Tag Archives: geolocking

The Release Windows Archaism

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As for the TV shows such as Homeland and others hits, there is not justification whatsoever to preserve this calendar archaism. They should be made universally available from the day when they are aired on TV, period. Or customers will vote with their mouse anyway and find the right file-sharing sites.

The ???Industry??? fails to assess three shifts here.

???The first one is the globalization of audiences. Worldwide, about 360m people are native English speakers; for an additional 375m, it is the second language, and 750m more picked English as an foreign language at school. That???s about 1.5 billion people likely to be interested in English-speaking culture. As a result, a growing proportion of teenagers watch their pirated series without subtitles ??? or scruples.

???Then, the ???spread factor???: Once a show becomes a hit in the United States, it becomes widely commented in Europe and elsewhere, not only because a large number of people speak serviceable English, but also because many national websites propagate the US buzz. Hollywood execs would be surprised to see how well young (potential) audiences abroad know about their productions months before seeing them.

???And finally, technology is definitely on the side of the foreign consumer: Better connectivity (expect 5 minutes to download an episode), high definition image, great sound??? And mobility (just take a high-speed train in Europe and see how many are watching videos on their tablets).

via mondaynote.com

The forces arrayed against geo-blocking.

Browsers should have been cars. Instead they’re shopping carts.

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I want to drive on the Web, but instead I’m being driven. All of us are. And that’s a problem.

It’s not for lack of trying on the part of websites and services such as search engines. But they don’t make cars. They make stores and utilities that try to be personal, but aren’t, and never can be.

Take, for example, the matter of location. The Internet has no location, and that’s one of its graces. But sites and services want to serve, so many notice what IP address you appear to be arriving from. Then they customize their page for you, based on that location. While that might sound innocent enough, and well-intended, it also fails to know one’s true intentions, which matter far more to each of us than whatever a website guesses about us, especially if the guessing is wrong.

via blogs.law.harvard.edu

Shopping carts on rails according to a later analogy from Doc. And that’s really sad. I used to compare railways to telcos, their services, their time-table, their price. And the Internet to the personal vehicle. From Doc’s perspective it appears the mass consumer Internet is trending that way.