Netflix CEO Reed Hastings:

I spent the weekend enjoying four good internet video apps on my Xbox: Netflix, HBO GO, Xfinity, and Hulu.
When I watch video on my Xbox from three of these four apps, it counts against my Comcast internet cap. When I watch through Comcast’s Xfinity app, however, it does not count against my Comcast internet cap.

This is just the sort of shady behavior that raised concerns during the Comcast-NBC merger. Why’d we let them go through with it, again?

Via Daring Fireball, a Red Sox fan immortalizes one of my favorite moments in sports broadcasting: the infamous Fenway pizza-throwing incident. Check out the video of the original throw:

The best part is how Don Orsillo starts giggling toward the end. You can tell that it’s late in a blowout ballgame and both commentators have more or less checked out. A timeless part of Fenway history.

About a year after the New York Times launched its web site pay wall, they’re reducing the number of free articles from 20 per month to 10. I don’t think the change is particularly significant, but it does dredge up the issue of their pricing structure, which I’ve been meaning to write about for a while. In short, it’s terrible, so much so that I’m disinclined to give them my money even though I enjoy the Times.
At the outset, I should say that the NYT made the right decision to start charging for content. The newspaper business is changing, and print subscriptions aren’t going to make a stunning comeback. The future of written-word news is online, and newspapers need to align their business models to that fact. Good coverage costs money, and papers like the Times need to find a way to fund their reporting.

My big problem is with the subscription levels and price points the Times has chosen. They offer three digital subscription plans:

• Access to nytimes.com and smartphone apps: $15 every 4 weeks
• Access to nytimes.com and tablet apps: $20 every 4 weeks
• All Digital: Access to nytimes.com and both smartphone and tablet apps: $35 every 4 weeks

The first item of note is that plans are billed every 4 weeks, not every month. The effect is to add an extra billing cycle to each year. (52 weeks / 4 = 13 cycles.) The best spin I can put on this is that the Times is trying to align billing cycles so they’re not dependent on variable-length months and with their print billing, which is weekly. But it just smacks of obfuscation: I get the feeling that they hope people will read “4 weeks” and think “month,” making the apparent yearly price seem lower than it is.

It also makes billing less predictable. Most bills, like rent, credit cards, etc., are due at the same time each month. Even if you have automatic bill payment set up, having a bill due on the same day each month makes it easy to keep track of how much you’ve paid and when. NYT’s billing model makes it much harder, because you have to work forward four weeks from your last payment.

My second issue is with the plans themselves. Why can’t I just pay for the website? The NYT has a pretty good web site, and I’d probably pay $10/month for unlimited access to it. On the other hand, the last time I used the NYT iPhone and iPad apps they were are slow and buggy. I have no interest in using or paying for them. It also seems bizarre to that the $20 plan adds an iPad app but takes away the phone version. It seems like they just wanted to have three plans rather than two, and had to shoehorn in a middle plan.

Finally, there’s a very strange price comparison with NYT’s print edition home delivery. All NYT home delivery subscriptions include unlimited access to nytimes.com and the phone and tablet apps. That’s true even for the “Sunday Only” subscription. Here in Washington, DC, Sunday Only costs $7.80 per week, or $31.20 every 4 weeks. That’s $3.80 less than the “All Digital” plan, even though you’re also receiving a Sunday paper. That means that here in DC, it makes more sense to buy the Sunday subscription and throw the paper away unread than buy the All Digital subscription. Granted, print subscriptions vary in price from place to place, especially outside of major cities, but it’s still an odd concept.

If I were in charge, I’d change the Times pricing to something like this:

• Access to nytimes.com: $10 per month
• Access to nytimes.com plus smartphone and tablet apps: $20 per month
• For print subscribers, free access to nytimes.com. Phone and tablet apps available for an additional $2 per week.

The basic, website-only plan is low enough to attract larger numbers of visitors. Not only could NYT make up for the lower price with higher volume, but that higher volume also generates more revenue from the advertisements on each page. Both apps are packaged into one, more expensive subscription for people who want to use them. The most expensive digital-only subscription costs less than the cheapest print subscription, which makes logical sense. Finally, print subscribers still get free access to the web site, but have to pay extra for apps.

If the New York Times adopted a pricing model like this, I just might pay for it.

NYT:

As soon as the Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it was suing five major publishers and Apple on price-fixing charges, and simultaneously settling with three of them, Amazon announced plans to push down prices on e-books. The price of some major titles could fall to $9.99 or less from $14.99, saving voracious readers a bundle.

But publishers and booksellers argue that any victory for consumers will be short-lived, and that the ultimate effect of the antitrust suit will be to exchange a perceived monopoly for a real one. Amazon, already the dominant force in the industry, will hold all the cards.

Hard to see an outcome that’s good for consumers. I don’t really use iBooks very much, but I do think it’s good to have a little bit of competition for Amazon.

A 9-year-old in LA builds a DIY cardboard arcade. If you don’t find yourself rooting for this kid, there’s something wrong with you.

Looking forward to seeing this next week. The flight is scheduled for between 10 and 11am. Anyone have suggestions for a good but at least semi-convenient viewing location?

NASA announced Monday that the Space Shuttle Discovery will fly approximately 1,500 feet above various parts of the nation’s capital on April 17. As a point of reference, the Washington Monument is about 555 feet tall.

While the exact route is still to be determined, the shuttle — strapped atop the space agency’s custom Boeing 747 — should fly over the National Mall, National Harbor and Reagan National Airport. The shuttle will end its journey at Dulles International Airport, where it will be transferred to the Smithsonian’s nearby Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Center.

The nation’s major wireless providers have agreed to a deal with the U.S. government to build a central database of stolen cellphones—part of a broad effort to tame an explosion of thefts nationwide.
The database, which the wireless companies will build and maintain, will be designed to track phones that are reported as lost or stolen and deny them voice and data service. The idea is to reduce crime by making it difficult or impossible to actually use a stolen device, reducing resale value.

Good to hear.

Jason Snell:

If Apple’s going to embrace the cloud wherever possible, it needs to change iTunes too. The program should be simpler. It might be better off being split into separate apps, one devoted to device syncing, one devoted to media playback. (And perhaps the iTunes Store could be broken out separately too? When Apple introduced the Mac App Store, it didn’t roll it into iTunes, but gave it its own app.)

The iTunes we’ve all come to know has had a good run, but it’s reached the point where it is a crazy agglomeration of features and functionality.

I couldn’t agree more, and I’d add one more issue to the list. Right now the iTunes Store is basically just a web site running inside iTunes. It’s slow and a pain to use. Apple should either turn it into a native app, or if they’re going to stick with the web app, at least let us access it inside our web browsers.

It’s important to be clear that Instagram is not going away. We’ll be working with Facebook to evolve Instagram and build the network. We’ll continue to add new features to the product and find new ways to create a better mobile photos experience.
The Instagram app will still be the same one you know and love. You’ll still have all the same people you follow and that follow you.You’ll still be able to share to other social networks.

An encouraging sentiment from Instagram, but I’m skeptical. Facebook doesn’t have a great track record of buying things and making them better. “Build the network” sounds like a euphemism for forcing users to log in via Facebook, rather than Instagram’s own login system. Moreover, Instagram became a hit because of it’s great iOS app, while Facebook has a terrible iOS app. Neither is particularly promising.

In short, it’s hard to imagine Facebook making Instagram better, and easy to imagine Facebook making Instagram worse.