40Tech

Recently, Netflix angered a large amount of its US subscriber-base by announcing changes to its pricing model. It used to be that, if you wanted to do the Neflix videos-by-mail thing and stream content as well, it would only cost you an extra couple of bucks per month. Now (as of two days ago, in fact), if you want both, you need to pay double — $7.99 for each service. While the Netflix move may be understandable, and part of a potentially larger plan to phase out physical delivery altogether, the customer backlash was also unsurprising — and significant.

To make matters worse for Netflix, on the very day that the new pricing came into effect, Starz, the distributor of Sony and Disney content decided not to renew their contract with Netflix. This is probably going to hurt Netflix customer relationships even more, but believe it or not, it happened as a result of Netflix attempting to preserve their pricing model, and, presumably, to keep their customers from imploding.

A few months back, we covered Doggcatcher, an excellent Android podcast manager and player. What’s a good player, though, without a good podcast? With that in mind, let’s share out favorite podcasts. I’ll start with a list of the podcasts on Doggcatcher on my Android phone. In the comments, let us know about your favorite podcasts, tech or otherwise.

While Spotify is the music service that is getting all of the press these days, Google’s own music service is up and running. In typical Google fashion, Google Music is currently in Beta. Google Music is not a subscription service, and doesn’t offer a catalog of music. Instead, it is a free service to which you upload the songs that you already own. You can then stream them to a web browser, or to the free Android app. The app also caches music, to support offline play. We’ve got 4 invitations to give away. Read on for details on how to score one.

Every once in a while, we get the opportunity to offer you guys something for free. We don’t always do it, mind you — we get a lot of solicitations, and only care to post about the products we think will be most useful to you. Well, a few weeks ago I was contacted by a representative of Digital Innovations. They make products for cleaning LCD screens, repairing discs, that sort of thing. I’ve seen their products before, or others like them, but honestly never considered buying them. I tend to roll on the cheap, as you know, and didn’t want to spend money on things that I wasn’t sure would even work.

The email came at a good time, though. I happened to be in the middle of transferring my CD and movie collection to digital, and there were a few discs that I couldn’t even put into my machine without the read-difficulty locking everything up. So when he offered to send me a few of their products to test in return for a fair review, and maybe a giveaway for our readers, I said “Sure. But you realize I’m in Canada, right?” A few weeks of shipping and customs errors later, the box arrived.

Here’s what I found:

The New York Times erected its paywall on March 28 in the U.S. While it is a fairly permeable wall (links from various sources will provide you with free access), the Times’ subscription model is way out of whack with the rest of the industry. Head on over to The Understatement to see a chart showing just how much more expensive the Times will be than any other online source.

For all the talk about “new media,” it appears that old media still powers the online trends of today. Last month, HP released the results of a study that showed that user activity and number of followers on Twitter do not contribute strongly to trend creation and its propagation. Instead, mainstream media play a role in most trending topics, and act as a feeder of these trends.

If you’re a regular visitor to 40Tech, you may remember that we’re fans of the Slingbox.  SlingPlayer for the iPhone works surprisingly well, allowing you to watch content from your home cable TV connection wherever you have a 3G or WiFi connection on your iPhone.  You can also watch via the web, and there are apps for many other mobile clients.   Unfortunately, the only option on the iPad was to run the iPhone app in compatible mode, so you didn’t get the benefit of the iPad’s higher resolution.  That’s about to change.

Hot tubs aren’t the only things that can double as time machines.  Your computer can, too, with a bit of help.  YouTube Time Machine is a website that allows you to pick a year, and watch video content from that year.

After a (very) long wait, Netflix has finally opened up in Canada. Well, mostly, anyway. For starters, the Canadian arm of the service is streaming only, no delivery, so that that immediately cuts down the amount of possible content available to Canadians. That was just the first content cut, however… Canadian usage rights for entertainment content have always been an added difficulty with any mainstream media service, and Netflix proves to be no different. Even though the service has finally found its way to Canada, when Hulu, Pandora, and even YouTube content is still restricted, the selection of movies and television episodes have been met with groans of disappointment by many.

Do you hate your local radio stations with a blinding passion? If not, you’re probably at least a little bit tired of hearing the same pop princess on the airwaves over and over and over and… well, you get the idea. Don’t despair! You’ve probably heard there are at least a few sites out there that do their best to provide you with alternatives to your local stations, and make it easy to find and lock into what you need. These are sites that will bring you real radio from around the world, as opposed to the often licence-restricted Last.FM or Pandora — and three of the best out there are RadioTuna, RadioTime, and Tun3r. Each have their good points — read on to see which will work best for you.