Structured film-viewing preferences and practices : a quantitative analysis of hierarchies in screen and content selection amongst young people in Flanders

Aleit Veenstra, Philippe Meers and Daniel Biltereyst address a specific segment of a typical small-market audience—Flemish youth film viewers. Their study “Structured Film Viewing Preferences and Practices: A Quantitative Analysis of Hierarchies in Screen and Content Selection among Young People in Flanders” deals with one of the symptomatic problems of the era of convergent audiences, the multiplication of screens used for domestic consumption of audiovisual content. Building an intriguing empirical design, Veenstra and her colleagues aim to identify patterns of screen selection and their relation to the perceived value of Hollywood, European and domestic Flemish films. Their conclusion is that there are well-articulated hierarchies applied by the audience members in the selection of both film titles and reception screens and that, to put it simply, in the case of screens, size matters

SunTrust Portfolio Recommendations: Crummer Investment Management [2013]

We believe that the U.S. economy will continue growing modestly through 2013 and pick up speed in 2014. We have positioned the portfolio to take advantage of a slowly growing economy by slightly over-weighting the consumer discretionary, energy, industrials, technology, and health care sectors as these have traditionally benefited from recoveries. Accordingly, the consumer durables, financials, materials, telecommunications, and utilities sectors were under-weighted. Although the future is unusually cloudy, we reached this conclusion based on expected economic growth rates, favorable market P/E ratios and continued low interest rates

Towards enabling cross-layer information sharing to improve today's content delivery systems

Content is omnipresent and without content the Internet would not be what it is today. End users consume content throughout the day, from checking the latest news on Twitter in the morning, to streaming music in the background (while working), to streaming movies or playing online games in the evening, and to using apps (e.g., sleep trackers) even while we sleep in the night. All of these different kinds of content have very specific and different requirements on a transport—on one end, online gaming often requires a low latency connection but needs little throughput, and, on the other, streaming a video requires high throughput, but it performs quite poorly under packet loss. Yet, all content is transferred opaquely over the same transport, adhering to a strict separation of network layers. Even a modern transport protocol such as Multi-Path TCP, which is capable of utilizing multiple paths, cannot take the (above) requirements or needs of that content into account for its path selection. In this work we challenge the layer separation and show that sharing information across the layers is beneficial for consuming web and video content. To this end, we created an event-based simulator for evaluating how applications can make informed decisions about which interfaces to use delivering different content based on a set of pre-defined policies that encode the (performance) requirements or needs of that content. Our policies achieve speedups of a factor of two in 20% of our cases, have benefits in more than 50%, and create no overhead in any of the cases. For video content we created a full streaming system that allows an even finer grained information sharing between the transport and the application. Our streaming system, called VOXEL, enables applications to select dynamically and on a frame granularity which video data to transfer based on the current network conditions. VOXEL drastically reduces video stalls in the 90th-percentile by up to 97% while not sacrificing the stream's visual fidelity. We confirmed our performance improvements in a real-user study where 84% of the participants clearly preferred watching videos streamed with VOXEL over the state-of-the-art.Inhalte sind allgegenwärtig und ohne Inhalte wäre das Internet nicht das, was es heute ist. Endbenutzer konsumieren Inhalte von früh bis spät - es beginnt am Morgen mit dem Lesen der neusten Nachrichten auf Twitter, dem online hören von Musik während der Arbeit, wird fortgeführt mit dem Schauen von Filmen über Online-Streaming Dienste oder dem spielen von Mehrspieler Online Spielen am Abend, und sogar dem, mit dem Internet synchronisierten, Überwachens des eigenen Schlafes in der Nacht. All diese verschiedenen Arten von Inhalten haben sehr spezifische und unterschiedliche Ansprüche an den Transport über das Internet - auf der einen Seite sind es Online Spiele, die eine sehr geringe Latenz, aber kaum Durchsatz benötigen, auf der Anderen gibt es Video-Streaming Dienste, die einen sehr hohen Datendurchsatz benötigen, aber, sehr nur schlecht mit Paketverlust umgehen können. Jedoch werden all diese Inhalte über den selben, undurchsichtigen, Transportweg übertragen, weil an eine strikte Unterteilung der Netzwerk- und Transportschicht festgehalten wird. Sogar ein modernes Übertragungsprotokoll wie MPTCP, welches es ermöglicht mehrere Netzwerkpfade zu nutzen, kann die (oben genannten) Anforderungen oder Bedürfnisse des Inhaltes, nicht für die Pfadselektierung, in Betracht ziehen. In dieser Arbeit fordern wir die Trennung der Schichten heraus und zeigen, dass ein Informationsaustausch zwischen den Netzwerkschichten von großem Vorteil für das Konsumieren von Webseiten und Video Inhalten sein kann. Hierzu haben wir einen Ereignisorientierten Simulator entwickelt, mit dem wir untersuchten wie Applikationen eine informierte Entscheidung darüber treffen können, welche Netzwerkschnittstellen für verschiedene Inhalte, basierend auf vordefinierten Regeln, welche die Leistungsvorgaben oder Bedürfnisse eines Inhalts kodieren, benutzt werden sollen. Unsere Regeln erreichen eine Verbesserung um einen Faktor von Zwei in 20% unserer Testfälle, haben einen Vorteil in mehr als 50% der Fälle und erzeugen in keinem Fall einen Mehraufwand. Für Video Inhalte haben wir ein komplettes Video-Streaming System entwickelt, welches einen noch feingranulareren Informationsaustausch zwischen der Applikation und des Transportes ermöglicht. Unser, VOXEL genanntes, System ermöglicht es Applikationen dynamisch und auf Videobild Granularität zu bestimmen welche Videodaten, entsprechend der aktuellen Netzwerksituation, übertragen werden sollen. VOXEL kann das stehenbleiben von Videos im 90%-Perzentil drastisch, um bis zu 97%, reduzieren, ohne dabei die visuelle Qualität des übertragenen Videos zu beeinträchtigen. Wir haben unsere Leistungsverbesserung in einer Studie mit echten Benutzern bestätigt, bei der 84% der Befragten es, im vergleich zum aktuellen Stand der Technik, klar bevorzugten Videos zu schauen, die über VOXEL übertragen wurden

Transformation of the media system under a neoliberal government (1998-2008) : introduction of pay TV and competition in South Korea

Recent shifts in the media landscape, brought about by political, economic and technological innovations, pose vital questions for media policy. This study sets out to locate these questions within the context of an examination of media developments in South Korea during a decade of intense change (1998-2008) when a neo-liberal government took office. The central concern is to document and shed light on the workings of the media system during a period that saw the introduction of several pay TV platforms by a government that questioned core elements of established media practices. Media development and its politics context have drawn much academic interest in recent years. However, little attention has been given to media development within the neoliberal government of Korea. Drawing on historical context, the thesis examines the politics of stakeholders in the media market and challenges of media policy within the shifting media ecology. To this end, the thesis employed political economy and media policy study disciplines. These disciplines incorporate an extensive study of literature, observational experience and semi-structured interviews. The thesis perceives the media market in a social context, composing of the government, market and civil organisations, while rejecting technology determinism. Three key findings are identified throughout this thesis. Firstly, with respect to media structure, the thesis has identified that the introduction of the pay TV platform has driven market competition, but social values such as pluralism are not guaranteed. Secondly, referring to media policy, this work has demonstrated that the government still maintains strong authority over the evolution of the media system. Despite proponents of the decline in government due to socio-political shifts as well as the globalisation trend, this work has proven that the government is a decisive agent not only in determining the media structure but also in the expansion of platforms. Meanwhile, the thesis also identified that the incumbent regulatory regime is under attack because of a widening gap between existing regulatory regimes and new services initiated by new technology. Finally, in terms of relationships between stakeholders in the media market, the work has demonstrated that public broadcasters have remained an influential player in the commercialised media market. It has been argued that the public broadcaster is in decline or demise because of shrinking funding sources, downsizing pressures and criticism of declining quality programming. However, the thesis has shown that the public broadcaster still retains its power in the commercial ecology. The thesis concludes that a healthy media market in a democratic society is constructed and sustained by a consistent media policy that balances public intervention and market principles