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Netflix provides a better opportunity for documentary content distribution than Discovery

Byrichard
Reading Time: 3 minutes

In the 1990s when satellite distribution of television content was in it’s infancy we got a satellite dish and I would watch the Discovery Channel from the start of the broadcast day to when the programmes were played for the second time that day.

By watching so many documentaries I learned a lot about the world. I watched Mythbusters, Lonely Planet, Modern Marvels and many many other documentaries. It is only ten years later that I stopped watching Discovery. By that time I was no longer in the family home and so documentary viewing was more restrictive. Whilst at the University of Bournemouth and the University of Westminster I did take advantage to watch as many documentaries as I could find. The dissertation I wrote during my third year of studies was about the documentary genre. I had an academic reason to watch these documentaries. It was no longer a hobby.

Aside from the selection of Discovery channels and University VHS tapes documentaries can also be found on national and European channels. I am thinking of Temps Present, Passe Moi Les Jumelles and other factual programmes and current affairs content. These documentaries fit within a specific format to be broadcast at the same times every week.

We then have artistic documentaries like those broadcast on Arte, shown at independent cinemas, festivals and more. These documentaries are not adapted for mainstream viewing. They fill a niche. They are sometimes hard to watch and other times so niche that aside from those with that passion or interest no one will ever watch them.

The Discovery Channel network broadcasts set documentaries at set times on set channels for a set number of hours per day. Viewers can either watch documentaries as they are broadcast or on demand. As PVR arrived viewers could shape their viewing habits around their lifestyle rather than the other way around.

Discovery channel documentaries have two serious flaws, that as a documentary professional cannot stand. The first of these is commercial breaks. When I watch content I want to watch it from start to finish. I don’t want it to be interrupted because it means that for two or three minutes I have to find something else to do. This could be a serious trigger to people having a laptop or tablet with them when watching TV. The second very big flaw with Discovery TV documentaries is sensationalism and repetition.

I found that when watching hour long documentaries on Discovery television channels more than half of the time is spent repeating what has happened and what will happen with very little content left over. You will spend an hour watching a show that could have been over in just 24 minutes. This is an excellent way to lose viewers.

Netflix is a video on demand platform. This platform makes available all of the content it has licensed to it’s customers. This content is ready to play within seconds and has no adverts. This is great for content creators. It means that they can spend more time moving the story forward. There is no need to worry about viewers starting to watch a show half way through. It means that if you have a 42 minute slot you can spend 52 minutes telling the story. This is great for content creators.

The flaw of Discovery Channel documentaries and commercial television in general is that they make mediocre content and then add adverts every few minutes. This means that a mediocre programme will be watched from one commercial to another before the channel is changed. They live under the misconception that sensationalism and excited narration will keep viewers. It has the opposite effect, at least on me.

Netflix allows you to watch the BBC Blue Planet and Planet Earth documentaries with no adverts. This gives documentary makers an advantage. Imagine watching Planet Earth documentary episodes that are 52 minutes long with an extra 15 minutes or more of adverts thrown in. For this reason Netflix is an excellent documentary distribution platform.

‘Make what people want to watch and the rest goes with it’. I don’t think that has changed at all. My job every day is to make what people want to watch.”

I have written several times about my notion that documentaries are encyclopaedias. Planet Earth and Blue Planet documentaries are a perfect demonstration of this. Each episode is about a specific biome. By watching each documentary your knowledge and understanding of the world around you increases.

Compare this to the sensationalist hyperactive content that the Discovery channel network places in between adverts. Their content is so sensationalist and so condescending that I switch programme within minutes, if not seconds, of tuning in. Through having to appeal to a mass audience the Discovery Channel documentary network fails me as a viewer. Their content is too unpleasant to watch.

I want to learn, I want good camera work, good editing and good narration. When documentaries have all of these features I will watch them. I want both the content creator and the content distributor to treat me with respect. Although Netflix is not perfect it does a better job than Discovery.

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A nice streaming surprise

Byrichard

The month is almost over and I’ve got fourty megabytes of streaming left to play with so I’m going to take advantage of that with my mobile phone. Since cities around Switzerland are covered by 3g you may find that I’m using Qik, Bambuser and Flixwagon to stream what I’m doing.

Today I actually got Flixwagon to stream live over wifi which is better than i got yesterday and I found that streaming via qik works well on 3g.

In less than a hundred days you’ll have big crowds of people in the streets and that’s going to be for the European cup. If enough bars and squares have wifi then you could get the fans streaming their reactions live from the pub.

It’s the Vertovian vision, the All Seeing eye, and it’s a reality, no longer just a 1920’s eutopian vision.

Forgotten Phones and eSIMs

Forgotten Phones and eSIMs

Byrichard

A growing number of mobile phones are eSIM compatible. As a result by simply turning on a phone, and selecting the eSIM option you could make a spare phone your primary phone. When I activated my current phone I chose to use an eSIM, rather than a physical sim. Whilst this is fun it does have one draw back. If you swap phones every so often you need to shift the eSIM from one device to another with less ease than switching nano sims.


With the iPhone I see that you have two options. You can transfer the sim from a nearby phone or you can use a QR code. This means that if you forget your phone in location A and you have to wait for a few days for it to arrive in location B you could use a secondary device as a primary phone, until it arrives.


The second, theoretically, cheaper option is to have a 4g enabled Apple watch. With this option you could forget your phone but still be online via the watch.


When it comes to road trips this is unlikely to happen to me for two reasons. The first is that if I leave a device behind my other devices remind me. The other reason is that I use the phone with car play. If I don’t have my phone with me car play will not be active. Within seconds I would be notified.


One of the biggest nuissances of leaving a phone behind would be to lose access to third party authentication apps. If I forgot my phone then I would miss having my authentication apps. Without them logging into wordpress, Google and plenty of other apps would be problematic. I depend on my main phone for authentication.


Having said this, both my old iphone and android devices have access to authenticator apps, so if I did find that one phone was destroyed by being dropped, or I forgot it somewhere then I have a secondary and tertiary backup.


Since we replace phones before they die we often have a backup phone or two. If we forget the primary phone we can quite easily replace it with an old phone, at least temporarily, especially now that phones are eSIM capable. When all phones are eSIM capable forgetting a phone won’t matter, because it is backed up in the cloud, and eSIMs can be swapped with relative ease, despite not having the physical phone with the eSIM with us.

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CCTV, Two Exhibits, one town crier and of course John Bull

Byrichard

England is a CCTV nation with more cameras per capita than any other nation. As a result there is great interest from people like Christian of documentally.com and Our Man Inside and John Perivolaris. Both of them are working on CCTV related pieces.


At Parliament Square Christian demonstrated his great ability to talk with anyone he meets. Two characters we met whilst at Parliament square were the London Town crier and John Bull from Birmingham. The London town crier has some interesting stories to tell should you desire to hear them. John Bull wears an image of the Queen on his left side and a picture of Winston Churchill on his right. He often comes down to London to protest about a number of topics.


As if that wasn’t enough a stop was made at London’s Photographer’s Gallery where there’s Taryn Simon’s exhibit for restricted places. It’s free so if you have the time you might as well drop by there.


To top off the day there is an exhibit starting in London very soon showing Giuseppe Di Bella’s stamps. Those are well known because they are referred to as the “Abu Ghraib Series”. The concept is simple enough. Print some stamps and mail them to people around the world and get the official seals. You can find a more complete explanation here if you desire.

Apple and Dongles

Apple and Dongles

Byrichard

Several years ago I broke my most important rule. Never take a laptop with you that you are not willing to carry at all times. I had a Mac Book Pro stolen and this was extremely frustrating. The reason for which it was frustrating is that this Mac Book from still had normal USB ports, an SD card reader and more. New Mac Book Pros have four USB-3/Thunderbolt 3 connectors.

Thunderbolt 3 Nuissance

Some people love this, because it’s smaller, lighter, and faster but I hated the move because it meant that all my hard drives needed a dongle to work. All my charging cables for watches, cameras and more needed a dongle to work. You need a dongle for a wired connection and you simply always need a dongle. What’s worse is that you don’t need one dongle. You need two or three, or more.

Easier to Lose

You need to keep track of the dongles. Sometimes they’re in one room, or drawer, and if you use them every few days or weeks they like to vanish so that instead of just plugging in a device you need to find the dongle, plug the USB cable to the dongle and the dongle to the laptop.

Fast Drives but Slow Dongles

Yesterday I plugged in a USB C drive to one port, and a USB C flat adaptor drive to the apple dongle with the other. The transfer speed was much faster but I didn’t test whether the difference was due to the dongle I was using, the Apple dedicated USB dongle or the other third party option for most drives.

I should do a read/write speed test with both dongles to see if there is a difference between dongles, or I’m using slow, old drives. As I write this I’m transferring 900 gigabytes from one drive to another and it will take “about 4 hours”.

Bring Pi

Linux reads Mac OS Journaled and APFS drives when configured. Instead of blocking a mac in time and space ato run for hours it makes sense for a Pi to do this chore. A Pi is not fast. It doesn’t matter if you’re moving files from an APFS volume to an ExFat or Ext4 drive.

Legacy Devices

Over the years I have had USB A, B and C devices with various adapters. I have also had Firewire 400 and 800 drives, as well as Thunderbolt 2. The firewire drives and Thunderbolt two drives become unusable due to the move away from one standard to another. Luckily drives often come with two or three standards, and the aim should be to migrate from old drives to new drives every few years. Old drives can be backups, and new drives can be the working, drives, until they are retired to backup status in turn.

 And Finally

In the good old days I would plug my drives straight into the computer and move data between drives. Now that I need to go from drive, to USB-C cable to dongle, to computer, between two or more drives I find that transfer speeds are very slow and I suspect that it’s the third party USB-C dongle that is slowing things down. Tomorrow I can recover my second dongle and test to see whether my suspicion is correct or not.

Corporate Social Responsibility and Apple

Byrichard

I have read numerous articles and I think that Corporate Social Responsibility and Apple are hot topics at the moment. When it was found that European firms were cheating on their emissions reports it was a great scandal and the European and German automotive industries took a financial hit. Their cheating cost them billions. In the US people were financially compensated whilst as one article put it Europeans got a plastic tube.

We should look at the Apple Back taxes story within the context of Brexit, the rise of the far right in a number of countries and the emerging popularity of Trump within certain sectors of the American voting public. The group anonymous is defending the rights of the 99 percent. They protest against Wall Street and the abuses of corporations and the wealthy.

When houses in the US were foreclosed because of the bubble bursting because of complex dividends those who suffered were the poor and the middle classes because they borrowed money at a rate that they could not pay it back. A number of documentary makers have explored this issue and there have been talks at the Graduate institute and other places.

Apple is currently making billions per quarter and that money is being stockpiled in offshore accounts so that neither the US government nor the European union can get to it. Other writers and journalists have written about this extensively. The perspective that I want to take is a moral one.

Apple products are expensive, they can cost twice as much as their android equivalents. People in the European markets are paying for these products. They pay the country’s VAT along with the product’s cost. They are contributing to the local economy.

Tim Cook argues that what the European Commission is doing is a “load of crap” and that it is abusing of its power. From an ethical and moral point of view though it is Apple that is being unethical and amoral. They are part of the economy. When they sell products they make huge profits that are taxed at less than one percent. 12 billion dollars could do a lot of good within the European Union if and when it is recovered because it could contribute to the road networks and transport infrastructure. It could contribute to housing, education and much more. In contributing to the economy those billions that Apple owes in back taxes could improve the quality of life of millions.

They hide behind the mask of job creation. They believe that because they contribute to the creation of 6000 jobs in Ireland that their corporate social responsibility stops there. It does not. Apple must be ethical enough to pay taxes like every other business is expected to do.

In effect Apple is providing a concrete example of what Brexiters voted against, the corporations syphoning off money to the detriment of living conditions of many populations around Europe. If corporations are allowed to make billions in profits without paying taxes because of creative accounting then society as a whole suffers. It also ferments resentment and encourages people to vote for the right.

In my opinion, based on the reading of numerous articles and watching many documentaries Apple should agree to pay the 14 billion as a gesture of good will and as a Public relations exercise. Imagine what a positive effect those billions would have for the European Union as a whole. Imagine how much social good having that money re-invested would do.

I believe that Tim Cook and Apple need to pay these back taxes to diffuse the tensions caused by austerity movements across Europe. A wealthy, rather than austere Europe could buy more Apple products. Other corporations would also benefit directly from people’s increased disposable income. A few weeks or months ago I watched a documentary about how the United States benefited from corporations paying their fair share of taxes.

Organising Terabytes Fast

Organising Terabytes Fast

Byrichard

Imagine for a second that you have six hard drives filled with Data. Some are four terabytes. Others are one terabyte each, and you’ve already sorted personal videos and photos from other media files. Each drive is moved to its own folder

Two Terabyte Seagate has gone from being a drive to a folder. Bob 2017 has also become a folder, rather than a drive. Samantha 2018 is also a volume, rather than a drive. There is a reason for congregating the media from smaller files to a large volume and that is speed.

If you want to organise photos into a “photos” folder, videos into a “videos” folder and then organise those photos by year, initially, then moving files and folders from location A on a drive to Location B on a drive takes seconds.

To be more specific, you have volume A, B and C with files in them, and there is a lot of overlap of files. You could compare the files in three locations to make sure that there are no duplicates across a spaguetti junction of physical drives but by centralising everything you have a single volume, whether it’s a raid or a hard drive.

When everything is on a single volume organising files becomes as easy as creating folders, and moving files to the right folder. Video files from 2024 all go into videos/2024, videos from 2016 go to videos 2016. You may notice that I’m not going through the year-month-date yet. That’s because I find that itteration is faster. The aim is to identify the duplicates fast, and delete them from the aggregation/consolidation drive. Having three or four copies across three or four drives makes sense, for data recovery. On a single drive it’s a waste of space.

Once duplicates have been identified and got rid of, then time can be spend in uniformising date format and file names. Remember, eventually you can move the well organised files back to a smaller drive as a low cost backup.

10 Terabytes Become Four

This figure is an imaginery one. The point is that if you have data across 6-8 drives, and their storage amounts to 10-12 terabytes but a lot of that data is duplicates then the real space needed and used is lower. You should have two local backups and one off-site backup.

By copying data from multiple drives to a single drive it becomes easy to get everything organised, and one it is organised you can dump that data, in an organised manner, back to external drives.

For example you could have a drive for photos from 2010-2024, and another for videos from 2020-2024, and so on. Usually I don’t print labels for drives so it can get confusing. That’s where I like to use post-it notes. They’re cheap, and versatile. They need to last only until you finish organising your files. In theory you could print proper labels for drives but post-its are quick, cheap, and easy to use.

If I had a label maker I might print labels. I would consider printed labels once things are finalised, rather than when they’re in flux. Post-its are good for constant change.

Knowing What You Have and Where

If you backup from your laptop to drive A when you run out of space, and then drive B when you run out of space you have duplicates, triplicates, maybe even five or six copies of the same file. The problem is that because it’s decentralised it’s easier to back everything up and be safe, than assume you have a file or folder backed up when it isn’t.

By aggregating smaller drives to a big drive you gain control of your former chaos. You go from thinking you need ten terabytes to realising you need four to six terabytes instead.

Two Motivations

The first motivation for finally doing this properly is that I noticed a few years ago that I had lost track of hundreds of files from the uni years and I wanted to recover them. Between Picasa, iPhoto, Aperture, Google Photos and other solutions I lost track of these files. Now that I have regained track of them I can take advantage.

My second motivation is that PhotoPrism and Immich look like interesting solutions. In the good old days I had so few photos that they fit on my laptop’s drive with ease, but in the age of having a camera with us everywhere we go we end up with thousands of photos. These take up space, and by having a self-hosted solution like PhotoPrism and Immich we can keep track of these images with ease.

Estimating Cost

For the sake of argument let’s say that you have twenty drives. and they vary from 750 gigabytes to 8 terabytes in size. In theory you would assume that you need a 30+ terabyte raid to backup all that data. The issue is that this 30 terabyte raid costs hundreds, if not thousands of francs. If you regain control of how much space you need, on smaller volume drives then you get a better idea of how much storage you need.

An empty four bay synology device costs over four hundred francs, and that’s before you get disk drives. With the disk drives you get to 1500 CHF. I am not against getting a Synology or other device. I’m encouraging people to get into good habits, to ensure that there are two local copies, and a third off-site backup, rather than 15 drives that all have similar files.

 And Finally

I chose to write this blog post today because yesterday I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the amount of data I felt I still had to consolidate and the little amount of space I had, relative to the requirement. Initially my idea was to dump all the data from the smaller drives to the central server but I don’t have that much storage.

By organising files by photos, documents, and videos, as well as then going down to organising them by year I can quickly detect and delete duplicates. This helps me streamline how much storage I need, and I can then backup that data by photos on one drive, video on another, and documents on a third, for example. I could also organise them chronologically.

By organising the video and photo files on a single volume though I prepare it to be indexed and catalogued by either PhotoPrism, or Immich, or both, to see which one I prefer over time.

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