(Downloaded) Video Killed the Video Star

Watched your latest movie on Netflix?  Downloaded a movie torrent?  You’re not alone.  For the first time ever, the number of cable subscribers decreased according to a WSJ interactive.

Netflix is onto this, opening up an online video only subscription.  Previously, you had to order DVDs by mail and online video was an add-on.  But they’re quickly realizing that streaming media is the future.

The Portland, Maine area lost 3,000 subscribers last quarter, out of approximately 310,000 total subscribers.

West Virginia’s Always an Enigma

Brilliant quote from Senator Nelson Rockefeller at a Senate Communications Subcommittee meeting yesterday.

When it comes to developing content, our entertainment machine is too often in a race to the bottom. In fact, it is in a race to the bottom. Getting close. Even worse, our news media has all but surrendered to the forces of entertainment. And much of our news media is entertainment as opposed to news. Instead of a watchdog that is a check on the excesses of government and business, we have the endless barking of a 24-hour news cycle. We have journalism that is always ravenous for the next rumor, but insufficiently hungry for the facts that can nourish something called our democracy. As citizens, we are paying one heck of a price in the dumbing down of America.

Did Sam Seaborne write this?  The full video below.

What’s amazing is that it took only 10 seconds to discover Rockefeller’s words in practice.  Trying to find information about the Committee’s bill I had to go through 4 “News” feed items from Google mentioning the speech before I got to one that came close to mentioning what the Committee was actual doing.  And that “News” source?  An industry specific news blog: http://goo.gl/Zpn69 and Variety: http://goo.gl/v8nNP.  Not CNN.  Or another “News” source. 

To avoid the same error of these other aggregators, here’s a quick synopsis on the Committee hearing which is looking at the structure between content producers - like Fox and ABC - and content distributors – like Time Warner.  Content producers want the current solution where they can sell channels in bundles to distributors.  Distributors feel they’re being monopolized.  Both sides use the consumer to argue their position: distributors argue consumers don’t want high rates, producers argue that consumers want access to their content.  They both want government to fix the issue (for them of course).  Neither side really cares about the consumer.  And the Senate can’t really do anything for the consumer anyways because the House is now controlled by free market government-do-nothings in Congress.

Always Something Interesting: Shorpy

Jonathan “the new guy” in development threw out this site, a blog of really high quality historical images from around the US.   Seems to be lots of exploring in this site. 

End of the Line: 1921 talks about how when the streetcars were torn out of the roads, people found all sorts of uses for the old carriages.

 

 

There’s the Marilyn Monroe colorized section.

 

And this node was cool too for its before and after shots.  A restaurant in 1937, this Savannah Georgia address has gone downhill since.

Tag, You’re It

Last week capped off the Glastonbury Festival, the largest music festival in Europe celebrating its 40th anniversary.

(from Boston.com – more pictures here)

But in what may be a first for social media, everyone that attended the concert is tagging themselves in a giant Facebook Connect project.  Go HERE to see the project.

It’s fairly clear that the guy in the middle with the hipster hat and glasses is John Belushi, someone should tag that guy.

Senate Forecasts

Nate Silver updated his senate forecast and the Democrats are now projected to have 55.2 seats come November, Republicans 44.2.  He also projects 0.6 Charlie Christs which I think is funny (expected value how cool are you).

What’s really interesting from a geek political perspective is the war brewing between Silver and Research 2000 (R2K), a polling company.  Daily Kos is suing R2K alleging that they fake their polling data, and Nate’s right there supporting the Kos with cool graphs like these showing the difference in week to week changes between R2K and Gallup.

Remember your normal distribution.  If I’m a polling company and I want to fake data, I never pick the same value (hence no 0’s in the left) and I add 1 or subtract 1 every week so it looks like it changes.  But if I’m sampling data, I vary normally which is the nice bell curve on the right.

The point is that not all polling companies are the same.  Nate’s been trying to point this out, the media doesn’t care, and he’s been starting a campaign for the political rating industry to grade polling companies based on performance.  Anyways, you can follow the drama at his blog fivethirtyeight.com.

Too Good Not to Post

That xkcd guy can be pretty weird, but this is great.