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As Netflix faces increased competition from other streaming services like Hulu, YouTube, and Amazon, it must find a way to distinguish itself from both its competitors and mainstream television. Their strategy for continued domination of the streaming services market so far can be summed up in two words: original programming.
Netflix’s first foray into the original programming market is Lilyhammer, a drama that stars Steven Van Zandt (of The Sopranos fame) as a former New York mobster who finds himself in Lillehammer, Norway after entering the witness protection program. Beautiful though it is, the town doesn’t provide much for a former mobster to do, and he soon returns to his old ways. The show has been a success - Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, recently announced that there will be a second season.
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Imagine you own a trucking company. You also own all the highways that make up your company’s shipping routes. You decide to levy a tax on all the vehicles that use your highways – all the vehicles, that is, except those that belong to your trucking company.
Is that fair? Absolutely not. But that’s exactly what Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is accusing Comcast of doing. Hastings took to his public Facebook account to call Comcast out for breaking net neutrality through its data cap policy on the Xbox 360 Xfinity app. Hastings’ post reads:
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File this one under “Really, really cool.”
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, Ancestry.com has released the most comprehensive collection of the ship’s records in history. The collection is available for free searching online until April 15.
The infamous tale of the RMS Titanic began on April 10, 1912, when the British passenger liner set sail from Southampton. Four days into her transatlantic crossing, on April 15, 1912 at 11:40pm, the ship hit an iceberg while traveling in the north Atlantic. The collision caused the Titanic’s hull to buckle inwards and over the next two and a half hours, the ship filled with water and sank. Some passengers and crew members were evacuated in lifeboats, the majority of which were women and children thanks to a “women and children first” procedure. When the Titanic finally sank, over 1,000 people were still onboard.
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When the U.S. Census Bureau conducted the 1940 census, America was on the brink of a war that would change the nation forever. The country was emerging from the trials of the Great Depression, but as hope returned a new menace was on the horizon. Americans were reluctant to become involved in conflicts overseas, believing that it was more important to focus on rebuilding the country in the wake of the devastating stock market crash, but history had a different path in mind. Although peace was not immediately in the cards, the 1940s saw an explosion in technology, financial prosperity, and world leadership for the United States.
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Dieters can now eat as much fruit as they'd like on the Weight Watchers program because there are no more "points" associated with the food group.
The famous Weight Watchers points system assigns a point value to foods, then lets dieters choose their meals as long as they do not exceed the number of daily allotted points. For the most part, higher numbers are assigned to more calorically dense foods, but in some cases foods have a high points value regardless of their caloric value. Those foods are usually snack foods and carbohydrate-based foods, encouraging dieters to move away from them in favor of lean protein.
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To commemorate the 70th anniversary of Japanese-American internment during World War II, George Takei and Ancestry.com are coming together to help Japanese-Americans reconnect with their past.
Before he rose to fame as Mr. Sulu on Star Trek, George Takei lived a very different life. At the age of 5, he was one of more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent who were forced to enter internment camps following the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Despite being born in Los Angeles, he spent three years in the camps before being released and has since called them “one of the most egregious violations of our constitution.”
