caractacus

How is market share particularly important when their overall subscriber numbers have rocketed? The entire streaming market is increasing massively atm and all services are growing (well, maybe not Tidal...).

> their prices aren't that much cheaper than taxi's in the UK

Really? I find them at least a third cheaper than taxis in London for any trip over about five minutes.

I still feel guilty for taking an Uber (and note the difference in ability and knowledge immediately compared to black cabs). I'll be more inclined to take them, even with less of a saving, knowing that they are not allowed to treat their drivers quite so poorly.

comScore reports just under 5m uniques for Vine.co last month. It may be down on the height of its popularity but 5m unique users is a decent mass of people to monetise. Seems an odd thing to kill and not at least try to sell.

The major DSPs in the music space have to license each music company separately. YouTube, Amazon, Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple - all have individual dealings with the majors and with groups of or individual indies. It's definitely not as simple as requesting a blanket license for all music everywhere and paying a single fee.

Sure, there are three major music companies and six major film studios plus a bunch of major tv networks / distributors but it's still a long set of negotiations.

I think the difference is that the music companies understand the value of each service having ubiquitous access to every piece of music. UMG's decision to stop their artists agreeing exclusives with single platforms demonstrates this to some extent.

So why doesn't this happen in the music industry? And a few exclusives here and there doesn't count. Spotify / Apple / Amazon / Tidal / Deezer have 99.9% of the same content with a few high profile albums that are only found on one or another service.

I wonder how the price changes were marketed and whether people already used to playing Candy Crush knew the cost of gold bars and so had (permanently) made their purchasing decision pre-promotion. "I know that Gold bars cost X, it's not worth it to me. This new pop-up promoting gold bars to me is unimportant, I shall dismiss it as in-game spam."

Also, this is very interesting: "this experiment suggests that some consumers who would have made small purchases were discouraged from doing so when faced with large-quantity discounts." In other words, a consumer wanting to buy one gold bar observes a fixed price of X but when she sees that ten gold bars only costs X*5, she is discouraged from purchasing only one, feeling that they are being ripped off or unduly profited from.

As a runner, I really don't see the point. I have a gps watch (Garmin) that records distance, time, pace, cadence, etc etc and shows it all to me on my wrist. Sure, there are people out there who just want to track a run but the use case for this - particularly with no display - seems very very limited.

Uber's stated reason to block tipping. But really, it means passengers don't need to care about working out the tip, feeling bad if they don't leave one or don't leave enough, don't need to carry cash, etc etc. It lowers the friction of taking an uber and means more business.

> My machine is my own. If I wish to grant other users access to the machine or data on it, cool. That's my choice. If I buy a program to do a task, good. When your program starts taking orders from "nameless faceless someone else", we have problems.

And the content you are streaming through 'nameless faceless someone else' is not your own. You pay to get access to it. Are you saying that because you install a program on your machine, you should have complete control over what it can and can't do to the content it provides?

> every bit of media that is “exclusive” to DRM-encumbered formats shows up, every single time, unlocked on file-sharing networks and torrent sites.

Incorrect. PC games, software, console games - many of these have not and likely will not be cracked. That's not to say there aren't many out there but if you have paid attention to information dripping out of cracking groups, you'll see it's becoming much more difficult to get around DRM.

Similarly, Cinavia works. RTMPE works.

It doesn't mean they should be there. It doesn't mean that adding the DRM doesn't cause annoyances to legitimate consumers. But that blanket statement that whatever DRM you add is ineffective is simply wrong.

Edit: quick example - ps4 released Nov 2013. Can you play pirated games on it? Nope. You can install linux but it's likely a number of years before piracy can happen.

https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2015/console-hacking-2015-line...

There are services other than bit.ly (like shorte.st and adf.ly) that stick interstitials between clicking the link and reaching the destination. So revenue. That's one reason.

Metafilter. Which works by charging a one-time only $5 membership and a one-week waiting period before you can post. Small enough for someone interested not to worry, large enough to make the trolls go bye-bye.

This is NOT a court ruling and NOT law. Yet.

Note the word 'advised'. This is a legal opinion from an important individual who looks at the case and tells the court what he thinks. But (i) the court can ignore it or look at the case themselves and make their own opinion; and (ii) any ruling they do make does not bind any EU government to implement it (though it should strongly decisions in EU countries). It's like asking your mechanic friend what he thinks of the car you've got lined up to buy.

As the CJEU press release states:

> NOTE: The Advocate General’s Opinion is not binding on the Court of Justice. It is the role of the Advocates General to propose to the Court, in complete independence, a legal solution to the cases for which they are responsible. The Judges of the Court are now beginning their deliberations in this case. Judgment will be given at a later date.

http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2016...

Hundreds of thousands destroyed? I think you will have to back that up with some evidence.

The photo of the engineer in what is clearly a cardboard mock-up: http://boom.aero/assets/boom-3-cd0822d52cb5c9ecaac404d5cfd09... .... does not inspire confidence.

> It is so much better than Glassdoor at dissecting salary data.

... perhaps, if you fit in its narrow definitions, share your own salary data, and are happy to 'sign in with linkedin' or give them your email before seeing any results. I wasn't, so can't comment.

When did I turn from the enthusiastic kid who dreamed of audio-controlled personal assistants like this to a cranky old man who doesn't want anything remotely spy-possible in his house?

No. Kanye is a law unto himself with a vast team of reactive PR people who try and perform damage control as and when needed.

Bookdepository.com is also Amazon owned.

Why would they do this? Remove comments? Unless trolling and racism and abuse were an overwhelming problem on the platform (and I don't believe they were any worse than anywhere else) why would a major platform built on user engagement deliberately disable comments?

This isn't about competing with Spotify. This about having the major labels on board so people can remix and play with and use that content without Soundcloud getting sued into oblivion. Maybe you'll find all of Kanye's albums now added into Soundcloud as well but the point is to allow Soundcloud to continue as it is - and that was never going to happen without some kind of subscription. They have gazillions in VC funding and have to find a way to monetise the site.

I am more surprised that Tesla did not make a point of saying 'Elon Musk did not encourage George Hotz to play fast and loose on San Francisco highways to win a bet' and 'there is no formal financial relationship between Tesla and geohot'.

$200 a month? I'm not aware of anyone paying an amount even approaching that. The Sky Sports bundle - which is 7 sports channels, Premier League, etc - is £45 per month at face value and cheaper with negotiation.

For all the crap and insults that get hurled at the music industry, at least they have this figured out on the streaming side. With a few very small exceptions (Taylor Swift on Spotify, Beatles on everything), it's a decision between what's the best service for me? than what service has most of the music I like?

Quite. What does it matter to an advertiser selling cars if I also indicate that I like holidays to El Salvador, Dove washing liquid, and videos about giraffes? They will still think that I want to buy a car.

They're already hugely popular in China where a lot of the use is streaming tv and movies, via both legal and illegal means (the boundaries blur a lot over there anyway). I bought an Android-based stick from Alibaba a few years ago that plugged into HDMI and worked fantastically. Computing power and abilities have come on tremendously since so I can imagine how well this would work for high quality video.

The portability of computing continues. Take anywhere, do anything.

Your people in the know are wrong. The labels own a very small part of e.g. Spotify - around 5% - and the rest is VC and the founders. Deezer's IPO documents were clear on where the ownership of that service lies.

They read Pitchfork only to be up on what Anthony Fantano is talking about.

And the data size limit is excel is stifling. 1m maximum rows? That can get filled very quickly.

"We want to hear from you and use your material if (i) you take the time to actually email us; (ii) you do so with a coherent and well-thought out response to one of our articles; (iii) you decide to do this even though there is likely little prospect of us publishing your email; and (iv) if we do publish it, cutting and highlighting your material in a separate article from which we can make ad revenue."