Tag Archives: logistics

Weekly output: YouTube TV drops NESN, upload speeds, AMC earnings, FedEx tech, election social-media misinformation, Discovery vs. T-Mobile

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The longest Election Day I’ve seen since 2000 wrapped up a few minutes before noon Saturday, when I checked my phone on a bike ride and saw that all the major news networks had called the race for Joe Biden. A few minutes later, I turned around and rode into D.C. to witness the city as ecstatic as I’ve ever seen it.

After four years of President Trump’s lies, cruelty, bigotry, and incompetence, Americans have chosen a future that starts with four words: Donald Trump, private citizen. This is the resolution I had been hoping for since the morning of Nov. 9, 2016.

11/2/2020: RSN cuts continue as YouTube TV drops NESN, FierceVideo

I started the week by spending Monday covering breaking news at my trade-pub client. This post started with a tweet from my friend Ron Miller about his streaming-TV service dropping the network that carries Red Sox games.

11/2/2020: Upload speeds still lag on most Americans’ broadband, USA Today

This column revisited a subject I’d covered for the paper back in 2016, and I have to credit the work I did for the U.S. News Internet-provider package for refocusing my attention on this problem.

11/2/2020: AMC sees third-quarter 2020 income slip as subscriptions grow, FierceVideo

I wrote up AMC Networks’ Q3 earnings and had a little fun with the lede. From what Google tells me, I may have introduced the phrase “zombies and subscriptions” to the Web.

11/4/2020: FedEx is upgrading its tech for a holiday season in pandemic times, Fast Company

FedEx staged an online event for media that unpacked some interesting work it’s doing with robots and drones. One thing this effort won’t deliver anytime soon: a live delivery map like what UPS and Amazon offer.

11/6/2020: Election misinformation on social media, Al Jazeera

The translator for this live hit on the Arabic-language news network asked me if Twitter was being unfair to Trump. I replied that the president should try not lying so often.

11/6/2020: Discovery To T-Mobile: What Do You Think You’re Doing Bundling Us?, Forbes

Two weeks after I covered T-Mobile’s launch of a streaming-TV service with some attractive pricing and some notable gaps in the channel lineup, I wrote about the unlikely complaint of Discovery and two other entertainment-industry firms–that T-Mobile doesn’t have the contractual rights to put their channels on its $10 TVision Vibe package.

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Technology hasn’t upped my gift-giving game much

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Between the advent of cloud-synchronized note-taking apps and the everyday logistics miracles performed by online retailers, remembering good ideas for Christmas presents and turning those thoughts into wrapped packages placed under the right tree in plenty of time should have stopped being a problem years ago.

2015 wrapping paperAnd yet my last holiday delivery arrived in the late afternoon of Dec. 24–and I made my last two gift purchases, one digital and one analog, at about the same time.

I can’t blame that on a lack of tools. I’ve had a frequently-updated “Gift ideas” note in Evernote since March of 2010–and I had a similar note in the memo-pad apps on various Palm phones and handheld organizers for most of the decade before. I’ve been able to lean on the time-condensing crutch of Amazon Prime since 2011, but by then I’d long since acquired a sense of logistical entitlement from the two-day shipping of such Web-retail pioneers as Cyberian Outpost.

But instead of letting me compile a thoughtful shopping list of gifts and fulfill that comfortably ahead of time, technology has only enabled and optimized my procrastination instincts.

It doesn’t help to have CES planning devour a large chunk of my mental processor cycles every December. But who am I kidding? If I didn’t have the annual gadget pilgrimage to eat my brain, I’m sure I’d find some other reason to leave present procurement until the last few days.