Tag: Premium

Linda Holmes summarizes the news:

Beginning in 2015, HBO will offer a streaming service to cord-cutters and other nonsubscribers on an a la carte basis. It should be noted that the announcement HBO released to the media does not explicitly say the service will be HBO GO (or that it won’t), only that it will be “a stand-alone, over-the-top, HBO service.” And, of course, it doesn’t say how much the service will cost. It doesn’t even say it will carry every HBO show, let alone what archival material will be available — HBO GO has a lot. Those who are currently jumping up and down and declaring their independence from their cable provider may or may not be as happy when more details emerge.

The move, though, would seem to be a big one, given that requiring a cable subscription is standard on many services besides HBO that provide streaming access to cable programming (without requiring episode-by-episode purchase through services like iTunes or Amazon).

Derek Thompson imagines the target audience:

It seems that the audience most likely to pick up an HBO “Go-It-Alone” product today are mostly the young, lower-income Internet-savvy viewers who weren’t cable customers, anyway. That suggests that HBO Go-It-Alone will restrain cable’s growth by preventing new sign-ups, rather than hurt cable by creating more cord-cutters.

Brian Merchant declares that HBO has “killed cable”:

I’m not worried that the death of cable TV will deprive of us of future Mad Men. We’ve already seen that the likes of Netflix and Amazon are more than willing to pay for thoughtful, elaborate productions; Transparent is the best show I’ve seen this fall, and everyone seems to love House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. The shows themselves are still better than ever, hence the success of Walking Dead—which, by the way, counted plenty of internet users among its record-breaking viewership—and there’s indisputably a market for them. Now, plenty of niche shows may fall by the wayside without the help of subsidies from the big packages—but ultimately, I think that means less crappy TV and more time-wasting on the internet.

I’m planning on returning to internet-only TV. More and more people are following suit—the number of households without satellite or cable TV has grown 44 percent over the last four years. That oft-uttered phrase “Oh, I don’t have a TV” is no longer an affected hipsterism but a practical choice.

McArdle asks, “how much will this actually benefit cord cutters in the end? ”

At first blush, the answer is “a lot” — they can get HBO without paying for ESPN! Over the long term, however, as this becomes a bigger revenue source, I’d expect to see the cable networks stop selling their content to other streaming services, crack down on login sharing, and otherwise make sure that if you personally are not paying the cable company, then you personally will pay HBO, not your old roommate who forgot to change his password. I’d also expect to see them offer significant bonuses for longer-term contracts to discourage viewers from signing up, binging for a month or two, then moving onto some other network like harvesting crews moving north.

Zachary M. Seward checks in on the HBO-Netflix rivalry:

HBO now says it can easily pick up additional revenue in the US from people who don’t pay for TV but would subscribe to a standalone HBO package. It’s not yet clear how that will affect the rivalry with Netflix. They can certainly coexist, but more heated competition could put pressure on their prices. Netflix blamed its slower-than-expected subscriber growth on its price increased to $9 a month; HBO’s internet-only service is likely to cost significantly more than that.

James Poniewozik sees HBO’s big news as “a potentially exciting development for TV viewers tired of watching their cable packages swell into bloated, gold-laden barges of tied-together offerings topping $200 a month”:

If big player HBO sees that it can offer a cable-free package and survive, that may lead the way for companies in other pricey TV sectors–live sports, for instance–which you’ve had to agree to buy a giant cable package to get.

Along those lines, CBS announced its own stand-alone web subscription today:

The new “CBS All Access” service, costing $5.99 a month, is the first time that a traditional broadcaster will make a near-continuous live feed of its local stations available over the web. … In a notable carve-out, National Football League games will not be available on the service. CBS executives said they now are in discussions with the N.F.L. and that other live sports already are available for streaming. A similar service from Showtime, the premium cable network owned by CBS, is likely in the “not too distant future,” [CBS CEO Leslie] Moonves said.

 

Danny Vinik recounts yesterday’s worrying economic news:

Wednesday was an ugly day for the global economy. British and German stocks each fell around 3 percent. Greek stocks fell 6 percent. (That’s huge.) In the U.S., a trifecta of economic indicators—retail sales, the producer’s price index, and a manufacturing report—were all disappointing. That sparked an early morning selloff here with investors fleeing into safe-assets like U.S. Treasuries. The interest rate on the 10-year-bond hit a low of 1.86 percent, a drop of more than 16 percent. (Again, that’s really big.) Equity markets closed down around 1 percent and U.S. Treasuries rebounded, closing the day around 3 percent.

This volatility has been a feature of the market during the past few weeks and is a signal that something is not right with the global economy.

The sell-off has continued today. Yglesias is concerned:

On Tuesday, the Eurozone reported that industrial production in Europe had fallen 1.9 percent over the past year. Even the German economy is struggling, leading to fears that the Eurozone will fall into a third post-crisis recession. Since the Eurozone never addressed the underlying problems that led to its last crisis, a new European downturn could plunge the world into another round of big financial scares.

The difference is that this time around the Chinese economy is also slowing, as is Russia’s, as is Brazil’s. It’s basically bad news everywhere.

Annie Lowrey asks if the problem is Ebola:

At least right now, Ebola poses little direct risk to the global economy. It is the fear of Ebola — a fear that the virus might reduce travel, hurt industry, slash trade, or just foment uncertainty — that seems to be rattling the markets.

Rana Foroohar posits that “markets have realized that this recovery has been a genetically engineered recovery”:

It’s been engineered by the monetary scientists at the Fed, who’ve pumped $4 trillion into the economy since 2009 in an attempt to strengthen an economy that is fundamentally not as strong as it looks. Despite the Fed’s best efforts (and I agree that they needed to do something, especially in the beginning), the real economy simply hasn’t caught up to the markets. Unemployment has ticked down, but wages still haven’t ticked up. It’s no accident that weak retail sales in the U.S. were one of the economic indicators that triggered the sell-off. As I’ve said many times before, you can’t have a sustainable recovery, one markets can really believe in, until you have the majority of the population with more money in their pockets.

The reality is that this hasn’t happened in the last few years, and for many people, decades (the average male worker today makes less in real terms than he did in the early 1970s).

Matt O’Brian’s bottom line:

[T]he global economy still hasn’t recovered from the financial crisis. And this time, policymakers don’t look as ready to ride to the rescue. The Federal Reserve is about to finish winding down its bond-buying program and is beginning to talk about when to raise rates. The European Central Bank is debating whether it should do too little too late or too late too little about Europe’s lost decade. And China’s central bank is reluctant to open its monetary spigots any further for fear of fueling an even bigger bubble. This means that the world’s central banks are all either pulling back or not pushing ahead despite weak growth. And that’s why inflation is disappearing everywhere.

Leonhardt’s explanation is simpler:

There are many reasons stocks are falling, from the worries about the condition of the global economy to the unknowable forces that often cause market fluctuations. But beyond those immediate factors, there is also the simple fact that stocks are expensive.

When stocks are expensive — relative to their earnings — they have less margin for error. Small pieces of bad news have the potential to make investors more anxious, because current prices are based on a relatively optimistic view of the world. Such optimism can crumble quickly.

Centennial, Colorado, 12 pm

David Watkins absorbs Philip Cohen’s recent findings debunking a killer-text epidemic:

Driving, of course, is what’s deadly here, and texting-while-driving, like anything that takes your focus away from such a dangerous, high-stakes activity, is obviously a terrible idea, the effort to focus on this one distracting activity misdiagnoses the fundamental problem …. [I]f we’re serious about continuing to push the fatality figures down, the most important thing we can do is make the kind of transit investments and change the regulatory environment to encourage the construction and development of neighborhoods and cities that facilitate low-car lifestyles. (To mount a hobby-horse of mine, down with parking requirements!) The good news is the kids want it, if we’ll let them have it.

On that note, Emily Badger looks into why young people are driving less:

It’s true that the recession has probably dampened car use, not just for millennials but for everyone. But there are also some relevant, long-term socioeconomic shifts underway that will likely continue to affect car use even after the economy fully recovers. As student loan debts rise, alongside the cost of housing in many big cities, budgets for car payments will be squeezed. This is particularly true in cities like Washington, D.C., where the high cost of housing is partly subsidized by the low cost of transportation for young professionals who rely on transit and bikes instead of cars.

Americans are also forming their own households, getting married and having children later – all trends that predate the recession and that postpone life stages associated with the peak driving years. … And one more economic argument: Americans just reaching driving age today “have no living memory of consistently cheap gasoline,” the PIRG and Frontier Group authors write. And they’re not likely to see it again in the near future, regardless of what the economy does.

A reader chimes in:

There has been something bothering me about Philip Cohen’s piece since and just put my finger on it (I’m sure Dish readers well versed in statistics have already seen this and pointed to it.) Cohen’s work comparing driving deaths and cell phone subscriptions doesn’t link anything, so it is not a surprise he ends up with a scattershot chart. It is funny that the work is about statistical truth while his chart his full of assumption. The chart assumes that owning a cell phone equals texting while driving.

But. This discounts all the people who have cell phones that don’t drive, can’t drive or don’t text while driving. My 93-year-old grandmother owns a cellphone – doesn’t drive. My 72-year-old father has a cell phone and wouldn’t know how to turn it on while driving, much less text while driving. My 9-year-old niece has a child safety cellphone – so she can’t text nor drive. And I never text while driving.

So while we own a cellphone (and thus are on the chart) we can’t die while texting. So you can’t know from us if texting equals fatalities. Our existence only proves we have not yet died while owning a cellphone.

I’m sure if we any kind of ownership study of widely used goods there would be the same scattergun chart. But I bet if we did “fedora hat” purchases by state suddenly death rates in certain retirement states suddenly cluster. Will owning a fedora cause fatal car crashes? No, but being an older man – the demographic likely to buy a fedora – would be the problem.

What needs to be examined is what people are actually doing when they have a fatal crash (drinking, drugs, eating, conversing, texting, watching a movie, on wifi, etc) and who knows where (or if) you can pull those statistics. Owning something is different from using something which is different from causing something.

Zack Beauchamp expects it to become become a major headache for the the ruling party:

Pew’s Katie Simmons reports that 42 percent of Chinese citizens think inequality is a “very big issue.” 46 percent of Americans said the same — and inequality is one of the most important issues in American politics. As the below chart shows, a plurality of Pew’s Chinese respondents blame their government’s policies for the wealth gap:

This is a real problem for China. The past view years have seen a spate of low-level social unrest — protests, riots, strikes, and the like. While in part this surely has to do with the rise of social media and other outlets for organizing, as well as the sense of civic participation that often comes with urbanization and a growing middle class, these protests are arguably tied to the growth in inequality as well. In 1993, there were about 8,700 “disturbances” — the official name for protests, riots, and the like — in China. By 2010, the figure was 180,000. Nargiza Salidjanova, an analyst at the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, links this to growing inequality. So while Chinese citizens broadly think the transition to capitalism has been worth it, there’s real anger about the rising inequality that’s accompanied by it. It’s a major problem for the Chinese Communist Party going forward — and it’s one among many.

Meanwhile, Darrell West wonders what kind of influence China’s growing moneyed class will wield on the government:

China is becoming a land of billionaires. With 152 billionaires, China is minting ultra-wealthy individuals at a brisk pace. Currently, the country ranks second in the world in number of billionaires, according to the Forbes compilation of billionaires. This is below the 492 in the United States, but ahead of Russia (with 111), Germany (85), Brazil (65), and India (56). But the broader question is what impact [Alibaba founder Jack] Ma and other billionaires will have on Chinese society and government.

West notes that Ma, like other Chinese billionaires, has “been careful not to position himself as an oppositional political figure”:

For example, he has set up a charitable trust with an estimated $3 billion in assets and announced plans to address China’s environment and health care problems. The wealthy billionaire is concerned about environmental pollution and has told reporters that “somebody has to do something. Our job is to wake people up.” But in announcing his charitable venture, he reassured government authorities about his long-term intentions. “I’m not political,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t want to confront [government officials]; we want to sit down and work with them.” …

In thinking about his options, Ma should be cognizant of the case of Chinese billionaire Wang Gongquan. That businessman attracted unfavorable government attention when he spoke out about his desire for greater citizen involvement in his country’s decision-making. He was arrested on charges of “assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place”, and his case is pending in the legal system. The line between billionaire policy advocacy and political involvement can be very treacherous in nondemocratic systems.

Nikil Saval, author of Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, wonders why so few contemporary novelists deal with the substance of work:

[I]f there is a politics of the white-collar novel in the United States, it is this: office fiction is deliberately and narrowly construed as being about manners, sociability, gossip, the micro-struggles for rank and status – in other words, “office politics” – rather than about the work that is done in offices. There are major exceptions to this rule:

the genre of the police procedural and the legal or medical thriller often make naturalistic drama out of the details of professional methods. So, too, do recent novels about finance. But well into the current era of the office novel – with books like Ed Park’s Personal Days (2008) and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007) – novelists place a premium on satirizing how shockingly little employees manage to get done in a day. At the center of their novels is the sheer emptiness of work—the fact not only that little gets done, but that one only remembers little about the little that does get done. …

The late David Foster Wallace blazed a lonely and unfinished path with The Pale King, with its sublime portrait of the tedious labor of IRS employees. Wallace seemed to want to redeem a publicly maligned bureaucracy, in much the way that the sheer bulk of his heavily worn research testified to the unexampled heroism of the writer, who could make literature out of boring materials. If a new politics and a new novel of work still remains to be found, it might be found here: in the still submerged mass of what we do and how we feel about it.