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Skyway Robbery

December 10, 2010

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If you pay Sky £34 a month for their content this is what you get:

Nice.

rip off. stealing sky

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Abracadabra Shazam!

I remember encountering Shazam sometime in the early naughties. They’d already been around for a while (I’ve read their setup date as variously 1999 and 2004 in the mainstream media, who still don’t seem able to check a fact but will itherwise provide opinions on anything and everything).
But who cares? The reality is that they are a British company with genuinely bleeding edge technology with little commercial application that has swallowed up tens if not hundreds of millions of funding over 15 years or more and have now exited at a valuation that would make a US startup laugh and which has probably washed out all but the most recent investors.
A British company selling itself for $400m to Apple might seem like a massive result. The reality is that this was a score draw...

Predicting Me

I'm actually quite important, I think. Some of the world's biggest companies are spending billions on trying to profile and target me. They want to know all about me.
And now broadcasters seem to care about what I actually want to watch. (Commercially I would want to build the most loved content service that no one wants to watch, since this is commercially optimal - sports channels broadcast 24 x 7 but viewers only want to watch 4 hours of football a week: my viewing habits are so esoteric that I might be difficult to target through content tags and categories: jazz, rugby, Scandi Noir).
Sorry... What do you mean ? They're doing the same to you ? We're all being profiled! But I thoughts I was special! That's why I ticked all those boxes and gave them all my data...
Drat.
But, of course, my data is more special. I'm richer (well I think I spend more). Or will their profilers see that I actually stay at home, shop at Tescos, cook a lot and really spend very little …

Recycling Software

Last week I upgraded my phone - just from an iPhone 6S to 7, so the differences are largely imperceptible. Still, I've had a week of my wife tutting me for swearing at an inanimate object as I try to come to terms with the idiosyncrasies of my new device.

At the same time we've been having a look at some issues a client was having with video playback and , just like pretty much everything else in life this days, I've come to the conclusion that you need to take your system to the tip occasionally and buy a new one, just like you do with your TV or phone, however frustrating and scary the prospect of change is.

In this instance old FFMPEG code meant that clips which were optimised six years ago are now looking pretty cruddy and not caching and rendering properly. We were able to fix the problem in a couple of hours and halved the file size for roughly the same quality, all using the latest version of the same product: that also means a substantial cost saving for the custo…

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(c) Iolo Jones,