akuma587 on 23 February 2009
I don't have much faith in VOD until I see a standalone VOD service start doing extremely well. Most analysts who have hedged their bets on VOD have been continually disappointed. Even Apple can't hang in the market.
The problem is that the only services that are doing at all well are tied to the hip of another service. Examples - the 360, the PS3, Netflix. People like to have the service as an added bonus, but nobody is running out to buy the service by itself.
Standalone set top boxes for video download services have sold like ET the videogame. Apple's set top boxes started getting moved from display windows to the warehouses when nobody would buy them.
I'm not saying the potential isn't there, I'm just not seeing it turn into profit. And at the end of the day that is the only thing that matters in the home entertainment industry.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
