About Strands
Strands is a life streaming service that helps users discover new things based on what their friends like and do, and allows them to see what’s hot among the people they care about.
Thanks to Kalong from Strands.com for posting this video of her receiving the FrostWire T-Shirt and stickers.
Also thanks to all the users that have posted pictures of their stickers and t-shirts on our Flickr Photo Album
About Strands.com
Strands is a life streaming service that helps users discover new things based on what their friends like and do, and allows them to see what’s hot among the people they care about.
From Wikipedia
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Official FrostWire 4.17.1 Download link
FrostWire.com — The last of the 4.17.x FrostWire series is finally out. The following is a list of the most important updates made for this release, which irons out most of the complains received from the community in regards to 4.17.0.
The new FrostWire will allow us to distribute twice the number of installers using the same bandwidth employed by 4.17.0, The new FrostWire installer has been reduced in sized more than 50% by using the latest in compression technology.
About FrostWire
FrostWire, a BitTorrent/Gnutella Peer-to-Peer client, is a collaborative effort from many Open Source developers and contributors from all around the world. In late 2005, concerned developers of LimeWire’s open source community announced the start of a new project fork “FrostWire” that would protect the developmental source code of the LimeWire client and any improvements to the Gnutella protocol design. The developers of FrostWire give high regard and respect to the GNU General Public License and consider it to be the ideal foundation of a creative and free enterprise market.
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Netflix is the company that fixed the annoying rules of movie rentals, you make a queue of movies you want to see, and then they’re delivered in batches of 1,3 or more movies depending on how much you pay every month, you can then keep the movies all you want since there are no late-return fees.
This article is about why I think they will be the real winners of Internet Video, with a different business model than the free/ad based approach of Hulu and Joost.
Their current business model
I’ll attempt to disect their current business model, which has proven to work, they now have over 8 million subscribers and a catalog of over 100,000 movies, revenues of over $1.2 billion, and a net income of $66.9 million last year.
But the goal has always been to deliver the movies instantly, the technology wasn’t there, but now it seems to be here, and probably it’s also gotten to the point that the bandwidth of delivering a movie is cheaper than the associated current costs of delivering a real DVD to your door.
Being a customer for many years, I can guess some of the costs involved per movie are:
Somehow, Reed Hastings and his team figured out a way to make money after these costs, maybe from the people that pay every month who don’t really have the time to watch 12 or more movies a week.
Let’s do the actual numbers to get the average customer price.
REVENUE PER CUSTOMER:
$1,200,000,000 revenues /8,000,000 subscribers = $150 a year avg. revenue per subscriber
$150/12 months = $12.5 avg. subscriber monthly rev.
NET INCOME PER CUSTOMER:
$66,900,000 net income / 8,000,000 subscribers = $8.36 a year avg. cost per subscriber
$8.36 / 12 months = $0.7 avg. subscriber monthly rev.
If we substract the net income from the revenue, we’ll get the average costs monthly per user, that’s
$11.8 a month, in costs.
Estimated Cost Per Movie (Now, CDs shipped)
The company ships on average, 1.9 million discs a day, that’s 57 million discs a month. They have 8 million users, that makes the average user watch around 7 movies a month. (I watch at least 3 a week, that’s 12 movies a month, 3 times more than the average user).
So, let’s say the average subscriber watches only 3 movies per week, that’s at least 12 movies every month. We grab those $11.8 and divide it by 12 movies
Average Cost per Movie $11.8/7.125 movies monthly = $1.65
The Online Business Model
Netflix has understood that the key to evolution on the TV/Movie business does not lie on the browser, it’s right there on the TV Room where we have been trained to sit and be entertained for hours. Only us early adopters, or people with no TV really have the adaptation capabilities to watch content on our computer screens, or we know that we need an HDMI cable and can do the whole setup to get our computers to play video on the living room.
This means the audiences for video on the internet are considerably smaller (Today) than those of TV, the best way to put it is by grabbing the numbers of the biggest internet video audience so far, The 2008 summer olympics… they only generated $6 million in ads, vs $1 BILLION that the broadcast generated… why? cause the big audience lies right there in the confort of the Living Room, or wherever you have your tv.
Netflix knows that there’s a great deal of people that have:
- TiVO
- XBox
- Other video game consoles
They made a first step when they came out with the RoKU, their own way of putting Netflix on a box in your living room. They’re cutting out deals with Samsung to put the same technology on Blu-ray players.
They will come out this Nov. 19th on the revamped Xbox Live which sits already on 10 million households with XBox Live Gold Subscriptions. I already have a Netflix subscription, but my guess is that at least 4 million of those 10 million XBox live subscribers don’t have it, and they will be tempted to subscribe. If Microsoft and Netflix are smart, they will allow those users to give it a try, and once they see the benefits, those $9.99 will be worth their while.
Xbox Live gets to keep the user base that’s doubting if its time to buy that PS3 and toss the subscription. Netflix on the other hand will almost double it’s customer base, if it manages to convince 1/2 of Xbox Live subscribers to give this a try.
(I wonder where Boxee stands in all this, they could also cut a deal with Netflix if they amass a millions of users at some point, although they seem to be doing something with Apple, and this would compete against the Apple Store per per view model, which BLOWS!)
At what price?
Here’s where the analysis gets tough. Microsoft has huge infrastructure, and Netflix just announced another partnership with TiVO (see, they know the war is won in your living room), but someone has to pay for all this bandwidth.
Engadget also confirmed that their streaming quality will be nothing but HD! (only 300 titles to start though)
So we estimated that currently netflix has about an average cost $1.65 per movie shipped (might be less if the average user watches less than 12 movies a month) and we see that bandwidth costs are dropping. Let’s take Amazon EC3 (which is expensive to me, given we can do it at a much lower price at MyBloop.com):
“Over 150 TB per Month $0.10 per GB”
If you’ve ever watched a movie compressed in DivX, you know you can get a feature film at very good quality eating up only 700Mb… let’s say that Netflix will actually do this in HD, and they had films in double the DivX quality, and each film would be 1.5Gb, it would only cost them $0.15, hell, even if it was 3 Gb or even 5 Gb per movie, you’re still below the 50 cent price, add to that royalties and other costs, at you are still way below the $1.65 cost per movie of today. Let’s say it’ll cost $0.65 per movie streamed.
That’s a saving of $1 per movie, however this convenience will make the number of movies delivered (streamed) to increase, but this might mean they’ll cut better deals in bandwidth getting the costs even lower.
Not to mention the savings to the environment, less DVDs would need to be printed, less paper and ink wasted in envelopes, no gas burnt by USPS, and all the carbon emissions generated in each step of the CD delivery process.
What this means also, is that Netflix will probably get rid of many of its +2000 employees, bringing costs further down, I will add less and less DVDs to my queue as the online catalog grows.
Helps fight Piracy
Another big plus of a full blown catalog (maybe available a few years from now) is movie piracy mitigation. Instead of the MPAA suing their customers, or making things hard for everyone being forced to distribute content with DRM based solutions that never work, what you need to do is have your product easily accessible to as many people, legally. I strongly believe most people are good, otherwise you couldn’t go out on the street and make it back in one piece every day. As a side note, I find it very funny that the MPAA is always asking Internet Video distributors (including netflix) to add DRM to their streams, but they don’t put DRM on their DVDs, anyone could get the 6 DVD subscription to Netflix and copy all the DVDs, there’s just no need to do it, cause Netflix makes it so convenient for you to get more and more movies.
So Why do I care?
I’m just very interested in what happens with TV, how it will manage to survive or evolve, but in this case, there’s a financial incentive.
Ladies and gentlemen, just check out the price of netflix on the stock market, we’ve been blessed with a recent crash, If I were you, I’d be buying NFLX right now.
So the question is, what’s gonna be the price of NFLX a few months or years from now? I’ll leave that answer to Henry Blodget, I think it all depends on execution (get XBox right and then expand to other services and the user base will easily double or triple for Netflix, then go international), they’re targeting the biggest audience ever, the living room audience, the one that makes billions of dollars in the Olympics, the one that’s fed up with the passive entertainment model and who wants to see what they want whenever they want, to share this experiences with friends.
I also care since I no longer have cable TV and I’m constantly looking for legal video entertainment of professional quality. Companies like Hulu and Joost should follow the same steps and try to go to our living room, Netflix not only has a great catalog of movies, but they have entire shows, some you can already watch, for example I got to stream 2 seasons of the office back to back on Netflix, before they were available on Hulu.
(Hulu || Joost) for Free TV streaming on the living room
As for Joost, they should probably acknowledge they’ve lost a great deal to Hulu, which streams 100 million videos a month, it would take a major breakthrough in content to beat Hulu, and even though Hulu is putting big numbers, they just can’t compare with the ad revenue that you can generate on the living room. For Joost (if Hulu didn’t start already) there’s still the opportunity to port their tecnology to PS3, to Wii, why not even come out with an Xbox free download that will allow you to watch Joost on your living room. There’s certainly going to be a lot of people not willing to sign up for Netflix, and the Free TV offer Joost has would be of interest to this audience. If I were Michael Volpi I’d try to use a considerable part of my resources geared in this direction, If Hulu gets in the living room before Joost, it’s game over.
This is hands down, so far, the most fucked up internet video I’ve seen this year.
I couldn’t find the new drums, but Activision was cool enough to allow the old drums to be compatible with Guitar Hero World Tour.
Here’s my performance on the old rockband drums of “Are you gonna go my way” on expert level.
I’ve strong beliefs that this is the first user made video of someone playing Guitar Hero Drums (with the rockband drums) outside the official promotional videos you can find all over the web.
This was a lot of fun to play, I didn’t do a 100% score, but close, so to all trolls, this is not a video to show how good I can play, but to demo the backwards compatibility, and that you can actually learn to keep the basic beat of this song with a game like this.
I put the original audio of the song on top and it syncs perfectly.
Played on Xbox 360.
By Gubatron
