Netflix Originals in 2016

Fans of the first season on Netflix of Jessica Jones will be pleased to hear that a second series is already in production, whilst the other Marvel show, the excellent Daredevil, returns for a second season on March 18th.

Netflix has also announced the fourth season of House of Cards will arrive on March 4th whilst the superior Orange is the New Black will return on June 17th. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (which for reasons beyond me The Guardian ranked as the number one TV show of 2015 - seriously??) gets its second season on April 15th; the almost unwatchably bad Grace and Frankie returns on May 6th.

New shows are also now scheduled. The Will Arnett comedy Flaked arrives on March 11th, followed by the Ashton Kutcher family drama The Ranch on April 1st. The teen-targeted Lost & Found Music Studios also launches on April 1st, followed by an animated series Kong on April 15th, the French political drama Marseille on May 5th, the Winona Ryder supernatural Stranger Things on July 15th and Baz Luhrmann's The Get Down on August 12th.

The big one for me is the return of Better Call Saul on February 14th. It may not be a 'Netflix Original' is the strictest sense (it's shown on AMC in the US) but it is unique on Netflix in the UK and is one helluva show. 

Netflix says it will clamp down on VPN access

As long as the major media companies still hang on to the archaic territory licensing deals of the analogue world, digital companies will continue to have to be forced to work within regional borders in the supply of licensed content.
The sad fact is that the profit-maximising mentality and content restrictions of the analogue media giants will continue despite global distribution being technically commonplace. And by sticking to twentieth century thinking and restricting content to territories piracy will inevitably continue to thrive.
In the UK, Netflix content is severely restricted by the all-encompassing deals Sky has secured with every major film studio and other major US content holders. If you want the newer Hollywood movies via streaming here and you don't want to pirate you have to use Sky's Now TV service, which is £9.99 a month for 720p movies, a notable cost increase and picture quality compromise from the services from Netflix and Amazon Instant Video. So much for customer choice - where's OFCOM on this?
But there was a way around it, to use a VPN service or browser plug in like MediaHint. But that angers the media giants who Netflix and Amazon rely on for the majority of their content, so it's no real surprise to hear that, in the same month Netflix announces expansion to now cover 190 countries worldwide, that it has also posted the following:

If all of our content were globally available, there wouldn’t be a reason for members to use proxies or “unblockers” to fool our systems into thinking they’re in a different country than they’re actually in. We are making progress in licensing content across the world and, as of last week, now offer the Netflix service in 190 countries, but we have a ways to go before we can offer people the same films and TV series everywhere.
Over time, we anticipate being able to do so. For now, given the historic practice of licensing content by geographic territories, the TV shows and movies we offer differ, to varying degrees, by territory. In the meantime, we will continue to respect and enforce content licensing by geographic location.
Some members use proxies or “unblockers” to access titles available outside their territory. To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies.

How they will actually block VPN/Proxy access is not explained - one can only assume it will be by blocking known IP ranges used by the 3rd party VPN services, a similar Whack-a-Mole game to that used by UK ISPs to block file sharing sites. That can affect legal users as these things often go wrong.
For those who access Netflix solely through TiVo this won't affect you, but if you watch Netflix on a laptop or tablet and access US or other overseas content you may find your access method blocked. One day maybe media companies will wake up and realise that we're now in the twenty first century and there are different ways of doing things, but until then, the customers will continue to be underserved and the pirates will profit.

How Sky Q's 4k may impact Virgin Media

My concern regarding this year's launch of Sky Q and 4K content on the platform is that Sky will step down the bitrates of the HD movies and sports feeds we get. I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine it when we saw the picture quality of SD versions fall when we couldn't get the HD versions on Virgin Media, and I wouldn't put it passed Sky to do similar again.
Not that the HD we get from Sky on VM is anything to write home about - I compared two TiVo recordings I had of the movie Hugo, one recorded from Sky Movies, the other from 4HD, and I couldn't believe the difference, the 4HD one was massively superior whereas the Sky picture lacked sharpness and 'sparkle'.

Happy 2016

Nothing like A Touch Of Evil to kick off the new year! This and details of a handful of other new arrivals to Netflix this month can be found at Vodzilla

Sky Broadband Porn Filters 'on by default' for new customers

Sky will block "adult content" by default for all new customers, the company has announced.

Sky said the move would result in "much greater use of home filters", but customers could still opt-out if they wanted to.

35% of existing Sky Broadband households have the porn filters on already, compared to 12% of Virgin, 14% of TalkTalk and 6% of BT. 

The broadcast giant said it will now email all existing customers, asking them if they would like the filter to be switched on.

If the email is ignored, Sky’s policy is to turn on the filter automatically, as it did following a similar email sent in January, when all customers who joined prior to November 2013 were contacted.

Not so super Superhubs

I recently took a call from Virgin offering a 'free broadband assessment' at my home. I said yes as I was a little disappointed with the reliability of the wifi around our house. The engineer was great; he identified the problem (my Superhub 1 was broadcasting on a congested channel in the area) and fixed it by configuring a Superhub 2 to use a less populated channel on 2.4Ghz and also activating the 5Ghz signal too. Instantly I was seeing speeds, during daytime at least, of 150mbps on all devices.
Sadly though, the wifi on the Superhub 2 proved unreliable, and a glance through various forums suggested that it's a very common and known problem with the Superhub 2 that the signals can drop for no reason. The solution is to either ask Virgin for the newer Superhub 2ac if you have devices that can take advantage of 802.11ac (ie from the last 18 months or so) or to add a 3rd party router.
I've now added the Apple Time Capsule, which centralises backups for my whole house (we're exclusively Apple) and the wi-fi has been super reliable and blisteringly fast across the board.
I post this as it may prove useful to others struggling with Virgin's wifi, but also to ask a question: why do Virgin undermine the promise of their class leading broadband by dishing out sub-standard hardware? Surely that's self defeating, and good routers are cheap as chips these days.

Netflix to tweak compression algorithms in 2016

Am I the only one who is a little sceptical about compression advances? Despite Netflixes assurances that their tweaking of the bitrate won't be perceptible I'm more of the opinion that these changes can diminish the quality of picture and sound for the sake of economy.

Large patches of color, like the kind found in children's cartoons, don't actually need a very high bitrate to look really good. What Netflix will do in 2016 and beyond is create specific recipes on a per show basis that will enable some shows with less visual data to use lower bitrates but still come through at 1080p quality. That means going back through its entire backlog of shows and creating new rules for every individual show.
In an example provided by Netflix, the company said that in order to get a crystal-clear 1080p stream in the past might require a bitrate of 5800 kbps. Using the new algorithm, Netflix can achieve the same quality with around a 4640 kbps file, effectively reducing the overall bandwidth needed by 20%. 

[more details on TechRadar]

Virgin Media London outage

I'm not sure how widespread this is (Virgin won't tell me) but in SE London we have had no broadband or TV services now for over 24 hours and still no definite fix time. 

My 'compensation' for the loss of a day's work (and pay)? £4.13. 

Also yesterday morning VM customers in the area received notification of the price rises in February. Nice one, marketing dept. 

Does anyone else in London have issues?

Interesting comment on EE TV

A comment from 'Griff' on the blog about the next price rises makes interesting reading. As it's an older post he's referring to I'm repeating it here:

"I've been loyal to VM for 15 years (NTL onward) despite moving house. Word for word I agree, finally with some comfort that I'm not alone and there better things - with the main poster of this thread. I agree so much that I thought I'd written the post myself and in a moment of advancing seniority forgotten that I'd written it myself! I even pay the same. So with a TiVo box that regularly has 3 red lights lit, with an advancing broadband speed heading over 200mb, with a router that just about services 4 people, Hive, Sonos, Apple TV, power lines, FIFA 16 and CofC on every available 'ageing device', even a xmas tree that turns itself on at sunset - with an 'ecosystem' that now prepares itself for the ever growing IoT, I felt prepared with VM to battle it out with whatever comes next. 
"Until yesterday. 
"On a shopping break, I headed into EE to discover that with EE TV, I can record 4 shows in HD. I can walk from 1 room to the kitchen, to have Michael Buerk on the BBC news follow me. I can upgrade to Sky Sports for only the months that I'll actually use it. And record sky sports / movies from Now TV. They'll even as a deal get supersize my already too much 10gb phone data allowance to 20gb so I can move my wife onto a shared data plan. Take all these savings (less the admittedly extra phone incentive) and I'm £1000 a year better off. Time to spend £500 each on 2 new smart TVs that offer even more capability to stream room to room and I'm quickly talking myself into moving away from a company that is rewarding loyalty with additional costs for no additional benefit. 
"Why shouldn't I move from VM to EE? I've got 2 reasons : both of which I already have an answer for : they can only offer 80gb speed not 150 or more that's coming. But do I really need this anyway? And so far there isn't a second EE TV box available but there is one in the pipeline. And if I can stream to a second smart tv anyway from the 1tb EE TV box there is no need for a second box anyway"

Netflix highlights for December

Worth having Netflix for this future classic alone...
Full details of new Christmas arrivals on Netflix can be found on VODzilla.