Day: September 27, 2011

It’s the Content Providers (or not)

It’s the Content Providers:

The Angry Drunk:

While the Netflix changes are certainly annoying, and the
messaging was less than stellar, we need to make sure to remember
where the blame ultimately lies  —  with the content
providers. Until they decide to get with the program content
distributors like Netflix and Apple will always be at their mercy
and customers will continue to suffer.

and

The answers to these ques­tions, and I believe the dri­ving force behind the Netflix changes all involve one group: the con­tent providers. The tech press some­times seems to think that dis­trib­u­tors like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Redbox, Blockbuster, etc. just pull this con­tent mag­i­cally out of their asses. They ignore the fact that there are pow­er­ful movie stu­dios and record labels that are obsessed with main­tain­ing con­trol over their prod­uct dis­tri­b­u­tion and are scared shit­less over dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion. How soon we for­get that a major Netflix con­tent provider, Starz, recently told Netflix to piss up a rope and took their ball home.

[It’s complex and battle between the content providers is always more complex that it seems on the outside. Amazon is getting into publishing, publishers are getting into selling retail. What if Amazon decided to start producing some of the products they sell (besides the Kindle et al)? It is also easy to decide that the content providers are screwing everything up for you and me… it’s never that simple.]
Source: Daring Fireball

The Cloud’s My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room Problem – Alexis Madrigal

The Cloud’s My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room Problem – Alexis Madrigal:

Netflix, Twitter, and Google make unasked-for, unanticipated, and unstoppable change in their products, which also happen to be our work and play spaces.

and

But the freedom of usage that defined personal computing does not extend to the world of parental computing. This isn’t a bug in the way that cloud services work. It is a feature. What we lose in freedom we gain in convenience. Maybe the tradeoff is worth it. Or maybe it’s something that just happened to us, which we’ll regret when we realize the privacy, security, and autonomy we’ve given up to sync our documents and correspondence across computers.

[The thing to remember is that we do not have to give up one to have the other. We can have document syncing etc. without living “in our parents house” simply by paying for the services. We can have our privacy and our freedom. But it has a cost.]