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Sunday, October 20, 2013

Telus Claims AMC Used 'Walking Dead' Premiere in Cable Fee Fight

AMC/Associated Press

"The Walking Dead"

Telus Communications is not very happy that AMC might deprive hundreds of thousands of its Canadian subscribers of seeing the end of the fourth season of The Walking Dead.

The telecom filed a lawsuit late last week that alleges that AMC has not provided proper notice to cancel its existing contract. The complaint says the two companies have discussed terms for a new agreement, but that negotiations broke down after Telus refused to bow to "increasingly harsh terms" proposed by AMC.

PHOTOS: Gale Anne Hurd: Inside 'The Walking Dead' Producer's Nerdy Offices

The plaintiff proposes the theory that because Breaking Bad had concluded its run and Mad Men will soon finish as well, AMC has been rushing to gain higher fees from its distribution partners, and along the way, has become embroiled in fights with companies like AT&T and Dish. The lawsuit says, "Seeking to capitalize on what it realizes may be fleeting success, AMC has publicly expressed dissatisfaction with carriage rates AMC receives from its licenses with television distributors, claiming that those rates do not reflect the popularity of the programming."

Telus says it honored its contractual obligations with AMC and that a termination letter sent on Sept. 27 isn't justified. The plaintiff says it was "shocked" to see the termination and that it wasn't given 30 days to cure defaults. "These alleged defaults are a transparent attempt to terminate the Agreement and extract from Telus the high carriage rates AMC could not achieve at the negotiating table."

Now, the telecom company asserts that AMC has been using the highly successful The Walking Dead to tarnish its reputation by telling viewers they will essentially be left out in the cold.

PHOTOS: Power Showrunners: Inside the Minds Behind 'Walking Dead,' 'Bates Motel,' 'Arrow' and More

"When Telus did not immediately capitulate to AMC's strong-arm tactics, AMC went a step further, threatening to unilaterally communicate to Telus' subscribers that the service would soon be terminated," says the lawsuit. "If Telus does not agree to new contract terms by today, Friday, Oct. 11, 2013, AMC claims that beginning this Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013 during the season premiere of its most popular show, 'The Walking Dead,' AMC will broadcast a scrolling message, or 'crawl,' at the bottom of the television content feed seen by Telus' subscribers, announcing an imminent service cancellation. This is not an empty threat: AMC has deployed similar damaging public relations efforts in past disputes with other distributors."

Telus, represented by Michael Elkin at Winston & Strawn, seeks an injunction and damages for breach of contract and the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing.

AMC declined comment on pending litigation. The basis for AMC's termination is unclear thanks to redactions in Telus' complaint.

E-mail: Eriq.Gardner@THR.com

Twitter: @eriqgardner

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/THREsquire/~3/HzVaqfik8xs/story01.htm
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Microsoft is updating all of its built-in Windows 8.1 apps--like Xbox Music, Mail, Calendar, People

Microsoft is updating all of its built-in Windows 8.1 apps—like Xbox Music, Mail, Calendar, People and all the rest—ahead of the operating system's release later today. Excited?

Facebook to let teens share with bigger audience

FILE - This Feb. 8, 2012 file photo shows a view inside Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Facebook is now allowing teenagers to share their posts on the social network with anyone on the Internet, raising the risks of minors leaving a digital trail that could lead to trouble. The change announced Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2013 affects Facebook users who list their ages as being from 13 to 17. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook is now allowing teenagers to share their posts on the social network with anyone on the Internet, raising the risks of minors leaving a digital trail that could lead to trouble.

The change announced Wednesday affects Facebook users who list their ages as 13 to 17.

Until now, Facebook users falling within that age group had been limited to sharing information and photos only with their own friends or friends of those friends.

The new policy will give teens the choice of switching their settings so their posts can be accessible to the general public. That option already has been available to adults, including users who are 18 or 19.

As a protective measure, Facebook will warn minors opting to be more open that they are exposing themselves to a broader audience. The caution will repeat before every post, as long as the settings remain on "public."

The initial privacy settings of teens under 18 will automatically be set so posts are seen only by friends. That's more restrictive than the previous default setting that allowed teens to distribute their posts to friends of their friends in the network.

In a blog post, Facebook said it decided to revise its privacy rules to make its service more enjoyable for teens and to provide them with a more powerful megaphone when they believe they have an important point to make or a cause to support.

"Teens are among the savviest people using social media, and whether it comes to civic engagement, activism, or their thoughts on a new movie, they want to be heard," Facebook wrote.

The question remains whether teens understand how sharing their thoughts or pictures of their activities can come back to haunt them, said Kathryn Montgomery, an American University professor of communications who has written a book about how the Internet affects children.

"On the one hand, you want to encourage kids to participate in the digital world, but they are not always very wise about how they do it," she said. "Teens tend to take more risks and don't always understand the consequences of their behavior."

The relaxed standards also may spur teens to spend more time on Facebook instead of other services, such as Snapchat, that are becoming more popular hangouts among younger people. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, though, says that the company's internal data shows its social network remains a magnet for teens.

Giving people more reasons to habitually visit its social network is important to Facebook because a larger audience helps sell more of the ads that generate most of the Menlo Park, Calif., company's revenue.

"What this is really about is maximizing the kind of sharing at the heart of Facebook's business model," Montgomery said. She worries that unleashing teens to share more about themselves to a general audience will enable advertisers to collect more personal data about minors "who aren't aware that their movements and interests are under a digital microscope."

Facebook hasn't disclosed how many of its nearly 1.2 billon users are teens. The social network was initially limited to college students when Zuckerberg started it in 2004, but he opened the service to a broader audience within a few years.

The teen audience is large enough to give Facebook periodic headaches. As its social network has steadily expanded, Facebook has had to combat sexual predators and bullies who prey upon children.

Facebook doesn't allow children under 13 to set up accounts on its service but doesn't have a reliable way to verify users' ages.

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-10-16-Facebook-Teen%20Privacy/id-5cdead4bf9fd401f91f949b0dc852f47
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Saturday, October 19, 2013

Many of the Most-Pirated Movies Can't Actually Be Bought Online

If the movie industry wonders why piracy seems to persist, here's one possible answer: people pirate 'em because they don't have the option of paying for a legal copy online.

iOS 7 round table review: One month later

iOS 7 launched a month ago, though in truth many of us have been using it for several months now, counting the beta. Some of the amazing new features have been transformative, and changed the way we use our iPhones and iPads every day. Others... have been buggy and frustrating. So, overall, how has iOS 7 been working for the writers and editors of iMore?

iOS 7 review

Peter Cohen

Transitioning to iOS 7 was no big deal. Much has been made about the dramatic user interface changes to iOS in this new release, but it's pretty easy to get the hang of, and while icons and lettering look different, most apps fundamentally operate the same way they did before. On the whole, I like the look and feel of iOS 7, though I find some of the embellishments, like parallax-tilting desktop wallpaper and prolific use of zoom effects, to be more distracting than helpful.

Ally Kazmucha

I've actually had iOS 7 installed since the first beta. My impressions haven't changed much since then minus the irritation of bugs. Unlike a lot of people, I like the color schemes and design direction that Apple went with iOS 7. I didn't for the first few days just out of resistance to change (I think it's human nature).

The thing I'm most excited about are all the app updates coming through that inherit iOS 7's design cues and native APIs. It's like experiencing iOS all over again for the first time, and in my opinion, that's a great thing.

Chris Parsons

I've been using iOS 7 since the first beta. Overall, iOS 7 has grown on me but to say I loved it ‘out of the box’ would be a lie. Apple made some dramatic changes with the look and styling that were less than pleasing initially. They’ve made some changes within apps that have essentially forced me to start using 3rd-party solutions. I’m OK with that. Often times those 3rd party solutions are better than the old way anyhow. My biggest gripe with iOS 7 is that while it seems fine on the iPhone 5, it has turned my iPad Mini a steaming pile of lag with some terrible looking fonts wrapped in a beautiful package.

Joe Keller

My thoughts on iOS 7 haven't changed much in the month that I've been using it full-time. I'm still a big fan of the redesign overall, even with some minor qualifications like the width of some lines. It runs very smoothly on my 5s, as quick and responsive as you'd hope.

How developers have responded to iOS 7 has been the most exciting thing so far. The best-looking apps on iOS 7 don't weren't content to just be flatter, but more colorful as well. Apps like Evernote and Vert use color both to bring attention to content and establish a strong visual identity.

The other aspect I enjoy most about iOS 7 is that despite the visual changes, much remains unchanged from the user's perspective. There's really no re-learning that has to occur when moving from iOS 6 to iOS 7, it's just the visual overhaul that takes some getting used to. Most of the truly important changes in iOS 7 are under the hood.

Richard Devine

iOS 7 is a huge step forwards for Apple, a step towards a future we're only just beginning. A lot has been made of the design, and while I don't like some of the icons and color choices, overall I love it. I think it's the best thing to happen to app design on any mobile platform. If apps are updated and haven't been given the iOS 7 glamour treatment, it makes me sad.

One of the things I've been enjoying the most is Control Center. I still believe more can be done with it, but having access to music controls and the flashlight in particular with just a swipe is so convenient it's a joy to use.

Elsewhere, I'm so, so happy that Apple has brought access to iTunes cloud music with iOS 7. I don't subscribe to iTunes Match, and I bought a ton of music over the years that I couldn't stream from the cloud until iOS 7. All the hype was around iTunes Radio, but this is much more important to me.

Derek Kessler

My experience with iOS 7 has been largely positive. As a webOS refugee, it's not surprising how much more I use the double-click home button to jump to the multitasking apps view. The iOS 4-style tray was mostly worthless to me, but by adding the full-app previews and true background multitasking it's become one of my favorite features.

The little physics bits like the active backgrounds and the accordion rebound action in lists like Messages still bring me some delight, but not nearly as much sitting there playing with it happens now as before. There are two other options that have changed how I use the phone: pull down to search in the launcher and Control Center. The latter has allowed me to reprioritize where I put apps for quick access (I no longer need to have Calculator or Camera on a first-tier launcher page). The former has made it that much easier to jump into search. It's kind of like webOS, in that it's available on every launcher page, but it's also just easier to know that I can swipe down and be in search.

I was neutral to positive on the iOS 7 visual design, and while there are some parts that still aren't quite there, once iOS 7-compatible apps started landing in the App Store (and getting pushed automatically to my device, praise be to Cupertino), it all started to gel. Now when I have to go into an app styled in the old iOS style it really stands out.

Also, is anybody else seeing the same much-improved battery life that I am?

Georgia

I have not yet updated to iOS 7. I'll do it eventually, but iOS 6 still works for me and I haven't seen any feature that's made me want to rush into it.

Rene Ritchie

Over the last few months, I've used iOS 7 for hundreds of hours and written tens of thousands of words about it. Needless to say, it's grown on me. It's become my new normal. Going back to iOS 6 (I kept an iPad and iPod touch on it) is like stepping back through time. It's still beautiful, but relics now of an era long past. iOS 7 is the future.

The back gesture in everything from Messages to Notes to Mail to Settings to a bevy of App Store apps is consistent enough that I now notice when it's not implemented. That goes for the entire physicality of the iOS 7. It's beyond delightful.

Some other things have been less consistent. I still don't know when Next Location is going to pop up in Notification Center. Maybe it's my wacky schedule, but it'll be there for a while, then go away, even when I haven't changed locations. Likewise, auto-refresh seems to still be in the process of getting implemented into apps. Sometimes updates are there, sometimes not.

For the most part reboots and re-springs are a thing of the past. The release version has been solid, more solid, in fact, than several earlier versions of iOS. And this is the worst iOS 7 is ever going to be. We're on iOS 7.0.2 already and I'm guessing 7.1 will be here soon enough.

One month in, and I'm even happier with iOS 7 than I was at launch.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/S0R4vLFdLwM/story01.htm
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5G will have to do more than send speed up your phone, Ericsson says

For consumers looking forward to 5G mobile technology for super-high speed, network giant Ericsson says there will be more to it than that -- and less.

A 5G mobile standard isn't in formal development yet and isn't likely to be in commercial networks until 2020, according to Vish Nandlall, Ericsson's CTO and senior vice president of strategy, who spoke at the GigaOm Mobilize conference Wednesday. Even then, 5G won't be totally at consumers' beck and call to deliver their cat videos and social network feeds.

[ Get expert advice about planning and implementing your BYOD strategy with InfoWorld's 29-page "Mobile and BYOD Deep Dive" PDF special report. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobilize newsletter. ]

More so than any previous generation of cellular gear, 5G will have to serve two masters, Nandlall said. Between wireless sensors, industrial equipment and an array of consumer gadgets, in a few years there are likely to be 10 mobile connections per person. If 5 billion humans join the mobile world, that's 50 billion connections that 5G networks will need to serve.

Not all of those devices will be hungry for megabits per second, Nandlall said. For example, remote sensors may need slow connections to achieve decades of battery life, while other pieces of the so-called Internet of Things may have to have much higher reliability than consumers get when they're just making phone calls.

"Every now and then, those calls drop, and that's probably not something that we want if I'm putting an industrial application on it," Nandlall said. For example, a device that turns the floodgates on a dam had better work correctly and at the right time, he said.

Bandwidth-hungry consumers won't get left behind, Nandlall said: As the next major step in the standards process, 5G should deliver 10 times the speed of 4G, putting a theoretical maximum of 10Gbps (bits per second) on the books. But with many more uses of wireless emerging, service providers may carve up their 5G networks and dedicate only part of that capacity to what we think of today as the mobile Internet, he said.

In an example of software's growing role in networks, 5G should be flexible enough that carriers can reprogram and reconfigure their networks to accommodate different applications, according to Nandlall.

"Those will actually get different slices of the network with different technologies," including modulation schemes and levels of capacity, Nandlall said. He compared the future architecture to cloud computing with multiple tenants each running their own applications.

Meanwhile, 4G will coexist with 5G, along with Wi-Fi and other technologies, which may include a future lightweight protocol specially designed for machine-to-machine communications, he said.

By moving to 5G, carriers should be able to keep cutting the price of mobile data, Nandlall said. Most consumers haven't recognized falling prices because their consumption continues to rise, he said. Network efficiencies have slashed the cost of delivering a megabyte of data by about 50 percent per year, from about 46 cents in 2008 to between 1 cent and 3 cents now. That hasn't lowered subscribers' bills at the end of the month because average data consumption has been doubling or more each year, he said.

Those looking at requirements for future 5G networks want them to be able to support 50GB of data consumption per subscriber, per month.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobile-technology/5g-will-have-do-more-send-speed-your-phone-ericsson-says-229017?source=rss_mobile_technology
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'Walking Dead' chews up huge premiere ratings

Michael O'Connell
The Hollywood Reporter

5 hours ago

Frank Ockenfels 3 / AMC

Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes on "The Walking Dead."

"The Walking Dead" kicked off its fourth season on Sunday night — continuing the AMC series' record-setting trend with more highs and blowing all non-sports competition out of the water.

PHOTOS: Inside 'The Walking Dead's' spooky season 4 premiere

Averaging 16.1 million viewers during its inaugural 9 p.m. broadcast, the series was up more than 5 million from last October's 10.9 million opener. Among adults 18-49, "The Walking Dead" averaged 10.4 million viewers. That's an 8.3 rating in the key demo, making it bigger than any broadcast series this fall and even stronger than last night's competition from "Sunday Night Football." With adults 25-54, "The Walking Dead" saw another high with 8.8 million viewers.

Compared to previous records set by the season-three finale, "The Walking Dead" was up 3.7 million viewers and 2.3 million adults 18-49.

This is the second huge ratings victory for AMC in just two weeks. The recent series finale of "Breaking Bad" smashed previous series records by jumping to 10.3 million viewers.

The return of the zombie drama, TV's top scripted performer for a year now, was already evident in Fast National ratings from Sunday's broadcast outings. Scripted competition in "The Good Wife" and "The Mentalist" hit their lowest ratings to date, while "Once Upon a Time" and "Revenge" sank to fall lows.

PHOTOS: 'The Walking Dead's' Most Shocking Deaths

"The Walking Dead" has been even more of a force after time-shifting is taken into account. Though the series remains formidable in its Live+Same Day returns, seven days of DVR gave the last season an average 7.2 rating among adults 18-49 and 13.8 million viewers.

Companion series "The Talking Dead" also saw records. An average 5.1 million viewers tuned in, 3.3 million of them adults 18-49 and 3 million of them adults 25-54.

The Walking Dead ratings timeline:

Season 3 finale, March 31: 12.4 million total viewers*, 8.1 million in 18-49*, 7 million in 25-54*
Season 3 midseason premiere, Feb. 10: 12.3 million total viewers*, 6.8 million in 18-49, 6.7 million in 25-54*
Season 3 midseason finale, Dec. 2: 10.5 million total viewers, 6.9 million in 18-49, 6 million in 25-54
Season 3 premiere, Oct. 14: 10.9 million total viewers, 7.3 million in 18-49, 6.1 million in 25-54*
Season 2 finale, March 18, 2012: 9 million total viewers, 6 million in 18-49, 5.3 million in 25-54*
Season 2 midseason premiere, Feb. 12, 2012: 8.1 million total, 5.4 million* in 18-49, 4.4 million* in 25-54
Season 2 premiere, Oct. 16, 2011: 7.3 million total, 4.8 million* in 18-49, 4.2 million* in 25-54
Season 2 midseason finale, Nov. 27, 2011: 6.6 million total, 4.5 million in 18-49, 3.9 million in 25-54
Season 1 finale, Dec. 5, 2010: 6 million total, 4 million in 18-49, 3.5 million in 25-54
Season 1 premiere, Oct. 31, 2010: 5.4 million total viewers, 2.7 million in 18-49

* Record at the time

Source: http://www.today.com/entertainment/walking-dead-returns-chews-competition-huge-ratings-8C11391270
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