Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April • Hacker News Board

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#101

Post by a-priori » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 9:08 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #86

rogerbinns wrote: post #7

The article did not mention Al Jazeera deciding to remove their Internet streaming, and requiring that you can only view via your local cable provider. See this page with the big note to US people: http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/201146152255537258.html I used to check in on their coverage on the Roku channel, but they made a business decision to prevent that. I can understand their decision to make their success…

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo (and subsequently Netflix). Tivo started it with the ability to record and watch later while fast forwarding through commercials. Netflix with it's mountains of commercial free content followed next. That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking…

Netflix already has local boxes on ISP networks that act as a local cache for customers on that network to ease the load on the ISP's peering connections. A similar architecture could handle that fanout for live content as well.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#102

Post by ConceptJunkie » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #52

Every time there is news somehow connected to Gore, I can't help but think somewhere in a parallel universe, the supreme court stayed out of election politics, didn't hand the election to Bush instead of Gore then 9/11 never happened the following year because he actually paid attention to the memo about "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" - then Iraq was never invaded - then the TSA was never created - Gitmo wasn…

It would be a lot different, but in that same universe, the entire population of the Earth was killed by a virus spread by unicorn poop, so be glad it didn't happen.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#103

Post by imglorp » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

xlm1717 wrote: post #56

imglorp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of their propaganda or slant, these outlets are useful specifically because they are not part of the US media cycle "play list". US audiences are in a filter bubble. Also some of the domestic outlets are too busy reposting Vines to cover enough stories in between sports and weather. Once encountering a story on those alternate sources, you can read with some critical thinking maybe, and then look for other…

You're trading one filter bubble for another. Unless you want to see how the population of another country experience propaganda, I don't see how it could be useful. You could do critical thinking on any source, not just alternates.

Right, but if you take the union of sources you see more new stories total.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#104

Post by efuquen » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #86

rogerbinns wrote: post #7

The article did not mention Al Jazeera deciding to remove their Internet streaming, and requiring that you can only view via your local cable provider. See this page with the big note to US people: http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/201146152255537258.html I used to check in on their coverage on the Roku channel, but they made a business decision to prevent that. I can understand their decision to make their success…

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo (and subsequently Netflix). Tivo started it with the ability to record and watch later while fast forwarding through commercials. Netflix with it's mountains of commercial free content followed next. That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking…

For $20/month you can get ESPN & ESPN2 and about 20 other channels (Food Network, HGTV, Cartoon Network, Discovery, History Channel are a few of the main ones I use) streamed via Sling TV. For another $5 you can add a few more Sports channels.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#105

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #86

rogerbinns wrote: post #7

The article did not mention Al Jazeera deciding to remove their Internet streaming, and requiring that you can only view via your local cable provider. See this page with the big note to US people: http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/201146152255537258.html I used to check in on their coverage on the Roku channel, but they made a business decision to prevent that. I can understand their decision to make their success…

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo (and subsequently Netflix). Tivo started it with the ability to record and watch later while fast forwarding through commercials. Netflix with it's mountains of commercial free content followed next. That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking…

[deleted]

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#106

Post by abalone » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 9:10 PM UTC

yellowstuff wrote: post #77

Someone1234 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports. So like NBC nightly news? The US is full of what can only be described as US government propaganda, 60 minutes is a prime example. CBS and NBC are no better than RT unfortunately, they just often tell Americans what they want to hear so nobody bats an eyelid. AJ and BBC have their biases but at le…

I don't know a good way to prove that US media is not a government mouthpiece, but I don't think there is much evidence to support such a strong claim, whereas it is pretty easy to argue that RT is a government mouthpiece. EG: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/12/the-truth-about-russia-to...

Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman have done excellent comparative research demonstrating exactly that in great detail. For example by comparing coverage of events by the U.S. and its allies to similar events by enemies, finding consistent and strong bias in the mainstream media.

They also develop a theory, more of an explanation, that this is essentially because mainstream media is funded through advertising which then naturally biases it towards the interests of the business elite. That is how we get thought control in a democratic society.

See Manufacturing Consent and Necessary Illusions for numerous cases. Wonderful books. See also Alex Carey's work on corporate propaganda, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#107

Post by icebraining » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 9:10 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #86

rogerbinns wrote: post #7

The article did not mention Al Jazeera deciding to remove their Internet streaming, and requiring that you can only view via your local cable provider. See this page with the big note to US people: http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/201146152255537258.html I used to check in on their coverage on the Roku channel, but they made a business decision to prevent that. I can understand their decision to make their success…

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo (and subsequently Netflix). Tivo started it with the ability to record and watch later while fast forwarding through commercials. Netflix with it's mountains of commercial free content followed next. That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking…

It's only a complication for the last mile, and I think it can cope. For the backbone, they can just do poor man's multicast with their appliances for ISPs. Just one stream to each ISP/appliance, which is then repeated to each client.

https://openconnect.netflix.com/

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#108

Post by gpvos » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 9:13 PM UTC

xlm1717 wrote: post #56

imglorp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of their propaganda or slant, these outlets are useful specifically because they are not part of the US media cycle "play list". US audiences are in a filter bubble. Also some of the domestic outlets are too busy reposting Vines to cover enough stories in between sports and weather. Once encountering a story on those alternate sources, you can read with some critical thinking maybe, and then look for other…

You're trading one filter bubble for another. Unless you want to see how the population of another country experience propaganda, I don't see how it could be useful. You could do critical thinking on any source, not just alternates.

In order to do critical thinking on a subject, you first need to know that it exists. Alternate sources can be helpful with being alerted to stuff.

Although with Russia Today, it takes a pretty large effort to filter out the information from between the propaganda. Al Jazeera on the other hand has a fairly high signal-to-noise ratio.

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#109

Post by peckrob » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

brightball wrote: post #86

rogerbinns wrote: post #7

The article did not mention Al Jazeera deciding to remove their Internet streaming, and requiring that you can only view via your local cable provider. See this page with the big note to US people: http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/201146152255537258.html I used to check in on their coverage on the Roku channel, but they made a business decision to prevent that. I can understand their decision to make their success…

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo (and subsequently Netflix). Tivo started it with the ability to record and watch later while fast forwarding through commercials. Netflix with it's mountains of commercial free content followed next. That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking…

> The reality for cord cutters and cable companies alike is that, if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package.

During college football season I got a Sling subscription solely to watch college football (ESPN and the SEC Network mostly). I never even really used the Sling app much - it's terrible, crashes a lot, and isn't on AppleTV. I just used my Sling account to connect to WatchESPN. That, plus an antenna for the marquee matchups on the major networks covered everything I wanted to see this last year at 1/6 the cost of a cable subscription.

All of my football-watching friends were doing the same thing this year.

The fact is, if I could, I would pay ESPN directly what I paid Sling for access to WatchESPN. Because, just like cable, Sling was giving me a bunch of stuff I don't really care about just to get ESPN. There's nothing else on TV that I can't wait for other than sports.

> With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.

I really don't think the problem here is technological so much as it is economic. The scalability problems could be solved if there was the will. But according to one article [0] an unbunbled or streaming subscriber would need to pay $36 a month for ESPN access for them to generate the same revenue they generate through current cable carriage contracts. Considering ESPN is starting to feel the crunch [1] from cord cutting and is beginning to trim costs, I imagine it will eventually become a reality.

[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2015/03/25/are-...

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-television-espn-househo...

Re: Al Jazeera America to Shut Down in April

#110

Post by virtuabhi » Wed, Jan 13, 2016, 9:14 PM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #32

andrewclunn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Moving away from service chord cutters at this point was just odd. Embracing alternative media has done wonders for outlets like Russia Today (Though that's state sponsored so it might not be the best comparison).

> Russia Today (Though that's state sponsored so it might not be the best comparison) Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar. However, I agree with you that it's not a good comparision. BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy. RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports.

BBC is not considered trustworthy in India. We listen to BBC for English language but also recognize that BBC still suffers from colonial-era mindset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Indophobi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Anti-Hind...

"Writing for the 2008 edition of the peer-reviewed Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Alasdair Pinkerton analyses the coverage of India by the BBC since India's independence from British rule in 1947 until 2008. Pinkerton observes a tumultuous history involving allegations of anti-India bias in the BBC's reportage, particularly during the cold war, and concludes that the BBC's coverage of South Asian geopolitics and economics shows a pervasive and hostile anti-India bias due to the BBC's alleged imperialist and neo-colonialist stance.[118]"