Submitted by acohill on Tue, 01/25/2011 - 15:19
The Daily is the new online newspaper that will be designed expressly for the iPad and other tablet devices. Developed by The News Corporation, the weekly subscription will be priced at 99 cents, or about $4 per month. By comparison, many newspaper subscriptions are closer to a dollar per day.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 01/16/2011 - 13:36
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 01/04/2011 - 09:22
Here is a report that tablet devices like the iPad are not delivering the predicted online magazine subscriptions. I have been saying for some time that these new devices have the potential to save the ailing magazine and newspaper industries. But I think it is too soon to say that data from essentially just one or two publishers is a trend.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 12/10/2010 - 16:44
Two stories in one: The iPad is cutting into traditional newspaper and magazine subscriptions while simultaneously increasing readership for the online versions of newspapers and magazines. The challenge for publishers of newspapers and magazines is to set the online subscription prices at the right price point. If they are greedy and try to keep the online price high, they will never achieve the economies of scale possible when distribution costs are nearly equal to zero.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 11/30/2010 - 14:07
Comcast and Level 3 are having a public fight. Level 3 is a long haul network provider; the company owns thousands of miles of inter-city fiber and hauls all kinds of data traffic, including Internet traffic, for a wide variety of customers. But Comcast is groaning under the weight of Netflix and other video traffic, and the cable company wants Level 3 to pay more to drop traffic onto the Comcast network for delivery.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 11/23/2010 - 09:51
Netflix has announced an increase in the price of monthly subscriptions, which is no surprise, given the popularity of the firm's video on demand service. With Netflix subscribers using 20% of the nation's bandwidth every evening, Netflix needs some way to pay for all that bandwidth. The company has also added a $7.99/month streaming only subscriptions--you can't get any DVDs.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 11/21/2010 - 11:41
If you have not yet heard about "The Daily," you will shortly. The new digital "newspaper" is a collaboration between Apple and News Corp., and it is designed expressly for tablet devices like the iPad. There will be no Web or paper edition. Hence, we need a new term for this, and I think "newspad" is just right, as it is derived directly from its predecessor, the "newspaper."
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 17:25
In what has to scare the heck out of the cable companies, Hulu has released an upgraded version of its premium subscription service and software while dropping the monthly cost from $9.99 to $7.99. Hulu Plus gives subscribers access to many of the most popular current season "TV" shows. I am going to start putting "TV" in quotes because broadband services like Hulu and Netflix are not the old analog TV, but they sure deliver the same content.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 10/27/2010 - 10:18
Netflix had an outage of several hours that prevented their customers from accessing any streaming content. This article discusses whether Netflix is spending enough on infrastructure, but what has also emerged is that Netflix customers using the company's streaming services are now consuming 20% of all the bandwidth in the U.S. during peak evening hours. As I and many others have been predicting for years, video in all its forms is now driving use of the Internet.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 11:48
The New York Times can now be read on the iPad via an upgraded NY Times app. The full edition of the paper is available for free until sometime next year, when a subscription fee will be charged. If I was the owner of a struggling newspaper with declining circulation, I'd be not only going the app route for distribution, I'd put together some kind of deal to bundle in an iPad with something like a twelve month easy payment plan for the iPad.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 11:29
I was talked into going to see the movie "The Social Network" last night. Ostensibly about the rise of Facebook, it's hard to know how much of it was based on facts and how much was fantasy. I know that I thought the movie would never end. I can't recall another film in recent memory where every single character was so consistently unlikable. Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, probably is hard to get along with, but by the end of the movie, I was starting to feel sorry for him.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 10/04/2010 - 16:32
As I have written previously, Google and Apple are in fierce competition with each other, which is good for all us. Competition makes both companies work harder to deliver better products at less cost. Google has just announced their Google TV service. It is a bit different than Apple's Apple TV.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 09/24/2010 - 07:43
I still remember a conversation I had about a year ago when I told an business acquaintance that Blockbuster was toast, and that it was only going to be a year or two before the company would be gone.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 14:45
Apple has announced a new version of Apple TV. Apple has cut both the price and size of the device; it's now tiny compared to the old version, and costs only $99. The old version of the product was able to store movies and TV shows, but the new version only streams movies and TV, either from online sources or from content stored on a nearby Mac computer.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 08/13/2010 - 18:06
In this article that speculates about an Apple TV upgrade, there is an interesting tidbit that validates what I and others have been saying for a long time: HD content chews up bandwidth:
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 07/13/2010 - 09:54
I just spent a few minutes clicking around trying to find the Web site of a particular business. After four or five attempts to click through on links that I *thought* would go to the actual Web site of the business, I gave up. Every link took me to another link farm or worse, actually just clicked back through to the same page I left. Of course, each time I clicked, another list of Web ads got loaded into the page I landed on, and that's what much of the Web has become--just a snarled mess of link farms.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 06/07/2010 - 09:16
Lately, visiting some of my regular "regular read" blogs, I'm finding not only fewer posts but notes from the bloggers that after five or six years, they are turning the blog off or just posting a lot less. The comments all seem to run in the same direction: "I've said everything I have wanted to say." And regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I am posting a lot less than I was three or four years ago. Part of the change is due the the growth in Design Nine; we're planning and building more networks in more places around the country than we were three or four years ago.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 06/02/2010 - 08:50
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 05/04/2010 - 09:11
Microsoft has announced that for Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), the company has a preference for HTML5 and the H.264 video codec. Flash plug-ins will continue to be supported, but IE9 will only have native support for H.264. This follows on the path blazed by Apple, which decided a while back not support Flash at all on the iPhone and iPod. The controversy has heated up with the release of the iPad, which continues the Apple strategy of no Flash support at all.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 04/05/2010 - 14:27
This article from Cory Doctorow is similar to a couple of other contrarian articles that have come out in the past week--they all complain about the perceived "closed" nature of the iPad and/or say that the iPad is not going to save the publishing business.
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