Publishing and content

Netflix, despite their clumsy handling of price changes, is not stupid. Somewhere along the way, they noticed they could pay outsized royalty fees to the studios every time someone streamed a TV show, or they could just produce their own TV shows and KEEP ALL THE MONEY.

Wired has an interesting article on the slow and steady approach Microsoft has taken with the Xbox. Wired describes the huge sales numbers for the Xbox over the Black Friday weekend, noting that it can't just be gamers buying a six year old design.

What has happened is that Microsoft has been able to sign a lot of content agreements so that you can use the Xbox to replace your TV, with lots of on-demand video from a wide variety of content providers.

A cryptic reference in the wildly popular biography of Steve Jobs suggests that Apple has something up its sleeve with respect to the TV set. MacRumors reports on a NY Times story that suggests Apple's intelligent agent technology, called Siri, may show up in an Apple-branded TV set. Instead of complicated remotes, we will just talk to our TV and tell it what we want to watch.

The iPod is ten years old today. The iPod was the brainchild of Steve Jobs. There were plenty of other MP3 music players at the time; most of them were much less expensive and smaller than the iPod, but the iPod was easy to use, both from the interface of the iPod itself, but key to the music player's success was the way the iPod synced with iTunes on your computer--a layer of complexity was completely eliminated, and that made all the difference.

Netflix has announced that it has abandoned plans to split its business in two and make customers to two different sites, depending on whether they want to rent a DVD or watch something instantly via the Internet. It was actually much worse than that, as they were also going to make customers have two different and separate billing accounts. The invisible hand of the market, when left alone, usually fixes stupidity like this, and it did.

Now that the broadband stimulus money has been distributed, and the Google fiber initiative has taken root in the two Kansas Cities, a lot of communities seem to have lost interest in broadband initiatives. The cable companies have done a fairly good job of keeping up with demand, and the telephone companies continue to cling to their share of the broadband market by competing on price rather than on bandwidth.

Amazon has just announced the Kindle Fire. You won't be able to get your hands on one until November 15th, but you can order one now. If Apple was planning to release an upgraded iPad before the holidays, Amazon just stole all of Apple's thunder.

According to the LA Times, eighteen years after the commercialization of the Internet, folks in Hollywood have determined that their might actually be something to that InterTubes things.

Passafire is a Savannah, Georgia based band with some roots on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Their most recent album, Start from Scratch, has zoomed to the top of the iTunes reggae charts to take the number two spot behind perennial number one Bob Marley. What is interesting about this is that the band does not have a contract with a major record label (and "record" is an anachronism these days).

Facebook rolled out an updated interface and a bunch of new features yesterday, and I spent some time yesterday evening looking at what they had did. There is much buzz about a new music-sharing service, but to me, the most significant change is the addition of "lists," which is the equivalent of Google+ "circles." The concept is identical: you can group your friends and contacts into sets, and you can look at only what is going on in that set of contacts, rather than having to plow through every item that gets posted to your wall.

Executives at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta are probably breaking out the bubbly (2 liter bottles of Coke) and toasting themselves. No longer will the New Coke be considered the dumbest, most asinine product roll out in history. Netflix will now be a source of business case studies in MBA programs for the foreseeable future.

Rich Swier of Startup Florida has a nice short article on Google+ and why he thinks it is a big improvement over Facebook. Google+ is still mostly a geek/early adopter phenomenon, but is probably the only competing service that has any chance of unseating Facebook.

Apple released the latest version of its Macintosh operating system today (OS X Lion). The software is available only via a download right now, and you better have a good, high capacity broadband connection if you want it, as the download is four gigabytes. Apple also announced that it will sell a version of the software on a USB thumb drive next month. In other words, no DVD version, not now, not ever. Apple has consistently led the way in media, including the 3.5 inch floppy, the CD drive, the DVD drive, USB ports, and Firewire, among others.

Netflix has raised prices. I got my notice via email yesterday. They have unbundled streaming from the traditional DVD via mail, and you now can buy one service, the other, or both. The DVD service is still more expensive than streaming, which suggests that the cost of mailing DVDs remains significant compared to the cost of buying bandwidth to drag streaming content across the Internet.

I just got an invite to Google+, the new Facebook-like offering from Google. So I created an account, and at first glance, I would say Facebook and LinkedIn have a lot to worry about. Note, however, that Google has a very mixed track record of success outside search and mapping. Anyone remember Orkut? It never caught on the U.S., although it has been successful in some other countries like India. If Google can do a better job of supporting business-oriented uses of Google+, both Facebook and LinkedIn will have to work very hard to keep their customer base.

Facebook growth has fallen dramatically, signaling that nearly everyone who is likely to have a Facebook account has one. The U.S., Canada, Russia, Britain, Norway, and Russia all posted lower numbers of new users and higher numbers of closed accounts. Like the blogging bubble of a few years ago, a lot of people have tried Facebook and have found they don't have much use for it.

Tennessee legislators just passed a law making it illegal to transmit an image that could "..frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress" to someone who sees it." And the person who suffers "emotional distress" does not have to be the person you sent it to. Suppose you send out a picture of a cat hanging desperately from the branch of tree to a friend. That friend forwards it on.

Apple's annual WorldWide Developer's Conference (WWDC) starts on June 6th, just a few days from now, and speculation is building that Apple will finally tell the world just what it plans to do with the million square foot data center it has built in rural North Carolina. Among the fevered discussion is the idea that Apple intends to announce a TV and movie on demand service.

The old TV empires are crumbling fast, and Netflix is speeding their demise. It just outbid all the other networks for a new original, uh, "TV" series called , which will star Kevin Spacey. Since you can watch Netflix on just about any device on the planet, there is even less reason to keep around one of those old timey television doohickeys.

Someone asked me just today if we really will need all the bandwidth that fiber offers, with the unspoken inference that DSL and cable modem service seems to be working just fine.

Uh-huh.