Veronica Mars proves piracy still beats following the rules for now, and Popcorn Time makes it easy.
CordKillers: Ep. 11 – Breki-ing the law
Recorded: March 17 2014
Guest: Breki Tomasson
Intro Video:
Primary Target
- Warner Brothers to “Veronica Mars” Backers: Okay, Okay — Use iTunes or Amazon if You Want
- Veronica Mars And The Case Of The Totally Adequate Kickstarter Movie
- Kickstarter backers complained about Flixster, used to distribute the UltraViolet version of the Veronica Mars movie.
Offered $10 rebate OR to compensate purchases on iTunes or Amazon with receipt.
Secondary Target
- Popcorn Time Is Hollywood’s Worst Nightmare, And It Can’t Be Stopped
- Popcorn Time refuses to stay shut down
- Creators shut Popcorn Time down on Saturday:
“Our experiment has put us at the doors of endless debates about piracy and copyright, legal threats and the shady machinery that makes us feel in danger for doing what we love. And that’s not a battle we want a place in. - BitTorrent site YTS has decided to take over the Popcorn Time project and resurrect it. Beta builds for Windows, OS X, and Linux are being posted to GitHub.
Signal Intelligence
- Here’s why Amazon Prime can afford to raise prices
- Amazon Prime US raised price from $79 a year to $99. Amazon was barely breaking even, or even losing money, on shipping costs for customers who ordered 20 packages year. That’s not counting the $40 per person it costs Amazon to license streaming media that Prime accounts get for free.
Gear Up
- Plex opens up Chromecast to everyone, adds automatic camera upload
- Thursday, Plex made Chromecast support available to all users not just PlexPass subscribers.
Under surveillance
Front Lines
- Tuesday, CBS CEO Les Moonves said “If Aereo should work, if they should win, which we don’t think is going to happen, we could go OTT with CBS.”
- Dish Launched Super Joey Thursday.
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The Super Joey adds two network tuners to the Hopper system, so you can record up to eight shows simultaneously. It still has the Hopper automatic ad-skipping tech.
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Google has also confirmed that its Movies service is now available in 37 new markets:
Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, Gabon, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Ivory Coast, Luxembourg, Mali, Mauritius, Namibia, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Niger, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Rwanda, Senegal, Sweden, Togo, Uruguay, Venezuela and Zambia. And these are the best bets where ChromeCast will show up next.
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Space NK, The National Film Board of Canada, Universal Music Group, House & Gardens, Tom Aikens and Epidemic Sound/ Must-have features for creators. “Advertising revenues just aren’t high enough to justify a low quality consumer experience, and your content deserves better!” The app is only available for iOS devices for now, but we’re told that an Android version is already in the works.
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Video channels for smartphones and smart TVs. Specific niches like sports, politics, science and fitness. Unlike Hulu or Netflix though, you’ll pay $10 a month for each of the channels you actually want. Apparently because they’ll have big personalities.
On Our Radar
On Screen
- Brian: Finished True Detective, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, Cosmos, playing Titanfall
- Tom: Veronica Mars movie, Deadwood, The Walking Dead, Cosmos
- Breki: catching up on things I never saw back in the days. How I met your Mother, Archer, Mad Men, etc.
Dispatches from the Front
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There’s no clear consistency here in the UK about when broadcasters show US shows. Back in ye olden days, programmes like ER and Friends would be held back until January so that the UK broadcasters would get a clear run of 20-26 weekly episodes without having to take a break. However these days with torrents and spoilers and hype crossing borders, broadcasters don’t really know what to do – do they follow the US schedule (Fox show The Walking Dead in the UK the day after the US broadcast) or do they hold back (More4 are only a few episodes into the latest season of The Good Wife). Or do they go for a half-hearted mixture (Channel 4 started showing Agents of SHIELD in the same week as the US, but it’s only just returned from it’s Christmas break)? My question is this – will there ever come a time when the money gained from advertisers isn’t enough to dictate the schedules for the US broadcasters, and they gain more from subscriptions, overseas sales and re-selling to services like Netflix, and therefore the US broadcasters drop their ridiculous scheduling of showing a 20 week season in drips?
John
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Hi guys, love the show, just became a Patreon tonight. My wife and I (and two four year old twin girls) cut the cord a few weeks ago (cut the phone landline and cable tv, leaving only internet).
I bought the Leaf for HD broadcast local channels, do you have any recommendations on a PVR to plug it into? My Tivo is old and doesn’t do DTV. Or is there a better way to get streaming broadcast show’s (like Big Bang Theory)… in Canada?Thanks, keep up the good work
Lee.
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I have been watching the various incarnations of this show for a very long time, and one of the recurring themes was how Netflix releases shows all at once, for a la carte binge viewing. The two of you have even argued the merits of binge vs. weekly releases. Imagine my surprise, when I got an email from Netflix announcing their new show, “”From Dusk Till Dawn””, and that they were releasing one episode per week! If this is not cord killing news, I don’t know what is!
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