Notices tagged with time

Commonwealth Edison of Chicago will get an IBM of the ‘700 series’ soon which will calculate and print the bills for 1,800,000 customers, use 270 clerks where 470 are now employed, and take only half the time. It will store a ‘memory’ of the past record of every customer, and if the current bill seems too low or too high, it will ask for a new meter reading.

Using Apple’s New Controls to Limit a Teenager’s iPhone Time

Apple’s new parental controls cut a teenager’s iPhone use in half. It wasn’t as effective on our personal tech columnist.

Article word count: 1591

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17510454

Posted by tysone (karma: 5269)

Post stats: Points: 93 - Comments: 71 - 2018-07-11T21:31:22Z

#HackerNews #apples #controls #iphone #limit #new #teenagers #time #using

Article content:

[1]Tech Fix

Testing Apple’s new Screen Time feature, which is meant to help people from compulsively checking their iPhones. The phone habits of so-called screenagers have caused particular concern.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times

Even as people have embraced the smartphone as one of the most powerful tech products, they are keeping a wary eye on the addictiveness of turning on the device to check for social media updates, read websites and play games. Some studies have tied extended screen time to distraction in classrooms, sleep deprivation and depression.

I, for one, probably have a problem with compulsively picking up my phone. So when Apple [2]announced new software to help people restrict the amount of time they spend on iPhones, I knew I had to test it on myself. I also wanted to try it on a “[3]screenager,” a teenager who is addicted to screens — exactly the kind of person generating so much concern.

Just one problem: I don’t have a child, so I needed to borrow one. Fortunately, my editor gleefully volunteered her 14-year-old, Sophie, to be a test subject. So last month, I lent Sophie an iPhone X loaded with an unfinished version of iOS 12, Apple’s new operating system, that included the [4]Screen Time feature, which is set for release this fall. We set up the account so that I was a parent, with the ability to set limits, and she was my child.

First, a primer on how Screen Time works. The feature, which lives inside the iPhone’s settings, shows a dashboard of data about your iPhone use. You can look at your stats for the day or week, including the amount of time you spent on specific apps and on the phone over all. Inside the dashboard, you can create time limits for specific apps or categories of apps, like social networking or games. When you run out of time with an app, it locks you out.

Over the last three weeks, I studied Sophie’s phone use patterns along with mine. After determining the apps that we spent extraordinary amounts of time on — Sophie spent hours each day chatting with friends on Snapchat, and I wasted too much of my life reading Twitter — I placed a few time limits on each of us.

Here’s how that turned out. During Week 2, when she was trying to withdraw from her phone, strange things started happening to Sophie. After the screenager first used up all her time on Snapchat on a Tuesday, she told her mother that she felt “triggered” (which I would learn is slang for feeling annoyed or incensed). She later told me that she had realized she would open her phone and just stare blankly at the app icons to avoid using up her limit on Snapchat.

“It was just a pattern for me — to open my phone and I would have nowhere to go,” she said. “I was just looking at a screen. It was kind of weird, so I’m trying not to do that.”

But in the end, the results were satisfying. Sophie’s average daily phone use plummeted by about half, from over six hours during Week 1 to about three hours and four minutes during Week 3. My average phone use decreased 15 minutes a day, to about three and a half hours. I still think we spend too much time on our phones, but Sophie’s progress made this faux parent proud (and ashamed of himself).

These early results should be welcome news to people who are growing increasingly concerned about long-term addiction to smartphones. There have been other ways to limit use, including apps like Moment, which have many of the same features as Screen Time. But none of them have been embedded into a phone like Apple’s new software.

Here’s a weekly diary on how Screen Time altered our phone use.

Week 1

Sophie and I had a rough start with the experiment because of technical difficulties. Apple’s iOS 12 is still in beta, meaning an unfinished version of the software system is being tested by app developers and early adopters — and we ran into major bugs.

For most of the first week, a bug prevented me from seeing Sophie’s Screen Time statistics. But at the end of the week, after Apple released a software fix, her weekly stats appeared. They revealed that she had used her phone for six hours and seven minutes a day on average over the week. I could also see that Sophie was sometimes sneaking glances at her iPhone past midnight, when she was supposed to be asleep.

Image
Left, Brian’s screen time after week one. Right is Sophie’s screen time tracker.

After I shared the data with my editor, she bombarded Sophie with a flurry of disapproving text messages and fiery emoji.

Meanwhile, my stats showed that I had used my phone for three hours and 46 minutes a day on average over the week. The majority of my time was spent using the Twitter app Tweetbot, and a significant amount was wasted playing Zynga Poker.

With Screen Time now working properly, I placed limits for both Sophie and myself. For her, I set a 30-minute limit on gaming and a 60-minute limit on social networking. To help her sleep, I also turned on Downtime, a setting that disables most parts of the phone for a set time, from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m.

I gave myself the same one-hour limit for social networking apps. But instead of setting a limit for games, I opted to nip my Zynga Poker addiction in the bud by deleting the game and kissing my dreams of being a fake-money billionaire goodbye.

Even though Sophie was initially incensed about being locked out of Snapchat after an hour, she eventually came around to enjoying the limit.

In fact, she asked for more limits. She said she was wasting too much time reading articles on the Safari browser, so she asked for a 90-minute limit there. She also requested that I keep all the limits on until she finished the monthlong summer camp she was just beginning.

I happily obliged. “I raised her so well,” I told my editor.

As for me, I realized that when I ran into my limit on Twitter, I would find other ways to stay glued to my phone. I caught myself repeatedly checking my bank account and loading the same news sites over and over.

Sophie’s progress was remarkable. Mine not so much. By the end of that week, she managed to cut her average phone use to four hours and 44 minutes a day, down 23 percent from the previous week. (I’m sure the trauma from her mother’s outburst of emoji had something to do with it.)

My average screen use barely decreased — to about three and a half hours a day.

Week 3

At the beginning of the third week, phone use continued to steeply decline for Sophie.

On some days that week, Sophie’s phone use was lower than mine. On Tuesday afternoon, her screen time dipped to about two and a half hours, whereas mine had already exceeded three hours.

At this point, I felt pathetic. (If I were young, I might have said I felt “triggered.”) I asked myself: What kind of parent am I if I’m more addicted than my teenage daughter to a smartphone? Who would listen to this degenerate?

Screen Time allows users to set time limits for specific apps like Snapchat, which is particularly popular with teenagers.CreditJason Henry for The New York Times

When I shared this revelation with Sophie, she chuckled and replied: “You use your phone more than me?”

So for the rest of the week, I kept pushing myself to beat her. I logged out of Twitter after each time I used it in the web browser. I stopped checking my bank account, assuring myself that no more money would magically appear.

It felt similar to competing with friends on Fitbit to see who could accumulate the most steps — the only difference here was that I was trying to win by doing less.

On Friday, my phone use was one hour and 51 minutes. Sophie’s was three hours and 17 minutes. With a fist pump I exclaimed, “What now, Sophie?”

Yet in the end, my average daily use for the week was three hours and 36 minutes. That’s largely because on the Fourth of July and throughout the weekend I spent a total of eight hours driving — with Google Maps running on my phone screen. That doesn’t seem as if it should count against my Screen Time since my eyes were mostly on the road.

But alas, with Sophie averaging just over three hours a day, I lost fair and square.

I checked in with Sophie to ask how she felt after completing the experiment. She said that other than being a bit more focused on homework for her camp, and sleeping with fewer interruptions, she felt about the same.

“It’s annoying having my phone but not being able to use it,” she said. “I think it increases my good habits, though.”

She also made one more request: “Could you add another limit for Netflix?”

Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology reporter, writes Tech Fix, a column about solving tech-related problems like sluggish [5]Wi-Fi, poor smartphone [6]battery life and the complexity of taking your [7]smartphone abroad. What confuses you or makes you angry about your tech? Send your suggestions for future Tech Fix columns to [8]brian.chen@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Step Away From the Phone: Cutting Back on Screen Time. [9]Order Reprints | [10]Today’s Paper | [11]Subscribe

References

Visible links
1. https://www.nytimes.com/column/tech-fix
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/technology/apples-wwdc-live.html
3. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=screenager
4. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/06/ios-12-introduces-new-features-to-reduce-interruptions-and-manage-screen-time/
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/technology/personaltech/mesh-network-vs-router.html
6. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/technology/personaltech/tips-and-myths-about-extending-smartphone-battery-life.html
7. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/technology/personaltech/a-travelers-guide-to-taking-a-smartphone-abroad.html
8. mailto:brian.chen@nytimes.com
9. http://www.nytreprints.com/
10. http://www.nytimes.com/pages/todayspaper/index.html
11. https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY

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#time #quote #cat #wisdom #life

reception time...

#reception #desk #time #clocks #backdrop #animatedgif

AT&T promised lower prices after Time Warner merger, but it’s raising them

Most DirecTV Now prices go up $5 a month, weeks after AT&T bought Time Warner.

Article word count: 675

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17445226

Posted by hiimnate (karma: 145)

Post stats: Points: 162 - Comments: 29 - 2018-07-02T20:48:41Z

#HackerNews #after #att #but #its #lower #merger #prices #promised #raising #them #time #warner

Article content:

AT&T is raising the base price of its DirecTV Now streaming service by $5 per month, despite promising in court that its acquisition of Time Warner Inc. would lower TV prices.

AT&T confirmed the price increase to Ars and said it began [1]informing customers of the increase this past weekend. "The $5 increase will go into effect July 26 for new customers and varies for existing customers based on their billing date," an AT&T spokesperson said.

The $5 increase will affect [2]all DirecTV Now tiers except for a Spanish-language TV package, AT&T told Ars. That means the DirecTV Now packages that currently cost $35, $50, $60, and $70 a month will go up to $40, $55, $65, and $75.

"To continue delivering the best possible streaming experience for both new and existing customers, weʼre bringing the cost of this service in line with the market—which starts at a $40 price point," AT&T said.

What AT&T told a judge

Just two months ago, AT&T said in a court filing that buying Time Warner would allow it to lower TV prices. The US Department of Justice tried to stop the merger, arguing that it would [3]raise prices for consumers, but a federal judge [4]sided with AT&T. The merger was [5]completed on June 15.

AT&T scoffed at the Justice Departmentʼs argument that the merger would raise prices. The telecomm giant wrote in its [6]post-trial brief that the merger will "enabl[e] AT&T and Time Warner to reduce consumer prices."

"The evidence overwhelmingly showed that this merger is likely to enhance competition substantially, because it will enable the merged company to reduce prices, offer innovative video products, and compete more effectively against the increasingly powerful, vertically integrated ʼFAANGʼ [Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google] companies," AT&T told US District Judge Richard Leon in the brief.

"There is no sound evidence from which the Court could fairly conclude that retail pay-TV prices are likely to increase," AT&T said in that same filing.

AT&Tʼs brief pointed out that the Justice Department walked back some of its price claims during the trial. "The government concedes that Turner will not withhold content [from other pay-TV operators], and it concedes that the merged entity will reduce its own consumer pay-TV prices," AT&T wrote.

Price benefits should flow to consumers quickly, AT&Tʼs filing said. "[C]ertain merger efficiencies will begin exerting downward pressure on consumer prices almost immediately [after the merger]" AT&T wrote.

Owning Time Warner gives AT&T more control over how much it pays for the programming it offers to DirecTV customers, because it no longer has to negotiate with a third party for Time Warner content.

"Currently, our ability to bring customers more of what they want has been constrained because we own very little of our own programming and cannot unilaterally determine what content we offer and how consumers may access it," AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson [7]told a Senate committee in December 2016 when he was asking the government to approve the merger. "Instead, we have to negotiate those matters with third-party content owners, and in a fast-changing marketplace like video, it is particularly difficult to obtain flexibility to pursue new and untested business models."

AT&T looking for more revenue

When contacted by Ars, AT&T didnʼt explain why the Time Warner merger didnʼt prevent the $5 price increase. But the company noted that it is also offering a new $15-per-month streaming service with fewer channels; that service is a [8]free add-on for AT&T mobile customers with unlimited plans.

AT&T last month also [9]removed HBO from one of its unlimited mobile data plans, and the company raised the price of that plan by $5 a month. AT&T also recently raised the "administrative fee" charged to postpaid wireless customers from $0.76 to $1.99 per month, [10]according to BTIG Research.

"AT&T attributed its changes to market forces, but the company may be under pressure to find new sources of revenue after its $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner," CNBC [11]wrote today. "The timing of AT&Tʼs price hikes and fee bumps coincides with the closure of the deal."

References

Visible links
1. https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/att-is-raising-the-price-of-directv-now/
2. https://www.directvnow.com/tv-packages
3. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/atttime-warner-merger-will-raise-tv-bills-436-million-a-year-us-says/
4. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/att-can-buy-time-warner-inc-judge-rules/
5. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/06/what-to-expect-now-that-att-officially-owns-time-warner/
6. https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.191339/gov.uscourts.dcd.191339.121.0_1.pdf
7. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/12-07-16%20Stephenson%20Testimony.pdf
8. http://about.att.com/newsroom/watchtv_app_with_unlimited_wireless.html
9. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/06/att-removed-hbo-from-an-unlimited-data-plan-after-buying-time-warner/
10. http://www.btigresearch.com/2018/06/27/att-fee-increase-could-boost-wireless-revenue-by-800-million/
11. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/02/att-is-bumping-directv-now-packages-by-5.html

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There was a time when search engines were a thing, and it seems they still are

There was a time when search engines were a thing. And it seems they still are

Article word count: 702

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17438333

Posted by CrocodileStreet (karma: 1015)

Post stats: Points: 80 - Comments: 85 - 2018-07-01T23:37:34Z

#HackerNews #and #are #engines #search #seems #still #there #they #thing #time #was #were #when

Article content:

I was poking around in the deeper parts of my harddrive when I came across the source code for [1]Geofind, a metasearch engine I wrote back in the late 90s. A “metasearch engine” is a website that searches not the Internet, but instead passes the search query to other search engines. Back in the 90s, search engines werenʼt quite as good as they are now (although some might contend that they arenʼt as good as they were a decade ago), but there were a fair number of them, and the thought at the time was, “hey, if we query a bunch of search engines at the same time, maybe one of them will have useful results.”

In fact, quite a number of them. Unlike the … um … two? ([2]Google and [3]Bing). maybe, three? (if you count [4]DuckDuckGo, which I only know about because of the circles I travel in on the Intarwebs) which exist today.

The last version of the code I have lists 10 engines, although I seem to recall we had as many as 15 at one time. But hereʼs the 10 engines we were querying as of April 1999:

 1. Magellan—once a search engine, now an [5]apartment finder. Itʼs probably not the same company, but I donʼt know for sure.
 2. Infoseek—the [6]domain is now owned by [7]Disney, which, I think, now owns close to 50% of movies and television.
 3. Lycos—is still around! Itʼs still a [8]search engine! As stated on their [9]About page: “Lycos, Inc. is a survivor. Established in 1995, we were originally a search engine ? before most people even knew what a ‘search engine’ was. Times change, and Lycos, Inc. has changed with them, evolving from a single search engine into a focused network of community and social sites that include [10]Gamesville.com, [11]Tripod.com, [12]Angelfire.com, and of course, [13]Lycos.com.” Incredible.
 4. FreeYellow.Com—I think this was a site much like [14]GeoCities, and now, [15]it still exists! Although I donʼt see a search function, and itʼs no longer free. Go figure.
 5. Webcrawler—good Lord, [16]itʼs still around! And apparently, the parent company runs its own [17]metasearch engine.
 6. Yahoo—[18]still around … somehow. And they still offer search … somehow.
 7. Alta Vista—is now Yahoo.
 8. Excite—[19]is also around! Itʼs a cluttered page that makes me think they want to be like Yahoo, but hey, they still offer web search.
 9. HotBot—[20]itʼs still around? Really? I mean, Yahoo, yeah, thatʼs still around. But five? In the era of [21]Google? Iʼm seriously surprised by this.
10. Goto.com—no longer exists, and the domain now redirects to [22]GoToMeeting, an Internet based collaboration site.

I also found a section of my bookmarks labeled “GeoFind Search Engines,” which includes a few more that werenʼt listed above. In this list we have:

What is it with these nearly twenty year old sites still up? I mean, thatʼs great and all, but given that probably 80% of all sites Iʼve linked to in my blog have disappeared, I find it surprising that nearly 50% of the old search engines are still around.

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I wonʼt bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that dayʼs entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: [23]http://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say [24]2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

[25]http://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select [26]an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and thatʼs intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. Itʼs an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you donʼt notice it, donʼt worry; itʼs not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2018 by [27]Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.

References

Visible links
1. http://www.conman.org/people/spc/refs/search/
2. https://www.google.com/
3. http://www.bing.com/
4. https://duckduckgo.com/
5. http://www.mckinley.com/
6. http://infoseek.go.com/
7. http://www.disney.com/
8. http://www.lycos.com/
9. http://info.lycos.com/about/company-overview/
10. http://www.gamesville.com/
11. http://www.tripod.lycos.com/
12. http://www.angelfire.lycos.com/
13. http://www.lycos.com/
14. https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=GeoCities
15. http://www.freeyellow.com/
16. http://www.webcrawler.com/
17. http://www.dogpile.com/
18. https://search.yahoo.com/
19. http://www.excite.com/
20. http://www.hotbot.com/
21. http://www.google.com/
22. https://www.gotomeeting.com/collaboration
23. http://boston.conman.org/
24. http://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01
25. http://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01
26. http://boston.conman.org/about/technical.html
27. mailto:sean@conman.org

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Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The nature of time

Carlo Rovelli combines science, philosophy and poetry to explore his subject.

Article word count: 884

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17376437

Posted by wyndham (karma: 462)

Post stats: Points: 85 - Comments: 73 - 2018-06-22T18:57:24Z

#HackerNews #carlo #greatest #mystery #nature #remaining #rovelli #the #time

Article content:

Joseph Peschel is a freelance writer and critic in South Dakota.

No one writes about the cosmos like theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. He may not be as well known in the United States as the late Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Alan Lightman. But in his books, “Seven Brief Lessons on Physics” and “Reality Is Not What It Seems,” Rovelli explains physics with reverence and exuberance, in ways that even a book reviewer without a PhD can understand. In his newest work, “The Order of Time,” Rovelli shares his enthusiasm as he discusses scientifically and philosophically the “greatest remaining mystery”: the nature of time. This book, like his previous works, is translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, and their poetic interpretation of his words, I surmise, derives strongly from the original Italian.

In the first part of this book, Rovelli describes the state of modern physics; in the second he depicts a world without time. The final and most difficult part of the book “becomes a fiery magma of ideas” devoted to the discovery of the essential components of time.

Some ideas in “The Order of Time” are a bit confusing and require a re-reading, but Rovelli includes only one equation in his new book, and he even apologizes for its appearance. This time it’s: S ≥ 0 (the delta of S is always greater than or equal to zero). You don’t have to know exactly what the equation means, other than that it’s the second law of thermodynamics: Heat passes from hot bodies to cold, never the reverse. Rovelli calls the equation “time’s arrow,” the only equation of “fundamental physics that knows any difference between past and future.”

Rovelli talks about time as a complex collection of layers and then strips away those layers, revealing “how the temporal structure of the world is different from our perception of it.” Rovelli is the sort of scientist who compares poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s “eternal current” to the idea of the “intrinsic difference between past and future.” He’s certainly not the only physicist to refer to Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” But as you might have guessed, Rovelli, a loop quantum gravity theorist, does not believe in the Einsteinian notion of a “block universe,” in which “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He’s not even certain Einstein believed it, since Einstein wrote the famous words in a letter upon the death of a friend. Rovelli’s opinion is certain to raise a few eyebrows, but that’s expected when you disagree with Einstein. (Rovelli does devote a few touching pages to demonstrate that the anguished Einstein didn’t actually believe what he’d written in the letter.)

(Riverhead)

Some of Rovelli’s critics, like physicist Lisa Randall, who also quotes Rilke, have accused Rovelli of romanticism, but I find an elegant grandeur in how he relates the worlds of science, philosophy and art. What’s more, scientists and philosophers, going back to ancient times, have weaved a connection between poetry and physics, or, as it was once called, “natural science.” Even today, Tyson and others remind us that celestial objects are often named for characters like Jupiter, Umbriel and Oberon from mythology, poems and plays. But I can think of no one other than Rovelli who would begin all but one chapter of his nonfiction book with excerpts from the “Odes” of Horace. That single aberrant chapter’s epigraph quotes Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part I.” Rovelli doesn’t limit himself to literary references, either. He alludes to Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” and he quotes from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice In Wonderland,” the Grateful Dead’s “Walk in the Sunshine” and Paul McCartney’s “Fool on the Hill.”

Just about any time you write about a technical subject for a lay reader, you open yourself to criticism that you are making things so simple that they are inaccurate, and, occasionally, statements intended as interpretation can be mistaken as fact. Randall’s criticism of Rovelli’s “Reality Is Not What It Seems” in the [1]New York Times faulted Rovelli for presenting interpretation as fact. Her beef was Rovelli’s explanation of quantum mechanics, in which he presents the idea that electrons exist only when they interact. Randall claimed Rovelli presented the idea as fact when it was only interpretation. Apparently, his view differed from her own so much that she missed the part a couple dozen pages later where Rovelli clearly said that it is his “least unreasonable” interpretation. Rovelli even replied with a [2]letter to the Times and on [3]Facebook. I suspect that Rovelli organized his new book to make clear what is fact, what is interpretation and what is speculation. Some technical sections require a closer reading or re-reading — Rovelli even suggests that you might want to skip Chapters 9 and 10 — but the distinction between fact and opinion is clear.

Rovelli’s new story of time is elegant and lucidly told, whether he is revealing facts or indulging in romantic-philosophic speculation about the nature of time. Who can resist reading a physicist who writes, “We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time — in our finite time — to savoring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence”?

By Carlo Rovelli, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

Riverhead. 240 pp. $20

References

Visible links
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/books/review/reality-is-now-what-it-seems-carlo-rovelli.html
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/books/review/letters-to-the-editor.html
3. https://www.facebook.com/Prof.Rovelli/posts/1622834574408273)

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Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

Mozilla redesigned its browser to take on Google’s Chrome. Firefox now has strong privacy features and is as fast as Chrome.

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361168

Posted by MilnerRoute (karma: 4777)

Post stats: Points: 221 - Comments: 136 - 2018-06-21T00:45:59Z

#HackerNews #back #firefox #give #its #time #try

Article content:

[1]Tech Fix

CreditMinh Uong/The New York Times

Do you ever feel that the web is breaking?

When shopping online for a toaster oven, you can expect an ad for that oven to stalk you from site to site. If you have just a few web browser tabs open, your laptop battery drains rapidly. And don’t get me started on those videos that automatically play when you’re scrolling through a webpage.

The web has reached a new low. It has become an annoying, often toxic and occasionally unsafe place to hang out. More important, it has become an unfair trade: You give up your privacy online, and what you get in return are somewhat convenient services and hyper-targeted ads.

That’s why it may be time to try a different browser. Remember Firefox? The browser, made by the nonprofit Mozilla, emerged in the early 2000s as a faster, better designed vessel to surf the web. But it became irrelevant after [2]Google in 2008 released Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser.

Mozilla recently hit the reset button on Firefox. About two years ago, six Mozilla employees were huddled around a bonfire one night in Santa Cruz, Calif., when they began discussing the state of web browsers. Eventually, they concluded there was a “crisis of confidence” in the web.

“If they don’t trust the web, they won’t use the web,” Mark Mayo, Mozilla’s chief product officer, said in an interview. “That just felt to us like that actually might be the direction we’re going. And so we started to think about tools and architectures and different approaches.”

Now Firefox is back. Mozilla released a new version late last year, code-named Quantum. It is sleekly designed and fast; Mozilla said the revamped [3]Firefox consumes less memory than the competition, meaning you can fire up lots of tabs and browsing will still feel buttery smooth.

Most notably, Firefox now offers privacy tools, like a built-in feature for blocking ad trackers and a “container” that can be installed to prevent Facebook from monitoring your activities across the web. Most other browsers don’t include those features.

After testing Firefox for the last three months, I found it to be on a par with Chrome in most categories. In the end, Firefox’s thoughtful privacy features persuaded me to make the switch and make it my primary browser.

Here’s why you should consider it, too.

Privacy Features

Both Chrome and Firefox support thousands of [4]extensions, which are add-ons that modify your browsing experience. Chrome wins in terms of numbers, with hundreds of thousands of extensions compared with Firefox’s roughly 11,000.

But in months of using Firefox, there wasn’t anything I wanted to do on Chrome that I couldn’t also do on Firefox. Both browsers support [5]1Password, the popular password-management program. Both support extensions that [6]prevent videos from automatically playing when you visit websites. And both support [7]uBlock Origin, the ad blocker recommended by many security experts.

Mozilla also offers a Firefox extension called [8]Facebook Container. Normally, [9]Facebook can track your browsing activities even outside its social media site by using trackers planted on other websites like web cookies. With Mozilla’s extension, when you open Facebook in a browser tab, it isolates your Facebook identity into its own container, making it difficult for the social network to follow you outside its site.

Firefox especially stood out for some privacy features that are baked into the browser. Inside the privacy settings, you can turn on tracking protection, which blocks online trackers from collecting your browser data across multiple websites. With Chrome, you can install a third-party extension to block trackers — but the fewer add-ons you have to tack onto your browser, the better.

Security experts applauded Mozilla for stepping up its efforts on privacy.

“Firefox does seem to have positioned itself as the privacy-friendly browser, and they have been doing a fantastic job improving security as well,” said Cooper Quintin, a security researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights nonprofit. “On the other hand, Google is fundamentally an advertising company, so it’s unlikely that they will ever have a business interest in making Chrome more privacy friendly.”

Google said that privacy and security went hand in hand, and that it led the industry on both fronts. The search giant said it had the only browser with a method for reliably addressing Spectre, the [10]security flaw that was revealed this year and that cannot be completely fixed. Spectre affects the microprocessors in nearly all of the world’s computers, and it can allow the theft of information from one application so that it can be shared with another. Chrome also includes a built-in filter that blocks inappropriate, malicious ads from loading.

“You can’t have privacy without security on the web,” said Parisa Tabriz, a director of engineering for Google who specializes in security.

In fact, both Chrome and Firefox have tough security. Both include sandboxing, which isolates processes of the browser so a harmful website doesn’t infect other parts of your machine. So if you loaded a website with malicious code, it would be contained within the webpage so it couldn’t infect your files, webcam and microphone.

Google said there was one thing it could do better on: the inclusion of privacy settings to block tracking technology, similar to the tools that Firefox includes.

“I think that’s something that we can improve on,” Ms. Tabriz said. “Firefox has some settings that we’re also exploring.”

Speed and Battery Tests

Which browser is faster?

Some benchmark websites, which determine the speed of a browser by measuring the responsiveness of different web elements, say [11]Chrome is faster. But some other benchmark sites say [12]Firefox is faster. In my anecdotal testing as someone who juggles more than a dozen web tabs at a time, both were very speedy. Let’s call it a draw.

Mozilla’s promise that Firefox consumes less computer memory raises hopes that it should also use less battery life. Yet in my tests on a laptop running a script that automatically reloaded the top 10 news sites, Firefox lasted only a few minutes longer than Chrome before the battery was depleted. On another test, which involved streaming a Netflix video on a loop on each browser, the battery lasted about 20 minutes longer when the Chrome browser was used.

Resurrection Is Just Beginning

Firefox is the No. 2 computer browser, with about 12 percent of the desktop browser market, lagging far behind Chrome, which has about 67 percent, according to [13]StatCounter. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari browsers are even farther behind in the desktop market, with Explorer’s share about 7 percent and Safari’s about 5.5 percent. On Android phones, the Chrome browser is still far more popular than Firefox’s mobile browser. And only lightweight versions of Firefox are available for Apple’s iOS devices.

Yet the path forward for Mozilla looks increasingly promising for consumers.

In addition to the normal Firefox browser, Mozilla offers Firefox Focus, a privacy-centric mobile browser that blocks trackers by default and purges your web browsing history as soon as you close out of a page.

These are privacy-conscious web products that Mozilla is in a position to expand on in the long term. The nonprofit has no direct relationship with advertisers; it gets a small sum from search providers like Google and Bing when a search is conducted through their sites using a Firefox product.

For Mozilla, there’s a plus side to being the underdog.

“The advantage of when you get beaten down is you kind of drop some of your own ego around your decisions,” Mr. Mayo said. “We had a lot less to lose.”

Brian X. Chen, our lead consumer technology reporter, writes Tech Fix, a column about solving tech-related problems like sluggish [14]Wi-Fi, poor smartphone [15]battery life and the complexity of taking your [16]smartphone abroad. What confuses you or makes you angry about your tech? Send your suggestions for future Tech Fix columns to [17]brian.chen@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B7 of the New York edition with the headline: Firefox Is Back, With Improved Privacy Tools And Speed. [18]Order Reprints | [19]Today’s Paper | [20]Subscribe

References

Visible links
1. https://mobile.nytimes.com/column/tech-fix
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/technology/02google.html
3. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox-quantum/
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/15/smarter-living/browser-extensions-text-swapping.html
5. https://1password.com/
6. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/technology/personaltech/stopping-video-autoplay-on-google-chrome.html
7. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
8. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/?src=search
9. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/technology/personaltech/i-downloaded-the-information-that-facebook-has-on-me-yikes.html
10. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/business/computer-flaws.html
11. https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/
12. https://browserbench.org/JetStream/
13. http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide
14. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/technology/personaltech/mesh-network-vs-router.html
15. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/technology/personaltech/tips-and-myths-about-extending-smartphone-battery-life.html
16. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/technology/personaltech/a-travelers-guide-to-taking-a-smartphone-abroad.html
17. mailto:brian.chen@nytimes.com
18. http://www.nytreprints.com/
19. http://www.nytimes.com/pages/todayspaper/index.html
20. https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8HYKU.html?campaignId=48JQY

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AT&T, Time Warner, and the Need for Neutrality

It is no surprise that a judge allowed the AT&T-Time Warner acquisition to proceed given the government’s poor case; the question is if a better case could have been made. What is ultimat…

Article word count: 1996

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17349368

Posted by thecosas (karma: 1042)

Post stats: Points: 133 - Comments: 34 - 2018-06-19T19:00:01Z

#HackerNews #and #att #for #need #neutrality #the #time #warner

Article content:

The first thing to understand about the decision by a federal judge to approve AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, over the objection of the U.S. Department of Justice, is that it is very much in-line with the status quo: this is a vertical merger, and both the Department of Justice and the courts have defaulted towards approving such mergers for decades.^[1]1

Second, that there is an explosion of merger activity in and between the television production and distribution space is hardly a surprise: the Multichannel Video Programming Distributor (MVPD) business — that is, television distributed by cable, broadband, or satellite — has been shrinking for years now, and in a world where the addressable market is decreasing, the only avenues for growth are winning share from competitors, acquiring competitors, or vertically integrating.

Third, that last paragraph overstates the industry’s travails, at least in terms of television distribution, because most TV distributors are also internet service providers (ISPs), which means they are getting paid by consumers using the services disrupting MVPDs, including Netflix, Google, Facebook, and the Internet generally.

What was both unsurprising and yet odd about this case was the degree to which it was fought over point number two, with minimal acknowledgement of point number three. That is, it seems clear to me that AT&T made this acquisition with an eye on point number three, yet the government’s case was predicated on point number two; to that end, the government, in my eyes, rightly lost given the case they made. Whether they should have lost a better case is another question entirely.

Why AT&T Bought Time Warner

What is the point of a merger, instead of a contract? This is a question that always looms large in any acquisition, particularly one of this size: AT&T is paying $85 billion for Time Warner, and that’s an awfully steep price to simply hang out with movie stars.

The standard explanation for most mergers is “synergies”, the idea that there are significant cost savings from combining the operations of two companies; the reason this explanation is popular is because saving money is not an issue for antitrust, while the corresponding possibility — charging higher prices by achieving a stronger market position through consolidation — is. Such an explanation, though, is usually applied in the case of a horizontal merger, not a vertical one like AT&T and Time Warner.

To that end, AT&T was remarkably honest in its [2]press release announcing the merger back in 2016:^[3]2

 “With great content, you can build truly differentiated video services, whether it’s traditional TV, OTT or mobile. Our TV, mobile and broadband distribution and direct customer relationships provide unique insights from which we can offer addressable advertising and better tailor content,” [AT&T CEO Randall] Stephenson said. “It’s an integrated approach and we believe it’s the model that wins over time…

 AT&T expects the deal to be accretive in the first year after close on both an adjusted EPS and free cash flow per share basis…Additionally, AT&T expects the deal to improve its dividend coverage and enhance its revenue and earnings growth profile.

Start with the second point: [4]as I noted at the time, it’s not very sexy, but it matters to AT&T, a 34-year member of the [5]Dividend Aristocrats, that is, a company in the S&P 500 that raised its dividend for 25 years straight or more. It’s a core part of AT&T’s valuation, but the company’s free cash flow has been struggling to keep up with its rising dividends. Time Warner will help significantly in this regard, as did the previous acquisition of DirecTV.

It is the first point, though, that is pertinent to this analysis: how exactly might Time Warner allow AT&T to “build truly differentiated video services”?

The Government’s Case

While the AT&T press release noted that those “truly differentiated video services” could be delivered via traditional TV, OTT, or mobile, the government’s case was entirely concerned with traditional TV. The [6]original complaint stated:

 Were this merger allowed to proceed, the newly combined firm likely would — just as AT&T/DirecTV has already predicted — use its control of Time Warner’s popular programming as a weapon to harm competition. AT&T/DirecTV would hinder its rivals by forcing them to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more per year for Time Warner’s networks, and it would use its increased power to slow the industry’s transition to new and exciting video distribution models that provide greater choice for consumers. The proposed merger would result in fewer innovative offerings and higher bills for American families.

The idea is that AT&T could leverage its ownership of DirecTV to demand higher prices for Turner networks from other MVPDs, because if the MVPDs refused to pay customers would be driven to switch to DirectTV. The problem is that, [7]as was easily calculable, this makes no economic sense: the amount of money AT&T would lose by blacking out Turner would almost certainly outweigh whatever gains it might accrue. The judge agreed, and that was that.

AT&T’s Real Goals

Remember, though, that AT&T did not limit its options to traditional TV: what is far more compelling are the possibilities Time Warner content presents for OTT and mobile. The question is not what AT&T can do to increase the revenue potential of Time Warner content (which was the government’s focus), but rather what Time Warner content can do to increase the potential of AT&T’s services, particularly mobile.

Forgive the long excerpt, but I covered this angle at length [8]in a Daily Update when the deal was announced:

 AT&T’s core wireless business is competing in a saturated market with few growth prospects. Apple’s gift to the wireless industry of customers demanding high-priced data plans has largely run its course, with AT&T perhaps the biggest winner: the company acquired significant market share even as it increased its average revenue per user for nearly a decade, primarily thanks to the iPhone. Now, though, most everyone has a smartphone and, more pertinently, a data plan…

 The implication of a saturated market is that growth is increasingly zero sum, which presents both a problem and an opportunity for AT&T. The problem is primarily T-Mobile: fueled by the massive break-up fee paid by AT&T for the aforementioned failed acquisition, T-Mobile has embarked on an all-out assault against the incumbent wireless carriers, and AT&T has felt the pain the most, recording a negative net change in postpaid wireless customers for eight straight quarters. Unable or unwilling to compete with T-Mobile on price, AT&T needs a differentiator, ideally one that will not only forestall losses but actually lead to gains.

 At first glance this doesn’t explain the Time Warner acquisition either: per my point above these are two very different companies with two very different strategic views of content. A distributor in a zero-sum competition for subscribers (like AT&T) has a vertical business model: ideally there should be services and content that are exclusive to the distributor, thus securing customers. Time Warner, though, is a content company, which means it has a horizontal business model: content is made once and then monetized across the broadest set of potential customers possible, taking advantage of content’s zero marginal cost. The assumption of this sort of horizontal business model underlay Time Warner’s valuation; to suddenly make Time Warner’s content exclusive to AT&T would be massively value destructive (this is a reality often missed by suggestions that Apple, for example, should acquire content companies to differentiate its hardware).

 AT&T, however, may have found a loophole: zero rating. Zero rating is often conflated with net neutrality, but unlike the latter, zero rating does not entail the discriminatory treatment of data; it just means that some data is free (sure, this is a violation of the idea of net neutrality, but this is why [9]I was critical of the narrow focus on discriminatory treatment of data by net neutrality advocates). AT&T is [10]already using zero rating to push DirecTV:

 [11]IFrame

 This is almost certainly the plan for Time Warner content as well: sure, it will continue to be available on all distributors, but if you subscribe to AT&T you can watch as much as you want for free; moreover, this offering is one that is strengthened by secular trends towards cord-cutting and mobile-only video consumption. If those trends continue on their current path AT&T will not only strengthen the moat of its wireless service against T-Mobile but maybe even start to steal share.

That this point never came up in the government’s case, and, by extension, the judge’s ruling, is truly astounding.

That noted, it is very fair to wonder why exactly the Department of Justice sued to block this acquisition: President Trump was very outspoken in his opposition to this deal and even more outspoken in his antipathy towards Time Warner-owned CNN. At the same time, Makan Delrahim, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust who led the case, [12]didn’t see a problem with the merger before his appointment. That the government’s complaint rested on both the most obvious angle and, from AT&T’s perspective, the least important, suggests a paucity of rigor in the prosecution of this case; it is very reasonable to wonder if the order to oppose the merger came from the top, and that the easiest case was the obvious out.

The Neutrality Solution

Thus we are in the unfortunate scenario where a bad case by the government has led to, at best, a merger that was never examined for its truly anti-competitive elements, and at worst, bad law that will open the door for similar tie-ups. To be sure, it is not at all clear that the government would have won had they focused on zero rating: there is an obvious consumer benefit to the concept — that is why T-Mobile leveraged it to such great effect! — and the burden would have been on the government to show that the harm was greater.

The bigger issue, though, is the degree to which laws surrounding such issues are woefully out-of-date. Last fall I argued that [13]Title II was the wrong framework to enforce net neutrality, even though net neutrality is [14]a concept I absolutely support; I came to that position in part because zero rating was barely covered by the FCC’s action.^[15]3

What is clearly needed is new legislation, not an attempt to misapply ancient regulation in a way that is trivially reversible. Moreover, AT&T has a point that online services like Google and Facebook are legitimate competitors, particularly for ad dollars; said regulation should address the entire sector. To that end I would focus on three key principles:

 * First, ISPs should not purposely slow or block data on a discriminatory basis. I am not necessarily opposed to the concept of “fast lanes”, as I believe that offers significant potential for innovative services, although I recognize the arguments against them; it should be non-negotiable, though, that ISPs cannot purposely disfavor certain types of content.
 * Second, and similarly, dominant internet platforms should not be allowed to block any legal content from their services. At the same time, services should have discretion in monetization and algorithms; that anyone should be able to put content on YouTube, for example, does not mean that one has a right to have Google monetize it on their behalf, or surface it to people not looking for it.
 * Third, ISPs should not be allowed to zero-rate their own content, and platforms should not be allowed to prioritize their own content in their algorithms. Granted, this may be a bit extreme; at a minimum there should be strict rules and transparency around transfer pricing and a guarantee that the same rates are allowed to competitive services and content.

The reality of the Internet, as noted by [16]Aggregation Theory, is increased centralization; meanwhile, the impact on the Internet on traditional media is an inexorable drive towards consolidation. Our current laws and antitrust jurisprudence are woefully unprepared to deal with this reality, and a new law guaranteeing neutrality is the best solution.

References

Visible links
1. https://stratechery.com/2018/the-need-for-neutrality/#footnote_0_3563
2. http://about.att.com/story/att_to_acquire_time_warner.html
3. https://stratechery.com/2018/the-need-for-neutrality/#footnote_1_3563
4. https://stratechery.com/2016/att-to-buy-time-warner-pending-regulatory-approval-the-att-perspective-the-time-warner-perspective/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500_Dividend_Aristocrats
6. https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/1012916/download
7. https://stratechery.com/2017/the-department-of-justice-sues-to-block-the-att-time-warner-acquisition-the-dojs-case-atts-objections/
8. https://stratechery.com/2016/att-to-buy-time-warner-pending-regulatory-approval-the-att-perspective-the-time-warner-perspective/
9. https://stratechery.com/2015/daily-update-watch-net-neutrality-zero-rating/
10. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/att-owner-of-directv-exempts-directv-from-mobile-data-caps/
11. https://www.youtube.com/embed/l2MYgAaPVDQ?rel=0&showinfo=0
12. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/video/no-big-worries-in-at-t-deal-for-time-warner~978794
13. https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/
14. https://stratechery.com/2014/netflix-net-neutrality/
15. https://stratechery.com/2018/the-need-for-neutrality/#footnote_2_3563
16. https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/

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Netflix Is Why AT&T bought Time Warner, and Comcast and Disney want Fox

Netflix is valued far higher than its rivals, and it's causing angst among media companies that feel they can't compete. Some should be changing their business models instead of focusing on getting…

Article word count: 3275

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17330734

Posted by prostoalex (karma: 61396)

Post stats: Points: 102 - Comments: 150 - 2018-06-17T03:24:59Z

#HackerNews #and #att #bought #comcast #disney #fox #netflix #time #want #warner #why

Article content:

The media industry is in a frenzy.

[1]AT&T is buying [2]Time Warner for $85 billion after [3]overcoming a challenge from the Justice Department. The Murdoch family has agreed to sell the majority of its [4]21st Century Fox empire to [5]Disney.

[6]Comcast [7]plans to crash that deal with a higher offer. It has also outbid Fox for the remaining 61 percent of European pay-TV provider Sky. Those two deals together could total $100 billion when the bidding is done.

Viacom and CBS continue to dance around merging. [8]Discovery closed a $14.6 billion acquisition for Scripps Networks in March. [9]Lionsgate completed its $4.4 billion deal purchase of Starz in December.

Thereʼs been a drastic change among legacy media company executives the last two years. Their CEOs wonʼt say it publicly, but theyʼre saying it privately: The pay-TV bundle, the lifeblood of the U.S. media ecosystem for decades, is dying.

Thereʼs a lot of places to blame. Competition on mobile devices. Video games. Even the internet in general.

But executives at most traditional media companies agree that Netflix, if not directly responsible, is at least holding the murder weapon. The 21-year-old company that was once best known for killing DVD rental giant Blockbuster has pivoted its entire business around the idea that streaming video delivered over the internet will replace the linear TV.

See also: [10]Reed Hastings won by studying Amazon — then running in the opposite direction

Consumers seem to agree. Netflix gained 92 million customers in the last five years while the number of people who pay for cable declines year after year. That dynamic has persuaded investors to believe in Netflixʼs high-risk business model of running cash-flow negative to outspend traditional media companies for content. It has let Netflix strike deals with everyone from David Letterman to Ryan Murphy to [11]Barack Obama.

And the more Netflix spends, the more investors cheer.

The success of Netflix in the market is why weʼre seeing "the greatest rearranging of the media industry chessboard in history," according to BTIG media analyst Rich Greenfield.

But chasing scale isnʼt the answer for every media company, according to [12]Netflix CFO David Wells.

"Not everybodyʼs going to get big," Wells said in an interview. "The strategic question is, ʼwhat type of business do I want to be in the next five or 10 years?ʼ"

So legacy giants are now beginning to contemplate how to beat Netflix at its own game. Comcast, which owns CNBC parent NBCUniversal, has had preliminary talks with AT&T to start an over-the-top digital streaming service with NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. content, according to people familiar with the matter. Discovery is also pondering its own OTT service, potentially with a global technology company, said other sources. Disney is debuting its streaming service next year.

Wells is skeptical about this approach.

"The consumer doesnʼt want 100 direct-to-consumer services," he said. "The consumer wants great breadth and amazing personalization so they can find something in 30 seconds instead of five minutes."

[13]Reed Hastings in 2006.

While traditional media is racing to catch up, Netflix CEO [14]Reed Hastings is not looking back at the runners heʼs passed.

Hastings has never really feared legacy media, said Neil Rothstein, who worked at Netflix from 2001 to 2012 and eventually ran digital global advertising for the company. Thatʼs because Hastings bought into the fundamental principle of "The Innovatorʼs Dilemma," the 1997 business strategy book by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.

That book, often cited in tech circles, explains how disruptive businesses often start off as cheaper alternatives with lesser functionality, making it difficult for big incumbents to respond without cannibalizing their cash-rich businesses. Over time, the newcomer adds features and builds customer loyalty until itʼs just as good or better than the incumbentʼs product. By the time the old guard wakes up, itʼs too late.

"Reed brought 25 or 30 of us together, and we discussed the book," Rothstein said of an executive retreat he remembered nearly a decade ago. "We studied AOL and Blockbuster as cautionary tales. We knew we had to disrupt, including disrupting ourselves, or someone else would do it."

Thereʼs no guarantee Netflix can keep up its big spending without seeing its stock fall back to Earth. But the media giants can no longer afford to wait and find out.

Letʼs say youʼre a carpenter, and you make furniture out of mahogany. You pay for mahogany wood and sell a finished product for a profit. Youʼve been doing this for years, and youʼve made a good living from it.

One day, a new guy — letʼs call him Reed Hastings — moves in next door. At first, Reed seems awesome. After looking through your store, he buys a bunch of the dusty pieces in the back no one else wanted.

[15]Reed Hastings in 2006.

But after a while, Reed decides to get into the furniture manufacturing business, too. And now heʼs telling your mahogany supplier that heʼll pay 50 percent more for the same wood. Then another competitor, a rich fellow named Jeff Bezos, shows up across the street. He wants the mahogany, too, and heʼs bidding 75 percent more.

This is crazy, you think. How are these guys able to afford to pay so much more for the same stuff? Theyʼve got to be passing along the costs to their customers, right?

But theyʼre not. You walk in their store, and theyʼre selling the same quality furniture you make for less than you sell it. And cash from investors is pouring in.

You say, what the hell? Iʼll up my spending, too. This is the new world, I guess. So you bid 100 percent more for mahogany. Instantly, your stock falls. "Boo!" say your investors. "Your business model is dying!"

This sounds like a Franz Kafka novel. But this allegory explains the current plight of legacy media.

Imagine Lionsgate is the mahogany carpenter. Lionsgate develops original and licensed movies and TV shows; it pays for the talent and the production costs and receives money in return from cable channels, digital outlets, TV networks and so on. It owns the "Hunger Games" franchise, "Mad Men" and "Orange is the New Black." That last one, of course, runs on Netflix.

For years, Netflix was a welcome addition to the media landscape because it bought a lot of library content that was old or not that popular. Plus, Netflix didnʼt get in the way of the two main ways content providers make money — signing deals with pay-TV operators like Comcast, Charter, AT&T and Dish Network, and taking cash from advertisers. Working with Netflix was like finding free money.

[16](L-R): Ted Sarandos, Reed Hastings, and Michael Rubin in Jan. 2005.
(L-R): Ted Sarandos, Reed Hastings, and Michael Rubin in Jan. 2005.

But the programmers kept asking for higher fees, especially on costly sports rights, and that pushed cable bills higher. Meanwhile, Netflix customers loved the low price — originally less than $8 a month compared with $80 or $100 for cable. When Netflix started offering a handful of original shows, such as "House of Cards" and "Orange Is The New Black," viewers kept coming, and the companyʼs valuation swelled.

Five years ago, Netflix was trading at about $32 per share. Today, Netflix trades at about $370 a share. Thatʼs a gain of 1,050 percent.

Over the same period, Lionsgate is down about 15 percent.

A lot of media CEOs believe Netflix is winning because the game is rigged in its favor. Their complaints focus on how companies are valued by investors.

Lionsgateʼs enterprise value (EV), a good measure of a companyʼs worth, is about $7.5 billion. Its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) over the last 12 months was $520 million. So, Lionsgate trades at a trailing EV/EBITDA multiple of about 14. Discovery, Disney and Viacom all trade at trailing multiples lower than 14.

Netflix has an enterprise value of $165 billion and EBITDA of $1.1 billion, giving it a multiple of about 150.

Thatʼs the equivalent of a huge cheering section, throwing money at the company to keep spending.

Indeed, Netflix is now the number one spender on media content outside of sports rights, according to consulting firm SNL Kagan.

Some traditional media execs and analysts are skeptical that Netflix can keep it up.

"To be worth $150 billion, someday youʼve got to make at least $10 billion in EBITDA," Steve Burke, CEO of CNBC parent company NBCUniversal, said in an interview. "Thereʼs at least a chance Netflix never makes that."

Netflix spends more money than it takes in each year, funding the gaps with debt. Last year, it posted free cash flow of almost negative $2 billion and has forecast that it could be [17]negative $4 billion in 2018. Netflixʼs path forward is tied to massive international growth, which will require spending billions more on original programming.

If you think Netflix should trade like a traditional media company, Burkeʼs got a pretty good case Netflix is insanely overvalued. Even Hastings acknowledges Netflix looks more like a media company than a technology company, which tend to trade at much higher multiples.

"Weʼll spend over $10 billion on content and marketing and $1.3 billion on tech," Hastings said in his April 16 quarterly earnings conference call. "So just objectively, weʼre much more of a media company in that way than pure tech."

The music will stop for Netflix if it canʼt quit burning money, said Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who has a sell rating on the stock and a price target of $140 per share.

"Netflix has burned more cash every year since 2013," Pachter said.

As of the end of the first quarter, Netflix had $6.54 billion in long-term debt and $17.9 billion in streaming content payment obligations, with only $2.6 billion in cash and equivalents on hand. In April, Netflix raised $1.9 billion of 5.875 percent senior notes.

"What happens when they need to keep increasing their spending and suddenly they have $10 billion of debt? People are going to start asking, ʼcan this company pay us back?ʼ If that happens, their lending rate will spike. If Netflix needs to raise capital, theyʼll issue stock. And thatʼs when investors will get spooked," Pachter said.

Even if his logic is sound, Pachter has been wrong for years on Netflix. Its stock has just kept rising.

Netflix executives even posted a 2005 comment of his on a wall at their Los Gatos, California, headquarters and would chuckle at it as they walked by. It read: "Netflix is a worthless piece of crap with really nice people running it."

Netflixʼs use of cash is strategic, even though itʼs not a typical corporate practice, according to Hastings.

"Itʼs horrible how mismanaged most Silicon Valley companies are in capital," Hastings said in a 2015 interview with venture capitalist John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and early backer of tech giants like [18]Google and [19]Amazon.

"Microsoft always wanted to have a lot of cash on hand. Apple had no cash 15 years ago in 2000. Who did the most innovation? The cash does not help. The cash insolates you in a bad way. Itʼs a bad thing that companies store cash."

From October 2016: Reed Hastings on AT&T-Time Warner, acquisition speculation:

The long-term bull case for Netflix is that its subscriber growth, coupled with incremental price increases, will eventually propel earnings and cash flow.

BTIGʼs Greenfield predicts Netflix will increase its global subscribers from 125 million to 200 million by 2020. Bank of America analyst Nat Schindler estimates Netflix will have 360 million subscribers by 2030. Netflix estimates the total addressable market of subscribers, not including China, could be about 800 million.

Meanwhile, the number of traditional cable and satellite pay-TV households falls each year, and the declines are accelerating. Research firm Statista predicts there will be 95 million U.S. pay-TV households by 2020, down from 100 million in 2015.

The bigger Netflix gets, the more A+ talent will want to sign exclusive deals with Netflix instead of traditional media companies. Itʼs a virtuous cycle, as top talent then accelerates subscriber growth. Itʼs also a death spiral for the weakest traditional media players.

Netflix has another edge in the content wars. While networks make decisions on TV ratings, Netflix plays a different game. Its barometer for success is based on how much it spent on a show rather than hoping every show is a blowout hit, said Barry Enderwick, who worked in Netflixʼs marketing department from 2001 to 2012 and who was director of global marketing and subscriber acquisition. Since Netflix is not beholden to advertisers, niche shows can be successful, as long as Netflix controls spending. That also gives Netflix the luxury of being able to order full seasons of shows, which appeals to talent.

"If youʼre a typical studio, you raise money for a pilot, and if it tests well, you pick up the show, maybe you make a few more episodes, and you wait for the ratings," said Enderwick.

"At Netflix, our data made our decisions for us, so weʼd just order two seasons. Show creators would ask us, ʼdo you want to see notes? Donʼt you want to see a pilot?ʼ Weʼd respond, ʼIf you want us to.ʼ Creators were gobsmacked."

That dynamic has led some content makers to decide theyʼre better off working directly for Netflix, which now spends more on content than many TV networks.

Last year, Netflix signed Shonda Rhimes, creator of "Greyʼs Anatomy" and "Scandal," to a multiyear contract after more than a decade at ABC Studios. Earlier this year, Netflix signed a deal with Ryan Murphy, creator of "Nip/Tuck," "American Horror Story" and "Glee," to a deal that could reach $300 million, according to [20]Deadline Hollywood. He left Fox TV for the Netflix offer and spurned a counteroffer from Disney. And Jenji Kohan, who created "Orange is The New Black" for Lionsgate? She left for Netflix, too.

So if youʼre a big media company, how do you fight back? What if youʼre [21]Comcast or [22]Charter or [23]AT&T? How do you stop customers from ditching pay TV services for [24]Netflix?

Compete

Disney is farthest ahead in its plan to fight Netflix head-on.

Itʼs removing all of its movies from Netflix at the end of the year and starting its own service for lovers of Disney and Pixar titles. Disneyʼs digital over-the-top service will launch in 2019 and include movies and TV shows from the Disney-ABC TV Group library. Foxʼs film and TV library would bolster this service, if Disney completes that deal.

NBCUniversal may be forced into offering a streaming service of its own, potentially with partners who can generate enough must-have content that it becomes enticing to customers with and without cable.

NBCUniversal executives have discussed launching a rival OTT service that would include Universal and Warner Bros. programming, according to people familiar with the matter, although it may not happen if NBCUniversal parent company Comcast succeeds in grabbing Fox from out of Disneyʼs hands. Outside of Fox, NBC views Warnerʼs library of programming as the strongest among potential partners, with Sony No. 2, one of the people said. (AT&T and NBCUniversal spokespeople declined to comment.)

Discovery, too, is considering an OTT product, according to people familiar with the matter — perhaps in conjunction with a global tech platform that can showcase its nonfiction programming — an area where Netflix isnʼt as strong.

"You look at the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google), and their strategy is focused primarily on scripted movies and scripted series," Discovery CEO David Zaslav said. "Discovery is probably the most effective nonfiction producer in the world. I like our hand given we own all of our content."

A Discovery spokesman declined to comment on plans for the OTT service.

There are several problems with competing with Netflix by offering rival online services. Netflix already has a huge first-mover advantage. Stand-alone digital services arenʼt where legacy media companies want to spend their money. Programming costs are high, and the result may just cannibalize their existing pay-TV model, which brings in billions of dollars from subscriber fees and ads. And just because the market has rewarded Netflix for its strategy doesnʼt mean investors will cheer on late competitors for following the same model.

Consolidate

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson [25]told CNBC earlier this year that the Time Warner deal is a direct response to Netflix.

"Reality is, the biggest distributor of content out there is totally vertically integrated," said Stephenson. "This happens to be somebody called Netflix. But they create original content; they aggregate original content; and they distribute original content. This thing is moving at lightning speed."

The desire to gain scale to take on Netflix is also driving interest by Disney and Comcast in Foxʼs assets, which include Foxʼs movie studio, some cable networks and stakes in Sky, Endemol Shine Group, and Hulu.

But getting bigger isnʼt the answer for everyone, said Wells.

"Some brands are big enough to compete to be another Netflix, or another YouTube, and vie for the global consumer media dollar," said Wells. "But not everybodyʼs going to be in that bucket. They may want to specialize in content production, and that may be a better business for them."

Capitulate

Comcast and Charter have actually accelerated Netflixʼs growth by allowing Netflix subscribers access to their programming through their cable boxes. Their strategy is if people are going to watch Netflix anyway, they might as well bundle it with cable service and improve the overall experience. That way, customers can subscribe to both.

Because these cable giants are also Internet providers, they also have a theoretical weapon in their back pocket — the ability to throttle Netflix speeds in the new era without net neutrality safeguards, or at least charge customers for using data via Netflix while keeping home-grown cable applications exempt from usage caps.

"We could experience discriminatory or anti-competitive practices that could impede our growth, cause us to incur additional expense or otherwise negatively affect our business," Netflix acknowledges in its annual report.

But this isnʼt much of a fear for Netflix. The company knows cable and wireless companies need broadband growth more than video growth to keep flourishing, and few companies drive internet usage like Netflix. T-Mobile now offers its customers Netflix for free.

Big Media isnʼt going to just disappear like Blockbuster. A company like CBS, with a market capitalization of $20 billion, had EBITDA of about $3 billion last year — thatʼs three times as much as Netflix. Many sports rights are still locked up for years by old media companies. That will keep affiliate fees and advertising dollars coming.

But [26]Amazon, [27]Facebook, [28]Apple and [29]Google have massive valuations and cash hoards compared with media companies. They, too, have the balance sheets to spend billions on video without seeing a major dent in their stock prices. And as young consumers get older, the days of paying for a bundle of TV channels may be waning.

So how does this end? Netflixʼs answer is again in a business strategy book.

Hastings derived many of his strategy lessons from a Stanford instructor named Hamilton Helmer. Hastings even invited him to Netflix in 2010 to teach other executives.

One of Helmerʼs key concepts is called counter-positioning, which Helmer defines as: "A newcomer adopts a new, superior business model which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business."

"Throughout my business career, I have often observed powerful incumbents, once lauded for their business acumen, failing to adjust to a new competitive reality," Hastings writes in the forward to Helmerʼs book "7 Powers," published in 2016.

"The result is a stunning fall from grace."

[30]Reed Hastings in 2008 looking in the window of a closed Blockbuster store.
Reed Hastings in 2008 looking in the window of a closed Blockbuster store.

References

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1. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=T
2. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=TWX
3. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/12/att-time-warner-ruling.html
4. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=FOXA
5. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=DIS
6. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=CMCSA
7. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/11/comcast-announcing-fox-bid-on-wednesday-if-att-time-warner-approved.html
8. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=DISCA
9. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=LGF.A
10. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/13/netflix-reed-hastings-inspiration-amazon.html
11. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/21/barack-and-michelle-obama-sign-multi-year-deal-with-netflix.html
12. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=NFLX
14. https://www.cnbc.com/id/105060000
17. http://www.businessinsider.com/netflix-is-burning-cash-and-investors-are-loving-it-2018-2
18. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=GOOGL
19. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=AMZN
20. http://deadline.com/2018/02/ryan-murphy-giant-overall-deal-with-netflix-1202287851/
21. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=CMCSA
22. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=CHTR
23. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=T
24. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=NFLX
25. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/09/att-ceo-stephenson-we-expect-to-win-approval-for-time-warner-deal.html
26. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=AMZN
27. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=FB
28. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=AAPL
29. https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=GOOGL

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phallic time…

#phallic #shadow #time #clock #sundial #animatedgif

AT&T Cleared by Judge to Buy Time Warner

AT&T Inc. was cleared by a judge to take over Time Warner Inc. in an $85 billion deal that will fuel the mobile-phone giant’s evolution into a media powerhouse and could spark a wave of new mergers.

Article word count: 975

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17297763

Posted by coloneltcb (karma: 37370)

Post stats: Points: 91 - Comments: 126 - 2018-06-12T20:41:16Z

#HackerNews #att #buy #cleared #judge #time #warner

Article content:

[1]AT&T Inc. was cleared by a judge to take over [2]Time Warner Inc. in an $85 billion deal that will fuel the mobile-phone giant’s evolution into a media powerhouse and could spark a wave of new mergers.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon on Tuesday rejected the Justice Department’s request for an order blocking the Time Warner acquisition, saying the government failed to make its case that the combination would lead to higher prices for pay-TV subscribers. The judge put no conditions on the deal.

Time Warner gained as much as 5.8 percent in after-hours trading, while AT&T fell as much as 3.9 percent.

After nearly two years, AT&T is on the cusp of completing its acquisition of Time Warner, a deal it struck in a bid to become an entertainment giant that can feed Time Warner programming like HBO and CNN to its 119 million mobile, internet and video customers, and go head-to-head with Netflix Inc. and [3]Amazon.com Inc.

"We think the evidence throughout the trial was quite clear and we’re very pleased that the court saw it the same way," said Daniel Petrocelli, AT&T’s lawyer. The company said in a [4]statement that it plans to complete the takeover on or before June 20.

The Justice Department can appeal and could ask an appellate court stay the ruling, though Leon said he hoped the government would have the "good judgment" not to do so. The Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, said he was disappointed and will consider his next steps.

[5]Read more: How other media stocks fared after AT&T win

The judge’s decision could open the door to other mergers, including Comcast Corp. making a formal bid for the 21st Century Fox, which gained as much as 7.3 percent after the ruling and is also the target of competing interest from Walt Disney Co. The decision also may make it easier for Verizon Communications Inc. to buy a content company and clear the regulatory path for deals Cigna Corp. and CVS Health Corp. have already announced.

All of those deals would unite companies in different parts of an industry’s supply chain. For years, these so-called vertical deals have typically received light treatment from antitrust enforcers, unlike the horizontal mergers that bring together direct competitors. Opposition to the Time Warner acquisition marked an aggressive turn by the Justice Department.

Leon described part of the government’s case as "gossamer thin," saying that during the trial the Justice Department’s expert witness declined to back some of the government’s own theories.

"I conclude the government has failed to meet its burden to establish that the proposed transaction is likely to lessen competition substantially," the judge wrote in his [6]opinion.

Leon said the government fell "far short" of showing that AT&T’s new Turner Broadcasting unit would have increased leverage in negotiations with distributors. He rejected testimony by distributors who said they were worried Turner would be able to raise prices.

"The bulk of the third-party competitor testimony proffered by the government was speculative, based on unproven assumptions, or unsupported -- or even contradicted -- by the government’s own evidence," Leon wrote.

The judge found similar deficiencies in the government’s other theory of harm to customers: that the deal would stunt development of streaming services.

Leon’s decision is a blow to Delrahim, who brought in a new enforcement approach with the case. The government’s November lawsuit was also the first major merger challenge under President Donald Trump, who railed against the tie-up when it was announced during the 2016 campaign. He vowed that his administration would oppose it, and as president, he has relentlessly attacked CNN for its news coverage.

Antitrust Theory

Trump’s criticism prompted speculation that the lawsuit was politically motivated. Still, the Justice Department’s case laid out a traditional antitrust theory: that combining two companies in different parts of a supply chain can give the merged company the ability to harm rivals.

The suit stunned investors and antitrust lawyers because it broke with years of past practice for reviewing such deals, known as vertical mergers. Rather than negotiating an agreement that imposes conditions on how AT&T can conduct business, Delrahim demanded AT&T sell businesses to address threats to competition, which the company refused to do.

"This is extremely bad for DOJ," said [7]Chris Sagers, an antitrust law professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. "This is probably the end of meaningful vertical enforcement for a good long time."

After Delrahim took over the division, he announced that the department would require asset sales to remedy harm to competition from vertical deals. Leon’s ruling raises the question of whether Delrahim can successfully maintain that stance.

The Justice Department claimed that AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner would give the No. 1 pay-TV provider increased bargaining leverage over rivals like Dish Network Corp. that pay for Time Warner programming.

Harder Bargain

Because of AT&T’s ownership of DirecTV, it can drive a harder bargain with other distributors that want Time Warner content, the government’s lawyers argued during the trial. If negotiations break down and rivals can’t secure that programming, their customers could switch to DirecTV, the lawyers said. That leverage would allow AT&T to raise prices for Time Warner content, with those costs being passed on to consumers, according to the Justice Department.

The government’s case hinged on an economic model produced by Carl Shapiro, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, who predicted an annual price increase to consumers of at least $285 million. AT&T attacked that projection as baseless, repeatedly poking holes in the various inputs Shapiro used to calculate the estimate.

In his opinion, Leon said Shapiro’s analysis had so many problems the government started backing away from it.

"I couldn’t help but notice that the more and more questions were raised during trial about the reliability of Professor Shapiro’s theory and model, the more the government appeared to be minimizing the importance of his analysis," the judge wrote.

— With assistance by Greg Stohr, Tom Schoenberg, Jeran Wittenstein, and Ben Brody

References

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1. https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/T:US
2. https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/TWX:US
3. https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/AMZN:US
4. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/terminal/PA8A8OMEQTXC
5. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/terminal/PA8A2X6JIJV9
6. http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/sites/dcd/files/17-2511opinion.pdf
7. https://www.law.csuohio.edu/meetcmlaw/faculty/sagers

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Country Time Lemonade Will Pay Legal Fees for Unlicensed Lemonade Stands

Are you thinking of helping your kid setting up a lemonade stand this summer? Apparently, some young entrepreneurs are getting shut down due to a lack of small business permits. In a very savvy PR …

Article word count: 252

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17283758

Posted by ca98am79 (karma: 15220)

Post stats: Points: 127 - Comments: 62 - 2018-06-11T12:48:36Z

#HackerNews #country #fees #for #legal #lemonade #pay #stands #time #unlicensed #will

Article content:

June 10, 2018 By [1]Jonathan Ping

Are you thinking of helping your kid setting up a lemonade stand this summer? Apparently, some young entrepreneurs are getting shut down due to a lack of small business permits. In a very savvy PR move, [2]Country Time Lemonade has offered to reimburse any permit fees or fines (up to $300) that are incurred while operating a lemonade stand. Here’s their [3]“Legal-ade” video:

[4]IFrame

On one hand, nobody likes bureaucracy. The United States is currently #6 in the world for “ease of doing business” according to the [5]World Bank. On the other hand, perhaps navigating local business laws is a valuable lesson for teens and above. I mean, even the Legal-ade website is crammed full of fine print:

 Open to legal residents of the 50 U.S. (including D.C.), who are the parents or legal guardians of a child 14 years of age or younger operating a lemonade stand. Program ends 11:59pm ET on 8/31/18 or when $60,000 worth of offers have been awarded, whichever comes first. For complete Terms and Conditions, including status of available offers, and all other details, visit countrytimelegalade.com.

You can’t even be 13 or younger to participate due to child privacy laws. But hey, now motivated parents can get those permits reimbursed (as long as they haven’t exhausted their $60,000 budget.) A framed official business permit for their first lemonade stand will go great on my kids’ walls, right next to their framed Berkshire Hathaway stock certificate…

Related

Last updated: June 10, 2018

References

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1. http://www.mymoneyblog.com/
2. https://www.countrytimelegalade.com/
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kocQvvKoyg4
4. http://www.youtube.com/embed/kocQvvKoyg4?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
5. http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings

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Cronopolíticas: ¿alguna vez te han regalado un siglo? https://www.eldiario.es/interferencias/cronopoliticas-in_time_6_780132005.html #dirigida #Andrew #Niccol #time #In