Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 7th, ’20

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March 7th, 2020




Copyright Lobby Calls Out Plex for Not Doing Enough to Stop Piracy

The media player is basically a free-for-all.
Ian Servantes

For those who don't want to dive fully into torrents, Plex is a great alternative for streaming television shows and movies for free. Officially, Plex is a "neutral" media player, and it first became popular with people looking to stream content between devices at home, like from their desktop in the study to their laptop in their bedroom. But, with Plex Media Server, users can also share media with other users to stream, creating a virtual free-for-all, and a serious problem from a copyright perspective.

CreativeFuture, a pro-copyright coalition boasting more than 560 members, has taken notice and is calling out the platform, along with rival service Kodi. "Thanks to a rapidly growing media application called Plex, torrent-based piracy is back in vogue, and better than ever (for criminals who have no problem with profiting from content that doesn't belong to them, that is)," the coalition writes in a blog post.

Pay to play — Those who pay $4.99 per month for Plex Pass are able to share their libraries with up to 100 users. As Creative Future points out, this isn't always done for the sake of altruism, or so family's can share their legally procured copies of Frozen. Some Plex users actually charge for access to their content — a more nefarious (though, granted, enterprising) evolution from the totally free world of torrenting. For extra sass, the shared content can be pirated to begin with.

The coalition points to the r/Plexshares subreddit as one of the major sources of this illegal enterprise, and even called out one user in particular for offering more than 3,400 movies, 6,000 episodes, and a dedicated kids' library for "$1/week, $3/month," or "$30/year PayPal or Credit Card."

Plex's stance — "Plex supports content creators and does not condone piracy," a spokesperson told The Verge last year in response to an exposé on the service. Plex's terms and services agreement specifies that users "may not take any action that will infringe on the intellectual property rights of Plex or any other third party." Plex has also entered into legitimate partnerships with the likes of MGM, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, and Tidal.

But CreativeFuture argues this isn't enough: "A sentence or two on a TOS page does not change the fact that all around the world, Plex subscribers are turning their personal media libraries into sharable streaming services and then profiting from content they do not own. In turning a blind eye to its piracy problem, Plex has joined the ranks of internet heavyweights who refuse to take responsibility for the criminal behavior on their platforms."

We get the feeling CreativeFuture isn't going to stop at a blog post.
https://www.inputmag.com/tech/copyri...-stop-pirating





'Free Netflix' Streaming App TeaTV is the Latest to Face Strict Clampdown

TEATV - a relatively new Netflix-streaming app that offers access to the latest Hollywood movies and must-binge shows without paying - is being targeted by the MPA in a series of takedown requests.
Aaron Brown

TeaTV is a popular app that enables users to stream TV shows and films without paying. Like any platform that enables viewers to access paid-for content for free – either by downloading or streaming – it's highly illegal.

Pirating not only means those behind your favourite shows and blockbusters aren't getting remunerated for their work – potentially leading to sequels being canned by the studio, but these platforms can also be a hotbed for malware and credit card scams.

Unsurprisingly, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA) has TeaTV in its sights. Available to download on Android, macOS and Windows 10 only for the time being – MPA is now targeting the underlying code that powers the application. Hosted on code repository GitHub, there are three different versions of the Netflix-style streaming app.

Free streaming of popular Hollywood hits is a pretty crowded marketplace – even torrent repository Pirate Bay has tried to enter the space, but TeaTV gained some traction towards the end of the year.

In the description of the Mac version of the TeaTV app, the creators of the software state: "Tea TV for Mac is the most favourite application in the market. The app is easy to use, with simple and elegant interface. You can search your favourite shows and movies from top right of the app.

"Even when you cannot clearly remember the shows/movies, the suggestion system immediately works to give you the most suitable choices. You only have to click onto the shows/ movies you love, choose one link between our 100+ links and enjoy the shows/movies."

In its appeal to GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft back in 2018 for an eye-watering $7.5 billion, the MPA brands TeaTV as "an app notoriously devoted to copyright infringement." According to records published by the trade association, which represents the five biggest movie studios in the United States as well as the video streaming service Netflix, it contacted GitHub about the TeaTV code in October and November 2019, as well as earlier this year, in January 2020.

“We previously provided you links to the Github repositories that TeaTV is using and are now providing you with the attached file titled ‘GitHub-Code’ which shows code hosted on Github that provides links to pirate sites with infringing copies of motion pictures and television shows that are scraped by the TeaTV app to provide access to the infringing content users are looking for,” the complaint, spotted by the team at piracy-centric blog TorrentFreak, reads.

Although four repositories previously highlighted in complaints by the MPA have now been taken down, the US organisation has now taken further action by demanding the deletion of repositories that carry executable files for the Android, Windows, and macOS app variants of TeaTV.
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style...-TV-Show-TeaTV





The Music Industry was Left for Dead a Few Years Ago. Now it's Booming Again
Frank Pallotta

The music industry was in crisis just a few years ago. Sales were cut in half from their peak as single downloads, YouTube and piracy made the CD album go virtually extinct. But music has found its white knight: streaming.

Last year, recorded music revenues in the United States went up by 13% to $11.1 billion — the highest level since 2006. That persuaded Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, two of the biggest music companies that represent stars like Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift, to announce plans to go public.

"The music industry today is healthier than it's been in more than a decade," Josh Friedlander, the senior vice president of research at the Recording Industry Association of America, told CNN Business. "Revenues from streaming services are more than offsetting decreases in physical sales and digital downloads."

Friedlander added "it's hard to overstate the impact streaming music has had on the music industry."

In 1999, the music industry was at its peak, bringing in more than $14.5 billion in domestic revenue. Most of that was thanks to CDs, which accounted for roughly 89% of that number, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

At the industry's low point in 2014, the music sales only brought in $6.7 billion domestically. Music downloads via iTunes and others had been growing for a decade, but that wasn't nearly enough to make up the ground loss by the erosion of consumers buying physical media.

After years of declines, the music industry began to rebound around 2016 thanks in large part to music streaming.

Music streaming — which includes paid streaming, ad-supported streaming and streaming radio — represented about 5% of the music industry's revenues in the US in 2009. In 2019, that number had grown to roughly 80%, according to the RIAA.

The format's surge in popularity makes sense since people love taking their music with them and streaming gives consumers access to pretty much all the music they would ever want, according to Larry Miller, the director of the music business program at NYU Steinhardt.

"Even in the 1990s we dreamed about a 'celestial jukebox' in which all the music would be available to everyone, everywhere," Miller told CNN Business.

Miller said that a lot of things had to occur to make that "celestial jukebox" a reality. Wireless high speed internet networks had to built, technology with smartphones and headphones had to improve, new music streaming services needed to be adopted by millions of people, and record companies had to license music to them.

Those services then had to persuade people to pay a monthly fee for music, even if they already owned songs and albums.

"Streaming is driving almost all the growth we've seen," he said. "In physical media, the CD business continues to decay toward oblivion and vinyl continues to grow... but the real story is the rapid growth of streaming."

With streaming propelling the industry, Warner Music and Universal Music believe it's the right time to go public, Serona Elton, the director of the music business program at the University of Miami's Frost School of Music, told CNN Business.

"We are in a Goldilocks Zone for music industry valuation," Elton said. "Consumers in the top revenue generating countries have finally embraced the idea of subscription streaming and the technology needed to enable it is finally in a mature state."

"When an industry is experiencing growth, especially a sexy industry like music, potential buyers want in," she said. "It is the right time to offer them a way to get in."

But streaming doesn't come without faults. Services have been criticized for not paying more to the artists and songwriters who create the music.

Warner Music filing to go public and Vivendi's plans for a Universal Music IPO in the next three years are signs of the music industry's state of good health. However, it also represents the industry's reliance on the future of streaming.

So the biggest question for the industry going forward is can streaming continue to grow? Warner Music is betting it can.

"The growth of streaming services has not only improved the discoverability and personalization of music, but has also increased consumer willingness to pay for seamless convenience and access," the company said in its regulatory filing. "We believe consumer adoption of paid streaming services still has significant potential for growth." (Warner Music did not have any further comment. Universal Music Group declined to comment.)

But, as Elton points out, if streaming revenue slows down, especially as quickly as it came on, then that may cause the music industry to falter once again.

"Music companies are well aware of these threats," she said. "And they seem to be doing much more to actively manage the risks than they did in the early days of digital piracy."

CNN Business' Jordan Valinsky contributed to this report
https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/28/media...ing/index.html





A Major New Intel Processor Flaw Could Defeat Encryption and DRM Protections

Security researchers claim it’s unfixable
Tom Warren

Security researchers are warning of a major new security flaw inside Intel processors, and it could defeat hardware-based encryption and DRM protections. The flaw exists at the hardware level of modern Intel processors released in the last five years, and could allow attackers to create special malware (like keyloggers) that runs at the hardware level and is undetectable by traditional antivirus systems. Intel’s latest 10th Gen processors are not vulnerable, though.

Security firm Positive Technologies discovered the flaw, and is warning that it could break apart a chain of trust for important technology like silicon-based encryption, hardware authentication, and modern DRM protections. “This vulnerability jeopardizes everything Intel has done to build the root of trust and lay a solid security foundation on the company’s platforms,” explains security researcher Mark Ermolov.

The root of the flaw is Intel’s Converged Security Management Engine (CSME), the part of Intel’s chips that’s responsible for securing all firmware that runs on Intel-powered machines. Intel has previously patched vulnerabilities in the CSME, but the researchers warn the CSME firmware is unprotected early on when a system boots so it’s still vulnerable to attacks.

“The problem is not only that it is impossible to fix firmware errors that are hard-coded in the Mask ROM of microprocessors and chipsets,” warns Ermolov. “The larger worry is that, because this vulnerability allows a compromise at the hardware level, it destroys the chain of trust for the platform as a whole.”

Successful attacks would require skill and in most cases physical access to a machine, but some could be performed by other malware bypassing OS-level protections to perform local attacks. This could lead to data from encrypted hard disks being decrypted, forged hardware IDs, and even the ability to extract digital content protected by DRM.

Intel has downplayed the new security vulnerability, noting it would likely require specialized hardware and physical access. “Intel was notified of a vulnerability potentially affecting the Intel Converged Security Management Engine in which an unauthorized user with specialized hardware and physical access may be able to execute arbitrary code within the Intel CSME subsystem on certain Intel products,” says an Intel spokesperson in a statement to Ars Technica. “Intel released mitigations and recommends keeping systems up-to-date. Additional guidance specific to CVE-2019-0090 can be found here.”

Positive Technologies plans to “provide more technical details” in a white paper that’s due to be published soon, which will allow other security researchers to dig deeper into the findings. “Intel understands they cannot fix the vulnerability in the ROM of existing hardware. So they are trying to block all possible exploitation vectors,” explains Ermolov. “We think there might be many ways to exploit this vulnerability in ROM. Some of them might require local access; others need physical access.”

Intel has been struggling with its processor security flaws recently. The initial discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities back in January 2018 led to additional flaws. Researchers warned that variants and other consequences of the bug would appear for years to come, and we’re still seeing the repercussions more than two years later. Intel has attempted to mitigate most flaws with patches, but only newer processors will escape these vulnerabilities thanks to new security designs.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21...-vulnerability





Struggling AT&T Plans “Tens of Billions” in Cost Cuts, More Layoffs

AT&T also de-emphasizing DirecTV except in areas without fast broadband.
Jon Brodkin

AT&T is planning tens of billions of dollars worth of cost cuts, AT&T President and COO John Stankey told investors yesterday. Stankey also discussed the future of DirecTV satellite service, saying it won't be the primary TV option AT&T pitches to most customers going forward.

For the company-wide cuts, AT&T management "has looked at effectively 10 broad initiatives that we believe can generate double digits of billions over a 3-year planning cycle," Stankey said at a Morgan Stanley conference, according to a transcript posted by AT&T.

One of the first of those 10 initiatives will include job cuts, which Stankey called "headcount rationalization." Stankey noted that AT&T has already been cutting jobs but said the company plans "additional work" in that area:

In the near term, things that fall in that short-term bucket, I already talked to you about some of them, some of the headcount-rationalization work we're doing on overhead, some of the benefit restructuring that we've done that we've already communicated out that get us a good way to some of our objectives this year. We have some additional work we can do in that area. We have some short-term opportunities on how we deal with third-party costs, supplier costs that we'll be pushing on. We have some near-term opportunities in our call-center structure that we're working on.

Longer-term cost cutting would start paying off after about two years, Stankey said. That will include "IT rationalization and architecture rationalization, turning down applications, movement to the cloud, getting cost efficiencies in our very, very broad infrastructure, some of that facilitated by portfolio rationalization." AT&T is also looking at ways to reduce electricity costs and a "billing and credit collections rationalization," Stankey said.

AT&T slashed network spending

As we previously reported, AT&T slashed capital expenditures by more than $1.6 billion in 2019 and projects a capital-investment cut of more than $3 billion in 2020. AT&T also reduced its employee count from 268,220 to 247,800 in 2019, despite promising to use a tax cut to create new jobs.

AT&T reported $181.2 billion in revenue and net income of $13.9 billion in full-year 2019. AT&T is trying to reduce its massive debt load, which stood at $163.1 billion total and $151.3 billion in long-term debt at the end of 2019.
Future of DirecTV satellite

AT&T's TV business has been cratering, losing more than 4 million subscribers across its satellite, wireline, and linear streaming-TV services in 2019 alone.

As AT&T shifts toward online-only services like AT&T TV, it is de-emphasizing the satellite service despite spending $48.5 billion to buy DirecTV in 2015. Stankey said yesterday that the future of TV is in software, not satellites, and that DirecTV will primarily be relevant in places without fast broadband:

Our software products are our lead products. Our products, our video product, bundled with broadband, is where we are most focused in what is our lead in the market today. We will continue to offer satellite and DirecTV where it has a rightful place in the market, places where cable broadband is not prevalent, oftentimes more rural or less dense suburban areas. We'll continue to offer it for customers on a stand-alone basis, who find its superior content offering to be something that they wish to have. But in terms of our marketing muscle and our momentum in the market, it will be about software-driven pay-TV packages.

AT&T purchased DirecTV because "we like the DirecTV customer base, thought it was attractive," Stankey said. But "shortly after that [acquisition], we made it clear that we would be developing a software platform that would ultimately not only take our satellite base and offer them a more updated product, but be the replacement for the U-verse [wireline TV service]," he said.

In addition to AT&T TV, which combines the convenience of online streaming with the contracts, hidden fees, and huge price increases of cable, AT&T is hoping the forthcoming HBO Max service will help put its video business on the right track.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...-more-layoffs/





Why the Success of The New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism

In his debut, our new media columnist says The Times has become like Facebook or Google — a digital behemoth crowding out the competition.
Ben Smith

The first time I met A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, I tried to hire him.

That was back in the heady days of digital media in 2014, and I was at BuzzFeed News, one of a handful of start-ups preparing to sweep aside dying legacy outlets like The Times.

Times stock was still sputtering, and the company had sold off everything but its furniture to keep paying for journalism.

Mr. Sulzberger, then the heir apparent to lead The Times, politely declined my offer. And today, after eight years as BuzzFeed editor in chief, I find myself in his employ as the new media columnist.

I’m stepping into the space opened a decade ago by David Carr, the late columnist who chronicled an explosion of new online outlets. My focus will probably be the opposite: The consolidation of everything from movies to news, as the media industry gets hollowed out by the same rich-get-richer, winner-take-all forces that have reshaped businesses from airlines to pharmaceuticals.

And the story of consolidation in media is a story about The Times itself.

The gulf between The Times and the rest of the industry is vast and keeps growing: The company now has more digital subscribers than The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the 250 local Gannett papers combined, according to the most recent data. And The Times employs 1,700 journalists — a huge number in an industry where total employment nationally has fallen to somewhere between 20,000 and 38,000.

The Times so dominates the news business that it has absorbed many of the people who once threatened it: The former top editors of Gawker, Recode, and Quartz are all at The Times, as are many of the reporters who first made Politico a must-read in Washington.

I spent my whole career competing against The Times, so coming to work here feels a bit like giving in. And I worry that the success of The Times is crowding out the competition.

“The New York Times is going to basically be a monopoly,” predicted Jim VandeHei, the founder of Axios, which started in 2016 with plans to sell digital subscriptions but has yet to do so. “The Times will get bigger and the niche will get nichier, and nothing else will survive.”

Janice Min, the former Us Weekly editor who reinvented The Hollywood Reporter, said The Times’s broadening content mix posed a formidable obstacle for other digital subscription businesses.

“Because we’re talking about the publishing business, it’s all still kind of sad, but in this parallel universe people talk about The New York Times in the way people in Hollywood talk about Netflix,” Ms. Min said. “It’s the tail that wags the dog, and it’s also the dog.”

The rise of The Times from wounded giant to reigning colossus has been as breathtaking as that of any start-up. As recently as 2014, print advertising was collapsing and the idea that subscribers would pay enough to support the company’s expensive global news gathering seemed like a pipe dream.

“We sold off every bit of the company we could sell off to hold our journalism investment as flat as humanly possible,” Mr. Sulzberger, who became publisher in 2018, told me in an interview last week. “All the smart people in media thought it was crazy, all our shareholders thought it was financially irresponsible.”

Just a few years later, amid a deepening crisis in American journalism, and a sustained attack from the president of the United States, Times stock has rebounded to nearly triple what it was in 2014 and the newsroom has added 400 employees. The starting salary for most reporters is $104,600.

The paper is now quietly shopping for dominance in an adjacent industry: audio. The Times is in exclusive talks to acquire Serial Productions, the breakthrough podcast studio that has attracted more than 300 million downloads.

The purchase requires deep pockets: Serial was for sale at a valuation of about $75 million, according to two people who were briefed on the deal, though The Times is expected to pay significantly less. (The Wall Street Journal first reported last month that Serial was for sale.)

The deal, along with The Daily, the popular weekday podcast at The Times, could form the basis for an ambitious new paid product — like the company’s Cooking and Crossword apps — that executives believe could become the HBO of podcasts.

When I spoke to Mr. Sulzberger last week, I was reminded of other figures in this digital economy who have experienced success at dizzying scale and speed, and still cannot believe it when you mention the word “monopoly.”

He sees plenty of competition for The Times — he cited cable news, though its own future is uncertain. What’s more, he says, Americans will buy more than one news subscription. He believes The Times is not dominating the market so much as creating one.

“What I actually think you’re seeing is not a winner-take-all dynamic — what you’re actually seeing is a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats dynamism,” said Mr. Sulzberger (who no doubt would have flourished in that midlevel product job I offered him).

His optimism is shared, at least publicly, by the small handful of news organizations that are scraping by on local subscriptions.

“The Times has shown the rest of the industry a path to some success,” said Brian McGrory, editor of The Boston Globe, which has attracted more than 100,000 digital subscribers.

Times executives say they are also looking for a way to help out their weaker cousins, given the threat that the collapse of local journalism poses to democracy.

“But as they say in the airplanes, put your own oxygen mask on first before you start to help others,” said Mark Thompson, the newspaper’s chief executive.

Because The Times now overshadows so much of the industry, the cultural and ideological battles that used to break out between news organizations — like whether to say that President Trump lied — now play out inside The Times.

And The Times has swallowed so much of what was once called new media that the paper can read as an uneasy competition of dueling traditions: The Style section is a more polished Gawker, while the opinion pages reflect the best and worst of The Atlantic’s provocations. The magazine publishes bold arguments about race and American history, and the campaign coverage channels Politico’s scoopy aggression.

I’m proud to be leaving BuzzFeed News as one of a handful of strong, independent newsrooms still standing amid the rubble of consolidation. But I miss the wide open moment 10 years ago, when we were among a wave of new players reimagining what news meant.
My job as columnist here will be an exciting and uncomfortable one — covering this new media age from inside one of its titans (though I hope you’ll tell me if I ever get too far inside).

And I hope that earlier era of innovation didn’t exist merely to create a farm team and some lessons for the newspaper equivalent of the 1927 Yankees.

“The moat is so wide now that I can’t see anyone getting into it,” Josh Tyrangiel, former senior vice president of news at Vice who is now producing television and documentaries, said in an interview. “There’s no new thing coming. And the editor of BuzzFeed News, who was probably the chief insurgent, is now writing this column for you at The New York Times.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/b...ers-local.html





Column: What’s Wrong with the New York Times? Don’t Ask its New Media Critic
Mary McNamara

The New York Times just debuted its new media critic, Ben Smith, with the headline “Why the Success of the Times May Be Bad News for Journalism” and I for one am very worried.

Not for journalism, for the New York Times.

It’s certainly a provocative headline — Ben Smith, most recently editor of the news site BuzzFeed, has just joined the staff of the New York Times and his first column is a criticism of his new employer?!? How counterintuitive! How courageous! Even “Morning Joe” was impressed enough to ask if Smith had managed to get fired on his very first day.

Why, it might even be considered a “hot take,” if Smith was not so famously anti-hot-take that he once pulled two columns from BuzzFeed because, as he said in a Tweet, “We are trying not to do hot takes.” (After near-universal outrage — both posts were critical of BuzzFeed advertisers — Smith apologized, reinstated the posts and later admitted he had bowed to advertiser pressure.)

Hot, his new media take might have been. Courageous, however, not so much. “Isn’t it terrible that we’re so amazing no one else can even hope to compete?” is not a promising start for a media commentator.

After introducing himself via ironic meet-cute — at BuzzFeed, Smith was once so sure that he was part of a digital emergence that would “sweep aside dying legacy outlets like the Times” that he offered now NYT publisher A.G. Sulzberger a job — Smith says he will be focusing on the “consolidation of everything” including that of journalism by the NY Times.

By which he means that the NY Times has done such an admirable job of transitioning from print to digital and other forms of journalism that it now dominates the journalistic landscape. So much so that it has “absorbed many of the people who once threatened it,” including editors and reporters from Gawker, Recode, Quartz, Politico.

And, of course, BuzzFeed.

Smith goes on to describe the NY Times’ “recent” success in many ways for many paragraphs, one of which actually describes the paper as rising “from wounded giant to reigning colossus.” Clearly, the NY Times puts journalism at risk because honestly, there is only so much self-congratulatory hyperbole a news organization can take.

No, wait, the NY Times puts journalism at risk because it may buy the podcast studio Serial Productions, potentially making it “the HBO of podcasts.” Or maybe it puts journalism at risk because even though the NY Times has (coughs self-deprecatingly) “more digital subscribers than the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the 250 local Gannett papers combined,” [ital his] it can’t hire all the journalists put out of work because … NY Times reporters start at more than a hundred grand a year? (Which is not that much when you consider the level of experience required to work at a reigning colossus.)

Actually I am not clear why, exactly, Smith seems to think the success of the NY Times makes it journalism’s Death Star because he never bothers to explain. Having been a journalist myself for lo these past 30-odd years, I have a few notions of what constitutes bad news for journalism, including but not limited to: the rising cost of paper; the precipitous decline of print advertising; the inability to build a sustainable advertising-based digital model; the creation of profit-driven, 24-hour cable news networks and then the politicizing of same; the power of search engines; the spread of digital and social media platforms; the ubiquity of smartphones; and the growing suspicion among consumers, including and especially our president, that members of the media are inherently biased. Oh, and no more classified ads.

All of that has led to the shuttering and downsizing of many fine news organizations, which does indeed, as Smith says, pose a threat to democracy, both politically and culturally.

But the ability of the NY Times to find paths to relative success despite the obstacles all news organizations face does not make it one of those obstacles. Would it be good for journalism if it had not?

Having watched the Los Angeles Times chipped, chiseled and then sledgehammered by market forces and owners who were, at best, hideously irresponsible, only to have it recently saved at the 11th hour by a local billionaire, I know that digital disruption is real and very scary.

I also know that even at legacy journalism’s darkest hour, no sentient being thought BuzzFeed was going to sweep aside the NY Times.

Deservedly, and occasionally not, the NY Times has long been the newspaper to beat. It has always cherry-picked from its competitors, and its rock-solid reputation has allowed it to survive scandal (Jayson Blair), mistakes (those weapons of mass destruction) and myopia (don’t get me started on its many near-fictitious depictions of Los Angeles) that would have felled or deeply wounded other news organizations.

That it is succeeding in this time of transition while others fail or continue to struggle is not surprising, it’s reassuring.

Granting a few news sources outsized influence has its dangers, of course, even in the best of times (see, please, the war in Iraq). But Smith does not analyze the perils of pride, which include the time-honored belief that the northeast corridor is the center of the universe, or even the more philosophical difficulties of seeking “domination” in a profession that purports to support the common good. At some point, one hopes that Americans will tire of having every state that was not an original colony described in ways that defy reality and subscribe to or resurrect their local paper/website (hint: If you think the media is too East Coast elite, subscribe to or watch outlets originating in other places).

But Smith does not even touch on that. Nor does he offer any examples of how the “reigning colossus” has harmed journalism, either through reportorial misadventure or omission, or how its “uneasy competition of dueling traditions” has damaged the culture.
I myself can think of several specific examples, but I don’t think any of them pose an existential threat to journalism itself, and who am I to do Smith’s job for him? (I’m also very curious about what exactly “Times executives” mean when they say they are “looking for a way to help out their weaker cousins” and if any of my fellow journalists would pay, say, 20 bucks for a T-shirt saying, “Do I look like a weaker cousin?” DM me if so.)

More important, having raised what he considers a problem, Smith does not offer a solution or even a way forward. Is the NY Times supposed to stop growing? Should it buy that “small handful of news organizations scraping by on local subscriptions”? Or is “NY Times ruins journalism” just a done deal, until, of course, AT&T sues for use of “the HBO of podcasts.”

Certainly nowhere in his column does Smith suggest that readers should stop reading him or even augment their worldview by subscribing to another outlet in addition to the NY Times. Which actually would have been a very cool thing for him to do. Instead, under the guise of analysis, Smith praises his new employer in prose as breathless as an “omg you’re so stunning I hate you” Instagram reply.

The column itself, however, does support the headline. If this is what passes for media analysis, then success of the New York Times may be bad news for journalism indeed.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainmen...w-media-critic





Contagion Shows the Lengths People go to Watch a Movie they Can’t Stream

Why a 2011 movie is suddenly being downloaded and rented worldwide
Julia Alexander

In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film about a pandemic, Contagion, is seeing a spike in viewing. The problem is that Contagion isn’t streaming anywhere — especially in the United States — leading to an increase in rentals on iTunes and torrent downloads.

The Verge partnered with TorrentFreak to examine the rise of people downloading Contagion between January 1st and March 4th. The data is estimated by looking at IP addresses that share the movie, according to TorrentFreak’s site editor Ernesto. Analysts look at torrent tracker data, “which is public and broadcasts downloading IP addresses,” he told The Verge. The data isn’t complete or exact, but torrent statistics never are. Think of them as close estimates.

There are four instances of Contagion downloads spiking between the end of January and early March. Each increase in downloads, varying from a couple of hundred to nearly 20,000, is timed to a major news event in the spread of the new disease. Prior to January 24th, Contagion was seeing a couple of hundred downloads a day. On January 25th, it jumped to over 1,500. By January 29th, when news began circulating that the new coronavirus had touched down in the United States, it was over 18,000 downloads.

The movie was initially most popular in South Korea, one of the most severely affected countries, but its popularity has since been overtaken by the US, according to Ernesto. “These download figures only apply to torrents, which are a small fraction of the piracy landscape,” Ernesto told The Verge.

This coronavirus has become an increasingly urgent crisis over recent months. Over 100,000 COVID-19 (the disease caused by the novel coronavirus) cases have been reported worldwide; more than 3,400 people have died, with the vast majority of cases and deaths still in China. Fears over the virus spreading have led organizers of massive tech conferences, including Google I/O, Facebook’s F8, and the annual Game Developers Conference, to cancel or postpone the events. Schools are closing, and offices are asking employees to work from home — making any activity driven by a computer, phone, or TV increasingly more appealing. Like, watching movies.

At the same time that people are torrenting the film, Contagion also jumped up the ranks of iTunes downloads around the world. It’s on the top 10 list in countries like Australia and landing on the top 20 in several more, including the United States. As BuzzFeed reported earlier this week, prior to the new coronavirus outbreak, it wasn’t even in the top 100.

“The similarities between our contagion and the coronavirus are immaterial, accidental, and really not that important,” Contagion writer Scott Z. Burns told Fortune recently. “What is more important and accurate is the societal response and the spread of fear and the knock-on effects of that. That is proving to be accurate.”

Rentals and torrent downloads are also increasing in part because Contagion isn’t available via any of the popular subscription streaming services in the United States. Only those with access to Cinemax — a premium network that is available as an add-on to a few streaming services including Hulu and Amazon’s Prime Channels — can access the movie. While there is a streaming service for Cinemax, called Max Go, it’s not as widely used as Netflix or Hulu. It’s more like HBO Now; to compare, HBO Now has approximately 8 million subscribers, while Hulu has just over 30 million and Netflix has more than 167 million worldwide.

Although Contagion was reportedly available on Netflix and other in other countries recently, it’s disappeared from many. As a result, people have to turn to Amazon and iTunes for rental options or downloading. There’s also an argument that many of the people downloading would use Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video to stream the movie via their monthly subscriptions if the option were there; “pirates” tend to spend the most on legal content, according to a 2018 study reported by Motherboard.

The big question is if Contagion were available to stream via Netflix, would it mean that suddenly everyone with a Netflix subscription would watch it? That depends. Streaming services like Netflix spend years working on the recommendation algorithm that leads to what appears on our homepages. These streaming services also tend to push original content over licensed titles. Using Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu as examples, look at the homepage when you open the app. The top carousel spot is reserved for their new big TV show or movie, and scrolling down the page prompts other originals the streamers want people to watch. The streamers aren’t just distributors anymore; they’re networks. Original content earns precedence.

Think of Pandemic, a new docuseries from Netflix about how to prevent a global outbreak. Despite it being an original and something Netflix could heavily promote, it never appeared on my homepage. I don’t watch many documentaries, and I definitely don’t watch anything medical. Even my intake of scientific series and films is low. Therefore, it’s not recommended to me. Other Originals that match my interests are instead. Netflix runs hundreds of A/B tests every year, all in an attempt to match content with people’s interests based on what they watch.

It’s because of this recommendation system that Netflix has started to try to generate conversation about what the majority of its subscribers are watching in each country where it’s available. Netflix rolled out its “Top 10” list in the United States a couple of weeks ago, after testing in the United Kingdom, and plans to enter more countries soon. Those titles are based on subscribers watching at least two minutes of a show or movie (the same data Netflix uses for its metrics). Overwhelmingly, the majority of the Top 10 lists tend to be Netflix Originals. Would Contagion make the Top 10 if it were on Netflix? Possibly, but it’s not certain.

Still, take a glance at recent Google Trends data for Contagion, looking at the past 90 days. The interest is skyrocketing, and the ninth most searched query after just the movie title is “where to watch Contagion?” The 19th, 20th, and 21st queries are “Contagion Netflix,” at the time of this writing. A number of other search queries include “Contagion full movie” and “Contagion full movie download free.”

People want to watch Contagion, and they want to use the streaming services they subscribe to, but without those options, they’re forced to look into rental options and downloading. Netflix executives have publicly said they plan to invest way more in original content instead of acquiring more licensed movies, but one has to imagine that they’re kicking themselves for not bidding on this now.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/7/21...nt-coronavirus

















Until next week,

- js.



















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