Cord Cutters And The Death Of TV – Business Insider

The cord-cutting and shift away from TV that I mentioned before is accelerating. TV as we’ve known it is dying.

The TV business is having its worst year ever.Audience ratings have collapsed: Aside from a brief respite during the Olympics, there has been only negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011, according to Citi Research.

Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, “The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever.” All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn’t sound like a huge deal — but it includes internet subscribers, too.

Broadband internet was supposed to benefit from the end of cable TV, but it hasn’t.

In all, about 5 million people ended their cable and broadband subs between the beginning of 2010 and the end of this year.

via Cord Cutters And The Death Of TV – Business Insider.

Lee Atwater on the “Southern Strategy”

A discussion on mobile phone safety led me to look up Lee Atwater. Atwater was the Republican strategist known for his divisive campaign tactics in the 1980s. Atwater died in 1991 from a brain tumor (thus the mobile phone safety angle).

I had long known Atwater excelled at race-baiting voters. Until today, though, I had no idea that this interview existed in which Atwater comes right out and explains the new codewords he used for this nefarious purposes. Those codewords are still being used today, sadly enough. Voters are voting on racial issues even now.
Lee_Atwater_1989
Perhaps Atwater will one day reincarnate as a black woman and get a feel for the hate-filled policies he put in motion.

The Problem with Facebook


Larry Lessig shared a video from Derek Muller of Veritasium about one of the biggest problems with Facebook: the intentional throttling of shared content.

It’s easy to take it for granted that what you post on Facebook is seen by all of your Facebook friends but that is actually far from the truth. Facebook’s business model actually requires the service to limit what people see, and to sell you the opportunity to promote your content for a fee. This video is a well-thought-out examination of what your role is as a Facebook user (hint: you’re being manipulated).

I wrote about this activity last year but it’s good to have a video which explains it so much better.