Kevin Mac Neil

Where’s the downvote button…

That could be. However, I think that as we go forward, it is becoming much cheaper to produce quality content. I don’t think we are too far from a world were a person, or a small group of people, can get together and raise enough capital to produce something like the Lost pilot themselves. High quality cameras are getting cheaper everyday, computer effects are getting cheaper and easier, and it is getting easier to find like-minded people to create and share with. Right now, something like Game of Thrones costs millions of dollars per hour to put together. Will that still be the case in a decade? Maybe, but I don’t think so.

The internet provides opportunities for the creation of movies and series, as well as a low risk way of distributing them. You don’t have to worry about maximizing prime time ad revenue anymore. You can sell it yourself for very little incremental cost, or license it to Netflix or Amazon or whoever else pops up.

I also don’t think that the old paradigm of channels as we know them will exist for much longer. What we will see instead are brands. I trust HBO to make good stuff, and so if they offered a subscription service online that gave access to all of their content, I would be likely to buy it. The companies that succeed will be the ones who find niches for themselves. Some companies will specialize in reality shows, and I won’t bother to buy into them. But others will make science and technology documentaries, and they will get my money. The company who makes soaps will have no interest to me, but scripted comedy and fantasy will.

So, to summarize, there may be a short term detrimental effect, but with so many people wanting so many different kinds of content, I am sure that companies will either adapt or pop up to service all those little niches.

I understand all that. I just think that instead of discouraging people from doing what they want to do, they should build out the network to handle what the customers want to do. If I believed that caps and throttling were genuine attempts to temporarily cope with massive increases in utilization while they upgraded the systems to meet demand, I would be less upset. But, as far as I can see (especially here in Canada), caps and throttling are much more about protecting cable and satellite subscriptions and avoiding capital expenditures than ensuring that everyone can use their connections satisfactorily during peak periods.

It isn’t that hard to consume 10 GB/day with legitimate services. I back up my pictures/videos/documents to the cloud, as does my wife. She watches hours of Netflix while she works (web designer). We watch streamed TV most evenings instead of cable. Even at a conservative 1 GB/hour for high def content, that is only five hours each. Seems like a lot, perhaps, but as I said, when much of it is passive video (like when she is working), it is not difficult to consume more than 5 hours of video in a day. Add in some kids, normal internet use, maybe a video chat or two, a few laptops making cloud based backups, and it adds up to more than 10 GB/day pretty easily.

Great. I’ve got two people and we average 250GB/month. It is different for everyone. All of these debates about what is reasonable and what isn’t are beside the point. Legitimate uses for huge amounts of data transfer are increasing every day, and putting caps on Internet connections discourages those legitimate uses.

I wouldn’t. That is just when the wife and I are sitting down to watch Netflix or other streaming services.

Heck even buying the blu-ray set the next year for every show you watch is cheaper (and that’s still overpriced)

I actually priced it out a few weeks ago, and it would save me about $300 a year to buy all of the shows I watch on Blu-Ray instead of paying for cable.

I think live TV at some point will be just sports and competitions (that includes stuff like American Idol and live gameshows, if you are into that sort of thing). You will buy subscriptions to companies like NBC, ABC, HBO, etc that produce the kinds of shows that you are interested.

I’m not confident that once technology enabling commercial skipping becomes ubiquitous that companies like Hulu and Netflix will be able to provide everything we could want to watch for just a few dollars a month. Once advertising revenue drops out of the model, the millions of dollars it costs to create this entertainment will have to come from somewhere else, and I’m not sure that aggregators selling everything under the sun for $8/month covers all those real costs once the advertising “subsidies” are eliminated from the production end.

I know I have already done so. It’s actually pretty cool how good Netflix is at recommending things to me I never would have watched, based on my previous behaviour.

Nope. Coincidences don’t happen.

Typos: “expect as 12 hours of battery life (when idle) on their energy efficient Piledriver cores.”
should be “expect as many as…”
“the company has baking a slew of features”
should be “the company has been baking a slew of features”
“As far as performance ins concerned, AMD has provided some cursory benchmark results against some of Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPUs, we’ll need to wait for proper reviews to get a real idea of where Trinity falls.”
should be “As far as performance is concerned, AMD has provided some cursory benchmark results against some of Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPUs, but we’ll need to wait for proper reviews to get a real idea of where Trinity falls.”

Hopefully AMD can catch up. I haven’t built an Intel system in a decade, but I am not considering an AMD processor for my next build, as it stands.

Typo: “While the content selection might not be for everyone, all the Apple TV can really do it get internet material on your TV. Let’s not forget to mention non-Apple solutions like DLNA”
Should be is

I play it on my 2010 MBA 13" and it plays just fine.

Agreed. And several have made it past security. So what is all this security theatre doing, exactly?

I’d say unwilling is probably part of the rhetoric of policy. If it is just unable, the law can’t do t anything. If, on the other hand, you are looking for a law which would require back doors be built into encryption schemes to allow monitoring, then adding unwilling makes it sound like they >could< intercept these communications through back doors but are unwilling to install them.

I suspect that part of the problem is the increasing use of encryption for voice and text communication. It is quite likely that in some cases, the phone company or internet provider is being asked to hand over types of data which they do not and cannot provide because it is encrypted and obfuscated enough that they don’t have that information. For instance, providing something like a call log or a list of visited websites becomes quite difficult if using encrypted voice over IP and TOR.

Tell you what. I’ll be done Law School in a few years. Just hold off till then, hire me, and it will be all good. I’ve been told I have a face for radio, so podcasts seem like a logical step for me.

Agreed. My wife bought it for her iPad. Money talks.