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Comment Re:And Nothing of Value was Included... (Score 1) 47

I got Google Play Music for my family back when that was a thing. It was the same price as Spotify, had the same catalog, and included any music on Youtube as well. The fact that it included ad free Youtube was just a bonus. These days that has morphed into Youtube Premium, and I still pay for it. I am mostly there for the music, but the ad free Youtube is not terrible.

The interesting thing is that it is pretty clear that most people just watch the ads. Youtube had $60 billion in yearly revenue last year. More than Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Brothers combined. Roughly $20 billion of that is credited to Youtube Premium which is bigger than any of its Hollywood competitors.

There's a reason that Peacock is being included with Youtube Premium and not the other way around. Youtube is worth something. Peacock, not so much.

Comment Re:Predictable. (Score 1) 47

Things have changed dramatically since the heyday when everyone had a cable subscription. I used to work for SlingTV (and then Dish), and I had a front row seat as the whole industry imploded. Every year the television networks and movie studios would sit down and renegotiate their contracts. Despite the fact that viewership was always down at least 10% year over year they always wanted price increases. If the cable providers pushed back (as Dish often did) they would lose access to channels, invariably during football season when it mattered most.

You see, as technology started allowing people to purchase their entertainment piecemeal it soon became clear what parts they were willing to pay for, and which parts they weren't willing to pay for. Hollywood thought that people paid for cable subscriptions to watch their scripted television. It turns out that, for most people anyway, the part of television that they were willing to pay for was live sports.

That's why Disney won't sell you ESPN unless you bundle it with everything else that they sell, and that's also why Disney is suing SlingTV for reselling access on a daily basis. SlingTV's "sports pass" allows you to pay for just the games that you want at a ridiculous price. Disney should be stoked, but instead it has sued because it wants to force sports fans to continue to pay for their other channels.

Almost no one is watching traditional scripted television these days. The few hits that the networks do have tends to be reality TV stuff like "Dancing with the Stars," where the audience can watch people compete in real time. Youtube (not YoutubeTV) has at least half again as many viewers as their next highest competitor (Netflix), at any time during the day, on traditional 10 foot devices (your living room TV). That's not counting people watching Youtube on their phones or their computers. Youtube is killing scripted content on living room televisions, during prime time. During the day its an order of magnitude worse.

Take a look at nielsen.com and take a look for yourself. It's absolutely grim. Look at the shows that are doing relatively well, they are all either sports or sports commentary. That's literally the only reason that anyone watches anything besides YouTube and Netflix.

Apple spent over $20 billion building up a content catalog. At their height they were spending nearly $5 billion a year making shows. They made some great shows and got rave reviews. Amazon spends $1 billion a year for the rights to Thursday night football. That is arguably the worst football game of the week. However, Prime generally gets as many viewers for a single game as Apple has total subscribers, including all of the free subscriptions that Apple gives away. It's not just Apple that is shifting away from scripted television either. Take a look at any of the streaming sites (including Netflix) and you will see that all of their recent moves have been to try and compete for the sports market. That's definitely what YouTube is doing by bundling Peacock.

Hollywood is currently circling the drain. Everyone is up for sale right now. No one is watching scripted television. They certainly aren't paying for it.

Comment Re:From the regulatory point of view... (Score 3, Interesting) 23

There is no next move. Netfilx was buying them for their back catalog. The part of WB that people care about is the part that makes new movies and television, and that part is dead no matter who purchases WB.

If you haven't seen the tour of the Warner Brother's lot, you should do that now. They are still even filming some shows there. My guess is that, no matter who owns it they will probably keep something open there as a museum, but the days of it functioning as a working studio are quickly coming to an end. Heck, they are already living in the past. Most of what they talk about when you visit the studio is shows that they stopped filming over 20 years ago.

Still, it is very interesting to see how shows like "Friends" and "Gilmore Girls" was filmed before computers could be used to create whatever shot you needed.

Comment Re:Worthless fucking statistic. (Score 1) 226

Your math is wrong. Not the actual numbers, but the way you apply them. Your idea is to build big power plants rivaling what you know from steam turbine powered based power plants (how the steam is heated, coal or nuclear or fusion or whatever the heat source du jour might be, is completely irrelevant). But that's not how Wind and Solar work. If you just cover the public parking spaces of Houston, TX with solar panels, you would not take a single farmer's land, and still, you would be able to power the whole city of Houston. It begs the question though why Houston needs that much parking, and if that's not the real waste of space. By the way, that's what Portugal does with parking spaces in the country - cover them with solar panels. It cools the tarmac below, improves the ambient temperature in the towns, and generates energy. And you can build glass houses with solar panels instead of pure glass sheets. There are solar panels which have 50% transparency. They provide enough light for the plants in the glass house, and still generate surplus electric energy.

Denmark started with wind turbines 40 years ago, and now, Wind accounts for more than 50% of Denmark's electricity generation. In Germany, Wind accounts for 30% of Germany's electricity (the high prices for electricity in Germany have very bureaucratic, and quintessentially German reasons with braindead legislation, but that's another chapter). Ah yes, biogas currently generates the same amount of electricity in Germany as Nuclear did the last year before it was switched off. And then there is balcony power - a concept completely alien to the U.S., but widespread in Europe. For about 300 EUR, you can get a small do-it-yourself solar power plant, and legally assemble it yourself and plug it into your wall socket (any wall socket will do). No licensed electrician required. It's limited to 800 Wp - but hey, free energy for everyone. In a town with 10,000 apartments, this would be akin to a 8 MWp power plant for the price of 3 million bucks - without any tax payer money. If you want to pay an electrician, buy 10 of them. Or 30. And he will do the connection to the grid. For 10,000 EUR, you get 25 kWp solar power, which should cover most of your electric energy needs. If the 20,000 households in a medium sized town would do it, we are talking 500 MWp. That's the usual size of a nuclear reactor.

Comment Re:Worthless fucking statistic. (Score 4, Informative) 226

I doubt that seriously. The big Iberian Peninsula outage already mentioned happened because a "reliable" power source was not decoupling correctly from the grid. France right now runs into electricity problems because its "reliable" nuclear reactors have to be shut down because of excessive heat making the cooling of the reactors problematic.

Your "reliable" power sources are not reliable, they are inert. This is not the same, and if conditions change quickly, or aren't within specifications, they fail in a big way.

Comment Re:DST is Dumb (Score 2) 263

Which might be true for the Southern U.S. states, true.

On the other hand, we tried this in the 1970ies already, and it was abolished immediately after the first winter, after traffic accidents during morning rush hour had risen sharply, and school children had to wait for the school bus in the coldest time of the day (and the school bus took longer because of all the icy roads anyway).

Comment Re: They should do the same in The Netherlands (Score 4, Interesting) 263

Permanent standard time is ideal for human health and balance of daylight throughout the day.

That is not true. Left without clocks, humans in median latitudes tend to sleep longer in winter than in the summer. A standard schedule throughout the year is not healthy, except you live close to the equator, where the day length does not vary much during the year.

Comment Re:They should do the same in The Netherlands (Score 1) 263

It's not only that. It's more that then, the very short daylight is concentrated in the evening, because you get up an hour early, during the coldest period of the whole day, and then you are wasting the daylight in the afternoon, when it is too cold anyway to have any outdoor activities which could profiteer from the light.

Comment Re:DST is Dumb (Score 2, Interesting) 263

Not having DST, especially in regions away from the equator, is also dumb. You have to deal with the fact, that the Sun rises in the summer much early than in the winter, and getting up in total darkness and not having any daylight until late in the workday like DST in the winter is as annoying as trying to go to bed when it's still bright outside.

So either you abolish a strict day schedule and adopt during the year, which is not only two switch days a year, but multiple times, or you have some kind of switch between Summer time and Winter time.

Comment Re:They should do the same in The Netherlands (Score 5, Insightful) 263

If the Netherlands did this, they would reverse it immediately after the first winter. Not getting any sunlight until past 10.00 AM is so annoying, and the cost of road maintenance because rush hours is when everywhere, there is still ice on the roads, will be prohibitive.

People complaining have simply no clue how it is to have DST in the winter, and can't imagine.

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