Here’s a quick tip for you Lion users out there. If you’re a fan of full screen apps, you may miss having quick access to the dock and menu bar. They appear to be gone, but they’re really not. Here’s how to use them.
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Last week, we covered two tools to help you scan your website for malware. Another method to determine if your site has been hacked is to look at changes in your server files themselves. That, though, can be time consuming if you do it manually. If you use WordPress (the self-hosted variety), and you want to use an automated tool that detects changes to files, take File Monitor Plus for a spin.
Over on TaskMac, a Mac productivity blog that is a side project of mine, I talked about how my use of Instapaper has declined drastically. That was through no fault of Instapaper. Instead, I found that I was just using Instapaper as a dumping ground, and rarely got around to reading what I sent there. As a result, I almost completely stopped using it. If there is an item that I really do want to read later, now I just email it to myself. That got me to thinking of some of the other tech toys, services, or apps that I once loved, that have fallen out of favor in my world.
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.
Netflix has been doing well, business-wise, of late. They opened up content streaming in Canada — which I use all the time, even though we don’t get the coolest content up this way — and they have plans for world internet-streaming domination that could be very viable. Unfortunately, their content and entire business is dependent on their relationship with content license owners. Starz Entertainment apparently insisted that Netflix put their content behind an additional pay-wall, making customers pay more to access it. Netflix offered them in excess of $300 million per year for the content, but that wasn’t good enough for Big Media, who initially asked for more than 10 times what Netflix paid them in 2008, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In a press release, Starz cited the usual spiel regarding “protecting the premium nature” of their brand and “preserving the appropriate pricing” of their “exclusive and valuable content.” The bottom line here, however, is that Starz holds all of the cards here. Disney and Sony content is good content. It is sought after. In a statement to Business Insider, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings maintains that it only marks 8% of their overall audience views, and that the content would have likely gone down to 5-6% of domestic views by Q1 2012 anyway, but as we all know, it takes less than 8% of pissed off people who perceive that they’ve lost something they felt they paid for to make 80%-sized noise about it.
One also has to wonder if other Big Media groups will follow Starz lead. To many of them, Netflix is likely more of an experiment that they tolerate to see if it will pay out big in the long run. Now that the dollars are coming in, naturally, they are going to want a bigger cut — one that makes them feel more like they are returning to their original business model that made them a money hand over fist — you know, before the advent of broadband and the explosion of extremely easy content piracy.
Speaking of piracy… it has been proven that consumers, by and large, are willing to pay a subscription price for content. If they weren’t, Netflix would never work; neither would Hulu Plus, Rdio, Sirius, pay-to-play MMORPGs, or any of the other premium-based multimedia providers out there. However, those prices need to be reflective of the general feel of pricing online — pricing that Apple was the baseline for with iTunes and apps taking over the online world as we know it. That is to say, the pricing needs to be low-ish. If all of the major license holders start clamouring “premium subscriptions for our content or else,” Netflix and their sizeable customer base will be threatened. When a media consuming customer base is threatened, they jump ship — and they have a tendency to land in a submarine that stealths its way into a dialect punctuated with “yo ho ho’s” and the occasional “Aaargh!” Not to beat the pirate metaphor to death or anything…
So what do you think of Starz demands for a Netflix pay-wall for their content? What about their decision to pull out? Should Netflix have given in?
Back in October, I wrote a short post about a father-son DIY project that sent an iPhone into the upper stratosphere. In December, the geeks at Google did the same thing, but with more of a mind toward data (and cool picture) collecting. Well, NASA one-upped them all by taking not one, but two Android Nexus S smartphones into orbit with the final space shuttle mission. They weren’t used to phone home or anything quite so cliché (but cool!) — nope, these little robot-bearing phones were actually used to control other, more sophisticated robots: SPHERE satellites.
SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites) are small, “volleyball-sized” robots that are used to capture video footage and record sensor data. Normally, the astronauts do this manually, but with the satellites and their fancy Android-powered phone-brains, these things can be controlled from the ground — via WiFi.
According to the Google blog, NASA decided that Android was perfect for them due to its configurable open source nature, as well as the handy app that some Google engineers built for logging sensor data (you can download the app yourself from the Android Market). Apparently, the multiple sensors and low-powered/high performance processor of the Nexus S was also a selling point.
Google’s been making a lot of big moves this past year, what with Plus, the redesign, the Chromebook, Chrome Web Store, and the purchase of a major cell-phone company (Motorola Mobility). Why shouldn’t they get some representation in space too? It only makes sense. And it’s only a matter of time until either Google or Apple carve their logo into the face of the moon for all to see. Am I right or am I right?
Android in Spaaaace Part 2 [Google Blog]