Piracy is the Future of TV: commercial TV sucks relative to illicit services

Piracy is the Future of TV: commercial TV sucks relative to illicit services: "'Piracy is the Future of Television' is Abigail De Kosnik's Convergence Culture Consortium paper on the many ways in which piracy is preferable to buying legitimate online TV options. None of these advantages are related to price -- it may be hard to compete with free, but it's impossible to compete with free when you offer something worse than the free option. De Kosnik finishes the paper with a series of incredibly sensible recommendations for producing a commercial marketplace that's as good or better than the illicit one. Alas, I fear that TV broadcasters would rather demand special online censorship powers and moan about piracy than fix their products:

Standardize

A single interface, a single mode of searching, a single way of listing new TV content, and a single
file format that plays on a single media player and works on every OS and can be ported to any mobile
device: this should be the goal of all legal services. Uniformity in each of these areas across services
will make all services of this kind - will make TV viewing on the Internet as a practice - more appealing
to all potential users. Once watching TV online can match the simplicity of clicking through channels
on a TV set, a larger percentage of the TV viewing population will be interested in using the Internet as
their primary interface for television content. And TV pirates will not migrate to legal services unless
they are at least as straightforward as pirate protocols. In fact, legal services can model their protocols
directly on established pirate standards, as they are hardly secret.7

Offer a Premium Service for Personal Archivists

At the moment, piracy provides the best means for individuals to build personal libraries of television
content, for all of the reasons given above. Legal services should consider how to serve this niche even
better than pirate communities do. Users interested in creating archives would likely pay a premium if
legal services could:

• Offer downloads (both standard definition and HD) of canonical versions of classic and current
television programs, either with their original commercials (an important feature for some TV archivists)
or commercial-free.

• Make files of new TV episodes available for download immediately after broadcast.

• Persistently 'seed' those files (i.e., guarantee that the interested user can always acquire TV files,
even older ones, since on pirate networks, older files sometimes are 'unseeded' and very difficult to
obtain). In fact, the network of collectors could be encouraged to seed files as they come into demand,
under some kind of incentive program. (Pirate communities dedicated to 'cult' or 'art' films often
offer rewards to members who are willing to seed requested torrents; for example, if a member seeds a
currently unseeded torrent that six other members want, then the community may reward that seeding
member with an increase in her maximum permitted download volume for a month).

• Provide collectors with seedbox accounts so that individual users do not have to consume their
personal bandwidth in order to download as much content as they wish.

• Offer to host collectors' libraries remotely, and to stream files from those libraries to any machine
authorized via login and password.

• Give users the ability to organize their archives as they choose.

Piracy is the Future of Television (PDF)

(via O'Reilly Radar)

(Image: Worship Me, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from bdunnette's photostream)

• Boing Boing: Future of TV: Piracy will save production


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• Sony accuses Beyonce of piracy for putting her videos on YouTube ...


• 7 things people get wrong about the Internet and TV - Boing Boing


• Infographic: buying DVDs vs pirating them - Boing Boing


• Neil Gaiman explains why he doesn't sweat "piracy" - Boing Boing

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GOP Lawmaker Mike Beard Claims God Will Provide Unlimited Natural Resources

GOP Lawmaker Mike Beard Claims God Will Provide Unlimited Natural Resources: "

Mike Beard, a Republican state representative from Minnesota, recently argued that coal mining should resume in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, in part because he believes God has created an earth that will provide unlimited natural resources.

'God is not capricious. He's given us a creation that is dynamically stable,' Beard told MinnPost. 'We are not going to run out of anything.'

Beard is currently in the midst of drafting legislation that would overturn Minnesota's moratorium on coal-fired power plants, an effort that he backs due to his religious belief that God will provide limitless resources while ensuring that humans don't destroy the planet trying to get them.

Read More...

More on West Virginia Mine Disaster

"

Macs give me a syncing feeling

Macs give me a syncing feeling: "

They make you feel good, Apple products – until you try to do something they don't want you to do

In 2007, I wrote a column entitled 'I hate Macs'. I call it a column. It was actually an unbroken 900-word anti-Apple screed. Macs, I claimed, were 'glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy-cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work.'

In 2009, I complained again: 'The better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them . . . I don't care if every Mac product comes with a magic button on the side that makes it piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead. I'm not buying one, so shut up and go home.'

The lady doth protest too much. A few weeks later, I buckled and bought an iPhone. And you know what? It felt good. Within minutes of switching it on, sliding those dinky little icons around the screen, I was hooked. This was my gateway drug. Before long I was also toting an iPad. And after that, a Macbook. All the stuff people said about how Macs were just better, about them being a joy to use . . . it was true, all of it.

They make you feel good, Apple products. The little touches: the rounded corners, the strokeable screens, the satisfying clunk as you fold the Macbook shut – it's serene. Untroubled. Like being on Valium.

Until, that is, you try to do something Apple doesn't want you to do. At which point you realise your shiny chum isn't on your side. It doesn't even understand sides. Only Apple: always Apple.

Here's a familiar, mundane scenario: you've got an iPhone with loads of music on it. And you've got a laptop with a new album on it. You want to put the new album on your phone. But you can't hook them up and simply drag-and-drop the files like you could with, ooh, almost any other device. Instead, Apple insists you go through iTunes.

Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating '.docx' Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet.

Plug your old Apple iPhone into your new Apple Macbook for the first time, and because the two machines haven't been formally introduced, iTunes will babble about 'syncing' one with the other. It claims it simply MUST delete everything from the old phone before putting any new stuff on it. Why? It won't tell you. It'll just cheerfully ask if you want to proceed, like an upbeat robot butler that can't understand why you're crying.

No one uses terms like 'sync' in real life. Not even C3PO. If I sync my DVD collection with yours, will I end up with one, two, or no copies of Santa Claus the Movie? It's like trying to work out the consequences of time travel, but less fun, and with absolutely no chance of being adapted into a successful screenplay.

Apple's 'sync' bullshit is a deception, which pretends to be making your life easier, when it's actually all about wresting control from you. If you could freely transfer any file you wanted onto your gadget, Apple might conceivably lose out on a few molecules of gold. So rather than risk that, they'll choose – every single time – to restrict your options, without so much as blinking.

Sure, you can get around the irritating sync-issue, but doing so requires a degree of faff and brainwork, like solving the famous logic problem about ferrying a load of foxes and chickens across a river without it all ending in feathers and death. And even if you find it easy, it's a problem Apple don't want you to solve. They want you to give up and go back to dumbly stroking that shiny screen, pausing intermittently to wipe the drool from your chin.

Apple continually attempts to scrape even more money from anything that might conceivably pass through iTunes' tight, leathery anus. Take ebooks. Apple's own iBook reader app may be nauseatingly pretty, but it's not a patch on Amazon's Kindle, which, far from being just a standalone machine, is a surprisingly nifty cross-platform 'cloud' system that lets you read books on a variety of devices, including the iPhone and iPad. It even remembers what page you were on, regardless of whichever machine you were reading it on last. (It does that by 'syncing' – but we'll forgive it that, because a) it happens seamlessly and b) you never, ever lose any of your purchases.)

Now Apple, typically, are no longer content to let people read Kindle books on their iPhones and iPads without muscling in on some of that money themselves. So they've changed their rules, in a bid to force Amazon (and anyone else) to provide in-app purchases for their products. What this dull sentence means in practice is that Apple want a 30% cut each time a Kindle user buys a book from within the iPhone Kindle app.

So 30% less for authors and publishers, and 30% more for the world's second-largest company. And that's assuming they'll let any old book pass through the App store: given their track record, chances are they'll refuse to process anything they consider objectionable. Still, if they start banning books, never mind. Winnie the Pooh looks great on the iPad.

Every Apple commercial makes a huge play of how user-friendly their devices are. But it's a superficial friendship. To Apple, you're nothing. They won't even give you a power lead long enough to use your phone while it's on charge, so if it rings you have to crawl around on your hands and knees, like a dog.

So I no longer hate Apple products. In fact I use them every day. But I never feel like I own them. More like I'm renting them from Skynet.

• Apple
• iPhone

Charlie Brooker

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

"

Burning Chrome

Burning Chrome: "

“A good player goes where the puck is. A great player goes where the puck is going to be”—The Great One

Google made a few interesting announcements this week. First, Google Docs Viewer support for a sheaf of new document types, including Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop and PostScript. Second, Chrome’s new ability to run background apps that run seamlessly and invisibly behind the browser. Third, they released Google Cloud Connect, which lets Windows users sync Office documents to Google Docs. They also announced the Android 3.0 SDK – but despite the ongoing tablet hysteria, in the long run, the first three are more important.

Little by little, iteration by iteration, the Chrome browser is quietly morphing into a full-fledged multitasking operating system in its own right. Oh, sure, technically it’s actually running on another OS, but you increasingly never need to launch anything else. View and edit documents in Google Docs, watch and listen to HTML5 video and audio, communicate via Gmail and its Google Voice plugin, use Google Docs as a file system – and the line between “Chrome OS” and “Chrome on any other OS” suddenly grows very fine.

Google’s long-term strategy seems to be to supplant Microsoft by first building the best browser, then making it easy to move your files to Google Docs … and finally, slowly but inexorably, making Windows and Office irrelevant. Obviously no one will abandon Microsoft products wholesale anytime soon; but as cloud computing grows more ubiquitous, Google steadily iterates feature after feature, and people grow accustomed to working in the browser, then one day, maybe only a couple of years from now, a whole lot of people – and businesses – will begin to think to themselves “Hey, we haven’t actually needed Windows or Office in months. Why do we even have them at all?”

The “network computer” dumb-terminal approach has failed many times before … but so did Six Degrees, Tribe.net, Friendster, and (eventually) MySpace, before Facebook came along. The original iMac was roundly criticized because it didn’t have a floppy drive, criticism that now sounds hilariously stupid. We might look back at the first Chrome OS notebook in much the same way. Of course, Chrome can’t actually compete with Windows until always-on broadband Internet access reaches the same level of reliability and ubiquity as electricity itself; but that’s only a matter of time. In the early days of electricity, every factory had its own power plant, and its managers would have been appalled by the notion of outsourcing that vital engine – but soon enough those inefficient installations were replaced by today’s electrical grid. Computing power is the new electricity, and cloud computing is the new grid.

Unlike most companies, when Google says “cloud”, they mean it. Compare Amazon’s cloud-computing service to Google’s. With the former, you essentially call up and configure one or more servers with the OS and specifications of your choice; but with Google’s App Engine, you don’t know anything about its hardware or operating system, because that no longer matters. It just runs the code you give it, and you don’t much care how. Similarly, Chrome is being built for a future where the ambient, omnipresent wireless Internet connects everything from clothes to computers to cars (which explains how their self-driving cars fits into their strategy) and it doesn’t much matter what OS any given device is running.

I’ve criticized Google pretty harshly of late, but credit where it’s due: they still think bigger and further than anyone else. The problem is that all these brilliant strategies are predicated on their continued dominance of the search space, whose users are forever just a whim away from jumping ship to an alternative, and they’ve taken their eye off that ball of late. But at least they’ve finally started cracking down on search spam. It’s a start. Maybe they haven’t grown too bureaucratic and sclerotic to make the Chrome future happen after all.

CrunchBase Information

Google Chrome

Information provided by CrunchBase

"

An Update is Available For Your Computer

An Update is Available For Your Computer: "

source: duelinganalogs

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Got Questions? Ask Them Now FREE on MakeUseOf Answers!

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Original article: An Update is Available For Your Computer

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"

Direct Installs for Android 2.3.3. Gingerbread for Nexus One and Nexus S discovered

Direct Installs for Android 2.3.3. Gingerbread for Nexus One and Nexus S discovered: "

Google’s warning that the OTA Gingerbread update for the Nexus S and Nexus One might “take a few weeks” to reach all owners was a dash of unpleasantly cold water to the face; happily, xda-developers have dropped by with a hot towel. They’ve dug up the official links from Google for the Android 2.3.3 update, which means the impatient can now update their handsets without waiting for Google’s schedule to notch along.

Two different downloads are available, one for the Nexus One:

http://android.clients.google.com/packages/ota/passion/81304b2de707.signed-passion-GRI40-from-FRG83G.81304b2d.zip

… and another for the Nexus S:

http://android.clients.google.com/packages/ota/google_crespo/e0b546c442bf.signed-soju-GRI40-from-GRH78.e0b546c4.zip

If the links are too slow for you, there’s information on mirrors at the original forum post.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in!]

)

"

Why Are You People Defending Apple?

Why Are You People Defending Apple?: "

As you’ve doubtless heard by now, yesterday Apple revealed its new fee structure for premium content: all apps that offer premium content outside of the App Store have to also offer it via Apple’s official in-app purchases (this includes Amazon’s Kindle) and Apple takes a 30% cut of all subscriptions. The response has predictably ranged from outrage to approval — my colleague MG Siegler did a thorough piece talking about why this makes sense for Apple and users, even if it may leave developers up in arms. But I’m still having a hard time swallowing it.

My reaction has been one of trepidation. I don’t like where this is headed, and I think that many who consider themselves technophiles are completely dropping the ball by rationalizing what Apple has done.

The first mistake people are making has been to focus on whether or not this move is Apple’s prerogative. Ignoring the rumored antitrust issues, I really don’t think it’s worth considering whether Apple has the right to impose a 30% fee on applications, any more than I question whether Monster Cable has the right to sell their HDMI cables at multi-thousand percent markups, or whether cell carriers have the right to charge exorbitant fees for text messages. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t being obscenely greedy.

Another flawed response is that Apple has the users’ interests at heart — after all, they’re restricting how much user information publishers can gather (and re-sell), and they’re making the in-app purchasing process as simple as possible. Which is great, but that doesn’t explain why Apple is demanding 30% of each purchase. In fact, that 30% cut could hurt users. Users benefit from ease-of-use, but they also benefit from competition. As it stands now, Amazon’s Kindle application will probably be handicapped or removed entirely from iOS, because Apple is effectively eliminating its margins. Which stinks, because the only real alternative — iBooks — is far inferior.

Yes, that’s right: Apple isn’t the best at everything. You can’t read an iBook on anything other than an iPad or iPhone, compared to Kindle which supports a half-dozen other platforms and the E-ink Kindle reader, which is a vastly better reading experience than any backlit display to boot. Oh, and users also stand to lose out on the pricing competition between the two eBook platforms.

Similar comparisons can be made for other services that could potentially compete with Apple’s products: music, movies, TV shows, and so on. I like being able to watch Netflix and Hulu from my iPad, but who knows if they’ll be able to operate now if they’re handing over 30% of subscription fees. Not to mention all the applications that Apple doesn’t compete with, but will get pushed out of the ecosystem anyway because of the 30% fee. How exactly are users winning here?

Another argument from Apple devotees: normal people don’t care about this change and will continue to eat up each new shiny Apple device. MG wrote a post yesterday that spent a lot of time talking about how users will vote with their wallets if they don’t like Apple’s policies (which probably isn’t going to happen). But this proves nothing. Normal people don’t care about a lot of important things — does that mean industry professionals and competitors and pundits should simply agree with the consensus (or lack thereof) of the masses? No.

And finally, there’s the related notion that anyone who doesn’t like Apple’s rules can pick up and move to another platform, like Android. Which is ridiculous. Android and iOS share many similarities, but they’re loaded with subtle (and not-so-subtle) UI differences that intimidate ‘normal’ people. Not to mention the fact that users have built up libraries of dozens of applications and DRM-laden content that won’t transfer between devices. This lock-in effect is only going to become more pronounced as Apple shifts content ownership to the cloud and has users stream the movies they ‘own’ from its own servers.

Which brings us to why I find all of this so alarming. Above all, I don’t like the precedents that Apple continues to set. The App Store has existed for less than three years, and Apple has been drastically changing the rules on the fly, ruining some businesses and hampering others. It took years to reveal its developer guidelines in the first place, and, even when it actually printed some guidelines, it’s continued to arbitrarily change how it’s enforcing them.

I don’t take issue with Apple demanding a small processing fee to handle credit card transactions, but 30% is too much, especially combined with the restriction that publishers can’t change their pricing to adjust to the tax. Not every business will be able to offset the decrease in margins with the increased purchase volume promised by one-click payments. And companies that are in the business of reselling premium content with fixed costs, like MOG or Amazon, don’t have many options.

The App Store isn’t a storefront in the way that Amazon.com or Walmart are — this isn’t just an extravagant affiliate fee. We’re talking about the primary method of app distribution for one of the most important computer operating systems, ever. iOS is still in its infancy, and is going to continue to permeate across Apple products: desktop PCs, laptops, televisions, and whatever else Cupertino cooks up. And as people grow up in households where iOS is computing, it’s going to become harder than ever to get them to switch to less restrictive platforms down the road. Even when, heaven forbid, Apple starts making products that simply aren’t as good as the competition, or publishers and developers try to move to a different platform.

I’m sure this post will invite a throng of Apple advocates to poke holes in my logic, pointing out that Apple should be able to reap the benefits of the userbase and infrastructure it’s spent years building out. So be it. Let’s hope some of these arguments do something to allay the sinking feeling I’ve got in my stomach as I imagine a world where a significant number of the world’s computer users are locked behind a 30% toll being enforced by one of the most monolithic companies around.

CrunchBase Information

Apple

Information provided by CrunchBase

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