The Sun's not yellow it's chicken

JTEM Approved (Netflix Edition)

1. Breaking Bad
2. Battlestar Galactica (2004 series)
3. Being Human (U.S.)
4. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia
5. Portlandia
6. 30 Rock
7. Weeds (though it goes down hill with age)
8. Family Guy (added benefit of pissing off the “Social Justice” twits)
9. Star Trek (Original/TNG/DS9)
10. The Rockford Files (best of the classic 1970s crime dramas)
11. Hawaii 5-0 (What I would give to go back in time & place…)
12. Shin Chan (so delectably wrong…)

And I’m always looking for recommendations from others, so if you know of any good shows (or movies) I might be missing then PLEASE hit me up…

Netflix really sucks lately

We have problems every day.  No exceptions.

And they used to claim that it was Apple, that the problem was Apple TV and not them, but dug out & reconnected the Roku box and there’s still problems.

Like right now, for example, it’s telling me that the title is “temporarily unavailable.”  That’s the usual error message.  It’s the only error message we ever get, assuming we get one at all.  Sometimes it just returns to the title screen without any message.

And this can (and does) happen at any point during a movie or show.  It’s not like you go to watch something and it says “Temporarily unavailable,” you’ll be halfway (or more) through an episode and it suddenly stops, returns you to the title screen and won’t resume…

Douche bags.

Why Can’t the Internet Be International Waters?

the-netocrat:

There’s no reason I should have to lie about what country I’m in to buy certain digital products. I had to tell Amazon that I moved to Bristol, England to buy a UK ebook. It would’ve been easier to pirate it!

Make an automatic tax (for each country) for different types of digital products. Why is that so difficult?

The problem is that so many business — and the BBC is notorious for this — are stuck in the past.  They always made money by selling the exact same product dozens of times.  For example, growing up, Boston was the 6th largest television market in America.  America was about 200 “Different” markets, according to the television industry (a little more, actually). But it sort of had to be this way because, absent cable TV and today’s internet, most people could only watch the TV shows being broadcast from nearby signal towers.  So the BBC wouldn’t sell a series like Doctor who to an American network, they would shop it to each & every television market… or at least all the markets with a PBS station.

The problem for them is that there aren’t “Different” markets anymore.  New York is the same as Boston today, and both are the same as London, Paris or even Tokyo and Sydney.  Even cable TV is unnecessary.  The technology has rendered cable obsolete. My room mate and I cancelled cable.  We watched the entire “Next Iron Chef” series by pulling it up on the iPad and sharing it over the Apple TV. 

But even THAT is unnecessary.  We only have to do it because who’s going to pay for cable if we can all get the programming directly from the producers? 

The industry is inventing divisions.  The entertainment industry is trying to enforce a reality which no longer exists, a world were there aren’t MP3 players, broadband internet and mobile devices.  The people who run the BBC (and all the other content producers) are old, they’re stuck in the past.  They’re all clinging to a business model which went obsolete years ago.

We should all be able to watch the latest episodes of Breaking Bad, or Doctor Who or Hawaii 5-0 as soon as they are available.  We should all be able to watch them anywhere in the world even as they are being broadcast new.

The only reason why we can’t is because they’re all still stuck in the 1970s, with a business model that insists that everyone lives in a “Different” market, that there’s over 200 markets in America alone, that it’s impossible for us to all view the same show at the same time.

Hopefully the same reality that these jokers are fighting will bury them.

NOTE:  Yes, of course they had cable when I was a kid!  But the cable certainly wasn’t digital, there weren’t anywhere near as many stations available and the “Separate Markets” where easily maintained… under some system as a matter of technological necessity (they couldn’t accommodate a everyone).  Plus, we didn’t have it.  Like I said, I don’t even have it now!  We did have it, but we cancelled it in favor of Netflix, HULUplus and all the online content that’s available.