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‘Arrested Development’ Returns on Netflix

May 23, 2013 by Leave a Comment

And there was Mitch Hurwitz, the creator of “Arrested,“ toying with the boundaries of television comedy through self-referential humor, cutaway gags and setups to jokes that sometimes only made sense a season later. For Mr. Hurwitz, he said, “the joy of it became the detail.”

But viewers didn’t have the tools to play along. So all of the in-jokes that he and his colleagues delighted in, all of the recurring lines about making a “huge mistake,” the foreshadowing about Buster’s real father and the references to an Aztec Tomb, well, they were about as inside as jokes can be. In fact, they may have turned Fox viewers off — or at least discouraged new ones from giving it a chance. “Arrested” was canceled in 2006 after three seasons.

Yet much like the jokes that took time to play out, “all that effort paid off years later,” Mr. Hurwitz said in an interview, as viewers with DVD box sets or Netflix accounts pored over the episodes and appreciated the mentions of hop-ons, never-nudes and banana stands. In retrospect, his show was made for Netflix streaming before Netflix started to stream.

Now “Arrested Development” has met its moment. And its medium.

Birthed and buried by Fox almost a decade ago, belatedly discovered by new viewers through DVDs and Web streams and beloved by a fan base that most other shows only wish for, “Arrested” will start its second life on Sunday as a Netflix original series, available to subscribers of the streaming video service at 3:01 a.m. Eastern time. All 15 of the new episodes about the dysfunctional Bluth family will be released at the same time, allowing the most loyal fans to watch — and pause and rewind and rewatch and screen-grab and tweet and recontextualize — until the sun comes up and sets again.

When the show was on Fox, some of this was impossible, and none of it was easy. “We were right on the cusp of a sea change in how people watched television,” said Michael Cera, who plays George Michael Bluth and who returned for the Netflix revival along with the rest of the original cast.

Television consumption has become more personal since America first met the Bluths. Seeing characters on a tablet or smartphone screen makes it that way, and so does having the ability to pause, rewind and rewatch at one’s leisure. Yet television has also become much more public. People who identify as “Arrested Development” fans can connect with thousands of others just like them on- and offline. Case in point: the hundreds of fans in their 20s and 30s who patiently lined up in Midtown Manhattan this month at a replica of the show’s famous frozen banana stand. When BTIG Research interviewed 427 of them, 86 percent said they subscribed to Netflix, and half of the others said they probably would sign up to watch the show.

Sounding a lot like Jason Bateman’s character, Michael Bluth, Mr. Hurwitz said the groundswell of attention had spooked him a bit. “Hey everybody,” he joked, “let’s not make a superbig deal out of this.”

Too late. “Arrested Development” is poised to outperform Netflix’s first original series of the year, “House of Cards,” which was released the same way in February. “Arrested” is a known quantity, something that Hollywood (and many viewers) tend to gravitate to. The producers make it sound like a purer strain of the Fox show, with even more metacomedy and an even higher total of jokes-per-minute. As with the Fox iteration, the callbacks (the comedy equivalent of a flashback) and call-forwards won’t all be apparent at first, Mr. Hurwitz said, “but if anybody gets past Episode 3, they’re everywhere.”

If? Some viewers will be well past that episode by 6 in the morning on Sunday. Netflix will not release television-like ratings for any of their original shows, but the “Arrested” actors say they feel the audience now is both bigger and more committed than it ever was in the 2000s. (On Fox the series drew nearly eight million viewers when it started, but lost more than half by the time it ended.)

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/business/media/arrested-development-returns-on-netflix.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Special Report: Technology and Innovation: Microsoft Inherits Sticky Data Collection Issues From Skype

February 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

BARCELONA — When Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, bought Skype in May 2011 for $8.5 billion, it acquired not only the technology behind the world’s dominant Internet voice and video service, but a connection with more than 250 million active users.

But perhaps what Microsoft did not anticipate when it made the purchase was that it would inherit the delicate privacy aspects of Skype’s business, including its billions of encrypted, peer-to-peer Internet conversations.

Those conversations, and the access Microsoft grants to them, are now the focus of a lobbying campaign by 50 digital rights groups and dozens of individuals.

In a letter sent in January, the group asked Microsoft to disclose what data it collected from Skype users and whether that data was passed on — whether to potential advertisers or to law enforcement agencies conducting criminal investigations.

The group, a collection of Internet activists from around the world that includes the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders and Zwiebelfreunde, a German university group, called on Microsoft to begin publishing regular transparency reports listing the requests made by government agencies for Skype client information around the world.

Amid the pressure, there are signs that Microsoft may be preparing to relent and publish what are known as transparency reports, which disclose the level of government requests for information. Google has provided the reports since 2010. Since then, Twitter and LinkedIn, among others, have moved toward offering regular reports — but not Microsoft.

Besides public disclosures, said Eva Galperin, a global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group also wanted to know the location of Skype’s headquarters — whether in Luxembourg, as it was before it was acquired by Microsoft, or at Microsoft’s base in Redmond, Washington.

The location is important, Ms. Galperin said, because if Skype’s headquarters are in the United States, Microsoft and Skype would be required to comply with requests made by U.S. intelligence services under Calea, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, which gives agencies easier access to monitor data from online businesses like Skype.

Internet activists in countries with authoritarian regimes also need to know whether their Skype conversations, once considered a hack-proof way of avoiding government phone wiretaps because of the peer-to-peer nature of the exchanges, are still secure, she said.

“What we know right now is that we don’t know,” said Paul Bernal, a lawyer and professor of technology, intellectual property and media law at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, one of 61 individuals who also signed the open letter to Microsoft.

“We need to know how Microsoft and Skype cooperate with law enforcement and others around the world,” Mr. Bernal said. “People living under authoritarian regimes need to know what kinds of personal risks they are taking when using Skype.”

Dominic Carr, a Microsoft spokesman in Redmond, said that Skype’s headquarters, even after the purchase, remained in Luxembourg and the company was subject to laws of Luxembourg and the European Union, not the United States.

Luxembourg, like other E.U. countries, has mutual assistance pacts and other legal mechanisms that permit companies like Microsoft to share information with foreign law enforcement agencies in continuing investigations. The purchase of Skype by Microsoft has not changed the ability of law enforcement to gain access to Skype data, Mark Gillett, a corporate vice president responsible for Skype engineering and operations, wrote in a blog post.

According to Microsoft’s published privacy policy, three types of information are generated by Skype: personally identifiable information on users; nonidentifiable information; and the actual contents of Skype-to-Skype audio and video conversations.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/technology/microsoft-inherits-sticky-data-collection-issues-from-skype.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Facebook Gift Store Urges Users to Shop While They Share

November 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The nudge comes from a new Facebook service called Gifts. It allows Facebook users — only in the United States for now — to buy presents for their friends on the social network. On offer are items as varied as spices from Dean DeLuca, pajamas from BabyGap and subscriptions to Hulu Plus, the video service. This week Facebook added iTunes gift cards.

The gift service is part of an aggressive moneymaking push aimed at pleasing Facebook’s investors after the company’s dismal stock market debut. Facebook has stepped up mobile advertising and is starting to customize the marketing messages it shows to users based on their Web browsing outside Facebook.

Those efforts seem to have brought some relief to Wall Street. Analysts issued more bullish projections for the company in recent days, and the stock was up 49 percent from its lowest point, closing Tuesday at $26.15, although that is still well below the initial offering price of $38. The share price has been buoyed in part by the fact that a wave of insider lockup periods expired without a flood of shares hitting the market.

To power the Gifts service, Facebook rented a warehouse in South Dakota and created its own software to track inventory and shipping. It will not say how much it earns from each purchase made through Gifts, though merchants that have a similar arrangement with Amazon.com give it a roughly 15 percent cut of sales.

If it catches on, the service would give Facebook a toehold in the more than $200 billion e-commerce market. Much more important, it would let the company accumulate a new stream of valuable personal data and use it to refine targeted advertisements, its bread and butter. The company said it did not now use data collected through Gifts for advertising purposes, but could not rule it out in the future.

“The hard part for Facebook was aggregating a billion users. Now it’s more about how to monetize those users without scaring them away,” said Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird.

He added: “Gifts should also contribute more to Facebook’s treasure trove of user data, which has the benefit of a virtuous cycle, driving more personalization of the site, leading to better and more targeted ads, which improves overall monetization.”

Facebook already collects credit card information from users who play social games on its site. But they are a limited constituency, and a wider audience may be persuaded to buy a gift when Facebook reminds them that a friend is expecting a baby or a cousin is approaching her 40th birthday.

The Gifts service, which grew out of Facebook’s acquisition of a mobile application called Karma, was introduced in September and expanded earlier this month on the eve of the holiday shopping season.

Magnolia Bakery, based in New York, was among Facebook’s early partners for Gifts. Its vice president for public relations, Sara Gramling, said the company had sold roughly 200 packages of treats since then. She counted it as a marketing success. The bakery, which gained fame thanks to “Sex and the City,” had only recently begun shipping its goods. “It was a great opportunity to expand our network,” she said.

Magnolia Bakery isn’t exactly catering to the masses. A half-dozen cupcakes cost $35, plus about $12 for shipping. Facebook, Ms. Gramling said, takes care of the billing. The bakery is eyeing Facebook’s global reach, too, as it opens outlets internationally, especially in the Middle East.

One of the appeals of Facebook Gifts is the ease of making a purchase. Facebook users are nudged to buy a gift (a gift-box icon pops up) for Facebook friends on their birthdays. They are offered a vast menu to choose from: beer glasses, cake pops, quilts, marshmallows, magazine subscriptions and donations to charity. They are asked to choose a greeting card. Then they are asked for credit card details. Facebook says it stores that credit card information, unless users remove it after making a purchase.

Facebook has declined to say how many users have bought gifts, only that among those who have, the average purchase is $25.

David Streitfeld contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/28/technology/facebook-gifts-urges-users-to-shop-while-they-share.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,