Lost Prediction #4 — My Steve Jobs movie returns to Netflix

2016predictionsAt least one reader pointed out that I somehow missed 2016 Prediction #4, so let me throw something in right here. Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview will shortly return to Netflix worldwide!

Our movie was on Netflix in the USA and Canada for a couple of years (it’s still streaming on Netflix in the UK) but the North American deal ended sometime in November when rights reverted from Magnolia Pictures back to John Gau Productions. The film had already disappeared from iTunes and Amazon, etc., but we hadn’t noticed because, well, Magnolia didn’t bother to mention it and we’re only pretending to be movie producers.

You don’t work directly with these streaming outfits if your body […]

Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview is on iTunes, but don’t tell anyone

My little film about Steve Jobs has finally made it to iTunes (now on Amazon and YouTube as well!) as a $3.99 rental, but you wouldn’t know it. Deeming the film “too controversial,” Apple has it on the site but they aren’t promoting it and won’t. The topic is “too sensitive” you see. It isn’t even listed in the iTunes new releases. You have to search for it. But it’s there.

Maybe I’m not even supposed to tell you.

Of course there is nothing controversial or insensitive about this movie, which everyone including the critics seems to like. It’s a different look at an interesting guy and some people seem to take […]

Absence makes the heart grow fonder and other weird thoughts

How many times yesterday did you do a web search that led you to a Wikipedia page that then didn’t load because of that site’s SOPA protest?  I didn’t notice the effect immediately but once I did I was later able to go back through my browser history and see that I tried and failed to open a total of 13 Wikipedia pages so far.  Whether you give a damn about SOPA or public protest, this experience has given me a whole new respect for the role Wikipedia has come to play in my life and probably yours.

As a result I made a small donation to Wikipedia around lunchtime then cursed it the rest of […]

Netflix too big to fail?

The Intertubes are alight this week with old news — that Netflix is the largest user of U.S. Internet bandwidth. Most stories cite a Sandvine report I won’t link to because you’d have to subscribe and I like you too much for that. Better still, look at the very interesting graphic above, courtesy of Arbor Networks. This chart has been floating around the net for a couple of months and shows the result of an Arbor study of several U.S. ISPs illustrating how we Americans spend our Internet bandwidth. There are three lessons I think we can learn from this chart: 1) that BitTorrent is no longer (or perhaps never was) the threat were were […]

The Future of Internet TV (in America)

ocean_hulu1This column has a global audience so sometimes I have to defend my tendency to see things from an American perspective.  But I’m not sure there even IS a defense for this particular item so I’ll just jump into it, because I think even readers from Kazahkstan and Kuwait (my two big K’s) may ultimately find it interesting.  It’s about Apple and Hulu and the direction Internet TV is going in the United States.

It’s not headed where you think it is.

Hulu is the ad-supported video distribution site set up by NBC-Universal and Fox.  It’s where, in addition to the TV network pages, viewers can go to watch thousands of television shows, old and new, […]