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Copernican

@Copernican@lemmy.world

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Copernican OP , (edited )

I don't think you understand how pricing works. Someone like Disney demands a high carriage fee agreement and mandates that ESPN must be in the basic cable package for all comcast subscribers, otherwise comcast doesn't get any Disney owned TV. As a result Comcast has to charge basically 10 bucks a month to all subscribers to have ESPN, not counting the general cost breakout for other disney owned channels. Sure, comcast leases STB's for X dollars and gets a cut of the subscription fees as well, but the point is the people that make the TV programming are the same. So it's not magically going to make the cost of TV significantly cheaper by cutting out comcast. Comcast is the person that collects the bills, but Disney, ViacomCBS, etc, are very much involved of setting up the prices consumers pay on cable and streaming.

Edit: Also add in the risk and churn factor. With cable bundling, TV programmers had scale and predictability on their side. Basically all cable subscribers had long term subscriptions and could guarantee a high volume of subscribers to collect from. With DTC (Direct to Consumer) streaming apps, consumers can churn and temporarily subscribe for monthly intervals. That means you have less subscribers at any one time on your app and for shorter durations. Guess what that does to the revenue. So if you no longer have the economics of scale in terms of long term subscription length and volume of subscribers, the cost for individual subscribers will probably have to keep creeping up and get possibly more expensive than cable.

Copernican OP ,

Say what you will about streaming, but I think everyone born before 1995 will understand that todays streaming is way way way better than renting and old school cable. In the old days there was no on demand, so you could only watch what was on at the time you wanted to watch it. You literally had to go to to block buster to rent physical media that wasn't always available for things like new releases. TV shows weren't easily available by VHS/DVD. So with streaming, it's basically cheaper than what Cable + Renting movies used to cost, but I can do it without limits of physical media and have access to crazy amounts of back catalog. I purchased Band of Brothers back in the day on DVD box set for like 70 bucks which is 10 1 hour long episodes. For 99 bucks a year I can get all of band of brothers and a lot more content than that. Sure I don't own it all, but that's fine for most of my purposes. With streaming, I think we are actually getting a lot more for less in the grand scheme of things. And bundling make it even cheaper.

Copernican OP ,

Bundling works at scale if you maximize customer pool. I don't think ESPN cable would be affordable to most people without bundling it into cable packages; their TV is subsidized by every non sports watching household. I wish there was more transparency into the costs to determine if you are coming ahead or behind in the bundling.

But at the end of the day everyone hates paying for multiple streaming apps. To me that means people just want a bundle that magically has everything they want to watch.

Copernican OP ,

Yeah. It took a while to work out the kinks of getting TV dvd seasons in the right order, but watching TV was easier when you didn't have unlimited options and more or less a pres defined playlist.

Copernican ,

It's cheap and easy for me to use it while traveling around and going on god knows what public wifi network. I am not using google VPN for privacy, but using it for some sense of security out of my home. Already paying for Google One storage, so this was a nice perk.

Copernican ,

Mods should stop working as mods. But they don't. 193 million maybe sounds fair for a person able to convince people to volunteer to free, and not quit despite this being obvious.

Copernican ,

So what stops my lemmy content from being used by Google to train ai?

Copernican ,

Default to subscribed communities views.

Copernican ,

The U.S. lawmakers say ByteDance may be using the app to collect data on Americans and pass it on to the Chinese government. The app’s algorithms also are capable of influencing public opinion in the United States, where the platform has about 150 million users

That's not a selling data concern.

A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO | Reddit warned us that its users were a risk factor, and boy do they sound excited about shorting its stock. (www.theverge.com)

A lot of Redditors hate the Reddit IPO | Reddit warned us that its users were a risk factor, and boy do they sound excited about shorting its stock.::Reddit seems like a likely candidate for a meme stock. But the actual reaction suggests that r/WallStreetBets isn’t going to send the stock to the moon.

Copernican ,

Don't try to overthink the market. If you are wanting to invest with no plans to spend that money within say 3 to 5 years, just by low expense ratio S&P500 tracking ETFs. My goal isn't to beat the market, just ride with the market benchmarks as best as possible.

Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis (www.theverge.com)

Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis::Google says it’s aware of historically inaccurate results for its Gemini AI image generator, following criticism that it depicted historically white groups as people of color.

Copernican ,

Is this that crazy though for AI since Hamilton the musical? All founding fathers were portrayed as people of color in the casting. Google image search for Alexander Hamilton is pulling a decent number of pictures from the musical cast.

Copernican ,

I was running an edge router x until a few months ago. It was the cheapest set up to deploy a unifi wireless access point for my apartment. I was worried until I read:

It affected routers running Ubiquiti's EdgeOS, but only those that had not changed their default administrative password. Access to the routers allowed the hacking group to "conceal and otherwise enable a variety of crimes," the DOJ claims, including spearphishing and credential harvesting in the US and abroad.

Change you default passwords friends. Given that the edge router is not the most noob friendly device to set up, I'm curious how the user base of these devices is not changing the PW.

Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO (www.bloomberg.com)

Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO::Reddit Inc. has signed a contract allowing a company to train its artificial intelligence models on the social media platform’s content, according to people familiar with the matter, as it nears the potential launch of its long-awaited initial public offering.

Copernican ,

They were transparent about it. AI and gatekeeping the user generated comments was the deciding factor to close the API and that's what they told the public.

Copernican ,

Reddit Wants to Get Paid for Helping to Teach Big A.I. Systems - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html

Copernican ,

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html

Copernican ,

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html

Copernican ,

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/18/technology/reddit-ai-openai-google.html

Copernican ,

I understand. But I think from the get go of the announcement of closing the API's, Reddit had always discussed not wanting to be harvested by AI tech for free. The point is they saw the value of their user content, and wanted to establish a model to profit on that. This announcement is just that; they now have something in market to allow AI to be trained on it's user generated content.

Copernican ,

You don't need cookies for this kind of targeting....

Copernican ,

What exactly is the relationship between spirit aero systems and Boeing? Who owns which responsibilities between these types of fuck ups? Is it Boeing design? Spirit manufacturing? Boeing inspection? The buck stops with Boeing, but since they deliver the final product, but wtf is going on at Spirit.

Copernican ,

Look at the reuters article cited: https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-companies-lose-190-billion-market-cap-after-alphabet-microsoft-report-2024-01-31/

Jan 30 (Reuters) - AI-related companies lost $190 billion in stock market value late on Tuesday after Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O), opens new tab delivered quarterly results that failed to impress investors who had sent their stocks soaring.
The selloff following the tech giants' reports after the bell underscored investors' elevated expectations following an AI-fueled stock market rally in recent months that propelled their shares to record highs with the promise of incorporating the technology across the corporate landscape.

I don't know that I would say this has anything inherently to do with AI...

The reuters article for AMD specifically: https://www.reuters.com/technology/high-flying-chipmakers-hit-after-amds-forecast-falls-short-2024-01-31/

Jan 31 (Reuters) - High-flying semiconductor stocks slipped on Wednesday after Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD.O) disappointing current-quarter revenue forecast added to investor worries over sluggish demand for non-AI chips

...

That overshadowed the company near doubling its AI processor projections to $3.5 billion for 2024.

Copernican ,

TV economics are hard. I think where basic cable and network TV make it work is that the content was filmed in a way to have natural ad breaks to make it less disruptive to the viewing experience. That becomes terrible when you shoehorn ads into places they don't belong. On the other hand, watching that content without ad breaks that was filmed with ad breaks also plays out weird because you'll have that commercial cliffhaner music/scene that is quickly followed with resolution before you have time to wonder "what is going to happen?" So shit gets weird when you have a tier model where some people get ad breaks and others don't because your content isn't made to satisfy both use cases.

TV is expensive to make and these are businesses that make money. A simple reductive "if user pays any money they deserve no ads" problem. It's a challenge of things like "The business needs to make X dollars per user and if we have ads we need to charge Y bucks where Y = X - expected ad revenue." The other challenge is in order to have an ad business you need to convince advertisers you have ad viewers they want to reach. Well, advertisers like rich people with lots of money, and they probably don't have the cheaper ad supported tiers. So can a TV company really support a completely ad free tier? Or do they still need to serve some, but less ads, to make sure their advertisers know they can get their ads seen by the platforms richest users?

Copernican , (edited )

Fake news. Netflix is the only one making a profit. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/17/hollywood-streaming-profits-struggles.html

I don't know why lemmy users love spreading misinformation that all streaming platforms are taking in profit hand over fist.

Copernican ,

You were talking about the streaming platform specifically as an industry.

it's an industry that's earning literal billions every single year...they absolutely don't need to have ads, they could serve their paying users a good ad-free product, and still make money. They choose to deliberately annoy their paying customers because they're fucking greedy.

It's okay to be corrected.

Copernican ,

"Google and Apple should manage consent, but let me manage payments directly so I don't have to pay them."

Copernican OP ,

I don't see how these small state specific regulations can work. California is the only state big enough, and the EU as a whole does GDPR type regulations uniformly. Regardless of what they regulations are, I feel like it needs to be US federal level regulation to make compliance practical

Copernican ,

iRobot said it would focus on margin improvements, reduce spending on research and development, and pause all work on “non-floorcare” products, including its air purifiers and robotic lawn mowers.

I doubt it. If you are stopping r&d and killing whole product lines, it makes sense to lay off the teams directly tied to those product lines. I'm guessing they needed Amazon to help them break into the market for areas outside of floor vacuums?

Copernican ,

It really depends on redundancy. Does Amazon have people that can do what iRobot staff does. For operational or sales teams maybe. If Amazon becomes the only store where you can buy a roomba, you probably lay off folks responsible for wholesale. That probably also means you lay off some marketing. But the core people that make the stuff probably have less redundancy. These layoffs are probably impacting the people that actually make and design the stuff, since they no longer or going to make all the stuff they planned. The hypothetical layoffs for acquisition would probably be smaller and impact different people at the company. And because it's an acquisition, there may have been negotiated more favorable severance terms,

Copernican ,

That's not what the article says. The article is saying that was true last year that the hiring spree was over optimistic and needed correction. Now that is not the case, but there's a weird knock on effect where the market has rewarded this behavior companies keep tightening to continue being rewarded. And there's a heard mentality where if company A gets rewarded by the market for layoffs, company B faces scrutiny from major shareholders not to do the same.

I think the initial correction of layoffs kind of made sense a year ago, but this article makes me think there is something not cool happening as it keeps continuing.

Copernican ,

Will there ever be a day where I can just buy a smart watch strap to attach to my mechanic watch to get biometrics and what not?

Copernican ,

Data includes ip addresses, etc... is that a surprise? How do most notifications work? Is the device client polling status updates to retrieve status changes to trigger a notification? If that occurs isn't it obvious the user IP would be known?

Copernican ,

So it's not so much what data is shared, but how it's triggered to do this at unnecessary times is where the intent is likely nefarious.

Copernican ,

I remember watching this PBS Frontline segment on plane maintenance 10 years or so ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw0b020OFj4

I imagine we still have those problems and the recent news of counterfeit parts entering the market is scary.

Good thing these recent incidents ended up with no serious injuries or death. Perhaps this timing is good in some really weird way as the Supreme Court starts considering powers of regulatory agencies and concerns around government funding to highlight the importance and need for this government role.

Copernican ,

May I ask why? If you are paying the full sub yourself, but the person you kindly share the sub with gets cut off, why would you stop paying? If you enjoy the content and service for the price, why does it matter if you lose the ability to share if you are the only one footing the bill.

Copernican ,

FWIW, I did not remove my subscription, but I did respond to the recent price bump by downgrading to a lower tier, and we’re still sharing it (if they ever shut us down for that I’m certainly not paying a second sub, but so far the locations are close enough and it’s used rarely enough in one of them that it’s never been an issue).

You kind of switched between "we" and "I" speak. So I interpreted it as you paying the full sub fee but someone else had access to it. You mentioned that you would not pay for a second sub, but what if you PW sharer was willing to cover just that cost? I feel like there are 2 kinds of PW sharers. Some that PW share as a gift. And others that split the cost for a single account. It's hard to tell when people say what they (the individual) are willing to pay for in terms of cost if in practice they are splitting the bill.

Copernican ,

For music it's cut and dry. In 2004 I was spending somewhere between 15 and 25 bucks for a an album on CD which might have 1 or 2 discs. I was buying something like 2 to 4 albums a month. How is it possible today you can pay a monthly sub of a single cd 15 years ago and just have unlimited access to all music. That is insane to me. I still buy albums on vinyl a lot, but keep my spotify for convenience and discovery purposes.

I am pretty sure back then when I purchased the box set of band of brothers on DVD around the same period it cost something like 60 to 80 bucks for 10 1 hour episodes and extra. Max today costs 10 bucks a month today.

Copernican ,

I'm aware of how media subs work and pw sharing works. But for me, I pay for the subscriptions I want access to. If pw sharing gets cut off, that is a free gift I used to give to other people as a bonus, but it doesn't impact how I chose which subs I pay for to access the content I watch. That's why I am curious why the primary sub holder of a service would cancel a sub if there's a PW share crackdown if they are the sole person paying for it and it's a subscription they enjoy utilizing.

Copernican ,

I am aware of close knit families. But when one family member had cable, we'd just have movie/game/tv watch party with the extended family. Sure, if anyone wanted to have it in their own home independent of the social viewing experience, you could always buy it for your household. And the family members that had the cable package, probably would have kept it even if we didn't come over to visit and watch a game on ESPN or some other cable TV. PW sharing is fine within the household. It's when it 's out of the household where the crackdown really happens.

Copernican ,

Netflix was always a physical household concept business model. They started by mailing DVDs to a physical address. I think the challenge has been around the technology to enforce that on the digital end where the devices allow portability of service via digital distribution and resolution of IP or other identifiers to household is not always deterministic. Netflix does get to define what household means in their terms of service for their business agreement with the customer.

Copernican , (edited )

I don't know that one cheeky tweet from their pr/marketing team mens they gladly advertised password sharing as a feature. Would need to go back to the TOS for subs back then. Multiple screens is one thing, but multiple households is another.

I've mooched off my parent's cable account for 10+ years for streaming well after I moved to another state. As services cracked down on the practice I personally have never felt entitled to the TV services my household was not paying for. Some I chose to pay for myself, others I realize aren't for me and don't subscribe. Forl
Netflix, I haven't yet broached the subject of joining accounts and paying for the additional logins option, but maybe I'll do that as a cost saving measure. But I can't think of a moral justification for why my household should be entitled to a TV service my parents pay for hundreds of miles away from where I live.

When CEOs talked about password sharing it was under the marketing POV that those folks would eventually convert into subscribers naturally. I guess they didn't expect it to become the norm. https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/11/netflix-ceo-says-account-sharing-is-ok/

Copernican ,

Add in that the 737-900ER has the same door plug design, it makes me wonder if it is rational to fear the Max 9 specifically. I would actually prefer to fly a max 9 that was forced to have a recent inspection instead of the older 737-900ER that recently had scrutiny for the same door if my fear was the door plug itself.

Copernican ,

Not sure why you're getting down voted to hell. I don't understand why people refuse to believe there is anything beneficial to human collaboration about being in person. It was a lot easier to help out teammates for a 10 or 15 minutes chat near a communal white board or on pen and paper as opposed to scheduling a virtual video call, and creating a diagram in power point or lucid chart in advance for something I could sketch by hand in 60 seconds in real time. Also those discussions did lead to SMEs overhearing and dropping in to provide additional help were great. Unfortunately this hybrid choose your own home or office location is just the worst of both worlds for those that come in.

Copernican ,

It adds up when you have a lot of meetings where you need to do that. Also 2 to 3 hour commute is insane. And I'm not suggesting office work needs to be 5 days a week. Also the type of work really makes a difference as well. I'm also not sure wfh is more efficient. In the in office days meeting room availability dictated the number of meetings you could have a day. Virtual has created meeting hell for me at times.

Copernican ,

Flexibllity is the key. Let the teams decide how they work best. Mandates, one way or the other, are silly.

I think that's where it breaks down and the people in the office get the worst of both worlds. It's actually less constructive to be in an office where you are taking calls all day with multiple remote employees that could be in the office. I don't go into the office at all anymore, but I would be happy and happier to be back in the office 3 days a week if I knew the teams I worked with were also in the office. Pre pandemic I had a very flexible in office policy where the norm was to be in the office 3 or 4 days a week. But folks that had long commutes were able to leave the office early and work from their commuter trains to wrap up the day. Folks on the team would roll in anytime between 830 and 11am. I think the unfortunate thing about RTO policy is that coming down from HR in a 1 size fits all approach makes it less flexible and terrible with badge swipe counting and what not. And in order to be fair, some type of written policy must be in place, but teams, managers, etc. should have flexibility to make it work for their teams.

Copernican ,

Not crazy at all. Not sure why there's a surprise. Advertising is everywhere. Design goes into making buying goods user friendly. The whole point of brands is to build loyalty to it. All of that has cost to acquire customers. So obviously customers are an investment because acquiring them has cost and labor involved.

It's like selling an iPhone knowing you will eventually make money on app store sales percentage margins.

Cable firms to FTC: We shouldn’t have to let users cancel service with a click — Customers may “misunderstand the consequences of canceling,” say lobbyists (arstechnica.com)

Cable firms to FTC: We shouldn’t have to let users cancel service with a click — Customers may “misunderstand the consequences of canceling,” say lobbyists::Customers may "misunderstand the consequences of canceling," cable lobby says.

Copernican ,

The real hurdle for me is the cost of leasing a cable box and other service fees. Cable bundles sound good on paper until I factor that cost in.

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