Entries Tagged as ''
Spud Gun!
An excellent roundup of so many of the naff toys I enjoyed in the BC (“Before Computers”) era. This was my favourite: the Spud Gun. Given that there were, in fact, an awful lot of potatoes in Ireland back then I was never short of ammo…
For The Discerning Nerd
The Ultimate Star Trek Collection
Price: $2,499.99
You Save: $1,409.00 (36%)
Britwashing
There’s an article by Michael Luo I saw today that repeats a classic lazy error of misattribution by stating that John Nelson Darby, the founder of the now-peculiarly USian superstition of Rapture was “British”. While technically this does reflect the political reality at the time, it is perhaps more correct to call him “Anglo-Irish”. It should also be noted that Bretheranism, the seed from which grew Dispensationalism, consisted in its early years almost exclusively of Irish or Anglo-Irish men educated in Trinity College, Dublin, and that the early theological viewpoint of the Bretheren was formed within an Ireland sinking into the listless decay of the forced political Union with the United Kingdom. As impoverishment and famine increasingly spread throughout the country, and the optimism and prosperity of the late 18th century became a fading memory within Ireland, it must indeed have been easier to believe that the End Time was approaching. Of course, for many in Ireland, the End Times did in fact arrive, in 1845-1848.
TV A Go GO
I think the idea of offering basically disposable TV for single item licence fees ala Apple is going to be a constrained market. Most of what people watch on TV they consider disposable. It is saved for a while and deleted. Obviously, fans will pay extra for high-quality, boxed DVD sets, as has emerged in the last few years.
But back to my point, for the vast majority of people, TV is disposable. I suspect that the prospect of dealing with fiddly little per-item licence fees will be off-putting. There’s a reason why most people who watch pay-per TV pony up to setups like HBO for content aggregation.
Therefore, I suspect if the whole legal download video market takes off it will quickly develop content aggregators, who will licence material from content providers. They will sell it to people as subscription services, ala Napster/Yahoo/Rhapsody. Of course, for fans, there will still be the option to pay extra to obtain an unlimited use/”eternal” licence.
I’d love to see a breakdown from the subscription companies as to how many of their tunes are downloaded on temporary licences, versus unlimited pay-per licences.
I suspect Apple would love to get in on the subscription model (after all, .Mac is a huge money earner for it), but currently lacks the software mojo. It took MS several painful years to get Janus to a stage where it kind of works, most of the time.
There are those people who say “But Apple will NEVER do subscriptions – Steve has said that over and over”. Well, he was also crapping on fancy Flash players (cue “Nano”), and personal video players. Apple craps on everything it either does not currently sell, cannot currently make, or has yet to figure out how to make money from.
Blogroll
