Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 17th, ’23

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002































June 17th, 2023




2 Men Who Helped Run Popular Pirating Website Megaupload Sentenced to Prison in New Zealand
Nick Perry

Two men who helped run the once wildly popular pirating website Megaupload were each sentenced by a New Zealand court on Thursday to more than two years in prison.

The sentencing of Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk ended an 11-year legal battle by the men to avoid extradition to the United States on more serious charges that included racketeering.

The men last year struck a deal with prosecutors from New Zealand and the U.S. in which they pleaded guilty to being part of a criminal group and causing artists to lose money by deception.

Meanwhile Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, is continuing to fight the U.S. charges and threat of extradition. He has said he expects his former colleagues to testify against him as part of the deal they struck.

U.S. prosecutors say Megaupload raked in at least $175 million — mainly from people who used the site to illegally download songs, television shows and movies -— before the FBI shut it down in early 2012 and arrested Dotcom and other company officers.

Ortmann was sentenced to 2 years and 7 months while van der Kolk was sentenced to 2 years and 6 months. Each had faced a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison but argued they should be allowed to serve their sentences in home detention.

New Zealand Judge Sally Fitzgerald made the unusual decision to allow both men to delay serving their sentences until August on humanitarian grounds because Ortmann is expecting the birth of a child and van der Kolk’s mother is ill, news website Stuff reported.

Fitzgerald said that while the victims of Megaupload included wealthy multinational film and music companies, they also included small companies like a New Zealand software firm, Stuff reported.

Dotcom tweeted Thursday that the sentences amounted to a slap on the wrist and showed the desperation of U.S. prosecutors in the case. He said he’s been advised the men will be eligible for parole after 10 months.

“They will serve less than a year instead of the 185 years we were charged with,” Dotcom tweeted. “Good for them.”

After their 2012 arrest, Dotcom and the other two men set up a legitimate cloud-storage website called Mega. Dotcom soon sold his stake in the company and had a falling out with the other men.

Lawyers for Dotcom and the other men had long argued that if anybody was guilty in the case, it was the users of the Megaupload site who chose to pirate material, not the founders. But prosecutors argued the men were the architects of a vast criminal enterprise.

U.S. prosecutors had earlier sought the extradition of a fourth officer of the company, Finn Batato, who was also arrested in New Zealand in 2012. Batato returned to Germany, where he died last year from cancer.

In 2015, Megaupload computer programmer Andrus Nomm of Estonia pleaded guilty in the case to conspiring to commit felony copyright infringement and was sentenced to one year and one day in U.S. federal prison.

New Zealand’s Supreme Court has ruled that Dotcom can be extradited to the U.S. But New Zealand’s justice minister has yet to make a final decision on whether the extradition will go ahead. That decision could be appealed, taking still more time in the slow-moving New Zealand legal system.
https://apnews.com/article/new-zeala...711e818d6400f5





China Plans New Rules to Regulate File Sharing Services Like Airdrop and Bluetooth

Under the proposal, service providers would have to prevent the dissemination of harmful and illegal information, save records and report their discoveries
Rachel Cheung

China is planning to restrict and scrutinise the use of wireless filesharing services between mobile devices, such as airdrop and Bluetooth, after they were used by protesters to evade censorship and spread protest messages.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s top internet regulator, has released draft regulations on “close-range mesh network services” and launched a month-long public consultation on Tuesday.

Under the proposed rules, service providers would have to prevent the dissemination of harmful and illegal information, save relevant records and report their discovery to regulators.

Service providers would also have to provide data and technical assistance to the relevant authorities, including internet regulators and the police, when they conduct inspections. Users must also register with their real names.

In addition, features and technologies that have the capability to mobilise public opinion must undergo a security assessment before they could be introduced.

“The new draft regulations would bring airdrop and similar services firmly into China’s online content control apparatus,” Tom Nunlist, a senior analyst at the consulting firm Trivium China, told the Guardian.

Google’s Android and other Chinese phone manufacturers, such as Xiaomi and Oppo, also offer similar functions that are compatible among their own devices.

But Apple, in particular, came under the spotlight after some Chinese protesters used airdrop in 2022 to bypass surveillance and circulate messages critical of the regime by sending them to strangers on public transport. The tool was a relatively untraceable method for sharing files in China, where most social media and messaging platforms are tightly monitored.

Shortly later, Apple limited the use of airdrop on iPhones in China, allowing Chinese users to receive files from non-contacts for only ten minutes at a time.

The proposed rules will take control of similar functions up a notch, requiring the receiving of files and preview of thumbnails to be disabled by default.

“It is mainly about cybersecurity, and the core aim is to ensure all the information transmission can be traced in case problematic things happen,” Gao Fuping, a law professor at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, told the South China Morning Post.

“Apple has faced criticism in the past for its compliance practices in China,” Nunlist, the senior analyst, added. “Implementation of airdrop controls could easily lead to blowback at home in the US.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-and-bluetooth





Netflix Password Crackdown Drives U.S. Sign-Ups to Highest Levels in at Least Four Years: Researcher
Todd Spangler

At least initially, Netflix’s broad password crackdown appears to be producing the streamer’s desired results in converting freeloaders into paying customers in the U.S., according to early data from research company Antenna.

On May 23, Netflix began notifying U.S. customers that users on their accounts who live outside their households would need to be added as an “extra member” (or get their own subscriptions). Since then, Netflix has had the four single largest days of U.S. user sign-ups since January 2019, when Antenna first began tracking the metric.

Based on the most current Antenna data available, Netflix average daily sign-ups reached 73,000 from May 25-28, a 102% increase from the prior 60-day average. That was more than the spikes in subscriber sign-ups Antenna recorded during the initial U.S. COVID-19 lockdowns in March and April 2020.

Netflix U.S. cancelations also increased over May 25-28 — a phenomenon the company told investors it expected — but those were less than the number of sign-ups, according to Antenna. The ratio of sign-ups to cancelations since May 23 increased 25.6% compared with the previous 60-day period.

In the U.S., Netflix has told customers they must buy an “extra member” at an additional $7.99/month for anyone who doesn’t live with them that currently uses their account. The streamer has said it will start blocking devices that attempt to access a Netflix account without having legitimate account access.

According to New York-based Antenna, its estimates are based on millions of permission-based, consumer opt-in, raw transaction records, which are sourced “from a variety of data collection partners.” The data includes online purchase receipts, credit, debit and banking data, and “bill-scrape data.”

Amid widespread global economic uncertainty, “our view is that [Netflix] should be able to deliver solid subscriber and financial results by better monetizing the 100M+ households that use NFLX product (via password sharing) but do not (currently) pay for it via higher ARPU and/or conversion to pay subscribers,” Pivotal Research Group analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczak wrote in a note Friday.

Netflix is “the world’s clearly dominant streaming video player,” according to Wlodarczak, with “strong medium/long term growth that is not properly reflected in the current valuation.” He noted that the company’s recently introduced ad-supported plan, which Netflix said had attracted nearly 5 million subs in the first six months, also should contribute to better results. “Importantly, [Netflix], unlike its streaming peers, has demonstrated massive scale economies which is evidenced by the major ramp in free cash flow in ’22/’23, a trend we expect to continue ‘24+.”

Pivotal Research raised its year-end 2023 target on Netflix’s stock from $425/share to a Wall Street high $535/share, mostly driven by an increase in estimated EBITDA (forecast to grow at a CAGR of 20% through 2027) and to a “lesser extent the effects of increases in our free cash flow expectations in ’23 and beyond.”
https://variety.com/2023/digital/new...ta-1235638587/





The Binge Purge TV’s Streaming Model is Broken. It’s Also Not Going Away. For Hollywood, Figuring that Out Will be a Horror Show.
Josef Adalian and Lane Brown

If you call a slew of Hollywood’s most powerful showrunners, studio chiefs, agents, and operators and ask them to describe the state of the television business, they will say things like:

“This is the single worst time to be making anything in the history of the medium. It’s just as dark as it’s ever been.”


“It’s such a fucking disaster, isn’t it?”


“It’s like the entire system has snapped.”


“These companies took what was an extraordinarily successful economic model and they destroyed it in favor of a model that may or may not work — but almost certainly won’t work as well as the old model.”


“Everything became big tech — the Amazon model of ‘We don’t actually have to make money; we just have to show shareholder growth.’ Everyone said, ‘Great. That seems like the thing to do.’ Which essentially was like, ‘Let’s all commit ritual suicide. Let’s take one of the truly successful money-printing inventions in the history of the modern world — which was the carriage system with cable television — and let’s just end it and reinvent ourselves as tech companies, where we pour billions down the drain in pursuit of a return that is completely speculative, still, this many years into it.’”


“The reason nobody really wants to open the books on this is because if Wall Street got a look, they’d have a collective stroke.”


“Where’s my Alias? Where’s my West Wing? Where’s my 24? Where’s my Ally McBeal, Once and Again, and Brothers & Sisters? I have a friend who works at Netflix, and for years I’ve been asking, ‘When are all of you streamers going to get your prestige heads out of your asses?’”


“We’ve invited all these fancy artists into the medium, and they look at it like art, not a job.”


“People are getting fucked. By the way, there’s a real social-progressive way to look at that, which nobody talks about, which is that the people who’ve gotten pushed out of the Hollywood economy generally are older white men. Because now they’re competing with younger people and women and people of color that they never had to compete with before. And it hurts.”


“The industry went a little crazy, and there’s going to be some pain in it righting itself, but I actually think it’s going to get to what hopefully will be more normal and livable, the place where we should have been the whole time.”


“I think we may be in the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme.”

It’s been a little more than a year since the Great Netflix Freak-out, when the streaming pioneer’s first-ever loss of subscribers and ensuing stock drop sparked overdramatic proclamations that TV as we’d come to know it was finished. In that time, it’s become clear that the business model dominating modern Hollywood is deeply broken but also that it probably isn’t going anywhere — at least not yet.

Across the town, there’s despair and creative destruction and all sorts of countervailing indicators. Certain shows that were enthusiastically green-lit two years ago probably wouldn’t be made now. Yet there are still streamers burning mountains of cash to entertain audiences that already have too much to watch. Netflix has tightened the screws and recovered somewhat, but the inarguable consensus is that there is still a great deal of pain to come as the industry cuts back, consolidates, and fumbles toward a more functional economic framework. The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood’s labor unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming’s busted math. There may be no problem more foundational than the way the system monetizes its biggest hits: It doesn’t.

Just ask Shawn Ryan. In April, the veteran TV producer’s latest show, the spy thriller The Night Agent, became the fifth-most-watched English-language original series in Netflix’s history, generating 627 million viewing hours in its first four weeks. As it climbed to the heights of such platform-defining smashes as Stranger Things and Bridgerton, Ryan wondered how The Night Agent’s success might be reflected in his compensation.

“I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl — it’s like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, ‘What does that mean?’” recalls Ryan. As it turns out, not much. “In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I’ll get a little bonus when season two gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I’m going out and buying a private jet, you’re way, way off.”

Ryan says he’ll probably make less money from The Night Agent than he did from The Shield, the cop drama he created in 2002, even though the latter ran on the then-nascent cable channel FX and never delivered Super Bowl numbers. “The promise was that if you made the company billions, you were going to get a lot of millions,” he says. “That promise has gone away.”

Nobody is crying for Ryan, of course, and he wouldn’t want them to. (“I’m not complaining!” he says. “I’m not unaware of my position relative to most people financially.”) But he has a point. Once, in a more rational time, there was a direct relationship between the number of people who watched a show and the number of jets its creator could buy. More viewers meant higher ad rates, and the biggest hits could be sold to syndication and international markets. The people behind those hits got a cut, which is why the duo who invented Friends probably haven’t flown commercial since the 1990s. Streaming shows, in contrast, have fewer ads (or none at all) and are typically confined to their original platforms forever. For the people who make TV, the connection between ratings and reward has been severed.

So who is getting rich off hits like The Night Agent? Not streaming services, no matter how many global viewing hours they accumulate. Many streamers have spent themselves into billions of dollars of debt building their content libraries, and subscription fees haven’t grown fast enough to close the gap. If platforms like Netflix make any money at all, it is only a fraction of what entertainment companies used to make back when more than 105 million U.S. households spent an average of $75 per month on cable.

“The entire industry,” says the director Steven Soderbergh, who has been navigating structural changes in Hollywood since 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, “has moved from a world of Newtonian economics into a world of quantum economics, where two things that seem to be in opposition can be true at the same time: You can have a massive hit on your platform, but it’s not actually doing anything to increase your platform’s revenue. It’s absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business.”

Like cryptocurrency, which has created massive on-paper fortunes built atop 1 + 1 = 3 arithmetic, streaming TV has always seemed too good to be true but seduced a lot of smart people anyway. Over the past decade, Hollywood completely reorganized itself around the digital model, as once-mighty networks and studios turned themselves into apps and abandoned reliable income streams hoping larger ones would materialize. They tripled their output, overpaid Oscar winners to debase themselves in miniseries, and hired all of your friends to work in writers’ rooms. Viewers across every niche and taste cluster were inundated with more bespoke programming than they could ever realistically consume.

We knew it couldn’t last, and it didn’t. Amid much lip service to fiscal responsibility, streamers have signaled plans to make fewer shows — a dramatic shift considering that the number of original scripted series had exploded from 210 in 2009 to 599 in 2022. We’ll still have enough to watch, at least for a while; billions will still be spent, and Ted Sarandos alone claims to have enough Netflix content stockpiled to last through the strike and beyond.

But for a certain type of viewer — imagine someone in her 30s or 40s who has never in her adult life had to worry about where her next critically acclaimed dramedy would come from — something already feels like it’s ending. Peak TV, as one of the industry’s most powerful tastemakers wearily puts it, “was a brief but intense mania that led to too much television.”

If you’re wondering whom to blame for TV’s predicament, that’s easy: It was Netflix. “Netflix completely revolutionized a 100-year-old industry,” says Mike Schur, who created The Good Place. “Everything changed, and everything changed the way they changed it.” In 2013, Netflix released the entire first season of House of Cards on the same day, overthrowing the time-honored orderliness of weekly schedules and giving viewers a brand-new way to spend 13 consecutive hours. Then the company embarked on what was probably the biggest spending spree in entertainment history. Wall Street treated Netflix not like the next HBO but more like the next Tesla, ignoring the profit factor to focus on growth.

“We all saw Netflix’s market cap go from $20 billion to $60 billion to $100 billion,” says someone who was then an executive at a legacy TV company. “The unspoken thing was that this will all be accretive to valuation: ‘I may not be running a profitable business, but boy, is it going to add stock value!’” He eventually went to work for a streamer.

Everyone bowed to what felt like the inevitable — even the most storied brand in entertainment. In 2017, Disney CEO Bob Iger told investors that he would pull his company’s movies and shows from Netflix, ending a lucrative licensing deal, to start its own streaming service. AT&T (which then owned HBO and Warner Bros.) and Comcast (which owns NBCUniversal) did the same. They willingly sacrificed hundreds of millions in revenue at the same time they were burning billions to make shows for their new apps. Apple got in, too, and Amazon dramatically upped its commitment to Prime Video when Jeff Bezos paid a quarter of a billion dollars for the rights to adapt The Lord of the Rings. (Actually making the show would cost even more.) “The entire industry was spending money with no regard to making money,” says an executive who helped launch a Netflix rival.

It’s absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business.

It’s easy to see this now as self-immolation, but at the time, investors rewarded the spending as an investment in the future and a hedge against the trend of cord-cutting. Disney’s share price — which had been trading in the $100 range when the company announced its streaming strategy — flirted with $150 in the weeks after Disney+’s launch. COVID further juiced the value of companies whose primary market is serving shut-ins. Netflix added 36.6 million subscribers in 2020 — its biggest annual gain ever — and Disney+ did even better, finishing its first full year of operations with 86.8 million customers. Iger retired on the last day of 2021. All that was missing was a MISSION: ACCOMPLISHED banner.

The first sign of trouble came the very next month with a ten-word aside in a Netflix shareholder letter: “This added competition may be affecting our marginal growth some.” Investors began to bail. In April 2022, when the company announced that it had lost subscribers — the first decline since it had started making its own content — more than $50 billion evaporated in a single day. A stock that had been approaching $700 would soon fall below $200. Netflix began to look more like one of the fusty incumbents it had attempted to vanquish. It changed policies on commercials (good) and password sharing (bad) and eliminated hundreds of jobs.

For the company’s rivals, Netflix’s woes begot a mix of Schadenfreude and relief: Maybe sanity had prevailed. But what at first looked like a Netflix correction was in fact a streaming correction. Investors started punishing Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and other Netflix wannabes. “Wall Street woke up and said, ‘Actually, profitability is the only metric,’” says a senior executive at a major streamer. “The idea that you could have the optics of success, where you could add 5 million subscribers and you gained 10 percent in value? It was over.” Iger unretired to retake the CEO job at Disney.

Layoffs and budget cuts spread across Hollywood. After years of green-lighting shows with impunity, platforms invented cruel and unusual ways to cancel them. HBO Max, Disney+, Paramount+, and Hulu purged entire series from their libraries for the tax savings. Some slashed shows that had already wrapped production on full, unaired seasons; Nasim Pedrad’s Chad got pulled just hours before its premiere. Not even projects with big names were safe. In June 2022, HBO nixed J. J. Abrams’s $200 million sci-fi drama Demimonde even though it had been in development for four years and had just cast its lead actor. “The Demimonde thing shook everybody up,” says one showrunner. “If HBO can say ‘no’ to J. J. Abrams, they could say ‘no’ to anybody.”

A few weeks later, Peacock pulled the plug on Schur’s TV adaptation of Field of Dreams even though it was deep into preproduction. “They just changed their mind,” says Schur. “They didn’t want to spend the money anymore.” He notes that the project will have one lasting artifact, perhaps the ultimate monument to Peak TV’s unfulfilled potential: “We built a baseball stadium in a cornfield in Iowa that’s still sitting there as we speak.” They built it, and nobody came.

By now, the grievances of the Writers Guild are well known, especially if you live near a picket line. Its members are upset that residuals are declining, that writing staffs are shrinking, that studios may replace them with ChatGPT, and that while streamers cry poverty, they’re paying their top executives nine figures. Many of these concerns are driven by a sense that the past decade was an elaborate bait and switch.

Early on, the streaming age seemed to herald exciting possibilities for writers. As the number of series ballooned, so did the number of writing jobs, allowing more people than ever, from a wider range of backgrounds and experiences, to partake in the great American fantasy of making TV. As other creative industries disintegrated, Hollywood promised not just an escape hatch but a ladder to career advancement, as former nobodies like Severance creator Dan Erickson saw their pilot scripts pulled from slush piles and given full-season orders. Novelists and playwrights descended on L.A., and there were so many writers’ rooms to fill that a few shows even hired (God help them) journalists.

The development surge was also great for established writers — at least at first, as the new economics of streaming made it easier than ever to cash in fast. Under the old TV model, if a show was a success, its creator stood to get rich on the back-end profits. With all of linear TV’s revenue streams combined (ads plus syndication plus overseas rights), a studio might bring in $3 for every $1 in costs on a hit. The problem for writers was that most shows flopped, so there was no back end to get a piece of. Streamers offered something different. Their model, called “cost plus,” might pay $1.30 to $1.50 up front, making every show a winner — just not a very big one.

To make up for the lost back end, streamers floated performance-based incentives. Schur describes a scenario in which a platform might promise a showrunner a $100,000 bonus for season one, $250,000 for season two, $500,000 for season three, and $1.7 million for season four. “So you’re like, Holy shit. This is great!” he says. There was a catch. Many seemingly successful series began to vanish after just a couple of seasons. “What no one saw coming was they’d just kill the show before they ever had to pay that money out,” Schur says. “They kind of tricked everybody. Now if you get to 20 episodes, it’s a miracle.”

“In the disorganization and the chaos of the free-for-all,” says Julie Plec, the creator of The Vampire Diaries, “the foundational pieces of the business that made it work for everyone disappeared. We thought we were paying attention, and yet it still happened because nobody really knew anything about how any of this was working. We just all as a group sat there and watched all of the things that we had worked so hard to achieve — we watched them get taken away right from under our noses.”

Streaming bosses (and even some agents) think such complaints are overhyped. The cost-plus model offers creators pretty good, low-risk income. But on the whole, creative types aren’t looking for predictability. “Most writers are gamblers,” says someone who has created megahits in both linear and streaming TV, “and are willing to bet on their own talents. They would be much happier getting a bigger payday with big success and a more modest payday if their show didn’t work. But now everybody’s basically playing a baseball game where people can only hit singles. The ball over the fence is still only a single.”

What no one saw coming was they’d just kill the show before they ever had to pay that money out. They kind of tricked everybody.

Much has been made recently about overall deals, under which writer-producers are paid — sometimes extravagantly — for the exclusive rights to their creative labor. Netflix famously used them to poach Shonda Rhimes (in a series of pacts reportedly worth $300 million to $400 million), Ryan Murphy ($300 million), and Kenya Barris ($100 million) from its rivals. These deals are also where creators of successful shows might get some indirect recompense. (Ryan expects he’ll see a bump in his next contract, post–The Night Agent.) But most are modest, makeshift solutions designed to pay talent for the work that falls through the cracks in the streaming era.

“We talk about showrunning as if it’s a real job,” says Briarpatch creator Andy Greenwald. “But it’s not. It’s a made-up title, and it’s not a paid position. The industry used overall deals to pay showrunners correctly for the blood, sweat, and tears they pour into a show that otherwise isn’t covered. Without an overall deal, there’s a world where if I’m making an eight-episode season of a TV show, I could be paid less than a co-EP in the writers’ room because everything else that I do — from hiring the writers, to being on set and producing, to being in post for months, then doing press — is not compensated.”

Lately, aside from the case of a few superstars, the market for these long-term pacts has dampened. “Overall deals are very hard to come by right now,” says a partner at a big talent agency. While anticipation of a strike was a factor, many expect streaming’s new profit-first economics to lower the appetite for such agreements in the future, too.

Things are naturally worse for those on the industry’s lower rungs. Writers on the staffs of hit shows used to be comfortable between jobs because they earned residuals from reruns. But those checks have shrunk for streaming shows made under the cost-plus model. And now that TV seasons are typically only six-to-ten episodes long instead of the traditional 22, even writers of successful series might find themselves out of work for much of the year. Some have taken jobs in retail or driving Lyfts.

One high-level agent says that studios regard the WGA’s demands — for higher minimum pay and staffing requirements, among other things — as simply incompatible with the way TV is now made: “The Writers Guild, delusionally, is harkening back to a day when there were 25 episodes of Nash Bridges a year and repeats and residuals. Back-end payments existed because Europeans were willing to watch our garbage, and Americans were willing to watch repeats of that garbage on cable at 11 at night. The real issue is that the medium changed. Instead of getting a job as a staff writer on CSI: Miami for 46 weeks a year, now it’s a 25-week job working on Wednesday, which is a better show. That’s just progress.”

But this so-called progress may have long-term consequences. Fewer weeks of employment mean that many entry-level writers are not receiving the training they need to advance through the ranks. Staff writers are now rarely invited to sets or editing rooms to learn the skills that would someday help them create their own series.

“Television has turned into a hyperspecialized Model T assembly line where everyone does one particular tiny job,” says Schur. “You focus really hard on screwing this bolt into this piece of metal, and that’s all you do. And as a result, nobody’s learning how to make a whole car. The battle now is to figure out which patches we can put on the process so that in five or ten years, people will still know how to make TV.”

“Staffing sucks right now,” says Greenwald. “I know that there are outliers and examples that are good, but broadly, I’m hearing horror stories.” Novice workers can spend “months on a show, and the show might just get tossed. It just might never air. What kind of career are you building with that handful of ashes?”

What was Peak TV, if we’re being honest about the stuff that piled up in our queues? The last decade surely produced some of the finest television ever, spanning high-toned dramas and offbeat comedies, several of them masterpieces unlikely to have been made under any other circumstances. But there were some stinkers, too.

“There is not a linear relationship between the amount of art you make in a given year and the amount of great art that will result,” says Soderbergh, whose new series, Full Circle, arrives on Max next month. “Let’s say there are 60 shows made at one platform in a year, and six of them are great. If they make 120 the following year, that doesn’t mean they’ll get 12 great shows. The number of people that really know how to make something great is small, and those people are busy. There aren’t a lot of secret genius showrunners out there.”

Despite the genius shortage, streaming services tended to disproportionately favor an elevated form of TV-making that was frequently genius dependent: the prestige show. Maybe because there was no straightforward way to profit from their popular hits, platforms chased buzz instead, programming for critics and Emmy voters. But as competition among apps accelerated, this strategy produced so many darkly serious, cinematically embellished shows that the bad ones crowded out the good ones and not even tastemakers had time to watch them all.

“In the Watchmen writers’ room, we would play this game called Is It a Show?” says Damon Lindelof, who co-created Lost and The Leftovers. “Somebody would name a title, logline, and one of the actors, and we’d have to guess whether it was real. But the joke was it was always a show. Some were in their second or third seasons, and none of us — supposedly television professionals — had ever heard of them.”

If you feel like playing along at home, consider that for every recent coastally adored breakthrough like The Bear or Beef, there were unloved misfires such as 1899, American Gigolo, Archive 81, As We See It, Becoming Elizabeth, Dear Edward, The First Lady, Let the Right One In, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Night Sky, On the Verge, Paper Girls, Reboot, and Shantaram, which all died in their first seasons in 2022 and 2023, plus others that may have escaped the embarrassment of cancellation only by disguising themselves as limited series.

“We’re all stuck in our bubbles of awareness,” says Lindelof. “Everybody I know is watching Swarm, but then my mom and my in-laws and my young and cool brother-in-law don’t even realize it exists. So then you ask yourself, Why do I know that this show exists? TV has become very artisanal.”

It may not have helped that some streaming services thought their recommendation algorithms could replace old-fashioned marketing, which made it easy for even great shows to come and go without causing a ripple. In an attempt to make their wares stand out among the glut, some platforms simply spent more money on them with mixed results. Over time, the expensive signifiers of prestige TV — the movie stars, the set pieces, the cinematography — became so familiar and easy to appropriate that it could take viewers six or seven hours to realize the show they were watching was a fugazi. “Premium and streaming have been chasing more of a film attitude than a TV attitude, which is making shows more expensive but oftentimes not as good as they used to be,” says Ryan. “You’re seeing ideas that should’ve been movies being elongated into eight episodes, and they don’t have the narrative engines to sustain them for that long.”

“People sometimes equate cost to quality, and that’s just utter bullshit,” says a senior executive at a major streaming platform. “They think they have to spend $20 million an episode, and they don’t.”

“TV doesn’t have to be Sundance in 2008. People like their stories, and they like tuning in to see what happens next, and there’s no shame in that,” says Greenwald, who in addition to making television also co-hosts the TV podcast The Watch. “Maybe I’m the problem, calling things ‘genius’ when only 600,000 people watched them. There’s this weird stratification where shows are for either the one percent or the 99 percent. We’re either doing Barry Jenkins’s Underground Railroad at Amazon or we’re doing — what’s an example of the trashiest thing that we could think of at this moment?”

This bifurcated development system has left a hole where the more populist shows that once ruled prime time used to fit. “It’s hard to develop hit sitcoms when the people selling, pitching, buying, and programming them don’t seem to like them. They don’t seem to like what the audience likes,” says the top agent. “I mean, I’m sorry, but people seem to really like Two and a Half Men, and none of my writers want to write that. They all want to write Barry. And you know who watches Barry? Nobody.”

Streaming TV’s first decade has been compared to film’s New Hollywood of the 1970s, when studios briefly ceded control to forward-thinking young hippies, resulting in some of the greatest works in the history of the medium. But as streaming reboots itself under a mandate of financial discipline, it’s hard not to worry that its next phase might look more like the movie industry of the 1980s, when creativity was suffocated under corporate micromanaging and the rise of tentpole franchises.

As miserable as the past year has been, the next one will probably be worse. Many expect Hollywood’s labor strife to last through the summer with a chance of a double-guild strike if actors walk out when their contract expires at the end of June. (The Directors Guild of America reached its own tentative deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers over the weekend.) A prolonged shutdown could lead to more Demimonde-style executions with streamers canceling any projects and overall deals they consider inessential. And once a new contract is hammered out, the business will likely pick up where it left off, planning for a future with fewer shows, smaller budgets, and safer ideas.

There are already discouraging signs. Recently, TV studios have embraced preexisting intellectual property with a cravenness that would shame even the movie industry of the 2010s. Warner Bros. has announced plans to adapt the dregs of the Harry Potter books into a decade-long TV show. Lionsgate says it’s doing the same with the Twilight books. Showtime is developing three Dexter spinoffs, four Billions offshoots, and sequels to Weeds and Nurse Jackie.

Unless a pitch has major IP or a major star attached, “no one in the last year really has been like, ‘Yes, absolutely: Full season, go crazy,’ in the way that they did a few years ago,” says Schur. “Now almost everything is in this liminal space between ‘yes’ and ‘no.’”

One of the best things about the boom was that it created space for stories and voices that had usually been marginalized. But as Hollywood reverts to what it thinks are sure things, many fear that TV may lose some of that diversity. “I recently spoke to the writers of a show that would’ve featured a trans lead,” Nori Reed, a comic and writer, says in an email. “After years of development at a major studio, they were told they had to change the trans character to cis if they wanted the show to be produced. Another friend was developing a show at another major studio that featured a central trans story line. Their show was canceled. When their manager tried to shop it to other studios, they were told that nobody wants to produce trans-focused shows any longer, citing the need for ‘global appeal.’”

One prominent studio founder recalls selling a hot identity-driven title back when the industry was green-lighting everything: “We had every network giving us a series commitment. We had Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Showtime. Everybody was like, ‘What do we need to do to get this show?’ And that was off a pitch, not even a script.” But recently, when shopping a similar show, the reception was entirely different. “People are very mindful, and the barrier to get something made is very studied. It’s very sort of labored over before anyone’s willing to take the shot of actually making something,” the founder says. This time, nobody bid.

One veteran executive of color says studios and platforms have been slashing development deals even though such pacts have helped the industry make “really big strides in changing its voice” by giving so many new creators a shot. “You don’t get Quinta Brunson and Abbott Elementary unless you invest in her,” she says. “The women and people of color and the new younger voices all went away when they scaled back on development deals.”

Some of this frugality may have an ulterior motive. Insiders say the belt-tightening is partially motivated by the anticipation of more corporate shuffling. Although Warner Bros. Discovery just rebranded HBO Max as simply Max, many foresee another revamp in a few years if the company gets broken up or sold. Conventional wisdom says that Paramount+ and Peacock may struggle to survive the next round of mergers; the same goes for smaller companies such as Lionsgate and AMC Networks. There has already been some soft consolidation: Showtime will be folded into Paramount+ this summer, while Iger last month said he plans to let subscribers watch Hulu content inside the Disney+ app soon. “It’s sort of the slow avalanche you see coming. I don’t think that all of these streaming platforms can or will exist,” says an executive who works at one of those services.

Even though neither Amazon nor Apple has shown any sign of retreat, the fact that their TV shows and movies are mere side hustles to trillion-dollar tech operations means that either company could suddenly rethink its commitment to streaming. “If Amazon said tomorrow they were just gonna do sports and sell digital copies of shows but not make any more originals, my guess is their stock price might go up, and I don’t think they would lose a single Prime subscriber,” says one streaming executive, who says the same applies to Apple. “Anytime something’s not a core business, it’s up for speculation.”

Many in the industry have conjectured that the streaming ecosystem may eventually shrink to four major platforms. If that’s the case, then we’d have sacrificed cable only to replace it with a broadcast-style monopoly. A world with fewer apps could have immediate downsides for both consumers and creators. A number of streamers have raised their prices recently, and less competition would embolden them to do so again. More significantly, anyone making shows would likely lose negotiating power.

One analog for Netflix’s impact is Uber — another investor-funded agent of chaos that upended an industry without plans for a sustainable future. Uber maimed the taxi systems in various cities; when its own finances became questionable, those old fleets didn’t magically reconstitute. But just as users have gotten hooked on the ease of ordering a car via app, there’s no going back to cable TV and carriage fees, either.

Instead, streamers are experimenting with other business models. Netflix claims its Basic With Ads tier brings in more revenue per user than its standard commercial-free plan. The rise of FAST (for Free, Ad-supported Streaming Television) channels such as Tubi and Pluto TV has helped spur an industrywide shift back to content windows; some of the shows that disappeared from HBO Max (Westworld, FBoy Island) are now available to potentially larger audiences on FAST services. And six years after Iger convinced most of Hollywood to lock up their library titles on their own platforms, Disney and others have said they’re open to licensing some shows again — even to their old nemesis Netflix.

Such developments hint at a future in which popular shows could generate multiple revenue streams again rather than just hiding on a single platform in hopes that subscribers notice it. One studio executive says she’s already had casual conversations with streamers about taking smaller up-front guarantees in exchange for a deal structure that allows for a larger back end if a project is a success. “Maybe you can change the license period so it’s not always ten or 15 years, or you can change how much of that is exclusive,” she says. In that scenario, it’s possible to imagine a show that breaks out on one service generating millions in new revenue when its episodes become available to license to others.

This shift might also realign the incentives of the TV business to favor shows with wider appeal. Maybe it already has. “Everybody is looking for high-quality, broad-audience shows again,” says one veteran writer. “If you could bring back the heyday of Brandon Tartikoff–Warren Littlefield NBC with shows like The West Wing, ER, Friends, and Seinfeld — maybe with some nudity and F-bombs — every streamer would be very happy right now.”

One recent wake-up call for the industry was the Amazon Freevee series Jury Duty, which blurred the lines between sitcom and reality show and, per industry sources, is on track to be one of the biggest half-hours in the history of either Prime Video or Freevee. “That show costs $2 million an episode,” says one top packaging agent familiar with TV budgets. “Well, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power costs $50 million. You tell me where they’re going to go next.” (An Amazon spokesman says the Rings figure is “way off.”)

Of course, none of that will provide much comfort to the fans and creators of so many artisanal and expensive shows that have defined television for the past decade, who worry that that sort of TV will become rarer in a more financially conservative business. “The solutions weirdly all revert back to what used to be on some level. And that is not good because certainly it felt pretty fucking broken at that time, too,” says Plec. “It’s not like just returning to the old status quo is the answer. We’re at the center of the tornado right now, and it seems like it’s whipping all around us, and I don’t think anybody really understands how to make it stop.”
https://www.vulture.com/2023/06/stre...paramount.html





Comcast Complains to FCC that Listing all of its Monthly Fees is Too Hard

Comcast blasted for seeking "loopholes" in rule requiring disclosure of all fees.
Jon Brodkin

Comcast is not happy about new federal rules that will require it to provide broadband customers with labels displaying exact prices and other information about Internet service plans.

In a filing last week, Comcast told the Federal Communications Commission that it is "working diligently to put in place the systems and processes necessary to create, maintain, and display the labels as required." But according to Comcast, "two aspects of the Commission's Order impose significant administrative burdens and unnecessary complexity in complying with the broadband label requirements."

Comcast noted that five major cable and telecom industry trade groups petitioned the FCC in January to change the rules. Comcast's new filing urged the FCC to grant the petition "as soon as possible before the rules become effective to help providers streamline and simplify their labeling processes, which will ultimately benefit consumers."

The FCC was required to implement broadband label rules in a 2021 law passed by Congress. Although the FCC approved the label rules in November 2022, it's not clear when they will take effect. They are subject to a federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review because of requirements in the US Paperwork Reduction Act. Medium-sized and large ISPs would be required to comply six months after the OMB review, while providers with 100,000 or fewer subscribers would have one year to comply.

"The label hasn't even reached consumers yet, but Comcast is already trying to create loopholes. This request would allow the big ISPs to continue hiding the true cost of service and frustrating customers with poor service. Congress created the label to end these practices, not maintain them, and Comcast offers no compelling reason for the FCC to violate Congress' intent," Joshua Stager, policy director at media advocacy group Free Press, told Ars. Stager previously advocated for the broadband labels when he was deputy director of New America's Open Technology Institute.

The FCC rules require ISPs to display the labels at the point of sale. The labels must disclose broadband prices, introductory rates, data allowances, Internet speeds, and include links to information about an ISP's network management practices and privacy policies.

Comcast doesn’t want to list all monthly fees

Comcast pointed to "recent filings regarding the Commission's underestimation of the burdens associated with implementing the broadband consumer label rules." Those filings came from Verizon, AT&T, Lumen (aka CenturyLink), and a trade group representing rural broadband providers.

Comcast and other ISPs have annoyed customers for many years by advertising low prices and then charging much bigger monthly bills by tacking on a variety of fees. While some of these fees are related to government-issued requirements and others are not, poorly trained customer service reps have been known to falsely tell customers that fees created by Comcast are mandated by the government.

The FCC rules will force ISPs to accurately describe fees in labels given to customers, but Comcast said it wants the FCC to rescind a requirement related to "fees that ISPs may, but are not obligated to, pass through to customers." These include state Universal Service fees and other local fees.

As Comcast makes clear, it isn't required to pass these costs on to customers in the form of separate fees. Comcast could stop charging the fees and raise its advertised prices by the corresponding amount to more accurately convey its actual prices to customers. Instead, Comcast wants the FCC to change the rule so that it can continue charging the fees without itemizing them.

The portion of the FCC order that Comcast and other ISPs object to says that "providers must list all recurring monthly fees," including "all charges that providers impose at their discretion, i.e., charges not mandated by a government."

Comcast wrote:

[T]he Order appropriately refrains from requiring ISPs to itemize state and local taxes, recognizing that they "often vary according to a customer's geographic location." The Order adopts the same treatment for government fees that a "relevant state or local government 'mandate[s]'" must be passed through to customers... However, the Order appears to take a different tack with respect to fees that ISPs may, but are not obligated to, pass through to customers. The language of the Order creates much uncertainty over how ISPs must treat these fees on their labels because it may be read to require ISPs to itemize each of these pass-through government-imposed fees on their labels... If these fees must be itemized, a separate label must be created for each unique combination of applicable nonmandatory pass-through government fees. Itemizing these fees would substantially increase the burden on providers to generate and maintain their labels, particularly as the fees are subject to change, in some cases as often as quarterly.

FCC urged to reject loopholes

Comcast said the FCC should let providers "list state and local government fees on labels the same way they list state and local taxes" or at least "permit the listing of the maximum amount of fees that may apply."

Even if Comcast's wish is granted, the cable company said it would still have to "create 251 separate broadband consumer labels to comply with the rules." Comcast's filing also specifies the number of labels it would have to create if the FCC declines to change the rules, but that number is redacted in the publicly available version of Comcast's submission.

Harold Feld, senior VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, said the FCC rules should remain unchanged.

"These rules are important for informing consumers about the basis for the cost of broadband and to ensure that ISPs comply with the rules," Feld told Ars. "In other words, they do exactly what the statute instructed. The reasons given to change these rules were not compelling when the trade associations filed their petition for reconsideration, and they have not become more compelling now."

The FCC, Feld said, "should reject the request to create loopholes which would obscure what fees providers decide to pass on versus those that are mandated by state law. It is an effort to pass blame to the state which properly belongs to the ISP."

Documenting compliance

Secondly, Comcast objects to a record-keeping requirement that seems designed to ensure that ISPs are following the rules. The record-keeping rule relates to providing labels through "alternate sales channels" such as retail stores or customer service phone calls. The FCC said that ISPs can meet the label requirement in these sales channels either by providing a hard copy of the label or by "directing the consumer to the specific web page on which the label appears by, for example, providing Internet access in the retail location or giving the customer a card with the printed URL or a QR code, or orally providing information from the label to the consumer over the phone."

ISPs that don't provide hard copies in those sales channels must document each instance in which they direct a consumer to a label. Essentially, ISPs must be able to prove that they pointed each consumer to the label.

Providers that don't provide hard copies of the label in the alternate sales channels "shall document each instance when it directs a consumer to a label at an alternate sales channel and retain such documentation for two years," the FCC rule says.

Comcast told the FCC that ISPs shouldn't have to collect these records. Comcast said that due to the "number of customer interactions in Comcast retail stores and over the phone," maintaining these "otherwise-unnecessary records imposes substantial additional burdens." Comcast urged the FCC to "act quickly to clarify that ISPs may comply with the Order's requirement by simply documenting their practices and procedures for displaying the label at alternate sales channels."

Advocates wanted stricter rules

Comcast also objected to how the record-keeping requirement was implemented. "The Order does not explain or justify this requirement, which is not reflected anywhere in the actual rules and was not even addressed in the underlying proceeding," Comcast said. The Comcast statement about the "actual rules" differentiates between the rules themselves and the much longer order in which the FCC explained its reasoning and how the rules will be enforced.

Before the FCC approved its rules last year, cable-industry lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association urged the commission to reject proposals to require that broadband labels be sent to consumers with every monthly bill. Stager believes that provision would have made it into the final rules if the FCC wasn't still operating with a 2-2 partisan deadlock due to the Senate refusing to confirm Biden nominee Gigi Sohn.

"Comcast already succeeded in watering down the label last year when they defeated a requirement to display the label where customers would actually see it—on their monthly bill," Stager said. "Despite strong support for this common-sense rule, the FCC didn't have the votes. It's a loophole that many ISPs, which are notoriously adept at hiding billing disclosures, will try to drive a truck through."

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel recently proposed similar pricing transparency rules for the TV services offered by cable and satellite companies. TV providers like Comcast generally advertise rates that don't include charges such as the "Broadcast TV" and "Regional Sports Network" fees. Rosenworcel's proposal would require cable and direct-broadcast satellite providers to "state the total cost of video programming service clearly and prominently, including broadcast retransmission consent, regional sports programming, and other programming-related fees, as a prominent single line item on subscribers' bills and in promotional materials."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...s-is-too-hard/





FCC Chair to Investigate Exactly How Much Everyone Hates Data Caps

ISPs clearly have technical ability to offer unlimited data, chair's office says.
Jon Brodkin

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wants the FCC to open a formal inquiry into how data caps harm Internet users and why broadband providers still impose the caps. The inquiry could eventually lead to the FCC regulating how Internet service providers such as Comcast impose limits on data usage.

Rosenworcel yesterday announced that she asked fellow commissioners to support a Notice of Inquiry on the topic. Among other things, the Notice would seek comment from the public "to better understand why the use of data caps continues to persist despite increased broadband needs of consumers and providers' demonstrated technical ability to offer unlimited data plans."

The inquiry would also seek comment on "trends in consumer data usage... on the impact of data caps on consumers, consumers' experience with data caps, how consumers are informed about data caps on service offerings, and how data caps impact competition." Finally, Rosenworcel wants to seek comment about the FCC's "legal authority to take actions regarding data caps."

"In particular, the agency would like to better understand the current state of data caps, their impact on consumers, and whether the Commission should consider taking action to ensure that data caps do not cause harm to competition or consumers' ability to access broadband Internet services," the press release said.

Tell FCC about your data cap experiences

Although the proposed Notice of Inquiry requires a commission vote before it can be issued, the FCC already created a "Data Caps Experience Form" and encourages Internet users to use that form to "share their unique experiences and challenges with data caps." The FCC said it wants to hear from users of fixed services (e.g., home Internet) and wireless broadband, "including those with disabilities, low-income consumers, and historically disadvantaged communities." The FCC also wants details on how data caps impact "access to online education, telehealth, and remote work."

The chairwoman's office noted in its press release that "many broadband ISPs temporarily or permanently refrained from enforcing or imposing data caps in response to the COVID-19 pandemic."

"Internet access is no longer nice-to-have, but need-to-have for everyone, everywhere," Rosenworcel said. "As we emerge from the pandemic, there are many lessons to learn about what worked and what didn't work, especially around what it takes to keep us all connected. When we need access to the Internet, we aren't thinking about how much data it takes to complete a task, we just know it needs to get done. It's time the FCC take a fresh look at how data caps impact consumers and competition."

FCC still lacks Democratic majority

Rosenworcel probably can't take any major regulatory action on data caps with the current four-member commission split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. Rosenworcel has led the FCC without a Democratic majority for President Biden's entire term because the Senate refused to confirm Biden nominee Gigi Sohn.

Biden is trying again with the nomination of Democrat Anna Gomez. The Senate Commerce Committee scheduled a nomination hearing to consider Gomez on June 22. Confirmation requires a vote of the full Senate.

Rosenworcel's proposal to issue a Notice of Inquiry was praised by advocacy groups that focus on broadband access. "Service provider limits on how data can be used can cause already disadvantaged consumers to refrain from a range of essential online activities, such as telehealth appointments or educational programs, for fear of exceeding monthly subscription limits. In effect, data caps curtail online activity and suppress residents' full participation in a digital society," the group Next Century Cities said.

Data caps called “confusing and pernicious”

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society Executive Director Adrianne Furniss said the group "supports the FCC's inquiry into data caps which limit the amount of access consumers have to data before they are charged surplus fees or cut off from service. There is scant evidence that such caps are necessary and their consequences can be especially disastrous for vulnerable populations."

"Data caps are particularly problematic for low-income individuals who may find themselves facing unexpectedly large fees at the end of the month as a result of surpassing a data cap," Furniss also said. She called data caps "insurmountable barriers for low-income consumers trying to access life-changing services online, such as educational tools," and said the caps are "particularly debilitating for the deaf and hard-of-hearing consumers who rely on Video Relay Service (VRS) in order to communicate."

She argued that data caps can "limit access to telehealth services which otherwise reduce medical costs through video technology, support real-time treatment by first responders through the use of wireless devices, and enhance senior wellness and preventative care through telemedicine and remote in-home monitoring. In general, data caps are not popular with consumers, nor are they an effective means of managing network congestion."

Harold Feld, senior VP of Public Knowledge, also urged commissioners to approve the Notice of Inquiry. He said:

Data caps are one of the most confusing and pernicious aspects of subscribing to broadband. How on earth can a wireless carrier offer multiple "unlimited" plans, each with different consequences for exceeding a different "soft" limit? How can subscribers measure their data consumption with any accuracy? This isn't like minutes or number of texts. And what about subscribers with no choice but a cable or satellite plan that imposes a data cap? How many subscribers have to put off a remote doctor's appointment rather than risk overcharges, or pay overcharges for the privilege of using a streaming or gaming app? How does anyone even know how much bandwidth their smart house uses?

"In addition to burdening subscribers, these data caps potentially burden the economy as a whole," Feld added. "By limiting the online activity of consumers, they severely limit the capacity for innovation."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...tes-data-caps/





$930 Million in Grants Announced in Biden’s Effort to Expand Internet Access to Every Home in the US
Kavish Harjai

The massive federal effort to expand internet access to every home in the U.S. took a major step forward on Friday with the announcement of $930 million in grants to shore up connections in remote parts of Alaska, rural Texas and dozens of other places where significant gaps in connectivity persist.

The so-called middle mile grants, announced by the Department of Commerce, are meant to create large-scale networks that will enable retail broadband providers to link subscribers to the internet. Department officials likened the role of the middle mile — the midsection of the infrastructure necessary to enable internet access, composed of high-capacity fiber lines carrying huge amounts of data at very high speeds — to how the interstate highway system forged connections between communities.

“These networks are the workhorses carrying large amounts of data over very long distances,” said Mitch Landrieu, the White House’s infrastructure coordinator, in a media Zoom call. “They’re the ones that are bridging the gap between the larger networks and the last mile connections, from tribal lands to underserved rural and remote areas to essential institutions like hospitals, schools, libraries and major businesses.”

The grants were awarded to a cross-section of state government agencies, tribal governments and telephone and electric cooperatives. They are intended to trigger the laying of 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers) of new fiber through 35 states and Puerto Rico.

The largest grant, of nearly $89 million, was awarded to an Alaska-based telecommunications company that hopes to build a fiber network through a remote section of the state where an estimated 55% of people lack access to basic internet.

The expansion is one of several initiatives pushed through Congress by President Joe Biden’s administration to expand high-speed internet connectivity to the entire country.

“The Middle Mile program is a force multiplier in our efforts to connect everyone in America,” Commerce Assistant Secretary Alan Davidson said. “These grants will help build the foundation of networks that will in turn connect every home in the country to affordable, reliable, high-speed Internet service.”

The grants were set in motion by the $65 billion allocated by Congress for broadband as part of the $1 trillion infrastructure measure Biden, a Democrat, signed into law in 2021. Most of that money, $42.5 billion, will be distributed to states as part of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment, or BEAD, program partly based on new federal maps identifying areas that aren’t connected.

States’ allotments from BEAD are expected to be announced at the end of this month. States will then run their own programs to identify recipients that would then build out last mile networks to unserved communities.

Winners of the middle mile grants announced Friday will have up to five years to complete their projects once they receive those funds, though a one-year extension may be requested under certain conditions.

___

Harjai reported from Los Angeles.
https://apnews.com/article/broadband...d9a98b0edab83e





“Clearly Predatory”: Western Digital Sparks Panic, Anger for Age-Shaming HDDs

Drives automatically get a "warning" flag if powered on for 3 years.
Scharon Harding

When should you be concerned about a NAS hard drive failing? Multiple factors are at play, so many might turn to various SMART (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) data. When it comes to how long the drive has been active, there are backup companies like Backblaze using hard drives that are nearly 8 years old. That may be why some customers have been panicked, confused, and/or angered to see their Western Digital NAS hard drive automatically given a warning label in Synology's DiskStation Manager (DSM) after they were powered on for three years. With no other factors considered for these automatic flags, Western Digital is accused of age-shaming drives to push people to buy new HDDs prematurely.

The practice's revelation is the last straw for some users. Western Digital already had a steep climb to win back NAS customers' trust after shipping NAS drives with SMR (shingled magnetic recording) instead of CMR (conventional magnetic recording). Now, some are saying they won't use or recommend the company's hard drives anymore.

“Warning,” your NAS drive’s been on for 3 years

As users have reported online, including on Synology-focused and Synology's own forums, as well as on Reddit and YouTube, Western Digital drives using Western Digital Device Analytics (WDDA) are getting a "warning" stamp in Synology DSM once their power-on hours count hits the three-year mark. WDDA is similar to SMART monitoring and rival offerings, like Seagate's IronWolf, and is supposed to provide analytics and actionable items.

The recommended action says: "The drive has accumulated a large number of power on hours [throughout] the entire life of the drive. Please consider to replace the drive soon." There seem to be no discernible problems with the hard drives otherwise.

Synology confirmed this to Ars Technica and noted that the labels come from Western Digital, not Synology. A spokesperson said the "WDDA monitoring and testing subsystem is developed by Western Digital, including the warning after they reach a certain number of power-on-hours."

The practice has caused some, like YouTuber SpaceRex, to stop recommending Western Digital drives for the foreseeable future. In May, the YouTuber and tech consultant described his outrage, saying three years is "absolutely nothing" for a NAS drive and lamenting the flags having nothing to do with anything besides whether or not a drive has been in use for three years.

A user on SynoForum discussed their "panic" upon seeing the label. And SpaceRex said one of its clients also panicked and quickly replaced the "warning" drives out of fear of losing business-critical data.

"It is clearly predatory tactics by Western Digital trying to sell more hard drives," SpaceRex said in a June 10 video.

Users are also concerned that this could prevent people from noticing serious problems with their drive.

Further, you can't repair a pool with a drive marked with a warning label.

"Only drives with a healthy status can be used to repair or expand a storage pool," Synology's spokesperson said. "Users will need to first suppress the warning or disable WDDA to continue."

Affected products

Oddly, Western Digital doesn't have a public list of its devices with WDDA. However, Synology has a partial list pointing to the WD Red Pro, WD Red Plus, and WD Purple, which Western Digital advertises for surveillance use, rather than NAS use.

On Synology's end, the company's spokesperson said the warning labels affect "devices supporting WDDA, which includes models with model numbers ending in -13 to -21 that are operating on DSM 7.0, DSM 7.1, and DSM 7.2." However, WDDA is no longer included in newer models, starting with the DS1522+, which launched in July of 2022."

SpaceRex also said that QNAP drives might support WDDA soon, so the automatic warning flags could affect non-Synology users working with Western Digital hard drives soon.

What is WDDA supposed to do?

According to Western Digital, WDDA provides device analytics enabling administrators to "proactively manage storage and to maintain optimal performance to preempt unexpected failure." Western Digital claims WDDA's benefits include "intelligent recommendation guidance for problem remediation" and "clear and concise instructions for support."

According to Synology, a warning label means "the system has detected issues or an increase in bad sectors on the drive. Even if the drive appears to be working fine, continue to monitor the drive's health and bad sector count." The problem here is with the broad, undefined meaning of the word "issues."

But now Western Digital faces accusations of using WDDA to try to push people to buy new drives prematurely. Interestingly, three years is also how long the warranty period is for some of the affected drives. However, some of the affected drives, like the Red Pro, have a five-year warranty. In his May video, SpaceRex pushed for the label to occur after seven years instead of three.

The controversy has also led some to question if WDDA provides any useful information beyond SMART. Upon further investigation, SpaceRex claimed WDDA's "nothing more than a canned SMART test throwing a few flags.

"There is some good data in there, but a lot of it is just redundant [SMART-based] information, and so it's really not even that useful," he said. "You can get pretty much all the information from these tests out of the SMART test, and I actually think it may be doing that."

NAS-ty reputation

To play devil's advocate here, the warning label, as per Synology, only indicates you ought to keep a closer eye on the HDDs after they've been powered on for three years. Some may think that's overkill, but Western Digital could argue that it truly thinks this is best practice. It's worrisome that the label is being applied to some HDDs before their warranty expires. But, again, Western Digital could just say it's being extra cautious.

Still, the lack of information Western Digital is providing users is causing unwanted confusion and concern. And it's irking some users even more when considering the brand's checkered past.

The company already had to pay out a $2.7 million compensation fund over a class-action lawsuit against Western Digital for 2020's sneaky SMR situation, as per Law Street Media in 2021.

Beyond that, last month we reported on portable SSDs from sub-brand SanDisk abruptly failing and Western Digital responding with a fix for some—but not all—affected models. Earlier this year, Western Digital My Cloud users were locked out of their data due to a breach. And if we want to go back further, Western Digital gave free software to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging it misrepresented drive sizes in 2006.

While a warning label may not be the end of world, some were already getting fed up with Western Digital and have had enough.

"In the past just three years they've had numerous anti-consumer behavior that has been really bad, and this one right here is probably the worst," SpaceRex said in a May video.

Getting around WDDA

Since Western Digital's questionable practice has come to light, there has been discussion about how to disable WDDA via SSH.

Synology's spokesperson said if WDDA is enabled in DSM, one could disable WDDA in Storage Manager and see the warning removed.

"Because the warning is triggered by a fixed power-on-hour count, we do not believe [disabling WDDA] it to be a risk. However, administrators should still pay close attention to their systems, including if other warnings or I/O disruptions occur," the Synology rep said. "Indicators such as significantly slower reads/writes are more evident signs that a drive's health may be deteriorating."

SpaceRex, meanwhile, is urging Synology to remove the test from their operating systems entirely. But as NAS Compares pointed out, this would require cooperation with Western Digital.

"Users argue that while [Western Digital] provides the information through WDDA, it is up to Synology’s DSM software to determine how to act on this information," NAS Compares said. "The inability to disable the WDDA warning [rather than WDDA entirely] in DSM 7, even if the drive passes SMART tests, has raised concerns among users who feel that the warning may cause unnecessary alarm or prompt premature drive replacements."

Western Digital didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023...-shaming-hdds/





Big Leap for Hard Drive Capacities: 32 TB HAMR Drives Due Soon, 40TB on Horizon
Anton Shilov

Offering a brief update on the future of hard drives, Seagate has shared some fresh insights concerning launch of its next generation hard drives featuring its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. The company's initial commercial HAMR hard drive is set to offer a 32 TB capacity, presumably in the third quarter of 2023, but the new recording technology will enable a relatively quick capacity increase to 40 TB. Meanwhile, high-capacity HAMR HDDs will co-exist with yet-to-be-released 24 TB and 28 TB drives.

The initial 32 TB HAMR-based HDDs from Seagate will rely on the company's 10-platter platform that is akin to that already in use by the company and which has predictable yields and which eliminates one potential point of failure. Given that the company will have to use new media and new write heads with its HAMR hard drives, it is a reasonable move to keep re-using as many proven parts as possible. That 10-platter HAMR platform will be used for 36TB, 40TB, and even higher-capacity HDDs going forward, presumably with as few changes as possible.

"When you go to HAMR, our 32TB is based on 10 disks and 20 heads," said Gianluca Romano, Seagate's chief financial officer, at the Bank of America 2023 Global Technology Conference (via SeekingAlpha). "The following product will be a 36TB and will still be based on 10 disks and 20 heads. So, all the increase is coming through areal density. The following one, 40TB, still the same 10 disks and 20 heads. Also, the 50TB, we said at our earnings release, in our lab, we are already running individual disk at 5TB."

Earlier this year Seagate said that it would 'launch its 30-plus terabyte platform in the June quarter,' so expect these drives to get into hands and racks of hyperscale cloud service providers in the coming months.

Back in April the company said it was shipping HAMR drives inside its Corvault systems for revenue, however, the company refrained from officially disclosing their capacities and only indicated that they were based on the 30 TB+ platform. Meanwhile the company is shipping its HAMR HDDs for qualification to hyperscalers, which will deploy them after they pass their tests.

In anticipation of the full rollout of HAMR drives, some cloud service providers may opt to use Seagate's 24TB HDDs, which rely on its traditional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology with two dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) read heads. Additionally, some may even go with 28 TB hard drives that use shingled magnetic recording. Meanwhile, Seagate stresses that these HDDs will be its final high-capacity nearline drives that use perpendicular magnetic recording.

"So, we have a 24TB coming out soon, next few months, you will see it," said Romano. "That is the last PMR product. So I would say [higher] capacity point above 24TB PMR, that is probably 28TB SMR."
https://www.anandtech.com/show/18901...0tb-on-horizon





I Just Bought the Only Physical Encyclopedia Still in Print, and I Regret Nothing

The still-updated World Book Encyclopedia is my antidote to the information apocalypse.
Benj Edwards

These days, many of us live online, where machine-generated content has begun to pollute the Internet with misinformation and noise. At a time when it's hard to know what information to trust, I felt delight when I recently learned that World Book still prints an up-to-date book encyclopedia in 2023. Although the term "encyclopedia" is now almost synonymous with Wikipedia, it's refreshing to see such a sizable reference printed on paper. So I bought one, and I'll tell you why.

Based in Chicago, World Book, Inc. first published an encyclopedia in 1917, and it has released a new edition almost every year since 1925. The company, a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, claims that its encyclopedia is "the only general reference encyclopedia still published today." My research seems to back up this claim, at least in English; it's possibly true even for languages. Its fiercest competitor of yore, The Encyclopedia Britannica, ended its print run in 2012 after 244 years in print.

In a nod to our present digital age, World Book also offers its encyclopedia as a subscription service through the web. Yet it's the print version that mystifies and attracts my fascination. Why does it still exist?

"Because there is still a demand!" Tom Evans, World Book's editor-in-chief, told Ars over email.

Today, up-to-date information flows freely thanks to the Internet. It's only a Google search away. Many people rely on Wikipedia, which is a nonprofit collaborative resource, for reference purposes. Despite that, some people and organizations apparently still buy paper encyclopedias. Evans said that sales of the print edition are "in the thousands" and that World Book always prints just enough copies to satisfy demand.

A World Book rep told Quartz in 2019 that the print encyclopedia sold mostly to schools, public libraries, and homeschooling families. Today, Evans says that public and school libraries are still the company's primary customers. "World Book has a loyal following of librarians who understand the importance of a general reference encyclopedia in print form, accessible to all."

As a kid, our family owned a 1968 edition of World Book that I relied on for school reports and projects all the way until my high school graduation in 1999, although I briefly used Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM and a CompuServe encyclopedia in the 1990s. At the time, even with electronic references, instantaneous, up-to-date information didn't seem as important. We were still largely operating at the speed of paper. While that concept seems foreign to us in our current world, there was a certain kind of comfort in that slowness.

Speaking of slow, a paper encyclopedia set certainly can't run away from you. Back in the day, our family's encyclopedia set took up a large dedicated shelf in our family room. Just like my old 1968 edition, the new print edition of World Book is a physically hefty reference. The 2023 version spans 17,000 articles spread over 14,000 pages in 22 volumes. The company says it features over 25,000 photographs, illustrations, diagrams, and maps.

All this paper-bound content can't possibly come cheap, you might think. And, of course, you're right. At a time when most information comes to us for free online (with strings attached, of course), it's easy to have sticker shock at the $1,199 retail price for the 2023 edition of World Book, although shoppers might occasionally find it for as low as $799 on Amazon (to compare, the online subscription costs $250 per year). Earlier editions are available for much lower prices.

I know it may seem weird to prefer the print edition since you can get the same content in the online version in a space-saving and portable format. But with the paper version, the World Book will always be yours. It can't be edited stealthily or taken down if the company needs the server space or goes out of business.

So I took the plunge.

Why I bought an encyclopedia

First, I'll be honest: The existence of an up-to-date print encyclopedia in 2023 took me by surprise. I experienced a range of emotions, from glee to confusion to sadness over the past. "The last of the dinosaurs" metaphor sprung to mind. But then I suddenly felt that I had to have it, and that's when the rationalizations kicked in. I have two kids, 10 and 13, and maybe the kids could use it for school, just like I did? Or maybe they could use it as a steady source of offline information in a world where unreliable information seems to be coming at them from all sides?

I'm an AI reporter for Ars Technica, and I often write about generative AI tools that could potentially pollute our online spaces (and our historical records) with very convincing fake information. Some people think these tools may destabilize society. At best, they may merely decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of online information. Years ago, The Guardian and BuzzFeed called this presumed coming age, where true and false information are almost impossible to distinguish, "the Information apocalypse." Never one to shy away from the chance to coin a term, I've called it the "cultural singularity."

Although I've warned about AI-generated misinformation on Ars Technica as well, I'm still optimistic that people who are cognizant of these issues can get through the coming decade with factual electronic knowledge at hand. But just in case I'm wrong, a little voice in the back of my head reasoned that it would be nice to have a good summary of human knowledge in print, vetted by professionals and fixed in a form where it can't be tampered with after the fact—whether by humans, AI, or mere link rot. That's appealing to me.

So I pulled the trigger and bought the 2023 edition. A week or so later, the entire encyclopedia set arrived in a single box that looked small but was massively heavy. Each volume came individually shrink-wrapped. It may sound silly, but as I carefully pulled them out of the box one by one, I enjoyed feeling the weight of the information in my hands. It felt like stepping back onto dry land after a long boat ride. It's hard to put a name on that emotion.

Opening up a volume of the World Book took me back in time. Memories of school libraries and book reports came flooding back. Notably, each volume has nothing to distract you from reading. No pop-ups, no requests for donations, no ads. It's just you and the information, curated by World Book's editors.

As for its content, the 2023 edition doesn't shy away from the contemporary. New biographies of notable figures such as snowboarder Chloe Kim, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the US Supreme Court, find their place alongside hundreds of article updates on topics varying from homeschooling and indigenous peoples of the Americas to space exploration and television.

To test its accuracy, I looked up articles on subjects I'm knowledgeable about, including "Artificial Intelligence," "Computer," "Video Games," "Internet," and "Communication," eagerly checking for updates and additions to the 1968 edition I had as a kid. It's surreal to open up a reference book familiar to me from my childhood and read (in the familiar World Book typeface) an up-to-date article that mentions Instagram and Snapchat and includes a photo of a smartphone.

World Book's authoritative, neutral tone feels refreshing. For example, the 2023 edition pulls no punches regarding its concise analysis of our previous US president's legacy, but it doesn't go out of the way to attack him, either. Every article I've read so far is accurate and well-written.

It hasn't been a perfect product, however. The 2023 edition of World Book that I purchased includes a binding error that replaces the first 60 pages of the "G" volume with pages from the "U" volume. Judging by a review from an Amazon customer who noticed the same thing, it's possible that defect is present in the entire (likely small) print run.

When I told Evans about the print error, he replied, "We were recently made aware of that manufacturing problem. The printer has assured us that it is an issue for only a very small number of sets." World Book offered to replace the faulty volume for free.

Reaction from my family

After I ordered the encyclopedia, I kept it a secret from my family until it arrived because I wanted to surprise my wife and kids. Who would expect an encyclopedia set to show up on the doorstep in 2023?

Upon first telling my wife that I bought an encyclopedia, she was confused, then excited. She, too, recalled the thrill of researching projects in encyclopedias as a kid. But that's where the fun ended. While she wasn't looking, I placed the set on a prominent bookshelf in the family room of my house, then unveiled it to her. When she saw the large photo of a shark spread across the spines of the 22 volumes, she frowned and said, "I don't want to see a big-ass shark every day when I walk in the room."

(I have since moved the set to a new shelf.)

According to the press release announcing the 2023 edition, World Book selected the shark photo (which it calls a "Spinescape®") because sharks are "a high-interest topic to students K-12 and World Book has a desire to support shark conservation." It's not a bad photo—it's just not the handsome set of formal reference volumes that my wife was apparently expecting.

Later, I introduced the encyclopedia to my kids. They had never used a print encyclopedia, and they looked at me like I was an alien, almost as if I were speaking a different language (such a trite expression, but man, is it accurate). I had hoped they could use the encyclopedia as an old-fashioned reference, but so far, they have completely and utterly rejected it, not even expressing interest or opening it once. That aspect of my plans for the encyclopedia has been a big failure.

My family's reaction was disappointing, but I don't mind that the encyclopedia set is just for me. Every morning as I wait for the kids to get ready for school, I pull out a random volume and browse. I've refreshed my knowledge on many subjects and enjoy the deliberate stability of the information experience. I feel confident using it as an occasional personal reference as the online world slides further into AI-augmented noise. And it's definitely more accurate than an AI large language model at the moment.

Aside from the shark photo and the print error, I am genuinely proud to own a modern World Book Encyclopedia. And I say that freely, having purchased the set out of pocket myself. In fact, World Book did not respond to my initial request to provide a sample volume to examine. Who knows—maybe they had to print out my email and physically mail it to Warren Buffett for approval first. I may eventually get a reply next year by steamship. But that's the comfortable, slow speed I'd expect from the world's last general-subject print encyclopedia.

For now, I was happy to chat with World Book's Tom Evans via tempered electrons, who says his employer's commitment to the print edition is ongoing. "We will continue to produce the print edition of The World Book Encyclopedia while there is still a demand. We believe in supporting teachers, librarians, and students and are committed to supplying content to them in whatever form is required," he said.

I'm no information prepper, but I'm glad that no matter what happens online, the information inside my World Book set will never change. Sometimes it's nice not to always be magically up to date.
https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023...-encyclopedia/





Edge Sends Images You View Online to Microsoft, Here is How to Disable that
Taras Buria

Microsoft Edge is a feature-packed browser with many tools and options to make your browsing experience better and more convenient. However, some of those features raise privacy concerns.

Not so long ago, Microsoft Edge ended up in hot waters after users discovered a bug leaking your browser history to Bing. Now you may want to toggle off another feature to ensure Edge is not sending every picture you view online to Microsoft.

Edge has a built-in image enhancement tool that, according to Microsoft, can use "super-resolution to improve clarity, sharpness, lighting, and contrast in images on the web." Although the feature sounds exciting, recent Microsoft Edge Canary updates have provided more information on how image enhancement works.

The browser now warns that it sends image links to Microsoft instead of performing on-device enhancements.

The biggest problem with Edge's "super-resolution" and other questionable services is that it is enabled by default. Therefore, unaware users automatically give the browser permission to send pictures to Microsoft for processing and enhancement. Here is how to fix that:

• Launch Microsoft Edge and open its main menu.
• Go to Settings > Privacy, Search, and Services.
• Scroll down and toggle off Enhance images in Microsoft Edge.A screenshot showing how to disable image enhancements in Edge

Microsoft is working on making the feature more flexible. Upcoming Edge updates will allow you to pick a more balanced way and specify what websites Edge should not process. If you use Microsoft Edge Canary, head to Settings > Privacy, Search, and Services > Enhance images in Microsoft Edge and click Add next to the Never Enhance images for these sites list.

Microsoft Edge has another AI-based feature called Video Super Resolution. It makes low-res videos sharper and less pixelated. However, it uses on-device processing powered by discrete graphics cards instead of sending the content to Microsoft.
https://www.neowin.net/news/edge-sen...-disable-that/

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

June 10th, June 3rd, May 27th, May 20th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black