Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to Sacha,
You believe what you want to believe, eh.
Mediaworks wants to make lots of money in an industry where regulation (or lack of) has a lot of influence on how much money is made. It's owned by a private capital company that's culturally in accord with the government's ideology. Not to mention that in return for playing nicely, Mediaworks gets let off paying its bills on time.
I'd say they'd listen when John Key calls.
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Speaker: We don’t make the rules, we're…, in reply to Russell Brown,
It's interesting how Netflix only filter by IP, rather than caring about where you 'were" when signing up, how you pay, etc. So, as that page indicates, if I access the service from NZ, I get the NZ content, but if I move (physically or virtually) to the US, I get US content.
That says to me that they, at least, don't really care very much about where their customers are.
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Speaker: We don’t make the rules, we're…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
See also the "www" which appeared on the front of a URL because an organisation wanting to make a web presence would set up a dedicated server and name this www.gradgrind.com to go with mail.gradgrind.com and ftp.gradgrind.com.
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Speaker: We don’t make the rules, we're…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
It's because inventing markup that can be easily input by humans, allows markup special characters to be used as literals, and that is consistently unambiguous is a moderately hard problem.
IMHO, Tim-Berners Lee made a reasonable job of it in 1993, and most attempts at a simplified markup language will have a range of undocumented glitches and/or won't allow certain results to be achieved.
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In the olden days, which I guess are still going on, the Warehouse or whoever would buy a container-load of DVDs from a middleman in the US, send them over here and sell them. The rights holders would (presumably) get paid on a US retail sale and everybody would be vaguely happy, especially as such grey imports are explicitly legal in NZ copyright law.
What's the difference if it's bytes rather than media? Netflix will see a US person watching the movie and pay over a few cents as usual to the producers. Sure, they won't get the extra NZ royalty and a bunch of middlemen won't get paid. Sad.
Companies like Sky and Telecom are a 21st century version of the Ferme générale of pre-revolutionary France - they get a license from government* to (try and) extort taxes from us peasants.
* Actually the ancien régime was less corrupt in that the fermiers explicitly paid for their taxing rights. Now, it's everything from helping the government spy on us to providing it with a propaganda channel.
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will be less likely to invest in future content for NZ consumers
We don't need them to. We can happily buy and use the content that US, British and Canadian consumers do, at the prices they do. Why would we want to have our own special sleepy hollow service with 1/10 of the titles just to keep a few people in unproductive work at Sky/Telecom?
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It's true Steve:
In just the few weeks I've read about:
- a noted former corporate CEO for whom one of the core goals of her oversized hobby business is to get written about in the media.
- a technology company CEO who wants to make "SAP for small businesses". What have small businesses ever done to him? It's excessive retribution for an overheated latte, really.
- and the person who destroyed HP now wanting to move on to larger targets and become President of the United States
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How much longer will broadcast TV plague us?
You've got tens of millions of dollars being spent maintaining transmitters on hilltops, dishes on studio roofs and leasing satellite transponders to do something that can be setup on AWS with credit card money. Just in order to benefit from the inertia of viewers watching a channel that's prominent in their EPG.
A future left-wing government would be well advised to give TV3 a little kick on its way. A combination of local media ownership restrictions and increased spectrum charges should do the job nicely.
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Hard News: Media Take: The Easter Show, in reply to mark taslov,
If the Manson Family had formed a close bond with the Beatles fan-club and worked with it to dominate many nations for the succeeding 1800 years (whilst suppressing heretical views on such things as the merits of the White Album), that might be a reasonable analogy.