2011 30
Netflix to launch in Spain
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Internet & Technology with No Comments
Probably the fact that Spain is the country with more downloads per internet user in Europe made Spain the first EU country to get Netflix. When I recently met with Presidential hopeful Alfredo Rubalcaba he spoke about how much pressure the Spanish government received to stop the downloading of US content without pay in Spain and was very aware of how Spotify was making it in Spain as a legal alternative.
Now the challenge will be to see if it was true that people downloaded because DVDs are a rip off or because they don’t want to pay any price for movies. Because Spotify really took off in Spain but only the ad based version. Few pay. And there is no ad version of Netflix. Only on Hulu there is. But to me Netflix is an incredible deal. To pay less than €10 per month for all you can eat quality streamed movies is unbelievable.
I pay for Spotify and for Netflix. Netflix I had to sign up through our home in NYC and use it with VPN service Witopia that makes me show up as a US client.
I love Spotify on my mobile!
2010 22
The Messenger, a great movie
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Movies with No Comments
Tonight we saw The Messenger with @ninavarsavsky. We started watching it while sailing back to Sardinia after a failed attempt of crossing to Menorca. With over 20 kts straight against us we decided to fly back and have the crew choose a better day for the return. In the meantime, in rough seas, we turned the Mac on and started what we thought was a better choice to throwing up. And it was.
In spite of its meandering last third, The Messenger is a great movie. While war is at the center stage of this drama, it is not a war movie. The Messenger is a movie about how war impacts everyday life. The title refers to the job that the two main characters (played by Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson) are assigned to do. Their job is to communicate to the NOK (next of kin) that their loved one has died at war. The acting, directing, photography are superb. If there’s anything weak is the plot itself, but I watch films more for their special moments than their story as a whole and the dialogues are great.
Americans believe that the Chinese Comunist Party promotes piracy of American movies. I used to share that view until I met a Chinese friend of mine, who is a member of the Chinese Comunist Party (yes, and I also have friends who work for the Bush administration!). He gave me a very different view. My friend told me that the Chinese Comunist Party would love to succesfully combat piracy not to help Hollywood but to prevent America from conquering the minds and hearts of the average Chinese. American movies and TV shows, he argues, are incredibly efficient at making most Chinese like America, and if there was no piracy, few Chinese could afford to see them. So comunists and hollywood lawyers, UNITE!
2005 2
A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Movies with No Comments
A Proposal for a New “Moveable” Language
This morning I googled the phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Not surprisingly, I got thousands of results. Quotes from teachers, photographers, illustrators, and people of all kinds making the point that a picture saves you time. However, as I went through the listings one thing caught my eye. None of them referred to the fact that in digital terms, a picture IS worth a thousand words! Or to put it another way, whoever coined the cliché was probably unaware that decades later it would be discovered that a digital picture and an e-mail of 1000 words, may very well have the same amount of digital content.
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