I've written before about how well NetFlix and the Postal Service work together. A couple of weeks ago I had a real surprise on how efficient that co-operation can be.
We returned a Netflix DVD on a Saturday morning. On the following Monday, President's Day, a federal holiday, we received an email from NetFlix that we would receive the next DVD "on or about" Wednesday. We received it on Tuesday!
I post these because I am tired of anti-government types who take a few incidents and blow them up to regular occurrences. Any large organization makes many mistakes; consider my complaints about Apple and its many unsolved problems. That doesn't mean that an organization that makes mistakes doesn't do a lot of other things well. I've done a lot of useful things with my Apple products. I just won't be in a rush to get the latest major upgrade of any of its software. I'll wait until I have to buy a new device with the software installed.
BTW, DVDs by mail beat streaming. Many call postal mail "snail mail". Try streaming a movie any evening with a moderate speed connection. A snail keeps moving. A streaming movie can stop without warning.
Showing posts with label DVD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DVD. Show all posts
Saturday, March 02, 2013
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Spotting a non-Italian playing an Italian
Tonight we watched "Inspector Morse 23: The Death of the Self". Chief Inspector Morse and Sgt. Lewis go to Italy to check on a suspicious death. They work with an Italian detective who spoke Italian now and then to other Italians. His Italian seemed to be Italian.
Then he answered a phone. The Italian custom is to say "Pronto", that is "Ready". However, he said, "Prahntoh", like we say it in the U. S. We learned it as "Prohntoh" in Italy.
It could be that they say the former in Vicenza were the movie took place, but …
Well, I checked the cast and found Georges Corraface as the detective. He is French and
"A classically trained and versatile actor, his gift for languages and his multi-cultural background has enabled him to work in eight languages and an even wider variety of accents."
Is "Prahntoh" used in Vicenza or did his extensive use of English make him lapse into the English pronunciation? Non so! (I don't know!)
Then he answered a phone. The Italian custom is to say "Pronto", that is "Ready". However, he said, "Prahntoh", like we say it in the U. S. We learned it as "Prohntoh" in Italy.
It could be that they say the former in Vicenza were the movie took place, but …
Well, I checked the cast and found Georges Corraface as the detective. He is French and
"A classically trained and versatile actor, his gift for languages and his multi-cultural background has enabled him to work in eight languages and an even wider variety of accents."
Is "Prahntoh" used in Vicenza or did his extensive use of English make him lapse into the English pronunciation? Non so! (I don't know!)
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
The endless use of "infinite"
How often have you seen claims of "infinite storage" or "endless possibilities" or "limitless growth"?
All of these are impossible! "Boxee TV, New Media Player, Combines Live TV, Unlimited DVR and Apps in Latest Shot At Cable", Huffington Post, Jason Gilbert, 2012-10-17 states that "Boxee provides an infinite amount of online storage space for your recordings…"
One, how can a finite human being accumulate an infinite amount of anything? Two, if Boxee's customers ever fill up the very large space that it provides, where are they going to put more storage space? In space? I would say that a finite company can only do a finite amount of work.
Now maybe the storage space would be infinite if Boxee continues to operate for millennia and eons and is able to put online storage farther and farther out in space. But the retrieval times would get longer and longer to the point that a retrieval request would not be filled in the user's lifetime.
Maybe a more accurate description of Boxee's capabilities would be that it can store billions of shows for millions of users.
All of these are impossible! "Boxee TV, New Media Player, Combines Live TV, Unlimited DVR and Apps in Latest Shot At Cable", Huffington Post, Jason Gilbert, 2012-10-17 states that "Boxee provides an infinite amount of online storage space for your recordings…"
One, how can a finite human being accumulate an infinite amount of anything? Two, if Boxee's customers ever fill up the very large space that it provides, where are they going to put more storage space? In space? I would say that a finite company can only do a finite amount of work.
Now maybe the storage space would be infinite if Boxee continues to operate for millennia and eons and is able to put online storage farther and farther out in space. But the retrieval times would get longer and longer to the point that a retrieval request would not be filled in the user's lifetime.
Maybe a more accurate description of Boxee's capabilities would be that it can store billions of shows for millions of users.
Tuesday, October 09, 2012
Netflix disappointed me
I've posted a couple of entries how the US Postal Service and Netflix give excellent service in keeping me supplied with movies. If I put a DVD in a mail box, Netflix has it early in the morning of the next delivery day and sends me the next DVD in my queue. I receive that DVD on the next delivery day, in effect, two days turnaround.
I think it was Sunday morning that I woke up wondering if the last DVD I sent back to Netflix even got there. I had to think when and where I put it in the mail. Ah, yes, I watched an Inspector Morse DVD on the night of the Presidential debates, last Wednesday. I put it in the mail box at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, on my way to a University for Seniors class.
Did mail get picked up from that box? I checked my account and it was no longer on my list. Ah, yes, I did get an email that it had been received but I had already deleted it. Then I got an email that the next DVD would be sent for Monday delivery.
Well, that wouldn't happen because Monday was the official Columbus day this year. Then my account said it was not available. I forgotten the other changes for the status that DVD. Finally, the status was that I would get the second DVD in my list on Wednesday and the first DVD would be sent shortly.
Drat, my wife isn't interested in murder mysteries (except Agatha Christie's) and she went to the Twin Cities today. So, I would be able to watch it without disturbing her.
Oh, well, the bright side, maybe, is that I wrote that "delightful" critique of the political parties at http://magree.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-true-names-of-republicans-and.html. If you read that, I hope you are pleased that I didn't watch a DVD instead. If you were pleased, I hope you'll let me know if you see me.
I think it was Sunday morning that I woke up wondering if the last DVD I sent back to Netflix even got there. I had to think when and where I put it in the mail. Ah, yes, I watched an Inspector Morse DVD on the night of the Presidential debates, last Wednesday. I put it in the mail box at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, on my way to a University for Seniors class.
Did mail get picked up from that box? I checked my account and it was no longer on my list. Ah, yes, I did get an email that it had been received but I had already deleted it. Then I got an email that the next DVD would be sent for Monday delivery.
Well, that wouldn't happen because Monday was the official Columbus day this year. Then my account said it was not available. I forgotten the other changes for the status that DVD. Finally, the status was that I would get the second DVD in my list on Wednesday and the first DVD would be sent shortly.
Drat, my wife isn't interested in murder mysteries (except Agatha Christie's) and she went to the Twin Cities today. So, I would be able to watch it without disturbing her.
Oh, well, the bright side, maybe, is that I wrote that "delightful" critique of the political parties at http://magree.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-true-names-of-republicans-and.html. If you read that, I hope you are pleased that I didn't watch a DVD instead. If you were pleased, I hope you'll let me know if you see me.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Limited choices for DVD rentals
Over two years ago I wrote "Netflix busts Blockbuster, or the Changing Economy". Over a year ago I wrote "Little box vs. BIG BOX (Videos)". I meant to write some follow-on articles about little boxes vs BIG boxes, such as drug stores, hardware stores, book stores, camera stores, and others. But I never did. Now about the only little boxes left are hair salons and restaurants. And the individual entrepreneurs in these have to compete with big chains.
I was also remiss in noting that almost every movie rental store in Duluth has closed. The last convenient movie rental, Mr. Movies, closed because they could not renew their lease on their terms. For me this was unfortunate because Mr. Movies had a good selection of foreign films, including some classics.
Now our choices for movies are DVD by mail or DVD by download. I shied away from Netflix because I didn't see paying ten bucks for one or two movies a month.
I did try downloading from iTunes and some other sources, but that is a two-hour wait at a nominal 7Mbps rate (more like 4Mbps actual). But at least twice, iTunes just hung up with 30 minutes or so left to download. I could restart the download and it would pick up at the hang-up point, but one shouldn't have to babysit a download.
Oh, yes, iTunes movies have subtitles that can't be turned off. Subtitles make it very hard to listen to the words being spoken.
We could stream DVDs, but that can be a jerky experience. And we can't stream at all at our cabin which has only 24Kbps. Even accessing the web has become a hassle at that speed.
We finally opted for Netflix, starting with the one DVD at a time program. The service has been excellent; I wrote about it in "Why do people pick on the Post Office?"
My latest choice is "The Hunger Games", which was released Saturday. I moved it to the top of our queue Sunday after I put the previous DVD in a mail box. Netflix told me "The Hunger Games" has been shipped and I should be receiving it tomorrow. That sure beats babysitting a download.
We do have a small problem. My wife doesn't care for movies with any violence, including murder mysteries. I wonder if she'll watch Miss Marple. So, I have to schedule watching such movies when she is gone or I'll be at the cabin alone. This, in turn, limits our shared watching. That sucked me into upping our Netflix account to two DVDs at a time. At about $12 a month, that beats one visit to a movie theater for both of us, or getting five DVDs a month from a store.
Has inflation changed the expression "nickel and dimed to death" to "ten dollared to death"?
I just hope this increased viewing doesn't reduce my book reading.
I was also remiss in noting that almost every movie rental store in Duluth has closed. The last convenient movie rental, Mr. Movies, closed because they could not renew their lease on their terms. For me this was unfortunate because Mr. Movies had a good selection of foreign films, including some classics.
Now our choices for movies are DVD by mail or DVD by download. I shied away from Netflix because I didn't see paying ten bucks for one or two movies a month.
I did try downloading from iTunes and some other sources, but that is a two-hour wait at a nominal 7Mbps rate (more like 4Mbps actual). But at least twice, iTunes just hung up with 30 minutes or so left to download. I could restart the download and it would pick up at the hang-up point, but one shouldn't have to babysit a download.
Oh, yes, iTunes movies have subtitles that can't be turned off. Subtitles make it very hard to listen to the words being spoken.
We could stream DVDs, but that can be a jerky experience. And we can't stream at all at our cabin which has only 24Kbps. Even accessing the web has become a hassle at that speed.
We finally opted for Netflix, starting with the one DVD at a time program. The service has been excellent; I wrote about it in "Why do people pick on the Post Office?"
My latest choice is "The Hunger Games", which was released Saturday. I moved it to the top of our queue Sunday after I put the previous DVD in a mail box. Netflix told me "The Hunger Games" has been shipped and I should be receiving it tomorrow. That sure beats babysitting a download.
We do have a small problem. My wife doesn't care for movies with any violence, including murder mysteries. I wonder if she'll watch Miss Marple. So, I have to schedule watching such movies when she is gone or I'll be at the cabin alone. This, in turn, limits our shared watching. That sucked me into upping our Netflix account to two DVDs at a time. At about $12 a month, that beats one visit to a movie theater for both of us, or getting five DVDs a month from a store.
Has inflation changed the expression "nickel and dimed to death" to "ten dollared to death"?
I just hope this increased viewing doesn't reduce my book reading.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Little box vs. BIG BOX (Videos)
Several weeks ago we went to our favorite video rental store, Video Vision in the Mt. Royal complex of shops in Duluth. We don't rent movies often, maybe twice a month on average. Even then, we weren't big spenders, as seniors we paid $1.08 for videos not considered New Release.
As we entered, we noticed a sign that the store would be closing in about two weeks. The sign referred customers to its other two stores that our outside our normal errands. I should mention that the now closed store was in walking distance for us.
This store was tucked behind a coffee shop and not easily seen from the street. It had a reasonable selection but was becoming eclipsed by two other competitors. One of course is Netflix, which many people find very convenient. The other is Red Box, which has a limited selection but is in high traffic areas. The nearest Red Box is at Mt. Royal Fine Foods, a supermarket that probably has more traffic in an hour than the video store had all week. Of course, not every supermarket customer is looking for a video, but I've seen many people standing in line with one.
The nearest video store to us now is a small shop that is for sale. We haven't visited it in years because of its small selection and at that time, nearly no DVDs. The next is Mr. Movies in the Plaza shopping center. It does have a large selection, including many foreign movies. But it is out of our normal shopping routes.
I couldn't tell you where the big video chains are without checking the phone book. We may be skipping the big boxes for videos completely and going "out of the box".
With a nominal 7Mbps internet speed, we can access movies online. It has some drawbacks, but we don't have to leave home to access a movie. Both Google's YouTube and Apple offer recent releases at $3.99. The customer has 30 days to access the movie and once viewed, 24 hours to complete viewing. Viewing includes backing up to see parts again.
We gave "The King's Speech" from YouTube a try. I ordered if from my laptop for delayed viewing and then we watched it several days later by streaming it on my wife's iMac. Even with the supposed high-speed internet, we had little, minor, annoying discontinuities.
If I remember correctly, YouTube only offers streaming. We could never watch a movie this way at our cabin with dial-up at 24kbps. At this speed, it takes five minutes to load the main page of many online newspapers. It would probably take most of the evening to get through the initial credits.
I checked Apple's iTunes store and they have the same deal for recent movies, but one can choose between streaming and downloading. Since I already "blew" my movie "budget" for the month with "The King's Speech", I chose "All the Pretty Horses" at 99 cents. I downloaded it for later viewing, but it took over two hours. I have yet to watch it but plan to do so later in the week. We'll see if it offers smoother viewing.
Wow, how movie viewing has changed in my lifetime! Neighborhood theaters at 10 cents for kids with a newsreel, a short, a cartoon, and one or two features. Were they ever crowded on Saturday afternoons. Downtown theaters with first-run movies. Drive-ins. The suburban multiplexes, making money with many of the seats empty. Then VHS for home viewing. Then DVD for home viewing. (Oops, I forgot cable because we never had it.) Stores cropped up in malls and neighborhoods to rent them. Each type of the movie theater has all but disappeared. The video stores are disappearing.
I wonder if anyone has done an analysis at the number of jobs "lost" as the tastes and technology changed.
Now we'll have less than a dozen companies offering movies for on-demand viewing, each with its huge banks of servers holding thousands and thousands of movies. It wouldn't surprise me if many movie producers had no hard copy of their work. From camera to computer to editors to computer to the online retailers computers. What meaning will "roll", "cut", and "in the can" have anymore?
As we entered, we noticed a sign that the store would be closing in about two weeks. The sign referred customers to its other two stores that our outside our normal errands. I should mention that the now closed store was in walking distance for us.
This store was tucked behind a coffee shop and not easily seen from the street. It had a reasonable selection but was becoming eclipsed by two other competitors. One of course is Netflix, which many people find very convenient. The other is Red Box, which has a limited selection but is in high traffic areas. The nearest Red Box is at Mt. Royal Fine Foods, a supermarket that probably has more traffic in an hour than the video store had all week. Of course, not every supermarket customer is looking for a video, but I've seen many people standing in line with one.
The nearest video store to us now is a small shop that is for sale. We haven't visited it in years because of its small selection and at that time, nearly no DVDs. The next is Mr. Movies in the Plaza shopping center. It does have a large selection, including many foreign movies. But it is out of our normal shopping routes.
I couldn't tell you where the big video chains are without checking the phone book. We may be skipping the big boxes for videos completely and going "out of the box".
With a nominal 7Mbps internet speed, we can access movies online. It has some drawbacks, but we don't have to leave home to access a movie. Both Google's YouTube and Apple offer recent releases at $3.99. The customer has 30 days to access the movie and once viewed, 24 hours to complete viewing. Viewing includes backing up to see parts again.
We gave "The King's Speech" from YouTube a try. I ordered if from my laptop for delayed viewing and then we watched it several days later by streaming it on my wife's iMac. Even with the supposed high-speed internet, we had little, minor, annoying discontinuities.
If I remember correctly, YouTube only offers streaming. We could never watch a movie this way at our cabin with dial-up at 24kbps. At this speed, it takes five minutes to load the main page of many online newspapers. It would probably take most of the evening to get through the initial credits.
I checked Apple's iTunes store and they have the same deal for recent movies, but one can choose between streaming and downloading. Since I already "blew" my movie "budget" for the month with "The King's Speech", I chose "All the Pretty Horses" at 99 cents. I downloaded it for later viewing, but it took over two hours. I have yet to watch it but plan to do so later in the week. We'll see if it offers smoother viewing.
Wow, how movie viewing has changed in my lifetime! Neighborhood theaters at 10 cents for kids with a newsreel, a short, a cartoon, and one or two features. Were they ever crowded on Saturday afternoons. Downtown theaters with first-run movies. Drive-ins. The suburban multiplexes, making money with many of the seats empty. Then VHS for home viewing. Then DVD for home viewing. (Oops, I forgot cable because we never had it.) Stores cropped up in malls and neighborhoods to rent them. Each type of the movie theater has all but disappeared. The video stores are disappearing.
I wonder if anyone has done an analysis at the number of jobs "lost" as the tastes and technology changed.
Now we'll have less than a dozen companies offering movies for on-demand viewing, each with its huge banks of servers holding thousands and thousands of movies. It wouldn't surprise me if many movie producers had no hard copy of their work. From camera to computer to editors to computer to the online retailers computers. What meaning will "roll", "cut", and "in the can" have anymore?
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Netflix busts Blockbuster, or the Changing Economy
As part of my notion that we don't have a weak economy but a changing economy, I've been thinking about a blog entry about how Netflix is reducing the need for video stores and their employees. Today the Star Tribune had a story about Blockbuster – "Shares of Blockbuster tumble after warning it may need to file for bankruptcy protection". The article states that one of the causes is competition from Netflix. "The company has had to close about 1,300 stores and wants to shut down hundreds more." Shutting stores means letting employees go. Think of all the other video stores in the same predicament. Think of all the other businesses whose reason to be has changed.
All the employees let go by video stores won't be able to get jobs at Netflix or at any other similar service. Think of the idealized Netflix operation. A customer signs up online and is accepted or rejected automatically. A customer places an order online. The computer orders a robot in the warehouse to fetch the DVD, put it in an envelope, print the shipping address on the envelope, and place it in a bin to go to the Post Office. Now humans get involved with a postal employee picking up the bins and driving them to a sorting center. The sorting center is mostly automated and the sorted packages are delivered in another truck or series of trucks. A mail carrier picks up the packages at the destination post office and delivers them to the customers.
Even the postal workers will be cut out of this system. As internet bandwidth gets larger and more people have faster computers, the customers will order movies to be sent directly to their computers ("streaming").
This scenario is being replicated across industry after industry. People not needed. And guess who demands this: people who want lots of goods for the least money and hassle.
I'll stop here and get off my soapbox about the trends too many of us aren't considering.
All the employees let go by video stores won't be able to get jobs at Netflix or at any other similar service. Think of the idealized Netflix operation. A customer signs up online and is accepted or rejected automatically. A customer places an order online. The computer orders a robot in the warehouse to fetch the DVD, put it in an envelope, print the shipping address on the envelope, and place it in a bin to go to the Post Office. Now humans get involved with a postal employee picking up the bins and driving them to a sorting center. The sorting center is mostly automated and the sorted packages are delivered in another truck or series of trucks. A mail carrier picks up the packages at the destination post office and delivers them to the customers.
Even the postal workers will be cut out of this system. As internet bandwidth gets larger and more people have faster computers, the customers will order movies to be sent directly to their computers ("streaming").
This scenario is being replicated across industry after industry. People not needed. And guess who demands this: people who want lots of goods for the least money and hassle.
I'll stop here and get off my soapbox about the trends too many of us aren't considering.
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