512 Pixels

Content Providers Should Fear Netflix⇢

Willa Paskin, in an article I started reading because I love Arrested Development:

Yet traditional television networks still apportion their series in weekly episodes over four to eight months, allowing binge-­watching only in retrospect, even though, for an increasing number of viewers, binge-­watching isn’t just a way to catch up on a season that has already wrapped but a better viewing experience altogether. Why let networks and advertisers get in the way of that? Which may explain what Sarandos says, that the audience for Breaking Bad is bigger on Net­flix than it is on AMC. (One of the few hard numbers Netflix has shared is that 50,000 of its subscribers watched all 13 episodes of Breaking Bad’s season four the day before the new season premiered on AMC.)

In case you missed it: Breaking Bad enjoys a bigger audience on Netflix than it does on AMC.

Remember that fact. I bet it comes back up again.

On Fighting About Smartphones⇢

Mat Honan:

Nobody cares what kind of smartphone you believe in. It’s not a religion. It’s not your local sports team even. Stop being a soldier. You are not a soldier. You are just wrong. Shut up. You there, with the blog, in the comments, in the pages of the newspaper or the magazine or on Twitter or Facebook. Whatever your opinion is, as soon as you employ it in partisan fashion, it’s deeply and profoundly wrong. Just by sharing it, you are wrong. And nobody cares. Except for the people who do. And they are wrong too. Myself included.

Like Matt Alexander, I think Honan’s piece comes at a perfect time. Maybe it’s just the headache I’ve had since the Samsung Galaxy 4 event or the fact that Apple’s turning up the heat, but I find the increasingly defensive views held in the technology community increasingly offensive.

I’m as guilty of it as anyone, though.

I blame Samsung.

URI.LV⇢

This looks like a great service for tracking RSS subscribers if you’re moving away from FeedBurner, and since you can pass your own URL through it, turning it off when it goes under because its free shouldn’t be a big problem.

via The Loop

A Green Apple⇢

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

Apple, which has received more than its share of criticism from environmental activists over the years, released its annual Environmental Progress report Thursday. The chief takeaway from this year’s issue: Apple’s corporate facilities worldwide now get 75% of their power from renewable sources — solar, wind, hydro and geothermal — up from 35% two years ago.