Recorded live at a local Dallas Comic-Con event, I speak with the star of Syfy's Defiance about being a gamer, making it in acting, and "kicking every chicken in the yard". The first season of is now available on Blu-ray and DVD.
Here are trailers and clips relevant to this week's episode of Screen Time (subscribe in iTunes or via RSS):
The second season just hit Blu-ray and DVD two weeks ago, and the third season is three episodes in and off to a shocking start.
I'm not generally one for full-on horror, but shocking suspense I can handle. The most appealing thing about this series, compared to others I'm digging into late (like I did with Fringe ), is that each season represents about 10 hours of content (over 13 episodes) as opposed to around 17 hours (over 22 episodes) per season. It's much easier to catch up over a lazy weekend.
The only way I can think to describe American Horror Story is that awful, weird, supernatural things happen in this show, and nothing is sacrosanct. The second season has a completely different setting and supporting cast, but it is inextricably linked to the first season. The whole thing is anchored by amazing performances from actors they would have had a hard time getting, were there a longer time commitment for filming, including not only star Jessica Lange, but also her ensemble co-stars James Cromwell, Sarah Paulson, Zachary Quinto, Joseph Fiennes, and others. Season two is set in an asylum where horrible, bizarre things happen and are done.
Fans of the show are rewarded for buying the Blu-ray by the inclusion of some better-than-usual featurettes, but especially by the inclusion of a deleted scenes reel. Picture quality and the DTS-HD Master audio are great, and bitrate is solid, thanks to the choice to go with dual-layer BD-50 discs. Amazon has it for $35, and if you're a Prime member, you can already stream Season 1 for free in HD, or buy the Blu-ray set for the extras at $31.50. Breaking Bad is gone, and you could do worse jumping into this one to add a new ongoing serial to your list of shows you follow.
Speculation has reached a fever pitch as it often does the day before an Apple product presentation. I've been relatively confident regarding one bit of speculation of my own ever since the WWDC reveal of the new Mac Pro: Apple has a 4K display ready, and the price will be the big surprise.
iPads and refreshed models of Macs and Mavericks, alongside a possible refresh to the iPod line? All of this is widely expected.
The long-awaited halo-end of the Mac line was pitched heavily on the back of its ultra-powered graphics horsepower, and consequently its ability to run up to three 4K monitors at once. The existing Thunderbolt Display also uses three inputs that are made obsolete by the new Mac Pro: Thunderbolt 1, USB 2, and the now ancient -looking FireWire 800.
Only in the last few days have people gotten more confident about predicting a new 4K Thunderbolt Display, and I'm surprised that everyone I've read or heard seem to predict the cost at $3000-$4000. These people include John Gruber and Marco Arment on the latest installment of The Talk Show, among others.
That price range sounds much more reasonable for the Mac Pro itself. Applied to a desktop display, the hefty price tag runs counter to the trend seen since the introduction of the 24" LED Cinema Display at $899, which replaced a 23" Cinema Display that originally cost $1999. For reference, the 30" Cinema Display from the same line dropped over time from $3300 to $1800.
It would be bizarrely out of character for the flagship Apple display to ratchet up in price at this point. One of the areas where Apple has shored up its component purchasing leverage in particular is in displays, including both iMacs on the large end and phones and tablets at the smaller end.
Aisin Seiki has been selling a $700 39" 4KTV (and a $1000 50" model) since April. I'm not saying that directly correlates to Apple's ability to price a 4K "Retina" display at the $999 point of the Thunderbolt Display, but if anyone in the computing industry has the component volume leverage to be first to move, it's Apple. If Apple can, they will, and it would be a hell of a precursor to a late 2014 TV set launch.
I wouldn't necessarily peg the same 27" size as the Thunderbolt for what I'm calling the Retina Pro Display, but it would make the most logical sense for it to be offered in the size of their largest iMac. That way, it would begin to drive down component pricing so that the iMac line could go 4K next year and not have an impact on margins. Refreshed MacBook Pros and even Mac mini models would have to support the new display resolution with beefed up graphics cards, but perhaps the theoretical new Air models wouldn't...or perhaps only at a reduced resolution.
It's not really Apple's style anymore to wow people with how much more than the old product their new thing costs. Whether it's Phil Schiller or Tim Cook who drops the news, an Apple 4K Display for $999 that works with their hot new Mac Pro would be a great way to sell multiples of three of them.
You know who really wins if this turns out? Whichever monitor arm mount manufacturer makes a three-headed model.
Post Script (11:30am CT 22 October 2013)
In 2012, Aisin Seiki (which generally does business as "Seiki" in the US) licensed Vizio's QAM patent portfolio. Those who dismiss them as a second-rate "Asian third party" are ignoring the fact that they are using the same core signal processing technology as one of the biggest LCD TV manufacturers in the United States. What I can't personally speak to is the signal processing and upconversion quality of their Ultra HD offerings. Could part of Apple's "fab-less" chip design strategy, with regard to graphics in particular, be geared toward reducing their overhead in display chipsets?
2nd Post Script (1:30pm CT 22 October 2013)
So my 4K/Retina desktop display prediction didn't pan out...yet. I stand by the pricing and positioning logic above, and expect some sort of movement during the coming months.
I've never bought an issue of Mental Floss, but boy am I going to when their December issue containing an interview with Bill Watterson is on stands.
Calvin and Hobbes is one of my absolute favorite works of sequential art. I love seeing comics adapted for the screen, both in animation and live action. I completely agree with Watterson regarding Calvin and Hobbes staying in its original medium and not succumbing to adaptation:
Years ago, you hadn’t quite dismissed the notion of animating the strip. Are you a fan of Pixar? Does their competency ever make the idea of animating your creations more palatable?
The visual sophistication of Pixar blows me away, but I have zero interest in animating Calvin and Hobbes. If you’ve ever compared a film to a novel it’s based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It’s inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie’s needs get served. As a comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes works exactly the way I intended it to. There’s no upside for me in adapting it.
I think there could be a good way to translate C&H to animation, but not as a franchise series of features or a TV show. If anything, animated shorts need to become something people can digest in ways other than Disney or Fox or WB (or whomever) slapping them in front of occasional mega-budget movies. It could be done well, but if Watterson isn't involved, it's just the same as The All-New, All-Different, Ted-Geisel-Free Lorax to me: wolves in sheep's clothing.
Kumar Pallana has always been one of my favorite parts of my very favorite Wes Anderson movies. He lived a long life, to the age 94. I would defy anyone to prove that he is not just as important to the success of Bottle Rocket as superstars-to-be Owen and Luke Wilson. I've really missed seeing him in post-Darjeeling movies from Anderson.
Kumar also founded Dallas' Cosmic Cafe, a much-beloved haunt.
I took some fresh grabs from his performances in his four turns with American Empirical Pictures. Enjoy.
Square Enix just dropped Final Fantasy V on iOS and Android, recently announced Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (a sequel with an awful literal title released to phones in Japan) for this winter, and have now told Kotaku that Final Fantasy VI is on the way too.
You would think the big sales success of these would result in porting of many more Role-Playing Games of yesteryear, but they Japanese studios are playing the Disney Vault approach with these as ever. RPGs work on touch (even better with tilt support), whereas platformers are a mess.
I'm so big a fan especially of FFIV that I considered buying a PSVita at one point just so I could finally play the sequel. FFVI is right neck-and-neck with IV as my favorite in the series. I've wanted them legitimately on my phone for ages. If only there were an "original graphics mode"...
I know, more than any other catalog re-release, everyone was clamoring to know whether the four-year-old Blu-ray of Love Actually has been made obsolete by next week's "All-New 10th Anniversary Digital Restoration" Edition.
"Digital Restoration", my eye.
UPDATE (11 Oct 2013): It's come to my attention that aside from an AVC encode rather than VC-1, the notable difference is that this new disc is the US soundtrack cut rather than UK, so it features a track by Kelly Clarkson during the office party sequence instead of one by Sugababes, just as US audiences originally heard regardless.
There is no difference in supplemental features compared to the 2009 disc. The new one adds a DVD, iTunesHD/Ultraviolet code, and a really cheap tin ornament.
Looking at the core feature file on each Blu-ray reveals that they are different sizes (about 2GB different). I'll be damned if I can tell a difference by looking at them. Color, texture detail, and other things like black levels and overall contrast look effectively identical to me. I did not re-watch the original disc the whole way through nor the new one, but watched the opening 20 minutes of each, along with a few minutes-long sequences throughout (specifically the "All I Want For Christmas is You" bit). Maybe they re-encoded a tiny bit and re-did the BD-Live ads or something, but in ways someone who loves or likes the movie would notice, the discs are functionally identical. Oh, I did find one difference...the menu loop video fills more of the screen now.
The below gallery denotes from which release each image was captured, merely resized to fit the site width. they are not frame-to-frame matches, but representative of roughly the same moments in particular scenes.
In case you were wondering...as cloying and didactic and obvious and stupid as this movie is, I like it a hell of a lot, in spite of myself and my generally gourmand taste profile.
The new one is pre-orderable for $19, but the basically-the-exact-same one is a better buy for $5 cheaper at $14. The ornament, Digital Copy (no iTunes Extras), and a DVD aren't worth $5 more to me, but therein lie the difference. It doesn't seem like they are taking the 2009 disc out of print, but they might. alternately, it could be in the $7.99 bin at you big box retailer this winter.
The Little Mermaid is the first movie I saw in a theater. The theater had a coloring contest upon exit, and I won a copy of the one-sheet that hangs in my parents' house to this day. I love the movie and sing songs from it at karaoke. I would pay to see it in a theater again, just as I would many other Disney Animated Classics.
I loathe the idea that there will be any children whose first cinematic experience will be sitting in a theater in front of an iPad instead of being enveloped in the experience. Their instructions:
Bring your iPad with you to the movie
Interact with the film, play games, sing along, find new surprises and compete with the audience
Download the free app before you arrive at the theatre
Requires Second Screen Live app and iPad or iPad mini with iOS 5.0 or higher
Thankfully, it looks like only 12 theaters nationwide are doing this crap: six in California, one in Manhattan, two in suburban NYC, and one each in New Jersey, Kansas, and Texas (Plano).
Here's an idea, Disney: do limited re-releases of your animated classics in theaters once a quarter like you did when I was a kid and create new fans instead of behaviorally-trained distraction drones.
I'm often asked whether "[Studio]/[Movie]" still does iTunes Digital Copy or not anymore. Some answers are cut and dry, and others are not. I will update/addend this piece over time.
Depending on the title, the UV code may or may not redeem for HD.
Recent releases have seen the iTunes codes redeem for the HD versions of movies (Paramount sequels seem to deliver as double features of late). UltraViolet codes redeem for SD only unless otherwise marked.
You get to choose from the services it offers you when you redeem the code. Sometimes it's all three (Oz the Great and Powerful), but I've found that sometimes, you don't get iTunes as an option (The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh ). Note that Vudu equals UltraViolet.
All of the above is why I make my own digital copies from Blu-rays when there's no iTunes code.
UPDATE 4 November 2013: Added above, a breakdown of iTunes Digital Copy studios that include iTunes Extras.
Last week, I went on at length regarding the anti-consumer, anti-fan implications of Paramount's bizarre choices regarding how they have chosen to carve up disc extras content for various retailer exclusive editions of the Star Trek: Into Darkness Blu-ray. For reference, here is my four-year-old review of the 2009 feature.
Read MoreLast week, I covered the majority of what I found interesting and/or troubling about the situation with retailer exclusives relative to the Star Trek Into Darkness Blu-ray.
Now, the day before release, I'm wondering why the Target set ($27.99) costs more than the Best Buy one ($19.99), since they both advertise the same amount of extra content (30 minutes). The Target one has another disc, as depicted all over. In this week's Best Buy newspaper ad, it denotes the following about the $8 cheaper BB-exclusive, which I previously gave some relative praise:
30 minutes of exclusive content delivered via CinemaNow
So the exclusive content is only available on yet another proprietary streaming service?
Let me attempt to explain how someone who should know better because she DOES THIS FOR A LIVING could have been so careless. There are slight spoilers that follow, but c’mon, it’s a slasher movie. What do you think is going to happen?Entertainment Weekly has already gone downhill and Geoff Boucher's been gone less than a month.
AppleTV added Disney Channel, Disney XD, The Weather Channel, VEVO, and Smithsonian Channel the other day. I fired up my AppleTV just now to put something on, and the TV Shows button in the top row is gone all of a sudden.
Maybe it's a momentary glitch, or maybe Apple decided people didn't want to "own" their TV shows after all.
UPDATE (4:10pm CT): It looks like this is a global thing. It isn't just US or UK, and it isn't the result of a software update. Does it bother anyone else that Apple can remote-pull or have core features fail one by one?
UPDATE (4:35pm CT) : After trying to open TV Shows in iTunes itself, it crashes you out to the main iTunes Store screen. Clicking on individual shows found on that main page still take you to the individual show pages. This all makes it seem like this is a temporary thing. For people in Europe doing their evening TV watching, the failure of the TV Shows "frontend" on the AppleTV itself is something that looks like they intentionally, maliciously removed the ability to access content they've paid for in advance.
One of the most frank, direct sources of informed news and opinion in home video has (since 1997) been Bill Hunt's The Digital Bits. Bill wrote a piece yesterday that should serve as a litmus test of anyone you follow for home video reporting. If their reaction is different than Bill's, you're reading someone more interested in screener freebies and swag than the interests of the consumer. Go read it and come back.
The problem isn't that a bizarre array of retailer-appeasing variant editions is happening, it's that it's been in process for a while and this is the big one setting new precedents that we're all actually noticing.
I've been quietly digging into retailer exclusive "variants" of home video titles for the last few weeks. I started taking notes when I noticed them growing both in frequency and the scope of their implications. Best Buy had an "Extended Action Cut" Blu-ray for G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Target has its own version of The Great Gatsby that includes an exclusive 20-minute featurette about the party scene. A year ago, Target had a version of Girls Season 1 that included an additional disc with exclusive content including commentary from the main cast on the pilot and a full SXSW panel Q&A. A few months ago, I got Best Buy's exclusive variant of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey , which only boasted just a fragment of a feature doc to be included on later editions. Well, it had that plus a lenticular cover...
These sorts of retailer exclusives aren't entirely new. Best Buy had their own versions of the Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs back in the day, among other exclusives.
I'm all for incentivizing retailers to carry and promote, but this all reminds me far too much of a more expensive, less foreward-thinking version of the variant cover craze that hit comic books during the speculator craze of the 1990's. The thing I like most about that Wikipedia article is how it sets the massive financial success of the five different covers of the Jim Lee-drawn X-Men #1 alongside the anecdote that when Lee would go on to co-found Image Comics, his new series Gen13 had a first issue with thirteen variant covers. Comics boomed and busted on the back of the assumption their financial success could ride on not just the biggest collectors, but regular people in the hundreds of thousands or millions buying five copies of the same comic book, which were only different in their cover art , for a few dollars each.
At $1.50 cover price each, buying all five versions of X-Men #1 would only set you back around $8 including sales tax. At modern cover prices, you'd be looking at around $20. What Paramount in particular is setting as a precedent with one of their most prominent franchises is much more troubling.
The iconic/infamous Jim Lee cover for X-Men #1
The strange thing, to me, about Paramount's Best Buy "Extended Action Cut" of G.I. Joe: Retaliation is that the only version of the movie on the Blu-ray is the extended cut. The theatrical cut is not on there, and no one is under the illusion that it can't be due to space limitations. Seamless branching has been on discs since DVD. The included iTunes HD copy is, in fact, the theatrical cut, but even that seems odd. The week-of-release pricing for the Extended Action Cut version was $5 more than the regular Blu-ray...but didn't include the same core piece of content as the cheaper one that you could get anywhere. What is the value proposition for physical media when as a consumer, you're paying a premium for an incomplete package?
Surely they don't expect a super-hardcore G.I. Joe: Retaliation fan to spend $60 to get both...do they? Now that I think of it, there was a Best Buy-exclusive DVD of Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy that included the Wake Up, Ron Burgundy alternate feature and only the (massively inferior) Unrated Cut of Anchorman itself. It cost $30 on its own, which in that age of DVD was Criterion-level pricing for a much smaller package.
The way they've splayed out the extras across retailer exclusives of Star Trek Into Darkness , it looks like Paramount really does expect hardcore fans to buy more than one of these to get the equivalent of what was fully housed in just one edition of the 2009 JJ Abrams movie, which I reviewed four years ago, opening my review as follows:
...is one of the most sensibly-designed I've seen in terms of packaging and extras. They've wisely put the feature & commentary on one disc and all other supplemental materials on the second. One would assume they did this to preserve picture and audio quality, since the featurettes, deleted scenes, and gag reel on disc 2 add up to over three and a half hours of material.
I haven't gotten a review copy of STID yet (forgot to ask for one), but based on Bill's assessment at Digital Bits, combined with the listings of what features are exclusive to different editions, my pre-release expectations can easily be summed up as "how the mighty have fallen". I've condensed the relevant differences and figured out the rough picture of what one would have to do to actually get all of the content one might care about (we can't know yet, since studios never send out the retailer exclusives for review).
Walmart
Exclusiveness: $40 Steelbook case plus Hot Wheels-produced figurine of the U.S.S. Vengeance
Best Buy
Exclusiveness: $20 ($3 cheaper than the regular edition, oddly) 2D-only that has 30 minutes of exclusive featurettes (focusing on alien design, one of the Enterprise engine room sets, "and more!") and a "giant letters against black" variant cover designed by a middle schooler
Target
Exclusiveness: $30 (3D is $35) edition that has 30 minutes not found on the Best Buy edition, a more colorful variant cover
Amazon
Exclusiveness: $80 3D edition that is the same regular 3D version, but with a phaser prop replica
iTunes
Exclusiveness: $20 "HD" package (a total of around 6GB at 1080p resolution) that is the Digital Copy otherwise included on all versions of the Blu-ray, which apparently includes the only way to watch a Picture-in-Picture-style integrated commentary as part of the iTunes Extras (more on this in a moment)
Would it have killed them to do a lenticular one, or holofoil, or a sketch cover...?
In all seriousness, to get all of the extras theoretically worth having, you'd have to buy both the Best Buy and Target editions ($50+tax minimum), and to watch with the commentary on, you can only view it on a computer, since iTunes Extras does not work on iPads, iPhones, or AppleTV. There's no way to know whether the exclusive featurettes on either the Target or Best Buy versions are more or less worth it respectively in advance, so whichever one you roll the dice on may be a bust.
Oh, and if you're a slave to Steelbook packaging (or Hot Wheels mini-replicas, I guess), you're forking over to Walmart for another $40.
In the event that price is better, or you're getting some extra stuff no one else is selling, that is an incentive. In the case of the first season of Girls, the price was lower than anyone, and it had the extra disc of content. Nice choices and well-executed! More of that, please!
If you're spending two or three times as much, and not all of the content is even housed on the discs, it makes you wonder whether you're being given an incentive to keep the money you would otherwise happily part with for the content you really do want. For years, studios have seen retailers as the customers, not the people (ideally) taking their product home. This is the best proof of that notion yet.
Look at the upside: they'll certainly package all of the fluff retailer extras in the eventual trilogy box set they'll put out in five years.
Elmore Leonard's list of ten writing tips is what I value most among his magnificent work in the world of writing. It's made me a better and more confident writer. If you haven't read a book in a while, and especially if you haven't read one of Leonard's, try one of his this week.
1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
The following Reading List post encompasses both "Unraveling Craziness" and "Heavy Metal Album Cover", which make up a full look at the entire Marvel NOW! line, which is half a year into its life. These episodes also feature interviews with artists Phil Noto and Jim Cheung (in his first-ever interview, according to him). Recommendations for their respective work can be found at the tail end of this post.
Unlike typical Reading Lists, these recommendations are predominantly one-line summaries of what each title is, including spoiler-free teases of the twists given to many iconic characters. The list proceeds chronologically alongside the flow of both episodes' conversation.
A significant amount of time and work goes into collecting links and compiling these posts. Even though referral revenue from the Amazon links help support the show and these posts, I always encourage you to support local comic shops, who can (generally) help you find everything you could want, including back issue special orders.
Read MoreI dislike the trailer for the Julian Fellowes-scripted ROMEO&JULIET (that's how they're writing it on the poster).
From the director of The Last Legion , Shakespeare's iconic romantic tragedy appears to have no need for decent line readings. Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis are fine for the moments we see, and their Tybalt sure is growly and handsome and was on Gossip Girl
...but the "greatest hits" rattling-off we get of some of the best-known lines sounds like half-asleep high schoolers cold reading in English class.
Ever since I saw it at SXSW this year, I’ve had trouble comparing Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess to other things that I’ve seen. I’ve read and heard others compare it to Kubrick, Cronenberg, and Carruth. While I agree that it shares spiritual DNA with some of the flavors, themes, and cerebral complexity of those directors’s work (most notably 2001, ExistenZ, Videodrome, and Primer), Computer Chess is its own sort of sentient cinematic intelligence.
I the interest of full disclosure, I’m friends with two of the actors in the movie, Wiley Wiggins and Daniel Metz. I also helped organize a screening of the movie during this year’s Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), too. I didn’t do the latter because of the former, but rather, because Computer Chess struck me as the movie most perfectly made for the hardest core nerds among us.
Read MoreI saw the world premiere of the latest DC Universe animated movie last weekend in Ballroom 20 at San Diego Comic-Con, and I'm still reeling from what I saw.
Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox represents yet another leap forward for DC Animation, as they continue to "earn the PG-13", pushing the boundaries of the shape and scale of stories that they tell from feature to feature. In many ways, this moving and profound parable of loss and grief is by far the most complex and darkest yet take on the DC animated universe. Believe it or not, F
lashpoint Paradox is darker than The Dark Knight Returns.
Read MoreVenturebeat had the lead on Boxee's having been acquired a couple of weeks ago. Today, Israeli paper Haaretz broke the news that Samsung snagged Boxee: the entire staff and all of their "strategic assets" (aka IP).
At one point, Boxee was considered one of Israel's most promising companies in the field of consumer technology. Its product, the Boxee Box, enabled video streaming and was a market leader several years ago, winning several prizes.
Samsung will keep Boxee's 40 employees on the payroll. Half of those workers are in Israel.
NYT's Brian X. Chen makes mention of this:
[...]For a few years now, Boxee has been a hot start-up at the Consumer Electronics Show, one of the biggest technology trade shows in the world. Boxee originally offered computer software for watching any format of digital video. It later shifted to selling a set-top box that runs its software.
The most excited I was for Boxee at CES was the year their software was running on a ViewSonic HDTV as the TV's primary OS. An RF-based remote and their stellar interface hit a few sweet spots for me. That was 2011.
Its challenge? The companies Boxee primarily competes against are all larger in size and scope: Apple (TV), Google (TV), TiVo, Dish Network and virtually every television manufacturer can out-muscle Boxee when it comes to market presence. (Only Roku, which is also independent, is comparable, though Dish Network has invested in it.) As more companies get into the "smart TV" game and integrate more functionality into a single device, stopgap products like Boxee's stand to be squeezed out.
The consolidation of players, to use a wartime analogy, is like amassing allies in the leadup to conflict. Boxee's IP and talent were its greatest value on its own. I disagree with Nusca's further point:
But the real question here is why Samsung believes it needs Boxee, either for talent or technology. That very large company has made great efforts in its Smart TV brand, but industry efforts in this space have been met with some disdain by consumers. (My CNET colleague David Katzmeier called the features "whizbang doodads, newfangled thingamabobs, miscellaneous frippery." Enough said.)Boxee's greatest success has been in developing simple, user-friendly UI and UX for devices, down to the remote, which their original "two-side" RF-based solution nearly perfected. If anything, they bring a simplicity to the table that Samsung has been most sorely lacking.
The no-brainer for Samsung is to use Boxee to massively overhaul the interface on all their existing TVs and Blu-ray players. If Samsung is playing smart, they wouldn't scrap the idea of having their own "puck"-style set top box. If their goal is to beat Apple in the living room, the best way to compete (let alone win) is to be the "open" alternative to Apple's ultra-closed "app channel" storefront.
They have greater leverage than Roku with mainstream content providers, from movie studios to "new studios" like Amazon. Apple's biggest advantage is their enormous installed base of users who are habitually conditioned to buy content. If Samsung is willing to be the pass-through for Amazon and others, they could have just made the most important step in building a viable hardware platform.
In case it wasn't already apparent, this is another signal that the Content Arms Race is really and truly on in a big way. Expect more about this specifically on the next Screen Time.
