Sometimes, what's good for the stock-price is not good for the business.

Maybe he had to be "decisive" and "strategic" in order to survive so he went boldly ahead to exit the DVD-by-mail business and preserved investor confidence at the expense of the business, even though he wasn't sure it was a good idea.

7.1 is a joke.

even pros can't align that many speakers in your typical small (not theater sized) room.

but as long as you bought into the MARKETING that more channels == better sound, hey, have fun.

just giving you a hint: less is more when it comes to audio. 2 plus a sub gives audio AND movies all it needs.

at home, you just don't need speakers coming out of every direction. that's the bose effect. you think that's good? interesting how you are affected by salesman (everyone who bought into multichannel at home was sold by some salesguy in person or online.)

just a pet peeve of mine. as a sound guy, I just shudder to think of all the cancellations and reflections that happen with even 5.1, let alone 7.x in a home sized room. my gawd! but again, some people LIKE the bose 'spray sound everywhere' effect.

its is NOT hifi, though. at least admit that much. its loud and coming from everywhere but its not hifi. too many reflections ruin the subtle high-end dacs you guys also insist on running (DTS and higher bit rate dolby, lol!)

I tend to agree, however their primary competition (Amazon Prime) supports Linux with no hassle. To make matters worse, NetFlix is not simply refusing to support Linux, they are actively preventing Linux users from accessing content. Chromebooks (essentially Chrome running on a streamlined Ubuntu distro) can access content just fine, but they've intentionally prevented the Chrome extension from working on standard Linux browsers.

Then you will complain about buffering issues and everything else as your ISP saturates because it cant handle what they promise.

Do you have any idea what 24bit uncompressed 7.1 surround take in bandwidth along with uncompressed 1080p HD? Let's not even look at deep color or 3d...

You CANT get that from them, even the top tier of comcast in their fastest market cant deliver that kind of bandwidth.

Yeah that so totally explains iTunes and Spotify thriving and CD sales in sharp decline.

You may notice there's an 800lb gorilla in the room here, it's not legal but it mostly resembles streaming...

It's not my fault your country is going backwards technologically. Here's how a country with progress [www.ssb.no] looks like, average = green, mean = blue. I'm on 60 Mbit uncapped for less than $100/mo and a BluRay costs about $30. Cue the Swede with 100 Mbit for $40. Delivering broadband is getting cheaper and cheaper, if you're not seeing it then you're getting ripped off.

Giving money to Blockbuster won't pressure Netflix to improve streaming, Netflix already wanted that; it's every single movie producer that doesn't want it. And I presume both services have access to the same DVDs. So what are you accomplishing?

Starz was Netflix' biggest contract, and during renewal talks Netflix offered them ten times as much money to renew the deal. Starz still said no - not unless Netflix would make a special 'Starz' plan that cost more.

Big Content won't give Netflix a simple, reasonable streaming contracts because that's 'not the model'; they give Netflix the very last dregs of the market for a film, and when it looks like anyone might possibly be waiting for a film on Netflix rather than watching it somewhere else they stop giving Netflix streaming rights - and even try to fuck with their acquisition of DVDs.

It's content producers' obsession with gouging the shit out of every distribution channel and their delusional attempts to make internet video behave like premium cable services that keeps streaming shitty, not Netflix' management.

You hate Blockbuster, but you'll use it to punish Netflix. How about you show some contempt for the assholes holding the cards and pulling the strings rather than despising the companies that are trying to give you a cheap, convenient option for video?

I agree, except for a couple of small nits.

PC's over main frames

You don't need an eighteen wheeler to move a single TV set. Doing spreadsheets or databases with only a few thousand records on a mainframe is wasteful. As is putting an apostrophe in PCs.

laptops over PC's

Same thing. No reason to be tied to a desk if the laptop does the job. No reason to carry a travelling trunk when you're only going to be gone two days. The thing with both of them is use of the proper tool, not convinience. You don't need a sledgehammer to open a walnut.

Which have a Ron Jeremy-sized hard on for late fees- or at least, late fees under the new guise of charging you by the day. I don't know anyone who uses kiosks who doesn't pay as much or more in extra days as they did in outright penalties at old-school Blockbusters. You can say that people don't have to keep them for 8 days and this is true; people also don't have to pay the minimum on their credit cards or finance their cars, but they do and it's a predictable source of income for banks and car dealers. Much as extra days are a major source of income for Redbox.

Just because it's a machine in a parking lot and just because they don't call it a 'late fee' anymore doesn't mean the model is different. All they've done is remove the guilt and vindictive gouging from the process - and then promoted their new, spiffed up late fees as a convenience service.

Being the fan that I am for Google products, and also knowing that the cash is there and the possibilities are there, if I was Google, I would buy netflix, and voila instant stardom for youtube netflix merger.....!!!

How are they measuring that? Metrics from web usage?

I think it's fair to say there is sampling bias there, as the average Linux user probably spends more time online and loads more pages than any other installed PC.

but as long as you bought into the MARKETING that more channels == better sound, hey, have fun.

Well, it's only a partial fallacy. Surround sound makes no sense. When listening to music, are you sitting in the middle of the orchestra, or in the audience where the theater's acoustics have been engineered for you to listen in, with all the sound from in front of you? In a movie, I find having sounds come from anywhere but the screen itself a distraction. Quad sound would make sense for movies if there were a speaker at each corner of the screen, so sounds could travel up and down as well as right and left.

However, the more drivers of different sizes you put in an enclosure, the better it will sound, especially if you separate the different frequencies into channels for each speakers.

And if you have real speakers (at least three ways with a real woofer in each one twelve inches or more diameter, eighteen is better), subwoofers are not only unnecessary, they will actually degrade the sound. Subwoofers are only necessary to overcome what was the downfall of quadraphonics in the '70s -- the cost of good woofers. I argued with a professor in an undergrad physics class about this when quadraphonics were new, and he actually conceded that I was right when I brought my two Kenwood 777s and a cheap stereo amp in. The trouble with quadraphonic was that you had to have twice everything, so a $1000 stereo would sound remarkably better than a $1000 quad setup. That, and you have the (planned and engineered) interference between the left channel's low frequencies and the right channel's. That is missing with a subwoofer, even though the ear can't discern the position of a sound with a wavelength longer than your head is wide.

Surround only worked because the price of the amps had come down so far, and the price of four big woofers was mitigated by having a single sub.

its is NOT hifi, though.

Even stereo CDs aren't. People misunderstand Nyquist, and think it means that you get perfect sound until you hit the Nyquist limit, but in actuality the closer you get to the limit, the more aliasing you get. There is no way to discern a 15kHz sine wave from a 15kHz sawtooth wave with only three samples per wave. I have never heard a CD through any equipment that would make me think it was a live performance, but I have heard LPs that were that good (and yes, it has to be well engineered in the studio or it's still not high fidelity).

And as you point out, people don't think of interference, with waves doubling and cancelling each other.

I'd prefer a company with a spine. The problem with certain business types is that man times they are too afraid to tell their clients or their suppliers when something just isn't going to happen.

It's the classic problem of valuing one relationship over another. NetFlix doesn't want to piss off the content providers by telling them that they aren't going to license their content for higher prices, for fear that the content providers will cut them off; instead, out of fear, they are playing into the content provider's hands, and screwing up their relationship with their customers.

In the end, NetFlix ends up pissing off a lot of their customers, and charging them higher prices. The content providers, who have NetFlix now on this treadmill, will continue jacking up content prices until NetFlix keels over and dies. NetFlix's demise will be greatly aided by the content provider's themselves coming out with their own competing service, for less money than NetFlix.

You see, the content providers (these particular ones) have a particular MO, and have a penchant for avarice that compares favorably with that of a two year old. They want ALL of the money, not just SOME of it. See the history of DRM if you need examples of content providers going a little insane.

The best thing NetFlix can do is tell the content providers that while they would like to continue offering their content to end users, they cannot for the prices they ask. If they have to make a choice, they'd prefer to remove the content provider's content, and stay in business, rather than lose their customers through attrition, ultimately resulting in NetFlix's collapse. After all, NetFlix has a duty to its shareholders, and they can make more money, by offering less content at lower prices, than more content at prices likely to bankrupt them.

"You only have 2 ears, you shouldn't need much more than 2 speakers."
that is the stupidest thing I have read on /.

We hear all around us. We detect spatial positioning with our ears.

"Sounds much better than any speakers I'm willing to pay for."
sure,. if you arr cheap, you find a cheap solution. That's not the same as accurately reproduction of sound.

With a good sound system, you can not only get a feel of were something is, but how far. That's the mark of a high quality system.
When you here the shells from Ripley's gun bouncing of the ground and they sound like the are bouncing at your feet, and feel something coming up from 50 feet away at the same time. Neither of which are actually on screen when you hear them. That, my friend, is good sound.

And no, my sound system isn't that good. But I don't kid myself that my systems is as good as a real high quality system

Ahem:

http://www.androidcentral.com/netflix-now-available-all-devices-running-22-and-23 [androidcentral.com]