Despite the spectre of a recession looming over the US economy, Netflix Founder, Chairman, and CEO Reed Hastings is confident about his company’s position for the remainder of the year. Although he sees slower growth than last year he predicts that recent and future developments will continue to fuel profitability.
One of things Hastings spoke proudly about in a presentation that was part of the company’s third quarter earnings conference call today was the deal struck recently with the Starz premium cable network. Starz opted to close their Vongo service, choosing instead to let Netflix provide internet delivery for them.
He pointed out that one of the biggest stumbling blocks for providing such services is the contracts the big networks have that tie up major studio content, adding “With this new model we think we can generate increased profit for Starz, increased profits for Netflix, and over time for the studios.”
He also spoke extensively about innovations that are around the corner for the Netflix streaming service. The previous quarter saw the introduction of the first Blu-ray player that can be used to stream movies from Netflix, LG’s BD 300. He also hinted at additional players with Netflix support coming in the future, saying “we’ll announce more Blu-ray partnerships as they’re ready for consumers.”
But the company isn’t planning to ignore people who prefer to watch on a computer. In fact he indicated an important innovation in the form of support for Intel-based Macs. “This quarter we’ll begin the rollout of our second generation player software which runs on both Windows and Intel Macs,” he said. “It’s a huge step forward for online video players and we’ll be announcing the details shortly.”
[More]>>
Result for: video players
Citing the latest market reports available, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Asia Pacific vice president Tim Meade has confided that the company believes sales of Blu-ray Discs will beat out that of standard definition DVDs by the year 2011.
According to the market reports, global sales value of BD movies will rise from 9 percent at the end of 2007 to about 25 percent of all market share by the end of this year, and that the number was already at about 20 percent as of July. This could however, be due only to the expensive suggested retail of most Blu-ray titles.
In addition, the global sales of BD players (I’m not sure if PS3s are included in Meade’s figures) in proportion to all video players, will rise to 15 percent from 7 percent year-on-year. Meade also noted that for the first half of 2008, sales volume of BD players increased 400 percent in the US and an astonishing 600 percent in Europe.
As a ratio, Meade says DVDs will hold a 75:25 percent lead over their HD counterparts by the end of 2008 and a 60:40 lead by the end of 2010 before losing out in 2011 by a margin that could be as small as 48:52.
Result for: video players
Download video off YouTube - Have you ever watched a video on youtube.com and found it so profound, so hilarious, or so moving that you wished you could yank it off and stick it on your iPod or save it to your computer? Well, you’re not the only one. Many people wish to remove video’s from these sites.
There have been many ways to do this published before, the original ones complicated and often difficult for the average user to do. Others work, but result in lower video quality. And finally, many save the video’s in an obscure video format that is not compatible with mp3 players or computers.
The first thing to do when preparing to download video off YouTube is to download the necessary software. While there are many software packages that will allow you to do this, there are some features to watch for: what format does the video get saved in, and what does the software cost?
You want the video to be saved as either .avi, .mpeg, .amv, or .wmv; and if you’re like most people, you want a free program.
The best program I have found to date that will meets all the needs of a user perfectly while remaining absolutely free is VDownloader. A simple, free program, simply install it onto your desktop, then follow the directions below:
Be sure that BROWSE VIDEOS is set to youtube.com
The link to the youtube.com page usually popups automatically in VDownloader, but sometimes you must manually insert it. Simply copy and paste the address from the browser into VDownloader URL.
[More]>>
