minding the store? The government doesn't regulate worth shit, corporations are only interested in short-term profits and consumers don't understand the risks or how to change a password. I'm staying far away from this cluster. It's only a matter of time before IoT causes some serious catastrophe.
Consumer electronics that need the internet aside, my appliances are going be staying like they are now: dumber than the President. That's my gold standard. I don't need lightbulbs or refrigerators to be connected to anything but a power source.
On the post: After Missing Cord Cutting Trend, Nielsen Falls Apart
Re:
Netflix will cancel creative shows like The OA with no help from Nielsens. The only thing that's changing is that we won't have Nielsens to blame. There's no way to say Netflix is wrong, since only they have the data, and I bet The OA's viewership did crater since S2 was so sucky.
Or maybe the viewership was still strong but Netflix realized, nobody is signing up for The OA so screw it, let's go hire the guys from Game of Thrones instead. That should get some buzz. The second quarter results were weak and the stock tanked. Gotta do something to turn that around.
On the post: After Missing Cord Cutting Trend, Nielsen Falls Apart
Re: There are times...
Nielsens' customers were advertisers and I don't see those guys as being naive or easily misled. If they suspected Nielsens' data was wrong, why did they continue to pay for it, or pay broadcasters/cable for their ad slots that aren't delivering the goods?
The system continued along until technology rendered it obsolete. The audience decamped for ad-free streaming and the advertisers decamped for Google and Facebook, where there is no need for Nielsens. Nielsens is not collapsing because it had "bad data" but because their services are no longer required to make the system work.
On the post: After Missing Cord Cutting Trend, Nielsen Falls Apart
Re: What they Want
Advertisers should have refused to accept logbook data then. The broadcasters are the foxes (Foxes?) guarding the henhouse. They can't be expected to advocate against their interests. The advertisers were the ones being overcharged, why did they meekly continue to pay? Their fault. Nielsens is just a referee between broadcast/cable and advertisers.
On the post: After Missing Cord Cutting Trend, Nielsen Falls Apart
Re: Re: Re: As a one time Nielsen household
Well in the brave new world of streaming where Netflix sees everything we do, where we pause to go to the bathroom and when we come back, shows still get cancelled. Just ask the fans of The OA.
I won't miss that one, I agree with Netflix, it's stupid and they gave it enough time to shape the hell up.
On the post: After Missing Cord Cutting Trend, Nielsen Falls Apart
Re: Re: As a one time Nielsen household
You work in marketing? You shouldn't be part of marketing surveys then. You know too much (cue ominous music). No seriously, people like you do skew the sample. Nielsens should ask if you work in TV or marketing and then screen you out.
On the post: After Missing Cord Cutting Trend, Nielsen Falls Apart
Some companies can be faulted for rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while they lose their business, but I'm not sure Nielsens is one of them. Their business was providing a mediator between broadcast and cable on one hand and advertisers on the other, to verify that the inventory advertisers were buying from broadcast/cable was, in fact, being watched by the demographic that the advertises wanted.
We can all quibble over whether Nielsesn was correct but we're not the people buying the data. Advertisers are. And as long as they believe the data, Nielsens stays in business.
But now the audience has gone to ad-fre streaming and advertisers are going to Google and Facebook, where the measurement is built into the product. I've bough ads from Google and I can just buy clicks rather than impressions. I see the clicks on my website and I see what the users are doing, so I know nobody is fibbing too terribly much. Nielsens has no role because nobody needs their verification. Not sure what verification they could have provided if the advertisers and the ad space providers are working together just fine?
Nielsens went thru a phase where they tried to find a new business model reporting Netflix numbers to Netflix's content suppliers - the people making content for Netflix, who maybe Netflix was fibbing to, about how popular there shows were? If Netflix downplays the popularity, then the content makers are being cheated when they negotiate a renewal. But that never seemed to get off the ground.
There's a lot more to that sort of negotiation than just dollars and cents. There's also the relationship, whether Netflix thinks the content creators will do good work for them in the future, so let's hang onto this somewhat weak show from them for now, and also the whole issue that sheer viewing numbers don't mean as much for Netflix as they do for ad-supported broadcast. With Netflix, I'm sure there's some metric that gets at how well a show or movie helps attract and retain subscribers. Something like Friends probably underperforms like that compared with their sheer viewing numbers. A nichey show like, say, GLOW probably overperforms. But that's a number Nielsens will never know because they can't see subscriber trends that only Netflix has access to.
On the post: Once More With Feeling: Nearly All General Interest News Paywalls Will Fail
Digital stuff tends to be winner take all, doesn't it? Streaming is going to work the same way. Households opt for 2 or 3 paid ones, ignore the rest. Ends up hammering it all down to about four survivors. Whoever is biggest fastest.
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