Hulu Plus Not a Danger to Netflix

Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth does not believe Hulu's new subscription service "Plus" will harm Netflix subscriber growth, though it is the "first credible competitive subscription offering," especially for viewers who watch serials and other popular TV fare.

Netflix still is heavy on movie content.

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Small Business Hiring up 4% for the Year, Pay is Down

Small business hiring continued to increase slightly in June ( 0.2 percent over May) while the average paycheck took a larger month-over-month dip (-0.6 percent over May) than we’ve seen since pay leveled off in March. That brings us to a year-to-date increase in small business hiring of 3.9 percent and a year-to-date pay decrease of -0.4 percent, says SurePayroll.

June 2010 Small Business Scorecard | SurePayroll

Is Bit Prioritization Necessary?

Network neutrality proponents, especially those supporting the "strong" forms such as an outright ban on any bit priorities, believe that next generation networks will have ample bandwidth to support all real-time services without the need for prioritizing mechanisms.

Users of enterprise networks might react in shock to such notions, as shared networks often encounter latency and bandwidth constraints that are overcome precisely by policy control. And despite increasing bandwidth on mobile networks, users and network service operators already know that congestion is a major problem.

And the evidence does not seem to support the notion that applications are not affected by congestion, or that use of two or more applications does not create externalities that impair real-time application performance.

"I measured my jitter while using Netflix (Jitter occurs when an application monopolizes a router’s transmit queue and demands that hundreds of its own packets are serviced before any other application gets a single packet transmitted) and found an average jitter of 44 milliseconds and a worse case that exceeds 1000 ms," says Ou.

http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/06/how-video-streaming-can-ruin-voip-and-gaming/

The Death of Another Bogus Anti-Net Neutrality Argument: Gaming Works on Neutral Networks Too | Public Knowledge

HTC Evo Update System Working Again

Sprint and HTC had to suspend the over-the-air update for the Evo 4G earlier today, but whatever the problem was, it is now fixed, and users can download the patches and upgrade. Apparently something about the upgrade was "bricking" user devices.

I escaped the problem downloading and installing the update, which is among other things, supposed to improve signal reception, access speed and battery life.

I'm not so sure I notice any particular signal reception or speed differences, but the battery life improvement seems to be there.

HTC Evo OTA back in action | Android Central

Verizon Wireless Says it Will "Rule the Air"

watch the video on Verizon Wireless site

U.S. Fixed-Line Voice Lines Rose for First Time Since 2000 in 2008

Perhaps the most-significant finding contained in the latest Federal Communications Commission data on voice lines is that total voice lines in service actually grew in 2008, reversing a declining trend since 2000.

We will have to wait for 2009 data to see whether this is a new trend or an anomoly. Still, the news is that, for the first time since 2000, total fixed voice lines in service have grown, rather than contracted.

That doesn't mean the trend has reversed for incumbent telcos, though. All of the gain came from non-traditional suppliers, either cable companies or competitive local exchange carriers. But it seems clear cable companies were the clear winners.

The big jump between June 2008 and December 2008 were accounts provided over coaxial cable lines used by cable firms. Between June and December, coaxial cable VoIP accounts increased from slightly less than 10 million to 20 million.

At year-end 2008, there were 141 million end-user switched access lines in service and 21 million
VoIP subscriptions in the United States, or about 162 million wireline retail local telephone service connections in total.

Of these, 97 million were residential connections and 65 million were business connections.

By technology and customer type, the 162 million wireline retail local telephone service connections were: 48 percent residential switched access lines, 39 percent business switched access lines, 12 percent residential VoIP subscriptions, and one percent business VoIP subscriptions.

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Singaporeans Still Like Newspapers

If you're an advertiser who wants to reach the digital Singaporean consumer, you might well have to use a newspaper, says PricewaterhouseCoopers, which says advertisers spend almost 10 times as much on print media like newspapers as they do on Internet advertising in that market.

PricewaterhouseCoopers also expects growth in the amount spent on print ads to be vastly greater than the growth in digital over the next five years.

By 2014, print would still capture 49 per cent of advertisers' dollars and television 28 per cent, while Internet advertising would rise from 4 per cent to just 6 per cent of total spending.

TODAYonline | Singapore | All wired up - but Singaporeans still prefer a traditional newspaper