Content and services

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.

Fuzebox is selling a videoconferencing service, and apparently business is so bad that they feel the need to bill customers that don't want their service. We signed up for a free trial some months ago, used it once, and decided it did not meet our needs. Some months after that, they started billing us a huge monthly charge. They claimed they sent out emails notifying us that they were converting the free trial to a paid subscription, but we never received anything. Nor did we receive any other email from them.

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 new study suggests that a slight majority of adults think social media is harmful to the social development of today's youth. With the ever-increasing use of social media by young people, Poll Position wanted to know if Americans think social media is helpful or harmful to the social development of today’s youth.

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.

True story. I discussed the possibility of eliminating our family cable TV subscription and just sticking with Internet. The response was, and I quote exactly, "Okay. Can we get Hulu Plus?" That's the state of cable TV today. It doesn't even merit a 30 second discussion of its value.

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.

The San Diego power outage may be responsible for the Microsoft Office 365 service (a "cloud computing" offering) being down. Other Microsoft cloud services like Hotmail and Live were also affected. The company is not saying what actually caused the problem, but the article notes that as many as 365 million users were affected.

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.

I was driving to work this morning, listening to the news on the car radio. The local station used the CBS syndicated news feed, and during the news break, there was an ad for the CBS iPhone/iPad app that "delivered all the breaking news from CBS," or something like that.

If I can get news feeds and programming directly on my computer or mobile device, why do I need an overpriced cable TV subscription. Netflix and Hulu provide virtually all of the movie and TV show programming, and a few iPad apps fill out the requirement for breaking news.

I had a conversation last week with a new college grad who had just started a new job and had moved into a new apartment. The young woman had a couple of questions about her Internet connection, which she had purchased from the local phone company (DSL). I asked if she had considered a cable TV/cable modem package.

She said, "No, I never watch TV. I can get whatever I need from the Internet."

In a nutshell, the customer base of the cable TV industry is getting old and dying, and they don't have a plan to attract younger customers.

The Harvard Business Review says that Groupon is failing. The half price coupon service has apparently burned through nearly a billion dollars in venture capital and needs just a measly three-quarters of a billion to keep going. Apparently there were some VC folks and business managers who learned nothing during the dot-com era. Groupon apparently spent on growth without attending to a fundamental business requirement: you actually have to make money.

Skype has rolled out HD videoconferencing for Macs--it's been available on the Windows platform for a while. Here at Design Nine, we just upgraded our own business videoconferencing software to include multi-party video. We use Skype videoconferencing daily for internal communications in our three geographically distant locations, which saves us money on our landline phone bill. We use Go To Meeting for client meetings, and find the screen-sharing particularly productive when trying to discuss something like a spreadsheet financial model.

Here in Virginia, Roanoke County and the City of Salem are struggling with the same problem that many other localities in the country have: cable companies that won't renew franchise agreements. Comcast purchased an aging cable system from Adelphia a few years ago when Adelphia went bankrupt. At the time, Comcast promised the localities it would upgrade the old system so it could support improved Internet access.

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.