Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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"I don't think they get it. The landscape has changed and I'm not going back."

You think? I do wonder about the economics though. $300M vs what? People with content aren't married to a distribution partner, and they certainly aren't married to one who can't deliver eyeballs. So come the next NAB show in Vegas it will be an interesting discussion Netflix has with its potential partners.

The next HUGE disruption will be the first team to put together a streaming 24hr news channel. Think about it, something like Google+ for news, where you get notified when there is actually new information about a news story you are following, and you can go back and see that story. Or you open the 'portal' and it shows you the top 5 news stories being covered in each segment, then as you watch them they drop off to be replaced by stories lower in the list, only to re-appear if they have new data. I can't wait, but nobody has done a Ted Turner yet. Hard to kick off since it violates a lot of current practices in the news business, but it will come.

It is really a historic time, this realignment which allows 'pure' information businesses. As folks who know me are aware I find economics of information to be pretty cool.

Currently, news in video format suck big time. I prefer text format (including web sites) a million times over, and the reasons are many: I can absorb the news at my own speed (which might be faster, or slower, or on repeat, etc), I don't get hypnotized by messages addressed to my reptilian brain (such as bright colors, the newsperson's gestures and tone and facial expression, glitzy sounds, etc), and so on.

But maybe this will change in the future. For now, text mode is much less biased.

That's a fair point, one wonders if all the flash and crawls and such give folks seizures. The concept would work well for audio as well though, and then listening to it as a sort of dynamic podcast while driving might be more useful than waiting for an hour of half hour point to arrive. If they could do that and give me traffic updates for the road on which my phone was telling them I was on? That would totally rock for me too. While I feel for the guy who's stalled on the Bay Bridge if that means they don't have time to mention that 101S is about to become a parking lot, then I'm screwed.

If I could have someone who I could say "what's new?" and have them tell me, knowing what they have already told me, so that I could actually just get what was new. I'd really really appreciate that and leave my car radio in aux-in mode 24/7 :-)

Have you tried Newslook? It's news video from third parties (i.e. Reuters) curated by editors.

Go to NPR.org and click Listen. It works almost exactly like that. No video, of course, but it's better content than anything on tv.

Or follow a news channel on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/RussiaToday

(as an example)

With a streaming news channel and notifications of upcoming stories you really can call someone, have them turn on the TV (or streamer) and catch the entire story from the beginning like they do in television/movies.

I get most of my news for free via the net on Al-jazeera on livestream.

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