MattMaroon.com

My guess: they’re serious about claiming they’re serious about fighting it, and that’s about it. It’s not their fault, it’s the nature of the game.

Between them and ustream, I was always able to find a Stanley Cup playoffs stream, and not just of the finals either. The rooms were linked to from some popular forums, and persisted from one game to another, so it wouldn’t have been hard to prevent.

And it’s not surprising. If this traffic graph:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/justin.tv+ustream.tv/

is even close to correct it’s a dead heat between those two sites. Guess what’s likely to tip the scales in one’s favor?

YouTube got big largely on copyrighted content. In fact still the most popular clips there are professionally-produced music videos. The simple fact is that user generated content is largely crap that nobody cares about, and all of it added together isn’t as in-demand as one Katy Perry video.

So the video sites will go around claiming “we’re covered by the DMCA” and “we’re developing software to stop it” but really their incentive is purely to allow copyright violations, and shocker, that’s what they do.

It’s no secret that most people use the same password over and over again for most of the services they sign up for. While it’s obviously convenient, this becomes a major problem if one of those services is compromised. And that looks to be the case with RockYou, the social network app maker.

This is no surprise to anyone who has ever dealt with RockYou. These people are as dumb as a box of rocks. That they’ve raised $119 million never ceases to amaze me. Here are just two of my experiences so far.

1. When emailing all developers, instead of using some mailing list software, or hell even BCCing everyone, they simply CC’ed hundreds or maybe thousands of people. On multiple occasions. Despite having promised to fix it after the first.

Once they sent out one that said “Merry Christmas” filling my Inbox with scores of replies, half of which said “Merry Christmas to you too!” and half of which said “take me off of this list.”
2. Negotiating a two-week ad run with us, followed by sending us a contract for x months. When returned, sending us a contract for 2x months. When we decided “what the hell?” and signed it, having run the ad for far longer than 2x months and then sending us a massive bill.

So yeah, this doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. RockYou is the short bus of the social games industry. I’m just glad I use Roboform so all any potential hacker got is some random string used only for them. And I’m not worried about someone getting my email address since RockYou already sent that out to everyone.

Those devices are all behind me now. I disconnected everything, threw it to the side and canceled the cable months ago. Instead, now I have a Mac Mini, wireless mouse and a Microsoft Xbox hooked up to my television.

I’ve been doing this for years. I have uTorrent download the few shows I want to watch via RSS automatically, then stream them to my Xbox 360. Thankfully with Windows 7, I can now view them through the Media Center function on Xbox, which previously could not read DivX and forced you to go through the less powerful video player.

When I want to watch something that is unreliable through Bittorrent (which is pretty much any show broadcast daily. For me it’s occasionally The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, but for others it might be The Tonight Show, etc.) I use PlayOn ($40 to purchase, no ongoing fees) to stream Hulu to my Xbox. It even lets me fast forward through the commercials.

The setup is not quite as seamless as cable and a DVR. Hulu keeps trying to break PlayOn and other software like it. They’re never more than a day or two behind with a patch, but still it gets annoying at times. Also sometimes it just won’t work, for no reason I can determine, until I reboot my computer.

Bittorrent is far more reliable. If you’re watching any once a week show, there’s an RSS feed for it, and the only bottleneck in the streaming process is your home network. For less than you pay for cable in 2 months, you can get a nice 802.11n router and matching network cards, which will greatly increase range and throughput.

Still, it’s a lot cheaper. I’m saving probably $1,000-$2,000 a year for a service I barely used.

The only real loss (and it isn’t much of one for me) is there are no live sports. You cannot simply watch a hockey game at home. But that just means the Stanley Cup gives me a reason to get out of the house, which is not a bad thing anyway.

Because here’s what happened. Some hack had an idea and went to his editor with it: Hey, you know, Google says “Don’t be evil,” but you know what? They really are kind of the new evil empire, aren’t they?

Editor says, Okay, let’s do it, but whatever you do, don’t just fucking say that! Jesus! You’ll get us all killed!

Hack says, So what do we do? Editor says, Let’s find other person who will say Google is evil, and we’ll quote him. See? But then make sure you find other people who say that the first guy is full of shit. So that way when someone reads the article they won’t know what the fuck to think. Is Google evil? Yes, absolutely. But no, not at all. This, my son, is how you stay relevant in the fast-moving world of information — by publishing pointless stories that don’t reach any conclusion er, deep insightful analysis that lets people make sense of the world around them

That right there explains why The Economist is the only print publication actually doing well these days. They’re not afraid to take a stance. They don’t get opposing quotes from people with vested interests in the outcome, they just tell you their opinion straight out.

In any event, in order for the e-reader market to thrive publishers must lower their wholesale prices so that distributors can turn a reasonable profit.  We believe that if the price is lowered enough publishers may earn less per unit, but could ultimately earn more in overall revenue and profit through a greater number of sales.  This, of course, benefits the e-book distributors as well.

People always apply the laws of supply and demand oblivious to other factors. They say “well if we just lower the price, more people will buy these books”.

That isn’t necessarily true because people can only devote so much time to reading. Much of the investment a person makes in a book isn’t money (at least not directly) it’s time.

It’s entirely possible that the price of books is set by other factors, such as competing books. People may largely decide they want a book, then shop around, and buy one. Which one they buy may have to do with pricing, in fact that may be the key factor in pricing (if I’m on the fence about two books, I’ll go with the one that costs lest).

So you can’t simply assume that “if the price is lowered enough publishers may earn less per unit, but could ultimately earn more in overall revenue and profit through a greater number of sales.” It’s quite probably untrue.

I’d actually argue that if you want to sell more books, you should make them shorter. Fewer pages will get the reader through it faster. I’m sure this will only work to a point, as nobody wants to pick up a “book” that feels more like a “pamphlet” but perhaps digital media (where all of your ebooks weigh the same as the Kindle you read them on) will change that too.