The USS Quad Damage

I had a ball at our very first “Christmas is over” party. Me and Paulo organised it so that it was the day after boxing day. A day which was hopefully a “black hole” in many people’s agendas. Either they’d gone off to whoop whoop for the NYE party, or they’d be at work, or they’d have nothing planned.

As it turned out, even if they had work the next day, it was OK to turn up for a little bit.

The turnout was excellent. The house was full, there was plenty of conversation, the food and drinks were mostly gone by the time the night ended. I had Kahlua. It was awesome. I had a ball. Judging by the noise, even though we completely forgot to play any music, everyone had fun.

Thanks everyone for turning up. Thanks to the peeps who turned up early and helped get stuff organised, thanks for everyone who just managed to take care of things. As a host, I felt I needed to do very little, and that’s likely because you guys took care of things for me. I had a great time, and hope you guys did as well. I owe you guys.

I should do this every year.

From Routers Apple and Fox plan movie rental deal.

I’m sure there’s alot of different ways people will comment on this however I’d like to comment on one particular paragraph which doesn’t make the slightest sense. Most people however probably just glanced over it.

Pali Research analyst Stacey Widlitz said the deal follows a trend of Hollywood studios selling directly to consumers and “cutting out the middleman.”

Now correct me if I’m wrong but how exactly does changing your distribution model from

Studio → Netflix/Blockbuster → Consumer

to

Studio → Apple → Consumer

cut out the middle man?

The only real difference I can see is the equivalent to a change from studios selling DVDs to stores to rent. To one where studios rent shelf space from stores for their DVDs to rent to consumers. I’m sure alot of video rental stores would love a relationship like this because it moves just about all the risk onto the movie studios.

The other analyst they quoted gets closer to the mark with his comments about how it’s probably aimed at expanding the business to sell rental videos to a different market. However it could also be the start of a disruptive technology which will eventually replace video rental stores. Depending ofcourse on future computer networking infrastructure (Interweb speed) and the penetration/intergration of set top boxes able to take downloaded movies from the internet and play them on TVs.