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has been bought by smartphone maker
HTC.
You can see what they’re up to. A
prominent competitor, Sony-Ericsson,
already has its own brand of headphones,
Walkman (the brand has been allowed
to go to seed, but never mind). HTC
is a major maker of Android phones,
with a strong contingent of presumably
street savvy young customers. Can being
associated with a rapper be a bad thing?
So, let’s see…HTC now has 51%
of Beats (for $300 million), and there’s
speculation that it is interested more
in the brand than in the original headphones
(which are more than pretty
good, by the way). Beats continues its
partnership with Hewlett-Packard (it
designed a branded sound system for
laptops), as well as Chrysler and of course
Monster.
We don’t know how much mileage
Sony-Ericsson is getting from the Walkman
association, but it has sunk to tenth
position in the list of the world’s top ten
phone makers according to a Gartner
report. Taiwan’s HTC is seventh.
But someone has been watching the
success of Beats, because there’s another
headphone brand, called Soul, fronted by
a hip hop artist.
A Beats near lookalike, the SL300,
is also active and noise-cancelling, with
a tangle-proof detachable cord, and is
also backed by a hip hop artist, Chris
“Ludacris” Bridges. Like the Beats, the
80 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
Souls are available at the Apple Store,
Amazon, and the usual suspects. The
price, $299, is slightly lower than the list
price of the Beats.
So…are they as good as the Beats?
Beats us!
Why Is This
Man Smiling?
Have you followed the doings of
Netflix in the US? What a circus it’s
been!
The company began life some years
back offering DVD’s by mail, and more
recently moved into film streaming. This
past summer it split up the two functions,
all but doubling the subscription
price for most customers. When there
was a massive backlash, and the exit of
nearly a million customers, Netflix then
spun off the DVD-by-mail service as a
new company with a nearly-unspellable
name, Qwikster. It then backtracked on
the spinoff, but not on the doubling of
costs. If the late Steve Jobs was lionized
this Fall as the world’s best CEO, there
were lots of people prepared to nominate
Netflix’s Reed Hastings, shown here, as
the world’s worst.
(Oh, except for that guy, Léo Apotheker,
who was 11 months into his reign
at HP, the world’s number one computer
maker, and announced HP would no
longer make computers; but at least he
got the boot. The boot…and about 25
million dollars!)
Hastings, by the way, claims that
Netflix needs the money (don’t we all),
but he also says that the Canadian Netflix
operation (streaming only, $8 per
month for all you can eat) is profitable.
We suspect creative accounting. The
Canadian film lineup remains pitiful,
with a number of titles that seem to
have bypassed cinemas to go straight
to Netflix. Maybe we’re being difficult,
but streaming movies from Canadian
Netflix is like renting DVDs from the
corner gas station.
And need we stress once again that
Netflix’s “HD” movies, like those of its
competitors, are not really HD? And
that they may blow enough Internet
bandwidth to run you into extra charges
with your service provider?
Long live Blu-ray!
goodbye
Blockbuster
It’s not as though we couldn’t see this
coming. The US parent of Blockbuster
filed for bankruptcy back in April, and
was picked up, for reasons that totally
escape us, by DISH TV. That should
have doomed the Canadian branch, and
ultimately it did, the following month in
fact, but why?
Fact is, the Canadian branch was
profitable. Surprised?
It’s easy to see the reason. In the US
(and only in the US) such companies as
Netflix, Apple, Google and Boxee have
a vast choice of movies available on line.
True, on-line movies are compressed,
but then hamburgers are compressed
too, and we don’t see McDo and Burger
King closing shop. In Canada, by contrast,
the on-line movie offerings are so
slim they are a cruel joke. Result: the
market for DVD rentals is much larger
here.
So why is Canada’s Blockbuster closing
down, again?
Blame globalization. And prepare to
get angry.
When the US business sank, its
board of directors tried desperately to
stay afloat, which meant it needed cash.