Kendle’s World

Back in January there was a story of Netflix updating their “Watch Now” service to unlimited streaming movies.  If you missed that story then read it here.  This was a huge thing for myself since a large portion of my life is sitting in front of computer screens.  While streaming music is nice, it is also nice to have a movie playing in the background on the monitor instead.

Well, now we can expand that service to our television sets.  And no, not you tech-e wise ass’s with a svideo extension from your video card. (Although I did at one time)  Now they are offering a $99 Netflix Player by Roku, which offers unlimited streaming of 10,000 Netflix titles, assuming you’re on a Netflix subscription plan of $8.95 or above. There’s no HD yet, but it’s coming down the road.

Now this sounds great, and more than likely I will indulge myself with the new technology. Yet this streaming service is starting to make me raise a few questions. 

Here are my thoughts:

• The “Watch Now” service needs to have a more current selection of movies.  While the selection is good for most, it would be nice to see some weekly/monthly updates to the service.
• While I subscribe to NetFlix and am still using the mail service, I feel they are attempting to save money on postage.  This is fine by me, but if this service is free will they be raising prices on the subscription packages if this is successful?

• A question which raises most eyebrows.  Does your ISP have a bandwidth cap?  My guess is that is does.  Comcast has its horrid unexplained “Invisible” cap and almost all DSL providers have a contract to stay within your usage cap.  This would also be a direct competition to Comcast’s “On Demand” while using their internet service. 
• Since a good quality movie may stream at maybe an amount of 1.5gb, that will add up on a weekend movie binge while sucking up your household bandwidth and effecting that oversold node down the street.

See reviews: CNET and Wired

In order to deal with the flood of DMCA letters from the entertainment industry, many college campuses have blocked access to P2P services altogether. But according to Inside Higher Education, Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla has a different idea. They force students interested in using P2P to take a copyright quiz to get six hours of P2P use. School sanctions for violating copyright include network bans, community service and academic probation. As far as DMCA letters are concerned, it seems to be working:

I’m guessing one or two students game the quiz, download what they want using encryption, then everyone else there simply transfers films and music among themselves off network. So while the University dodges liability and conserves bandwidth, it’s probably not doing much for overall piracy levels. At least students don’t have to take classes taught by the Copyright Crusading Ferret or Captain Copyright, so that’s something.

Source: dslreports.com

Its been a few since I updated here, and sorry about that.  I have been rather busy with some new additions which will be revealed at Edgegamers. 

Firstly I have been busy with two new server boxes.  One box will be running two instances of Call of Duty 4 (36 slot).  The other one will be running two instances of Team Fortress 2 (32 slot).  It generally does not take much time to copy over the files, yet COD4 is being a challenging since Activision does not distribute a primary linux server.  I finally found a host I can “wget”from.  Thank you http://www.e-esports.de!!!!!!

EdgeGamers has become the number one rated clan in the world.  This is two years of hard, hard, hard work.  Yet it is worth everything to myself as I continue to devote myself to a great vision.  Here is a little reference to were we are at: http://www.gametracker.com/clan  The websites will be undergoing a large change also which we could see the first public announcement this weekend.