Category: Internet
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The Premier League in an SVOD World – Running the Numbers
This week, Amazon Prime in the UK has begun the first of its streaming-only games offered to Prime subscribers. You will recall that during the last UK round of Premier League TV rights, a package comprising of the entirety of one mid-week “matchday” and all the Boxing Day games was offered. In the end Amazon…
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Space for Audio: The Internet and Streaming Radio
Yesterday I was a speaker at this year’s Radio TechCon conference, and took part in a “debate” about the future of broadcast radio. If there had to be one platform for radio in the future, which would it be? DAB+, broadband or 5G? Obviously this is not a true representation of the options. Nobody is…
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Flixster Transition to Google Play
A few weeks back I noted that Flixster would be closing soon and had written to me to say that my film collection would transition to Google Play. Well last week, that time finally came to pass. The Flixster website is shutting down in December, and I’d need to migrate my digital collection to Google.…
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Twitter’s Algorithmic Toxicity
This piece started life as a Twitter thread – ironically – which I posted recently. Read the thread here, or read on. Introduction I’ve recently come to the conclusion that many of Twitter’s toxicity issues essentially come as a consequence of their own software’s behaviour. Algorithms affect so many systems and businesses these days, that…
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RIP Flixster
At the start of this year I noted that buying a digital movie or TV series in the UK was an absolute mess. You can buy movies or TV series from a number of sites including: iTunes, Google Play Movies, Amazon, Sky Store and Rakuten. But if you buy something in one of those places,…
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Transitioning from Evernote to OneNote
I feel a little bad about this, but I’ve decided to close down my Evernote account and move across to OneNote. The main reason is that it feels like OneNote gets a bit more love and support. EverNote is fine as far as it goes, but it hasn’t really moved on much, with newer features…
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NAS Upgrading Fun
I’m documenting this, just in case there’s someone out there for whom it’s useful. I had two NAS drives, both made by Synology. I have a DS210j that I bought back in 2010. It had a pair of 2TB drives in it with a mirror RAID array, and perhaps the most important thing stored on…
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Undercover Advertising
In the UK, we have some really tight restriction on what and how we are able to advertise. Ofcom has a Broadcasting Code. The Advertising Standards Authority has both Broadcast and Non-Broadcast Codes. Beyond these, there are EU wide codes, and industry codes. But frankly, the internet still appears to be the wild west. Panorama…
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Great Sadness
This week, the Paweł Pawlikowski film, Cold War, was released on home video. I missed this in the cinema, even though I found the film’s trailer utterly entrancing. So I thought I would treat myself to a Blu Ray copy of the film. Earlier in the week I actually saw an advertisement for the film in…
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HMV
A few thoughts on the new difficulties faced by HMV. In part this is response to some utter nonsense I’ve read online, and some of the news reports surrounding HMV heading into administration for the second time in five years. There are undoubtedly structural problems with how music is sold in 2019, but I think there are multiple…
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Is Bandersnatch the Future of Television?
No. No, it’s not. Bandersnatch is the recently released episode of Black Mirror from Charlie Brooker available on Netflix. It takes the form of a choose your own adventure book/game and I loved it! In many respects, this episode ticked just about every box for me. It was set in the eighties, in and around writing…
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Things I Hate on News Sites
I’m something of a news junkie, and I spend a lot of time reading stories on a reasonably wide range of news sites. I pay for a number of those sites, but appreciate that advertising revenues alone aren’t enough to support any sites – with the possible exception of the very largest. But there are…