Post Tagged with: "Netflix"

Hulu looks to take on Netflix with new original shows

Hulu looks to take on Netflix with new original shows


Hulu Original Shows

Hulu on Monday announced 10 original and exclusive TV shows that will premiere this summer, including one from writer-director-actor Kevin Smith. Smith, known for the cult classic Clerks and numerous other films, will host a half-hour movie “revue” for movie lovers, which will be available on Hulu and Hulu Plus beginning June 4th. “I have always wanted to do a show that provides an open forum for real fans to discuss real movies in real time and that’s what ‘Spoilers’ is about. As a filmmaker and lover of movies, I understand that ultimately it’s the fans who make the film. So in this show, we do not review movies, we revere them,” said Smith. In August, Hulu will launch a travel series called “Up To Speed” from filmmaker Richard Linklater, and in the same month, the company will premiere “an edgy male comedy” called “We Got Next.” The streaming website will also carry seven TV shows that have never been available before in the U.S., including “Rev.,” “The Yard,” “Pramface,” “Derren Brown: Inside Your Mind,” “The Promise” and “Little Mosque,” along with the second season of the sci-fi thriller, “The Booth at the End.” Hulu’s press release follows below.

Hulu Announces New Original Series with Kevin Smith, Premieres Summer Slate of Ten Original and Exclusive TV Shows

Hulu Original Series Include Kevin Smith’s “Spoilers,” “Up To Speed” by Richard Linklater, and “We Got Next”

Hulu Exclusives Include Season Two of “The Booth At The End” and International TV Hits “Rev.,” “The Yard,” “Pramface,” “Derren Brown: Inside Your Mind,” “Little Mosque” and “The Promise”

LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Proving that summer doesn’t have to mean the start of rerun season, Hulu today announced a full slate of new original and exclusive TV shows that begin premiering on June 4th on Hulu and the Hulu Plus subscription service. Hulu’s summer lineup offers new TV shows for all kinds of entertainment fans, from comedy, sci-fi, travel, reality and even a little magic. For a preview of the upcoming programming, visit www.hulu.com/hulu-summer-series.

The summer slate announcement kicks off with “Spoilers,” a half-hour movie “revue” for movie lovers hosted by beloved filmmaker and podcasting maven Kevin Smith (“Clerks,” “Red State”). “Spoilers” launches on Hulu and Hulu Plus on June 4th.

“I have always wanted to do a show that provides an open forum for real fans to discuss real movies in real time and that’s what ‘Spoilers’ is about. As a filmmaker and lover of movies, I understand that ultimately it’s the fans who make the film. So in this show, we do not review movies, we revere them,” said Kevin Smith. “Hulu really lends itself well to a show like this because they have an audience that is passionate and active when it comes to shows they love. And frankly, those are the people I want to hang with.”

In August, Hulu will launch the highly anticipated travel series “Up To Speed” by acclaimed filmmaker Richard Linklater (“Bernie,” “School of Rock,” “Dazed and Confused”) and starring Speed Levitch (“The Cruise”). August also brings the premiere of “We Got Next,” an edgy male comedy co-created by Kenya Barris (co-creator of “America’s Next Top Model”) and Hale Rothstein (writer, producer of “The Game”).

Hulu exclusively offers fans seven popular TV shows never before available to U.S. audiences with the premieres of “Rev.,” “The Yard,” “Pramface,” “Derren Brown: Inside Your Mind,” “The Promise” and “Little Mosque,” along with the second season of the sci-fi thriller, “The Booth at the End.”

“In an on-demand world, viewers are going to actively choose to watch TV shows that they really love. At Hulu, we want to offer exclusive shows and make original TV programming that speaks to a passionate group of fans. Because today, you don’t have to settle for watching something mildly entertaining,” said Andy Forssell, senior vice president of content for Hulu. “We are proud of our summer line-up of Hulu Original Series and Exclusives, and we look forward to delighting our users.”

BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech

May 21, 2012 0 comments Read More
A Better Queue sorts Netflix with Rotten Tomatoes ratings

A Better Queue sorts Netflix with Rotten Tomatoes ratings

Netflix logo

Although Netflix has put quite a bit of effort into its recommendation engine, it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re just not seeing the best video their catalog has to offer. Sometimes you don’t want personalized suggestions, you just want to know what’s good from a more objective viewpoint. Enter A Better Queue, which is a simple mashup of Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes that allows you to view what’s available to watch instantly from Netflix in a list sorted by Tomatometer ratings. You can filter by year, genre, and rating — which makes for a much simpler interface than instantwatcher, another Netflix tools that hooks into your queue.

Developer Dave Jachimiak has promised that more features will be coming soon, including the…

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The Verge – All Posts

May 4, 2012 0 comments Read More
Netflix on the rise at the expense of kids’ TV

Netflix on the rise at the expense of kids’ TV

netflix apple tv

For some of us, Netflix and other streaming services are rendering the traditional syndicated TV paradigm less and less relevant by the day, but a new report suggests that this is affecting certain channels more than most. Bernstein Research used data from TiVo boxes to find out that, among households that use Netflix regularly, kids’ TV networks are losing out — Nickelodeon’s ratings declined 6 percent in streaming households despite seeing 2 percent growth elsewhere, and Teen Nick saw an even bigger 11 percent drop for Netflix users while increasing viewership 26 percent in non-streaming households.

Other networks such as CBS, ABC, and NBC aren’t seeing such a negative impact from Netflix, and it’s possible that in some cases the…

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The Verge – All Posts

April 26, 2012 0 comments Read More
Netflix beats estimates in Q1; posts narrower loss on $870 million in sales

Netflix beats estimates in Q1; posts narrower loss on $870 million in sales


Netflix posted its financial results for the first quarter of 2012 after the bell on Monday. The company reported a loss of $ 0.08 per share, or$ 5 million, on $ 870 million in revenue, beating analysts’ consensus. Netflix posted a profit of $ 1.11 per share on $ 719 million in revenue in the first quarter last year, and Wall Street was expecting a loss of $ 0.27 per share on $ 866 million in sales this past quarter. All eyes were on Netflix’s subscriber additions this quarter, and the company said it added nearly 3 million streaming customers in the first quarter, including 1.21 million international streaming subscribers. The company shed more than one million DVD rental subscribers in the U.S. after losing 2.76 million DVD subscribers in the fourth quarter. Netflix’s global streaming subscriber count now sits at more than 26 million, up from 24.4 million at the end of the fourth quarter. In the second quarter, Netflix expects a net loss of between $ 6 million and $ 8 million as domestic streaming subscriber totals reach between 23.6 million and 24.2 million, below the Street’s estimates of 24.5 million. Shares of Netflix stock tumbled nearly 15% in after-hours trading on Monday following the release of the company’s earnings report.

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BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech

April 23, 2012 0 comments Read More
Netflix CEO complains about Comcast’s data caps again: ‘In what way is this neutral?’

Netflix CEO complains about Comcast’s data caps again: ‘In what way is this neutral?’

hastings netflix

It’s no secret Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings thinks Comcast’s data caps are unfair. Last month he posted a message on Facebook complaining about how data used by Comcast’s Xfinity app for the Xbox 360 doesn’t count toward his monthly Comcast data cap, unlike competing service HBO Go. Now Hastings is back on Facebook (post below), saying essentially the same thing, only this time he’s cutting straight to the net neutrality point.


It’s unlikely that Comcast is going to stop being selective about its data caps just because of a couple of Facebook posts — it’s going to take pressure from Washington, and Netflix recently established its Flixpac public action committee to get just that. We thought the formation of the PAC might move the…

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The Verge – All Posts

April 16, 2012 0 comments Read More
Amazon, Netflix said to be inflating streaming library sizes

Amazon, Netflix said to be inflating streaming library sizes


Online retail giant Amazon is said to be stretching the truth regarding the size of its streaming content library when reporting numbers to the public. According to a report from Fast Company, the “17,000 movies and television shows” Amazon claims to offer Amazon Prime customers is inflated by roughly 10 times. Amazon Prime members have free, unlimited access to Amazon’s streaming content catalog, which can be viewed using a number of devices including a Roku set-top box and Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet. Rather than counting a TV series toward the total content tally Amazon claims its users have access to, Amazon counts each individual episode of a TV show toward that 17,000-title total. So, for example, Fox’s “24″ counts not once but 192 times, and various versions of the “Power Rangers” show add 715 shows to Amazon’s catalog. The actual size of Amazon’s library? 1,745 movies and 150 television series. Similarly, Netflix, which claims to have a catalog of 60,000 streaming titles, actually has approximately 13,000 different titles including 9,500 movies and 3,500 TV series, the report claims. 

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BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech

April 13, 2012 0 comments Read More
Netflix paid $1 million for a recommendation algorithm it never used

Netflix paid $1 million for a recommendation algorithm it never used


Netflix in 2006 held an open competition to find the collaborative filtering algorithm that would best predict whether or not a user would like a particular film or TV show based on previous ratings. The grand prize of $ 1 million was awarded to a team called “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” in 2009. The team’s algorithm was found to be 10% more effect than Netflix’s own recommendation service, however the company never implemented the team’s solution into its own service. “We evaluated some of the new methods offline but the additional accuracy gains that we measured did not seem to justify the engineering effort needed to bring them into a production environment,” Netflix finally explained in a recent blog post. “Also, our focus on improving Netflix personalization had shifted to the next level by then.” The company said because the majority its users were streaming videos rather than renting DVDs, it wasn’t logical to integrate the algorithm into its recommendation service, which is different for its streaming service and DVD rental program.

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BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech

April 13, 2012 0 comments Read More
Netflix to release source code for its army of diagnostic monkeys

Netflix to release source code for its army of diagnostic monkeys

Netflix logo

Wired reports that Netflix is poised to release the source code for its suite of cloud monkeys, programs that keep its systems running smoothly, over the next few months. The streaming media company detailed its “simian army” last year, which began with Chaos Monkey — a tool that randomly disables live servers to test if the system can withstand common types of failure. Netflix then added a number of other monkeys, like Latency Monkey, Conformity Monkey, Doctor Monkey, and Janitor Monkey, that run other diagnostics and simulations on Netflix’s service. Adrian Cockroft, director of cloud architecture at Netflix, tells Wired that “we will be doing bits and pieces of it throughout the summer and into the fall.”

Netflix has steadily moved…

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The Verge – All Posts

April 13, 2012 0 comments Read More
Netflix receives underwhelming update on Xbox 360

Netflix receives underwhelming update on Xbox 360

The Netflix app for Xbox 360 received an update today that improves some functionality, but ignores some long-standing complaints. You now have the ability to skip forward and back during play for movies and TV episodes, and a zoom function for those with 4:3 screens lets you convert letterbox to full screen.

One other notable tweak is social media integration for Facebook users outside of the States. There’s also a single sign-on with cloud profiles, allowing members to access Netflix on another Xbox 360 (like, at a friend’s house) with sign-in credentials. Handy!

Filed under “still not fixed”: TV episodes still start automatically sans individual episode selection screen, and searching is still done with a string of letters, and not a keyboard interface. Maybe next time?

JoystiqNetflix receives underwhelming update on Xbox 360 originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Joystiq

April 10, 2012 0 comments Read More
Netflix Xbox 360 app updated with new contrast settings, zoom, and Facebook integration

Netflix Xbox 360 app updated with new contrast settings, zoom, and Facebook integration

Netflix Xbox 360 April 9 update

Netflix has updated its app for Xbox 360 today with a few more features. The headline change seems to be a new contrast setting that the company says makes “colors more vivid and black more pure.” Along with the new contrast settings, the update introduces a zoom feature that’ll let you get rid of those letterboxes and fill out the entire screen with video — at the expense of cropping the image at the top and bottom, of course. Additionally, there are new skip forward and skip back buttons that promise to make navigating through TV episodes quicker and easier, and in every country but the US the app now features Facebook integration. Netflix hasn’t yet introuduced Facebook features to the US because of the VPPA act, which the company…

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The Verge – All Posts

April 9, 2012 0 comments Read More