Pay-TV Sector Posts Worst Subscriber Trends in Four Years

Todd Spangler on the most recent cable television numbers:

Q1 is historically one of the strongest periods for pay TV providers. But the 176,000 net adds in the most recent quarter came in at less than half the totals for the sector in the previous three years, according to Bazinet’s calculations. The industry added 403,000 in the first quarter of 2012; 483,000 in Q1 2011; and 507,000 in Q1 2010.

Indeed, the four largest publicly held MSOs in the States — Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications and Cablevision Systems — collectively lost 208,000 video subscribers in Q1 2013, exactly double the 104,000 they dropped in the year-earlier period.

I sense a trend. And if my math is correct, that trend is not a good one for cable television.

[via @ryanlawler]

Don't make fun of renowned Dan Brown

Michael Deacon:

“Hello agent John, it’s client Dan,” commented the pecunious scribbler. “I’m worried about new book Inferno. I think critics are going to say it’s badly written.”

The voice at the other end of the line gave a sigh, like a mighty oak toppling into a great river, or something else that didn’t sound like a sigh if you gave it a moment’s thought. “Who cares what the stupid critics say?” advised the literary agent. “They’re just snobs. You have millions of fans.”

That’s true, mused the accomplished composer of thrillers that combined religion, high culture and conspiracy theories. His books were read by everyone from renowned politician President Obama to renowned musician Britney Spears. It was said that a copy of The Da Vinci Code had even found its way into the hands of renowned monarch the Queen. He was grateful for his good fortune, and gave thanks every night in his prayers to renowned deity God.

Well played.

The Evolution of the Web, in a Blink

Vijith Assar:

Since <blink> won’t blink in Blink, Firefox would be the only remaining browser that allows text to actually flash using the <blink> element. In the messy world of Internet technology, where the browsers often can’t even agree about the size at which to draw a simple box, that is as clear a signal as one can reasonably hope for: perhaps it’s time to retire <blink>.

A few hours after Google unveiled its plans for Chrome and Blink, a manager on Mozilla Japan’s internationalization team, Masayuki Nakano, filed a new ticket in the company’s internal bug-reporting system to suggest that Firefox do just that. After a few rounds of discussion, Nakano altered the necessary code in about a day’s worth of work, and submitted his changes on April 14th. Starting with version No. 23 of Firefox, Gecko, Mozilla’s internal rendering engine, will no longer support the <blink> element.

So long <blink>, it’s been an awful ride.

shortformblog:

Some design agency spent a lot of time coming up with a rough concept of what iOS 7 probably isn’t going to look like. But let’s just say it looks kind of cool.

Some good stuff, some awful stuff. Overall, a “B”. Expect about 1,000 more of these as we inch closer to WWDC.

Update: John Gruber has some good thoughts on the video:

The shape of app icons is not going to change from round-cornered squares to sharp-cornered ones (or any other shape for that matter). Apple owns this shape; this shape says “iOS app” in everyone’s mind. It’s even printed right on the hardware home button of every iOS device. In fact it’s the only thing printed on the front face of every iOS device.

It’s not clear why so many people seem to think “flat” equates to “square”.  Because Windows Phone tiles are square? If that’s the case, chalk something up to Windows Phone — while they may not be doing well in market share, they seem to have a pretty good presence in mind share, at least from a “flat” design perspective.