rwmtest

Shomi has announced they are shutting down as of November 30.  I just signed up for the trial period in order to do a technology review, but I was never interested in the programming.   I assumed that being offered by another BDU it would be just like Bell's CraveTV which never even attempted to be competitive with Netflix . A Canadian Press story offers the all too familiar perspective from the industry, which is the claim that Bell and Rogers were trying to play catch-up with Netflix.  The reality is that while Netflix is intended to be a replacement of broadcast, CraveTV is only an add-on to broadcast and doesn't offer a comparable service. I continue to look forward to real competition for Netflix , but don't expect to see it from a broadcaster or a BDU.

Reading The Netflix Backlash: Why Hollywood Fears a Content Monopoly  feels so disconnected from my experience as a fan of the works of scripted video (television) productions.  There are things I agree with, but the solutions being proposed are disconnected and in my mind counterproductive. I too fear a distribution monopoly, and I think it is a problem that Netflix is largely alone in their market.  As much as the legacy BDU and telecom industry can claim that CraveTV or Shomi are "Canadian" competitors,  they are not in the same market . Netflix originals offers me programming that is available to me at the time of public release, is made available in all markets (doesn't block Canada for Netflix originals), and is available on all the devices I own that I'd ever want to watch television on.  It even passes the "wife test", meaning it is a technology which someone who doesn't love to spend time playing with technology all the time would be willing to ...

Fair Vote Canada (FVC) has a slogan that it wants to "Make Every Vote Count".  It has a list of voting systems it approves of, and a list it disapproves of.  The problem is that their list is composed based on whether the system is proportional, not whether it "makes every vote count". A more honest name and slogan would be: "Canadians for Proportional Representation : Make every vote count for voters who vote like us".   While it may not roll off the tongue, it would be more accurate. In other articles on electoral modernization I've discussed how there are two different criteria people currently use for voting in  Canada: Party representative: Those who are voting for parties, and can be oblivious to or vote despite the local candidate whose name is on the ballet. Local representative: Those who are voting for individuals, and can be oblivious to or vote despite the party affiliation of that local candidate. While there are modern voting systems tha...

Dr Danny Kingsley recently concluded a series of articles titled The case for Open Research :   the mis-measurement problem (part 1),  the authorship problem (part 2),  reproducibility, retractions & retrospective hypotheses (part 3),  does peer review work? (part 4), and  solutions? (part 5). Anyone wanting to understand some of the complex issues that are top of mind in academic and scientific publishing should read this series.  I found it extremely valuable. The series discusses issues quite different than what some Canadians have been claiming are issues in academic publishing, namely the Access Copyright activism.  Their nonsense claim is that the primary problem is educational institutions using "foreign" free texts and this is pushing out Canadian non-free texts. (See:  "Copyright-free" material is not edging out Canadian educational texts )  This misinformation campaign has even tried to waive the "Digital Canadian Content" ...

Since the 1950's there have been some Canadians who believe that in order to protect the culture of Canada we need to restrict Canadian's access to culture from outside of Canada.  Concepts such as CanCon has existed in positive forms such as government funding for Canadian creators, but has also existed in negative form such as restrictions on what Canadians can access of non-Canadian creativity. While the restrictions may have made sense in the 1950's in a pre-Internet era, the restrictions simply don't make sense any more.  Like a number of other modernizations we have seen recently, the reasons why we should eradicate these restrictions comes down to that simple slogan: because it's 2016. CanCon We need to modernize how we think about CanCon, and who the target of regulations should be. In a broadcast era we had the problem that there were intermediaries that programmed what people could see and when.  As it was not Canadians themselves that are making these cho...

After the cast functionality stopped working with CraveTV after a browser upgrade, I tried contacting CraveTV for support.  As I wanted to send detailed browser version information I sent is an an email, and they ignored the email and asked me to phone support.  After spending a considerable amount of time on the phone they created a support ticket. A week goes by and all I got back was: "We've received an update from our technical support team that CraveTV is not supported on Chromebooks or any device that is running Chrome OS." After looking at it again the CraveTV FAQ does only list specific version of Windows XP and MacOS to access CraveTV from a computer.  This is consistent with my previous (and confrimed today) experiments where CraveTV didn't work on either Firefox or Chrome on my Ubuntu desktop.  In the case of Firefox it would always say "To watch video, you need an Adobe Flash Player Update.Please click to download." even if the Flash Player was...

Today is the last day for LAC's Alter Ego: Comics and Canadian Identity exhibit  (See more on LAC's blog via their 'comics' tag), so yesterday I wandered through again (during lunch break as I work in the building).   When I first looked it was right after Ottawa Comiccon and I was thinking in that context.  This time I couldn't help but think about Kellie Leitch's 'anti-Canadian values' survey questions. As much as some (lower-case c) conservative Canadians like to believe there is one unified set of Canadian values, this has never been the case.  Sure, we may apologize more than our neighbors to the south but what each of us apologize for differs greatly. The exhibit at LAC touched on this, and suggested we ask if there is a "Canadianness" that enters into the stories when they are drawn or written by Canadians, even when it is a hero like Superman that often waives the US flag.  And what is this Canadianess?  What is our identity as citiz...

In early April I subscribed to CraveTV to evaluate it, and 6 months later I'm less happy with it. Technical I wrote in the earlier article how CraveTV worked on few of the devices that I owned, but that at least it would work with my regular Chromebook and the Chromecast.   This didn't last long, as an upgrade of Chrome OS which made cast functionality native to the browser later in June was incompatible with CraveTV.  I would have thought CraveTV would fix their site relatively quickly, but the problem persists. The next most convenient way to watch CraveTV was to run an HDMI cable across the living room floor to connect the Chromebook with the TV.  I say next most convenient as CraveTV is not at all convenient.  The web interface hasn't improved since my last posting. I still find myself having to do a search for things which are already in my "cravings" in order to choose the right episode to show next, as the interface often doesn't accurately select th...