08:23 – Netflix Instant is obviously under pressure from Amazon and other video streaming vendors. Netflix is having to pay much more for the rights to stream programming, and it’s really starting to show in their selection of new titles. For the last few months, I’ve noticed that their new material is heavily skewed towards material from Korea and other Pacific Rim countries. For at least the last three months, their “Recently added in TV Shows” category has been more than half Korean and other dubbed material. I’m sure they get this stuff for almost nothing, and I’m equally sure that almost none of their subscribers have any interest at all in watching it. It’s simply a cheap and cheesy way of padding their catalog. Even so, at eight bucks a month Netflix streaming continues to offer incredible bang for the buck.
I’m not sure what’s going on with kit sales to foreign customers. Over the past year our sales have been steadily about 95% domestic, with nearly all of the remainder going to Canadian customers. Lately, 15% to 20% of sales have been to customers outside the US, with Canadians, Australians, and Brits about evenly split.
I read an interesting report yesterday about generosity by nation. The generosity in question was not foreign aid, but individual generosity, measured not only in monetary contributions but in willingness to help others, contribute time and work, and so on. The PDF included a table of the top 10 over the past five years. Positions 1 through 6 were held by the US, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, and the UK. It’s probably not a coincidence that all of these are English-speaking countries.
09:46 – Congratulations to John Farrell Kuhns, whose Heirloom Chemistry Set Kickstarter project has nearly reached four times its original $30,000 goal. That’s with only a month gone and two weeks remaining.
Several people have asked me why I’m supporting and promoting a competitor’s project. The short answer is that I don’t really consider John to be a competitor. We focus on different markets. But even if John were our competitor, I’d still support his project because I think it’s important that kids have as many good options as possible for getting involved with hands-on science.
An appropriate Christmas tree for our host:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/wipuaz8fdveuu15/1474572_817979564898165_1178647260_n.jpg
I thought about making one of those for Barbara. I have at least a dozen 250 mL round-bottom flasks in the lab. I’m not sure I have a dozen clamps, though. Actually, it’d be a bad idea anyway to set one up here, with wildman constantly dashing around chasing balls or his tail or dust motes or whatever.
The same influx of pacific rim stuff is also evident on Hulu. Some is actually kind of cute, in a 1960’s production quality sort of way.
I do wish Netflix had an option like “NEVER show me any title that was not produced in English”. I can count the number of dubbed/subtitled films I liked on one finger. Okay, two, counting “What’s Up Tiger Lily?”.
Speaking of Woody Allen, remember that scene in Take the Money and Run where Allen hands a hold-up note to a bank teller but Allen’s handwriting is so poor that the tellers end up arguing over what it says? To this day, Barbara and I pronounce the phrase “I have a gun” as “I have a gub”.
“I can count the number of dubbed/subtitled films I liked on one finger. ”
Surely Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was the one…
Hey Chuck W, I’ve been enjoying your comments here for too long without expressing my appreciation. I worked in broadcasting in the sixties, and always had an affection for it. In my case, it was TV. Wanted radio, but the opportunity to work at one of the big ABC-owned stations (WXYZ, Detroit) beat out radio, and I never looked back. This was a great way to finance my way through college.
Building PCs brought me to Robert’s books and this site, and I have learned a lot. Thanks. Have been “playing” with Linux for about seven years, but still have a LOT to learn.
A while back, you mentioned music players. I have been looking for a good one for quite a while, but not with much intensity. Something that doesn’t require building playlists, but which has a good front end for playing a collection of files without metadata. My formats include uncompressed (.wav), wma, and mp3, but all of these could be converted to something else. I could also rerip everything, and suspect I will do that to capture metadata.
Long ago, I liked an old version of Windows Media Player because it was simple, but I moved this to Linux and Android. An old version of Amarok was pretty good, but later versions are too cluttered for me. Most of my stuff is converted from CDs, and runs from classical to modern jazz to old 50-60s rock and roll if that matters. Usually I just play the files individually, but might occasionally create playlists. My Samsung Galaxy Note 3 has a built-in music player that is fairly simple and along the lines I am looking for. I also don’t mind using different players for different purposes.
I should add that I have not used many players (obvious?), and have missed out on the whole Winamp generation and other popular players. I do use Windows (retired, but still do a lot of business stuff for which Windows is prettry much a necessity,) but am trying to leave it behind for Linux. Been hard to do. I also don’t do anything Apple, not even their iTunes stuff (please, don’t want to start flames.)
So, my hope is that you could keep these thoughts in mind and post when you have a chance. I would especially appreciate your opinions on players, but would also enjoy reading how-to sites, which seem to be a bit rare. Most of what I have seen involves organizing through downloaded music or in the cloud, which I have avoided. Maybe I need to move into the 21st century.
Thanks, and enjoy you brief time off for the holidays.
Oh, I didn’t mean to leave out inputs from everybody else đ
I liked the Swedish versions of the Stieg Larsson books (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” series) subtitled in English as well as numerous other subtitled films. They are available on Amazon. I saw “Titanic” dubbed in Spanish when I was in Mexico and I thought it was better than it was in English because it was so incongruously funny.
Rick in Portland
I am wondering when Netflix will move to tiered cost programming and add the broadcast channels such as ABC, NBC, CBS, Syfy, USA, Hallmark, etc. I see it as just a matter of time.
I must disclose that I am a stockholder of Netflix.
This is why that I think the USA will get Medicare for All ™ in 2014. The House speaker is not a conservative:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/john-boehner-conservative-groups-have-lost-all-credibility-20131212
In fact, I would not be surprised to see a coalition of House Repubs and House Democrats leading the charge to convert Obamacare into Medicare for All. They will be in great fear of losing their seats as the number of people losing their current health insurance increases towards 25% of the nation in early 2014.
Ditto on those. The Spanish time-travel thriller Los CronocrĂmenes is also very good.
I can count the number of dubbed/subtitled films I liked on one finger.
I would include a couple of Kurosawa films in my list, but only one recent one – the Argentine “Nine Queens” (Spanish: Nueve Reinas). In fact, when it came out, I was so intrigued by Ebert’s review, I saw it at the theatre without realizing it was going to be subtitled. I enjoyed it so much, I saw it again at the theatre and then bought it on DVD as well.
I had a dislike of subtitled films dating back *decades*, from an older sister dragging me to arty films.
But I ended up watching an episode of “My little nightmare” at a friends house a few weeks ago, and was amused enough to finish the series.
Currently we’re working our way through “It started with a kiss”, Taiwanese, in which the stupidest girl in class is desperately pursuing the smartest. It’s sweet.
Little violence, sex, or male bashing. Adults have foibles, but arent morons. The good guys usually win.
I would suspect that there is a huge audience for the Asian language stuff on Netflix. Houston has several Asian-language radio stations and had at least one low power TV station in Chinese. There are a couple of multiplexes that show films from China, SE Asia, and (especially) India. Get good traffic from what I have heard. And there are video stores that serve niches like this around town.
It’s a way to serve a market that has limited options on cable and broadcast TV. Sure they may only be a few percent of the population, but they tend to be middle class and up, tech savvy, and early adopters. Sounds like a good business plan to me.
“Netflix Instant is obviously under pressure from Amazon and other video streaming vendors. Netflix is having to pay much more for the rights to stream programming…”
How come Netflix is paying more? Did they sign a long contract years ago when prices were higher?
The reverse. The contracts they signed formerly gave them the right to stream at much lower costs than they’d have to pay today. As those contracts expire, Netflix has to negotiate new ones, and now there are lots of other companies bidding, driving the price up.
Netflix had access to the Starz library until a year ago at a fixed cost of $30 million per year if I remember. Yup, here it is:
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/blogs/gear-up/netflix-loses-huge-library-of-movies-from-starz-20110902
Jim B says:
Hey Chuck W, Iâve been enjoying your comments here for too long without expressing my appreciation. I worked in broadcasting in the sixties, and always had an affection for it. In my case, it was TV. Wanted radio, but the opportunity to work at one of the big ABC-owned stations (WXYZ, Detroit) beat out radio, and I never looked back. This was a great way to finance my way through college.
Thanks for the kind comments and sorry for the delay in responding. At one point there were quite a few people in broadcasting hanging out here. And our hostâs brother worked in TV, as well. I did the same as you, working my way through college at a local TV station, and stayed with it for over 30 years; then 10 years out for Germany, and I am back doing video recording and editing for lawyers.
TV has changed dramatically since the 60âs, and not in a direction I care to be affiliated with any longer. Owners—in both TV and radio (and newspapers)—have no understanding at all what the business is about and positively refuse to accept cause and effect in programming and operations, thus driving audiences away in increasing numbers. I am glad to be away from constant arguments with those bonafide idiots who do not understand that broadcasting IS show business. When you think commercials constitute programming, disaster awaits. Just imagine what it would be like if those Dummköpfen got a hold of something like Cirque du Soleil and told them it was not show business, but solely the delivery of potential customers to advertisers, instead.
I intended to work in radio, I really think because of my attraction to the music. I was recently relating to the computer programmer daughter in-law, who spent a year at my alma mater in the Julliard of the Midwest—the music school at Indiana University that has spawned such talent as Joshua Bell, and back in my day, Booker T of the MGâs,—that I was in music up to Jr. High School, but it was thoroughly unsatisfying. I was in the schoolâs city-wide orchestra and remember playing all this dull classical stuff and feeling that I had to work and struggle through a couple pages of music, before a really nice but very short chord progression came along that was the only enjoyable part of those 4 pages of music. In rock and roll, most of the chords and progressions were immediately satisfying, and whatâs more—they were repeated over and over for 3 minutes! Around age 12, I got acquainted with the local Tiny Town rock music disc jockey, who had quit college to return to Tiny Town for radio, and he was not so much older than me that he was of a different generation. I realized this guy had it made: he got to listen to all this terrific music as soon as it came out, and play all of it every single day.
I quit the orchestra, and headed for speech and drama instead. At university, the radio and TV department at the school where I started, was in with other performing arts—music, dance, and theatre—in a college that was taught with the conservatory technique. And they owned a 50kw FM radio station. During my first semester, the Music Director for the FM station withdrew from school, and thus I spent almost all of the next 3 years on a work scholarship programming music for the station, which included daily programs of 2 hours of rock, 2 hours MOR, 2 hours semi-classical, 2 hours classical, 2 hours of…hmm, what would you call it? music to go to sleep by? elevator music, I suppose. The station also played country, jazz, folk, and big band, but the DJâs programmed those, not me; I just acquired and catalogued their records.
In my third year, I lost the scholarship when they decided others should have a chance at it. Because of the fast-rising price of tuition at that school, I was forced to transfer to state-owned Indiana University, where I ultimately graduated. I always say that I got my education at Butler University, but got my degree and my wife at IU. Actually IU was focused on research, and I got plenty of that, which my compatriots back at Butler did not get. The IU business school was the place where it was discovered that co-locating McDonalds and Burger King did not allow one to steal from the other, but actually meant significantly more business for both. Locating food places next to each other is now the rule, not the exception.
Meanwhile I had been working at the local CBS TV affiliate part-time since I graduated from high school, and when I changed schools, I was immediately hired to work at the university-owned public TV station, in addition to the television unit that produced all the educational programs used throughout the university—with many distributed throughout the US.
In fact, when I arrived, we had just bought 4 practically new GE black and white 4.5 inch IO cameras from you up there at WXYZ, when you went color before most of the rest of the country and abandoned all your B&W equipment. Man those big tube cameras produced incredibly fine pictures. The ending days of black and white were wonderful, not only for the super-sharp resolution pictures, but the superb lighting that was done to make black and white look so good. Color was actually a step backwards for both, IMO. I am not sure lighting for color ever has come close to the artistry of the end of the black and white days.
And while you were up there getting network scale (or close) working at the O&O, I was barely above minimum wage at a network affiliate. Although I had done part-time radio work all through my adolescence, I never went back to radio (except for occasional commercial voice work), until after returning from Germany (and that is volunteer at a non-profit community station), but I stuck with TV instead, in a pretty nice progression of jobs (there were lots of jobs everywhere back then). I probably could have continued in TV in Berlin, except when I arrived, I knew not a word of German, and that, of course, was not enough to work in the industry there. All TV originating from Berlin was German; English programming came from other parts of the country. By the time my German was acceptable, I was already established and making good money teaching English—which oddly, I enjoyed as much as working in TV.
[more in a minute]
A while back, you mentioned music players. I have been looking for a good one for quite a while, but not with much intensity. Something that doesnât require building playlists, but which has a good front end for playing a collection of files without metadata. My formats include uncompressed (.wav), wma, and mp3, but all of these could be converted to something else. I could also rerip everything, and suspect I will do that to capture metadata.
Well, I maintain my library 100% manually, although that is going to change. I suspect Winamp is likely your best bet. Grab it before it disappears in about 5 days. I donât use the Winamp library management, but those who do are pretty vocal with their disappointment in all other alternatives. As far as I know, Winamp can use metadata, but does not require it. If you activate the library management functions, it starts modifying the metadata with things like the number of times you play a song, ratings—if you assign them,—and other stuff. As I say, I have never used it, except to try it when Winamp was very young in the late â90âs; it has since developed far beyond what it was capable of back then. The engineering guy at the radio project says the âliteâ version of Winamp excludes all the video stuff they bulked it up with, and that is what we use at present—although I personally use a Winamp v2.91 German release that came out when I was still in Berlin.
The broadcast software made for radio is really unexcelled. Music Master is the best as far as I am concerned (no surprise one of the principals is German). But you are talking big money there. You can attach liner notes to any song, see album art, and write comments that appear when the song is ready to be played. Again, it will track all plays of the song, and the software allows creating rules for songs to protect things like artist separation—even the scheduling or banning of songs in various dayparts.
The scheduling software that comes with Broadcast Electronicsâ Audio Vault is probably #2 when it comes to use and flexibility. Again—big money. NextGen and its RCS Selector scheduler are fading from the scene, but were once big. One of the things that has happened with the conglomerate consolidation to so very few station owners, is that the industry is also losing competition in equipment manufacturers. Harris and Broadcast Electronics are now the unquestioned leaders, having forged relationships in supplying nearly all the big conglomerate operators.
There is also some pretty good software coming out of Europe. Costs money, but a lot less than US radio software people want for theirs. mAirList from Germany and Station Playlist Creator from Australia have schedulers used by a lot of Internet-only originators.
I have a plate full of stuff to accomplish, but on the music front I am re-ripping all of my own CDâs, and a substantial portion of the radio stationâs library. The reason is to switch to WAVE as the audio format and add composers to the metadata for a future of mandatory reporting that seems to be on the horizon. Audio processing is improving by quantum steps these days. The latest advances improve clarity so much, that it is really easy to identify items that have been encoded to MP3. I still encode an MP3 while ripping, but I am not sure why at this point—I use the WAVE files almost exclusively.
WAVE files CAN contain metadata, contrary to some claims on the Internet. .wav is just a container, and there is more than one format for it. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_Wave_Format
for info on what is used in radio and TV. WAVE can accommodate metadata at the head of the file as a RIFF chunk. As far as I know, aside from broadcast software, only Tag & Rename can write metadata to WAVE files. It costs money.
http://www.softpointer.com/tr_help/0101_overview.htm
There are some rippers that can write metadata to WAVE files too, but I cannot find my list of those at the moment. In video, Sony writes a lot of stuff useful for editing in metadata on the WAVE PCM files it creates for audio and video using their pro broadcast equipment.
Definitely re-rip over format conversion, as the state of audio is improving all the time and conversions degrade the audio. WAVE 16-bit PCMâs are the best for the present—although I use 24-bit WAVE for all production recording; there really is a noticeable improvement. Some broadcast people want to see FLAC better supported in the industry, but that does not seem to be happening. FLAC is WAVE PCM using better compression techniques to make the files smaller. It is a lossless format, because it IS PCM.
The DVD standard is 48,000khz sample rate; CD is 44,100khz (those mean there are that many respective samples in each second of audio). CDâs ripped to 48,000khz are actually interpolated from 44,100 to 48,000, and there are people with good ears who say artifacts from that sample conversion can be heard. Now the big problem is that work on making transmitters accept digital inputs is currently playing with 48,000 as the sample rate. Not good when the music has to be converted from 44,100 somewhere along the line.
I do not know any audiophiles who use iTunes, and people here are pretty open to multiple OSâes, with many having to work in and support all of them, so not much chance of flames here on that. It is more likely to occur on subjects like whether religion is real or fiction. But even so, people are not flamers here. They are rational conversationalists—although sometimes with very pointed views.
Audio in Linux is problematic. The Rivendell open source radio automation runs on Linux, using ALSA only, and recommends high-end ASI audio cards made especially for Linux (even used, those go for hundreds). There are problems—sometimes very big problems—caused by Linuxâ use of three different sound systems: OSS; Pulse; and ALSA (depending on the distro). Safest practice for pro audio is to kill everything but ALSA.
There are no satisfactory players in Linux, IMO—unfortunately. Outside of Rivendell on Linux, I use Winamp and XMPlay in Windows, but do not use either of their library management capabilities. After ripping, all my audio files are made read-only, so modifying metadata becomes problematic. Most of the broadcast software uses a separate database to store information about songs, although Rivendell does use the WAV RIFF chunk—to store what, I am not sure. Everything must be âimportedâ to Rivendell, which creates a duplicate of the ripped file that Rivendell then uses, instead of the original.
My library is getting out-of-hand. Record companies no longer send free copies of songs to radio stations—except to the headquarters of the 3 or 4 largest radio conglomerates, where music selection for all their stations is centralized these days. So building a music library is now essentially up to individuals, with no help from the record companies, as in the past. At the radio project, we get donated CDâs from listeners, but those are usually all the CDâs people do not want—and neither do we. So every few weeks, we hit the used record stores and go on a buying spree. The collection I deal with is now so large that I can no longer remember what I have and do not have when pondering some purchase. Thus I need some kind of database I can carry with me on the Android so I can look it up. Not sure how I am going to accomplish that, as yet.
Hope this is helpful. It sure is long.