Daylight Savings Time becomes easier in the internet age

Daylight Savings Time didn’t used to be this easy. I may be missing one, but so far the number of clocks I’ve had to change tonight has been zero. My computer, my phone, even my cable box all dutifully fell back an hour when the clock struck 2am. That was half an hour ago. Another half an hour and they’ll all reach 2am again. My wristwatch needs updating, but that problem has sort of taken care of itself since I can’t find it anyway, as I took it off earlier this year and never put it back on. After all, my phone knows what time it is and it even knows how to deal with Daylight Savings Time. Well, not completely, but that’s another story.

Funny how old habits die hard, though. DST was such a big deal back when I was a kid (which wasn’t THAT long ago) that there was always at least one kid in my class who would arrive at school an hour late and wonder why classes had already started. Then again, time moved slowly enough back then, again the world was disconnected enough, that you could theoretically go through the time change on Saturday night, not know it, go through all day Sunday without realizing you had the wrong time, and show up to work an hour late on Monday morning before you’d catch on that you’d been oblivious to something. Nowadays, even those who rely on a wristwatch are bound to realize something is up as soon as they look at their phone or sit down at their computer.

But that didn’t stop me from taking caution when I went to set the alarm on my phone for tomorrow morning. Out of habit, I set the alarm for an hour earlier than I needed to. Only later did I remember that, yeah, my phone takes care of that kind of stuff, thanks to being always connected to the network. In any case, as the one o’clock hour enters its second hour, I’m reminded that even with all the complication brought on by the digital age, some things really have gotten simpler. Now, if the digital age could only do something about that lost hour of sleep. Oh wait, that’s in the spring, isn’t it? Nevermind.

Hulu iPhone app price tag angers fans, should not have been a surprise

The Hulu Plus app for iPhone is free, but unlike the television content on hulu.com, the content available through Hulu’s app comes with a price tag. This should be a surprise to precisely no one. The original Hulu business model, in which users could watch full length television episodes for free on a website an exchange for sitting through the embedded ads, is failing for the same reason that the traditional network television business model is failing: viewers skip ads. Unlike with a DVR, where viewers can fast forward through the ads, Hulu viewers don’t have such an option. But they do have the ability to mute the ad and go do something in another program on their computer, such as checking their email, in order to kill the fifteen seconds during which Hulu’s ads run. So it’s not a surprise that with Hulu’s ads being ignorable and advertisers not getting their money’s worth, the service is now looking at pay-for models, and decided that the iPhone userbase would be its testbed.

It’s not a bad idea in theory, as iPhone users are the type who are willing to pay $200-300 for the cellphone they want, as opposed to the majority of the population who still chug along on whatever free flip-phone was tossed at them during contract renewal. But Hulu has apparently mistaken taste for chumpiness, as the company thought it could suddenly get iPhone users to pay for a service whose one and only claim to fame was that it was free.

Hulu’s problem is that by offering a crappy television experience through a lame webpage for years and using the “but it’s free!” mantra to build an audience, Hulu ended up attracting the kind of users who won’t pay for anything unless they absolutely have to (and yes, a portion of the iPhone userbase does fit this description). Now that the free model has been proven not to work, Hulu now faces going back to its overly thrifty audience with its hand out, asking for money that it’ll never get from them. Worse, by virtue of gaining a “crap but free” reputation, Hulu will now have significant difficulty marketing its pay-for service to those members of the public who are willing to spend their money but only on quality stuff. If Hulu had charged a bit for its service from the start and had used that revenue to improve its user experience, the company might now be able to sell its product to those who are willing to open their wallets. But once you’re known for being a “crap but free” kind of service, you’re generally stuck with that model for better or worse.

Keep in mind that Hulu is owned by the television networks themselves and was started simply so those networks could have a bigger bargaining chip when it came to negotiating with Apple about television shows in the iTunes Store (its the same reason, in fact, that the major record labels convinced Amazon to launch AmazonMP3, which not coincidentally, is now being held back by its “crap but cheap” reputation). As Hulu has only ever existed as a pawn in a larger tactical strategy, its original business model is no longer working, and its sudden attempts to move to a different strategy are being met with outrage by existing users and indifference among potential new users, one wonders how much longer Hulu will be around one way or the other. On the other hand, the iTunes television model, in which users pay two to three dollars to “own” an episode that they’ll most likely only watch once before discarding, hasn’t exactly been a success either.

So even though it’s killing the television industry financially, driving the highest quality shows off the air, and pushing us further into reality TV hell, most of us will continue to stick with our DVRs until something finally gives. But considering how thoroughly Hulu is being run through the shredder today by iPhone users who have made it clear through their posted App Store comments that they have no intention of ever paying a dime for something as crappy as Hulu, one has to wonder what if anything will save television.

Apple only bought dying Lala for the engineers

Ever since Apple launched its iTunes Store in 2003, various geek pundits have openly speculated that the company would soon abandon its attempt at selling music in favor of a music rental model. And even seven years later, after Apple has proven digital music sales to be a highly profitable business model, while music rental has proven to be a failed model time and time again, those same pundits have still opined that an iTunes music rental service was somehow just around the corner. So when failing music rental service Lala concluded back in December that it wasn’t going to be profitable and decided to approach Apple about a buyout, Apple agreed to the acquisition so the ever-expanding company could add to its engineering roster.

But that didn’t stop those same pundits from looking at the failure of yet another music rental service and interpreting it as Apple, the only widely successful company in the history of digital music, getting ready to shift away from a music sales model which has been proven to work in favor of a music rental model which has been proven time and again to be a failed idea. And now that Apple has shut down Lala’s music rental service this month, a move that any dispassionate observer would have seen coming since the day of the acquisition, those same geek tech pundits have now declared that the shutdown of Lala is even more evidence that Apple is about to abandon its own successful business model in favor of Lala’s failed one. How can these pundits be so insistent on misinterpreting the blatant facts of the matter?

Seemingly the only conclusion is that these geek tech pundits are still so desirous of the opportunity to rent music that they’re willing to overlook every detail to the contrary in order keep their hope alive that Apple, the only company who’s shown any ability to succeed in digital music, will give them their rental service. Which is why this week’s shutdown of Lala, which almost no one was using, was met with cries of pain by geek pundits who saw it for what it was, and hoots of denial from those geek pundits who were able to convince themselves that it was reasonable that Apple would shut down its newly acquired music rental service in favor of launching it again later.

Why are geeks are so insistent that music rental is the future, even as years of evidence have mounted to demonstrate that no one outside the geekdom has any interest? Perhaps it’s just part of the fundamentally differing mindset between geeks and the mainstream. Geeks want a theoretically infinite choice of external monitors for use with their personal computer; the mainstream is increasingly embracing an all in one computer like the iMac. Geeks consider the App Store to be “closed” despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of apps from tens of thousands of developers; the mainstream considers the App Store to be wide open; what geeks call “open” the mainstream would refer to as anarchy. So while it’s unclear whether geek tech pundits (and all tech pundits are geeks) truly believe that the mainstream would suddenly want to swallow a music rental service after a lifetime of soundly rejecting the concept, or whether the geeks merely want such a service for themselves, it seems increasingly clear that while Apple won’t be launching a music rental service anytime soon to replace the failed music rental service that it just put out of its dying misery, every additional step that Apple takes in burying Lala will result in yet another round of headlines from geek tech pundits about how the move somehow represents Apple moving one step closer to finally getting around to shutting down the overwhelmingly successful iTunes Store and replacing it with an iTunes Rental Depot. But then that’s what bubble geeks tend to do.