Cordkillers Ep. 43 - Gear Three Ways

Starz joins the party and YouTube tries to become the next HBO. Also why Roku is NOT winning the set-top box race.

Starz joins the party and YouTube tries to become the next HBO. Also why Roku is NOT winning the set-top box race.

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CordKillers: Ep. 43 - Gear Three Ways
Recorded: November 3, 2014
Guest: Justin Robert Young

Intro Video 

Primary Target

Signal Intelligence

  • Susan Wojcicki Wants to Sell You YouTube Video Subscriptions
  • Half of YouTube's views now come from phones and tablets
  • - Susan Wojicki, CEO of YouTube spoke at Code/Mobile last week
    - “YouTube right now is ad-supported, which is great because it has enabled us to scale to a billion users; but there are going to be cases where people are going to say, `I don’t want to see the ads, or I want to have a different experience’.”
    - She compared the idea to apps where users can “either choose ads, or pay a fee, which is an interesting model. … We’re thinking about how to give users options.”
    - “We’ve been thinking about other ways it might make sense for us [at YouTube]. We’re early in that process, but if you look at media over time, most of them have both ads and subscription services,”
  • STATS
    - 50 percent of YouTube views are now coming from mobile devices.
    - site is growing 50 percent each year in terms of watch time

Gear Up

Front Lines

Under Surveillance

2014 Winter Movie Draft
draft.diamondclub.tv

  1. Justin: $10,441,000
  2. Brian: $0
  3. Tom: $0
  4. John: $0
  5. Brett: $0
  6. Scott: $0

Dispatches from the Front

I was running a bit behind on your show and just got done watching episode 41 when you(Brian) were talking about starting up season 3 of Korra. All of season 3 is this good. These villains are some of the best I've seen in both Avatar shows. I haven't started season 4, but I really hope that it at this level or better to finish out the series.

Seriously Brian. What will it take to get you to get back into the Walking Dead? First you said two great episodes in a row. We had those. Now you said secretly it was 3. In my opinion(and maybe Tom's), we had those. Now we started season 5 and it started out amazing. We're 3 episodes in and it's still good. There's no good reason to not jump back in. As your boss, I think you need to give it a chance again. You wouldn't want this to go on your permanent record would you? I'd hate to see you miss your next promotion all because you were dragging your feet and making excuses about watching a TV show.

Tom, you're doing great work. The other bosses and I agree that if you keep this up you may get that new office chair you've been wanting.

Dictated but not read,
Your Boss,
Bill Russell (not the basketball player)

PS: If Brian gets caught up on either Walking Dead or Agents of SHIELD can we get a spoiler zone on it? I always enjoy your thoughts on the shows I watch.

 

 


Below is an analysis of the top Chatrealm selection of the movie draft and can also be seen on this Google Doc
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LP-77q40AgFRW4Ee9ULzqPVEG4ZkDNLW2pQWcK3J8TY/pubhtml

This is a count of the movie take from the 437 entries at the time of my review.

(If you want an update Monday after more people have made picks let me know)

Joe Gasz
 



Movie Selection Count % Selected
Taken 3 259 59%
Big Hero 6 213 49%
Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb 151 35%
Interstellar 147 34%
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 104 24%
Penguins of Madagascar 87 20%
Dumb and Dumber To 84 19%
Unbroken 79 18%
The Theory of Everything 77 18%
Horrible Bosses 2 76 17%
Exodus: Gods and Kings 72 16%
Nightcrawler 72 16%
Paddington 70 16%
Foxcatcher 53 12%
Annie 50 11%
American Sniper 47 11%
The Pyramid 47 11%
Wild 47 11%
The Wedding Ringer 45 10%
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 44 10%
Inherent Vice 36 8%
The Imitation Game 33 8%
The Interview 28 6%
Big Eyes 26 6%
Blackhat 26 6%
Beyond the Lights 25 6%
Into the Woods 24 5%
Mortdecai 15 3%
Top Five 15 3%
The Gambler 14 3%

 

 


Hey Tom & Brian, it's your boss here with a (longer than expected) memo regarding the state of Hulu Plus.

After the baseball season ended (I'm a Yankee fan), I traded in my MLB.tv subscription and decided to give Hulu Plus another try - I tried it briefly when it was first announced. This time, I went into the experience knowing two things: even though I was going to be paying, I still need to sit through commercials, and windowing on Hulu Plus is completely and totally weird and what seasons and episodes that are and aren't available varies per show.

Additionally, I was coming into this experience having been an extremely happy Aereo subscriber, where I paid for broadcast TV that had commercials.

If you go into Hulu Plus and compare it to more of an Aereo alternative, rather than a Netflix or Amazon Instant alternative, I feel like it's easier to be forgiving. There are a lot of tradeoffs between Aereo and Hulu Plus, but I think they mostly even out.

While you could fast forward through commercials on Aereo, you needed to manage your recordings and make sure you didn't forget to record something. Additionally, networks are constantly messing with the airing time by a few minutes in either direction, so unless you always set a few minute buffer around each episode, you would have shows be cut off slightly. And lastly, you had a limited number of tuners that prevented you from recording more than a couple of shows at once.

With Hulu, you can't fast forward through commercials. And while Hulu used to be extremely painful in terms of how often the same commercials were repeated, I've found that the variation of commercials have improved a huge amount. It's almost a rare occurrence having to sit through the same commercial twice during a single show. Additionally, most Hulu interfaces now show the exact amount of time until the commercial break is over and overall, there are less commercials shown these days during each episode. As far as recordings, there's nothing you need to setup or configure or futz with. You always get the full show, and it doesn't matter if you didn't know a new season started last night.

I sort of feel like a Hulu Plus apologist writing this all, but after a couple of years of improvements on Hulu's end, and coming from Aereo this time, rather than Netflix, I think Hulu Plus is actually kind of a good deal now. Or at the very least, worth trying again.


Tom Mango


Links

patreon.com/cordkillers
Dog House Systems Cordkiller box

Tom Merritt2 Comments