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The article did not mention Al Jazeera deciding to remove their Internet streaming, and requiring that you can only view via your local cable provider. See thi

The article did not mention Al Jazeera deciding to remove their Internet streaming, and requiring that you can only view via your local cable provider. See this page with the big note to US people: http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/201146152255537258.html http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/201146152255537258.html I used to check in on their coverage on the Roku channel, but they made a business decision to prevent that. I can understand their decision to make their success dependent on the existing way of doing content business in the US (cable channels), but the number of cord cutters keeps increasing, the most valuable segment for advertisers (younger folk) are the most likely cord cutters (or cord nevers), and the cable business depends heavily on bundling. For example Disney owns ESPN (most of it), so they can make the cable companies to take a portfolio of channels, or get none of them. Al Jazeera had no such leverage. Their business model was a big gamble, based on the past, and didn't work.

andrewclunn 11y ago
This. Moving away from service chord cutters at this point was just odd. Embracing alternative media has done wonders for outlets like Russia Today (Though that's state sponsored so it might not be the best comparison).
- hackuser 11y ago
  > Russia Today (Though that's state sponsored so it might not be the best comparison) Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar. However, I agree with you that it's not a good comparision. BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy. RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports.
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Same with the Australian ABC. Pretty much only rusted on supporters of the Liberal and National parties are the only ones who don't support it, and even they watch it over the commerical networks. That said, I really want to see what Netflix can do with the news cycle.
    - jkldotio 11y ago
      Although it's becoming less meaningful statistic due to a host of reasons the audience figures for free-to-air (FTA) TV have almost always had the ABC trailing the smallest commercial network. A 2009 graph[0] shows how it's historically been although digging into more recent numbers their position is slightly better with the new digital channels.[1] Although we are in the holiday season and the commercial channels seem to perform better in other portions of the year. [0] https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/research/statistics/archftvratingsnetwork.aspx https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/research/statistics/archf... [1] (~467k pdf) http://oztam.com.au//documents/2015/OzTAM-20151227-C1MetFTAShrCons.pdf http://oztam.com.au//documents/2015/OzTAM-20151227-C1MetFTAS...
    - mtbcoder 11y ago
      > I really want to see what Netflix can do with the news cycle. I don't see this as a good fit for Netflix as I'm not quite sure what they would bring to the news cycle table that isn't already being done. Commercial free broadcasts? Infrastructure? Most quality, public media stations already upload full, commercial free shows to their Youtube channels (and often with quick turn-around from the original broadcast date.) You just simply need to subscribe to their channel (something that I can't do in Netflix).
  - imglorp 11y ago
    Regardless of their propaganda or slant, these outlets are useful specifically because they are not part of the US media cycle "play list". US audiences are in a filter bubble. Also some of the domestic outlets are too busy reposting Vines to cover enough stories in between sports and weather. Once encountering a story on those alternate sources, you can read with some critical thinking maybe, and then look for other sources to corroborate.
    - xlm1717 11y ago
      You're trading one filter bubble for another. Unless you want to see how the population of another country experience propaganda, I don't see how it could be useful. You could do critical thinking on any source, not just alternates.
      - Avshalom 11y ago
        Well I mean I can't say anything to Russia Today but Al Jazeera for instance is often the only english language network with reporters on the ground in a lot of middle east situations.
        seanp2k2 11y ago
        This. It can be hard to get a non-US spin on middle eastern events, which is I regularly look to AJ and BBC. The value is in getting a different perspective, not completely unbiased reporting. Associated Press feeds can also be somewhat helpful: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/APNewsFeeds http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/APNewsFeeds
        br_smartass 11y ago
        Yep. There's whole different point of views to be seen. People are saying propaganda like it means only the caricaturization of propaganda(i.e.: overt), and, corollarily, like what is not overt is not propaganda or like it's "but ours is nicer/good". It's not like this, propaganda is everywhere. To me, anything that's not the pure facts plus context is the same as propaganda/ideology, there's only reality or propaganda/ideology, it's what I'm saying. If you want to approximate reality of stuff getting the different perspectives is absolutely mandatory. I guess that's too much work for most people, though.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
    > RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports. So like NBC nightly news? The US is full of what can only be described as US government propaganda, 60 minutes is a prime example. CBS and NBC are no better than RT unfortunately, they just often tell Americans what they want to hear so nobody bats an eyelid. AJ and BBC have their biases but at least they try. PS - I moved to the US from abroad and was genuinely shocked not by the obviously ridiculous cable news (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News) but by the "news" pretending to be unbiased while in reality being a US government mouthpiece.
    - yellowstuff 11y ago
      I don't know a good way to prove that US media is not a government mouthpiece, but I don't think there is much evidence to support such a strong claim, whereas it is pretty easy to argue that RT is a government mouthpiece. EG: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/12/the-truth-about-russia-today-is-that-it-is-putins-mouthpiece/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/12/the-truth-about-russia-to...
      - Someone1234 11y ago
        Just to be clear I never said RT wasn't a government mouthpiece. I said that some US news is "as bad as" them. I have no idea how exactly it works with CBS/NBC/60 minutes. Does the US government literally write the words? Do they just dictate what they should report on? Do they send them pre-produced bottled reports? It is unclear, but what is clear is the ultimate result: pure dripping pro-US government propaganda of the worst kind.
        learc83 11y ago
        I don't think we are watching the same news at all. CBS and NBC regularly have reports that the government would stop if they could. >I said that some US news is "as bad as" them. I've seen plenty of reports on NBC or CBS criticizing Obama (or Bush before him), have you ever seen a report that was critical of Putin on RT? How would this even work. Do they switch stories depending on who is in power?
  - david-given 11y ago
    The Al Jazeera that we get in the UK is apparently run by a lot of ex-BBC people, and uses a lot of the BBC house style, which means and news report will instantly look respectable to a big British market segment. Not that I've ever met anyone in the UK who's ever watched it, of course. This is the best run-down of the BBC house style I've seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI
  - virtuabhi 11y ago
    BBC is not considered trustworthy in India. We listen to BBC for English language but also recognize that BBC still suffers from colonial-era mindset. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Indophobia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Indophobi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Anti-Hindu_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Anti-Hind... "Writing for the 2008 edition of the peer-reviewed Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Alasdair Pinkerton analyses the coverage of India by the BBC since India's independence from British rule in 1947 until 2008. Pinkerton observes a tumultuous history involving allegations of anti-India bias in the BBC's reportage, particularly during the cold war, and concludes that the BBC's coverage of South Asian geopolitics and economics shows a pervasive and hostile anti-India bias due to the BBC's alleged imperialist and neo-colonialist stance.[118]"
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      The BBC is not seen as a trustworthy news source by all in the UK either, but its biases are harder to spot than some other outlets. Generally speaking, you only get a clear picture of their news manipulation when you're on the opposing side of the messages they put out. To give a recent example, there was a story a week or two ago where they held back on an interview with a politician they knew was going to resign until just before a parliamentary debate, which appears to have been a move to undermine the leader of this politician's party, which they've been making efforts to discredit. http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=81049649 http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=81049649
      - paublyrne 11y ago
        Although there is no such thing as complete objectivity in news reporting, the BBC news department tends to try to give all political parties an equally hard time, with the possible exception of extreme right parties like UKIP, who they are a little harder on.
    - arjn 11y ago
      Thats odd, I distinctly remember a huge liking and trust for the BBC (especially radio) among the older Indian folk - middle class and above.
  - KineticLensman 11y ago
    > BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy. Brit here: The BBC is state-funded, but it's output is not state-driven. The news team (IMHO) generally takes an editorial view that is to the left of the current Tory government. For once I think the BBC is to the right of the current Labour opposition, whose new leadership is the furthest left it has been for a generation. And perhaps worryingly non-electable to people who are mildly left-of-centre. My current approach to getting the UK news is to interpolate between the Guardian (pro-Labour, but less so of its current leadership) and the Telegraph (Torygraph).
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      > "worryingly non-electable" I find it baffling that people still believe this rhetoric, especially after Corbyn winning the Labour leadership election by a huge margin. The whole 'unelectable' thing certainly gets repeated enough in the media, but I'd hoped more people would've seen through the concerted effort to attack him by now.
      - KineticLensman 11y ago
        Yes. The BBC isn't pro-govt but it isn't neutral either. IMO
    - mahranch 11y ago
      > The BBC is state-funded, but it's output is not state-driven. It's amazing how many people don't understand this fact. You'll see people on reddit compare the BBC to RussiaToday or Xinhua. The latter two are literally government run agencies that specifically exist to push their country's narrative of world events out to the rest of the world. The BBC is government owned but not government ran, there's a massive difference.
  - moo 11y ago
    If Western media could not stop the WMD lie, what are they good for? You can find BBC fabrication in faked Madaya media images [1], or see bad stage acting used in BBC Panorama 'Saving Syria's Children.' [2] [1] https://thewallwillfall.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/madaya-bbc-caught-recycling-footage-from-yarmouk/ https://thewallwillfall.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/madaya-bbc-... [2] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/ https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/
  - jzd 11y ago
    _______ is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi (INSERT TOP NEWS NETWORK HERE)
  - grayje 11y ago
    Careful, don't poke the Russian internet troll war machine. Before you know it, this thread will be filled with posts from users with no posting history defending Russia Today's journalistic integrity and/or slighting that of US networks.
  - rdancer 11y ago
    > considered to be trustworthy By who, please, people who don't watch the BBC? The BBC has been in opposition to the UK government once in living memory, back in 2003, and it's still being talked about.
  - shitgoose 11y ago
    none of the news channels is trustworthy. the difference is in degree of bias. BBC is very biased.
  - MichaelMoser123 11y ago
    The BBC is not very objective in its coverage of Israel. http://bbcwatch.org http://bbcwatch.org is very critical of the BBC in this respect. Al Jazeera seems to have a problem with Jews in general ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_controversies_and_criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_controversies_and... says so ). They also don't like the Shia - not without editorial bias so to speak.
dublinben 11y ago
I can personally attest to the impact of this change. I used to watch their English language coverage, but have not done so since the launch of their cable channel. If this decision means I can stream the international feed from the US again, I won't complain.
- dirtytleilaxu 11y ago
  It's actually still possible to stream their international feed (AJE) from the US. I'd rather not post how here out of fear something will be changed and it won't work any more, but if you send me an email or reply with some way to send you a couple lines of text I'll set you up. It's stupid easy, streams straight to VLC.
thirdsun 11y ago
Furthermore are cable customers really Al Jazeera's target audience? Those folks sticking with cable are probably older, more traditional people - do they regard Al Jazeera as legitimate news source or is it "that terrorist news channel" in their eyes? Honest question, I've always enjoyed Al Jazeera, but as a european I don't know if they are mainstream enough to succeed in US cable networks.
- rogerbinns 11y ago
  > Furthermore are cable customers really Al Jazeera's target audience? I think it was purely a business decision. The way the US cable model works is the content providers get however many cents a month per subscriber that has the channel. The individual amount isn't great, but the cable company does all the hard work of collecting the money and giving you a single nice bigger cheque. It also helps with advertising, because they can now give aggregate demographic information to their advertisers such as income levels, locations, and others based on correlation (eg age). Advertisers really don't want to pay for non-target users. For example if targeting women in their 30s, they aren't going to pay for ads going to males in their 60s. The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information, especially if you don't already have it (eg Google and especially Facebook do). This can be somewhat addressed by requiring accounts to view, but that is a big burden for getting new viewers (who wants a new account to view something you have never seen before?) Ben Thompson of Stratechery (good site and reporting BTW) has a nice overiew article on the US cable tv ecosystem: https://stratechery.com/2015/changing-unchanging-structure-tv/ https://stratechery.com/2015/changing-unchanging-structure-t...
  - lbotos 11y ago
    >The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information Is this a problem in 2016? I'm pretty sure you can get _MORE_ data from internet tracking vs. otherwise.
    - rogerbinns 11y ago
      The cable channel only decision was made in 2013. In 2016 they could just shut down Al Jazeera America, and stream the main channel. (It looks like that is what will happen.) You do get data from internet tracking, but it is based around your activity and some correlation (eg geoip). Note that Al Jazeera would only get information about their own activity. There are various services that aggregate at a higher level, but they do cost money. I can't find any now, but there were a few companies that had a service you could ask about the current user and they would return likely demographic information. That all matters if you are trying to sell the advertising yourself. If someone else higher in the user visibility chain sells the ads (eg google, facebook, yahoo) then they already have the comprehensive tracking and demographics. But advertising isn't that profitable and those guys will take a big chunk of the revenue, while you remain beholden to them.
brightball 11y ago
Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo (and subsequently Netflix). Tivo started it with the ability to record and watch later while fast forwarding through commercials. Netflix with it's mountains of commercial free content followed next. That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking Dead that have community reactions as episodes air. The reality for cord cutters and cable companies alike is that, if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package. When you break down the technology, that won't change anytime soon either. With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.
- a-priori 11y ago
  Netflix already has local boxes on ISP networks that act as a local cache for customers on that network to ease the load on the ISP's peering connections. A similar architecture could handle that fanout for live content as well.
- efuquen 11y ago
  For $20/month you can get ESPN & ESPN2 and about 20 other channels (Food Network, HGTV, Cartoon Network, Discovery, History Channel are a few of the main ones I use) streamed via Sling TV. For another $5 you can add a few more Sports channels.
  - te 11y ago
    Serious question: can I record streams from Sling TV so I can watch on my schedule and skip commercials?
    - verisimilidude 11y ago
      There's no way to skip commercials or record shows. Sling does offer an interesting alternative: each channel is accompanied by an on-demand section of recent broadcasts, meaning you wouldn't need to record anything because it'd already be available for streaming. Sadly, support for this is inconsistent between channels. I signed up for Sling TV over the summer to help get me through long sleepless nights with a newborn. It's an interesting service but there are lots of little problems like the above. I dropped it around Thanksgiving.
profeta 11y ago
ironically, the only station not following the old-US media book is going away because they followed their business model.
Grishnakh 11y ago
I'd also like to add that Al Jazeera's most likely viewers are obviously going to be pretty liberal, and therefore younger and much more likely to be cord-cutters. Basically, their best demographic is going to be Millenials, and those are the most likely to not have a cable subscription. They really shot themselves in the foot with this move.
avn2109 11y ago
I thought Al Jazeera was run at a loss as a propaganda expense by the Qatari government. Is that untrue?
- largote 11y ago
  Most of their articles and videos seem to be quite objective. Might be run as a way of raising awareness (every once in a while) of Middle Eastern progress, but I certainly wouldn't call that propaganda.
  - geowwy 11y ago
    Their reports on Israel and the Syrian civil war are a very one-sided. http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/middleeast.html http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/middleeast.html
    - espadrine 11y ago
      They try to be objective, but nobody blames any media for siding against ISIL. As for Israel, I feel like Al Jazeera isn't one-sided; there simply are more articles about Palestinian deaths because there are more Palestinian deaths. Even when around 20 Israelis across a few attacks died at the end of last year, with each death heavily reported around western media, a comparative death toll puts it into perspective: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2015/10/mapping-dead-latest-israeli-palestinian-violence-151013142015577.html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2015/10/mapping.... It seems that one side simply has better weapons, and so, causes more deaths.
- Albright 11y ago
  No, it is entirely true.
- geff82 11y ago
  Might be. But it does not matter that much. A sheikhdom is something else than your regular dictatorship. As long as you stay away from critizising the ruler directly, you can talk about pretty much everything (depends on country of course). Dubai/VAE, for example, feels like an "ok" free country to me, even if it is an absolute monarchy.
aagha 11y ago
No, they didn't. Part of the terms of them being able to buy Current and retain broadcast rights with the existing networks was a requirement that AJ stop online streaming. Without the deal, they would have lost all the distribution Current came with.

andrewclunn 11y ago

This. Moving away from service chord cutters at this point was just odd. Embracing alternative media has done wonders for outlets like Russia Today (Though that's state sponsored so it might not be the best comparison).

hackuser 11y ago
> Russia Today (Though that's state sponsored so it might not be the best comparison) Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar. However, I agree with you that it's not a good comparision. BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy. RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports.
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Same with the Australian ABC. Pretty much only rusted on supporters of the Liberal and National parties are the only ones who don't support it, and even they watch it over the commerical networks. That said, I really want to see what Netflix can do with the news cycle.
  - jkldotio 11y ago
    Although it's becoming less meaningful statistic due to a host of reasons the audience figures for free-to-air (FTA) TV have almost always had the ABC trailing the smallest commercial network. A 2009 graph[0] shows how it's historically been although digging into more recent numbers their position is slightly better with the new digital channels.[1] Although we are in the holiday season and the commercial channels seem to perform better in other portions of the year. [0] https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/research/statistics/archftvratingsnetwork.aspx https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/research/statistics/archf... [1] (~467k pdf) http://oztam.com.au//documents/2015/OzTAM-20151227-C1MetFTAShrCons.pdf http://oztam.com.au//documents/2015/OzTAM-20151227-C1MetFTAS...
  - mtbcoder 11y ago
    > I really want to see what Netflix can do with the news cycle. I don't see this as a good fit for Netflix as I'm not quite sure what they would bring to the news cycle table that isn't already being done. Commercial free broadcasts? Infrastructure? Most quality, public media stations already upload full, commercial free shows to their Youtube channels (and often with quick turn-around from the original broadcast date.) You just simply need to subscribe to their channel (something that I can't do in Netflix).
- imglorp 11y ago
  Regardless of their propaganda or slant, these outlets are useful specifically because they are not part of the US media cycle "play list". US audiences are in a filter bubble. Also some of the domestic outlets are too busy reposting Vines to cover enough stories in between sports and weather. Once encountering a story on those alternate sources, you can read with some critical thinking maybe, and then look for other sources to corroborate.
  - xlm1717 11y ago
    You're trading one filter bubble for another. Unless you want to see how the population of another country experience propaganda, I don't see how it could be useful. You could do critical thinking on any source, not just alternates.
    - Avshalom 11y ago
      Well I mean I can't say anything to Russia Today but Al Jazeera for instance is often the only english language network with reporters on the ground in a lot of middle east situations.
      - seanp2k2 11y ago
        This. It can be hard to get a non-US spin on middle eastern events, which is I regularly look to AJ and BBC. The value is in getting a different perspective, not completely unbiased reporting. Associated Press feeds can also be somewhat helpful: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/APNewsFeeds http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/APNewsFeeds
        br_smartass 11y ago
        Yep. There's whole different point of views to be seen. People are saying propaganda like it means only the caricaturization of propaganda(i.e.: overt), and, corollarily, like what is not overt is not propaganda or like it's "but ours is nicer/good". It's not like this, propaganda is everywhere. To me, anything that's not the pure facts plus context is the same as propaganda/ideology, there's only reality or propaganda/ideology, it's what I'm saying. If you want to approximate reality of stuff getting the different perspectives is absolutely mandatory. I guess that's too much work for most people, though.
- Someone1234 11y ago
  > RT is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi; I wouldn't trust their weather reports. So like NBC nightly news? The US is full of what can only be described as US government propaganda, 60 minutes is a prime example. CBS and NBC are no better than RT unfortunately, they just often tell Americans what they want to hear so nobody bats an eyelid. AJ and BBC have their biases but at least they try. PS - I moved to the US from abroad and was genuinely shocked not by the obviously ridiculous cable news (CNN, MSNBC, Fox News) but by the "news" pretending to be unbiased while in reality being a US government mouthpiece.
  - yellowstuff 11y ago
    I don't know a good way to prove that US media is not a government mouthpiece, but I don't think there is much evidence to support such a strong claim, whereas it is pretty easy to argue that RT is a government mouthpiece. EG: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/12/the-truth-about-russia-today-is-that-it-is-putins-mouthpiece/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/12/the-truth-about-russia-to...
    - Someone1234 11y ago
      Just to be clear I never said RT wasn't a government mouthpiece. I said that some US news is "as bad as" them. I have no idea how exactly it works with CBS/NBC/60 minutes. Does the US government literally write the words? Do they just dictate what they should report on? Do they send them pre-produced bottled reports? It is unclear, but what is clear is the ultimate result: pure dripping pro-US government propaganda of the worst kind.
      - learc83 11y ago
        I don't think we are watching the same news at all. CBS and NBC regularly have reports that the government would stop if they could. >I said that some US news is "as bad as" them. I've seen plenty of reports on NBC or CBS criticizing Obama (or Bush before him), have you ever seen a report that was critical of Putin on RT? How would this even work. Do they switch stories depending on who is in power?
- david-given 11y ago
  The Al Jazeera that we get in the UK is apparently run by a lot of ex-BBC people, and uses a lot of the BBC house style, which means and news report will instantly look respectable to a big British market segment. Not that I've ever met anyone in the UK who's ever watched it, of course. This is the best run-down of the BBC house style I've seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI
- virtuabhi 11y ago
  BBC is not considered trustworthy in India. We listen to BBC for English language but also recognize that BBC still suffers from colonial-era mindset. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Indophobia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Indophobi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Anti-Hindu_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC#Anti-Hind... "Writing for the 2008 edition of the peer-reviewed Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Alasdair Pinkerton analyses the coverage of India by the BBC since India's independence from British rule in 1947 until 2008. Pinkerton observes a tumultuous history involving allegations of anti-India bias in the BBC's reportage, particularly during the cold war, and concludes that the BBC's coverage of South Asian geopolitics and economics shows a pervasive and hostile anti-India bias due to the BBC's alleged imperialist and neo-colonialist stance.[118]"
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    The BBC is not seen as a trustworthy news source by all in the UK either, but its biases are harder to spot than some other outlets. Generally speaking, you only get a clear picture of their news manipulation when you're on the opposing side of the messages they put out. To give a recent example, there was a story a week or two ago where they held back on an interview with a politician they knew was going to resign until just before a parliamentary debate, which appears to have been a move to undermine the leader of this politician's party, which they've been making efforts to discredit. http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=81049649 http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=81049649
    - paublyrne 11y ago
      Although there is no such thing as complete objectivity in news reporting, the BBC news department tends to try to give all political parties an equally hard time, with the possible exception of extreme right parties like UKIP, who they are a little harder on.
  - arjn 11y ago
    Thats odd, I distinctly remember a huge liking and trust for the BBC (especially radio) among the older Indian folk - middle class and above.
- KineticLensman 11y ago
  > BBC also is state sponsored, but generally considered to be trustworthy. Brit here: The BBC is state-funded, but it's output is not state-driven. The news team (IMHO) generally takes an editorial view that is to the left of the current Tory government. For once I think the BBC is to the right of the current Labour opposition, whose new leadership is the furthest left it has been for a generation. And perhaps worryingly non-electable to people who are mildly left-of-centre. My current approach to getting the UK news is to interpolate between the Guardian (pro-Labour, but less so of its current leadership) and the Telegraph (Torygraph).
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    > "worryingly non-electable" I find it baffling that people still believe this rhetoric, especially after Corbyn winning the Labour leadership election by a huge margin. The whole 'unelectable' thing certainly gets repeated enough in the media, but I'd hoped more people would've seen through the concerted effort to attack him by now.
    - KineticLensman 11y ago
      Yes. The BBC isn't pro-govt but it isn't neutral either. IMO
  - mahranch 11y ago
    > The BBC is state-funded, but it's output is not state-driven. It's amazing how many people don't understand this fact. You'll see people on reddit compare the BBC to RussiaToday or Xinhua. The latter two are literally government run agencies that specifically exist to push their country's narrative of world events out to the rest of the world. The BBC is government owned but not government ran, there's a massive difference.
- moo 11y ago
  If Western media could not stop the WMD lie, what are they good for? You can find BBC fabrication in faked Madaya media images [1], or see bad stage acting used in BBC Panorama 'Saving Syria's Children.' [2] [1] https://thewallwillfall.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/madaya-bbc-caught-recycling-footage-from-yarmouk/ https://thewallwillfall.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/madaya-bbc-... [2] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/ https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/
- jzd 11y ago
  _______ is propaganda run by a government that has propaganda as its modus operendi (INSERT TOP NEWS NETWORK HERE)
- grayje 11y ago
  Careful, don't poke the Russian internet troll war machine. Before you know it, this thread will be filled with posts from users with no posting history defending Russia Today's journalistic integrity and/or slighting that of US networks.
- rdancer 11y ago
  > considered to be trustworthy By who, please, people who don't watch the BBC? The BBC has been in opposition to the UK government once in living memory, back in 2003, and it's still being talked about.
- shitgoose 11y ago
  none of the news channels is trustworthy. the difference is in degree of bias. BBC is very biased.
- MichaelMoser123 11y ago
  The BBC is not very objective in its coverage of Israel. http://bbcwatch.org http://bbcwatch.org is very critical of the BBC in this respect. Al Jazeera seems to have a problem with Jews in general ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_controversies_and_criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_controversies_and... says so ). They also don't like the Shia - not without editorial bias so to speak.

dublinben 11y ago

I can personally attest to the impact of this change. I used to watch their English language coverage, but have not done so since the launch of their cable channel. If this decision means I can stream the international feed from the US again, I won't complain.

dirtytleilaxu 11y ago
It's actually still possible to stream their international feed (AJE) from the US. I'd rather not post how here out of fear something will be changed and it won't work any more, but if you send me an email or reply with some way to send you a couple lines of text I'll set you up. It's stupid easy, streams straight to VLC.

thirdsun 11y ago

Furthermore are cable customers really Al Jazeera's target audience? Those folks sticking with cable are probably older, more traditional people - do they regard Al Jazeera as legitimate news source or is it "that terrorist news channel" in their eyes? Honest question, I've always enjoyed Al Jazeera, but as a european I don't know if they are mainstream enough to succeed in US cable networks.

rogerbinns 11y ago
> Furthermore are cable customers really Al Jazeera's target audience? I think it was purely a business decision. The way the US cable model works is the content providers get however many cents a month per subscriber that has the channel. The individual amount isn't great, but the cable company does all the hard work of collecting the money and giving you a single nice bigger cheque. It also helps with advertising, because they can now give aggregate demographic information to their advertisers such as income levels, locations, and others based on correlation (eg age). Advertisers really don't want to pay for non-target users. For example if targeting women in their 30s, they aren't going to pay for ads going to males in their 60s. The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information, especially if you don't already have it (eg Google and especially Facebook do). This can be somewhat addressed by requiring accounts to view, but that is a big burden for getting new viewers (who wants a new account to view something you have never seen before?) Ben Thompson of Stratechery (good site and reporting BTW) has a nice overiew article on the US cable tv ecosystem: https://stratechery.com/2015/changing-unchanging-structure-tv/ https://stratechery.com/2015/changing-unchanging-structure-t...
- lbotos 11y ago
  >The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information Is this a problem in 2016? I'm pretty sure you can get _MORE_ data from internet tracking vs. otherwise.
  - rogerbinns 11y ago
    The cable channel only decision was made in 2013. In 2016 they could just shut down Al Jazeera America, and stream the main channel. (It looks like that is what will happen.) You do get data from internet tracking, but it is based around your activity and some correlation (eg geoip). Note that Al Jazeera would only get information about their own activity. There are various services that aggregate at a higher level, but they do cost money. I can't find any now, but there were a few companies that had a service you could ask about the current user and they would return likely demographic information. That all matters if you are trying to sell the advertising yourself. If someone else higher in the user visibility chain sells the ads (eg google, facebook, yahoo) then they already have the comprehensive tracking and demographics. But advertising isn't that profitable and those guys will take a big chunk of the revenue, while you remain beholden to them.

brightball 11y ago

Whenever people talk about the money in college football right now, I generally tell them to blame Tivo (and subsequently Netflix). Tivo started it with the ability to record and watch later while fast forwarding through commercials. Netflix with it's mountains of commercial free content followed next. That put a huge advertising premium on content that people NEED to watch live like sports or hit shows like Walking Dead that have community reactions as episodes air. The reality for cord cutters and cable companies alike is that, if it weren't for ESPN I'd have no reason to have cable. It's the only reason I have a pay TV package. When you break down the technology, that won't change anytime soon either. With Netflix or other streaming services 50,000 TVs is 50,000 individual streaming sessions. With a broadcast 50,000 people watching the same thing is 1 broadcast. It's just a question of scalability that gets complicated if millions of people all want to watch the same thing at the exact same time.

a-priori 11y ago
Netflix already has local boxes on ISP networks that act as a local cache for customers on that network to ease the load on the ISP's peering connections. A similar architecture could handle that fanout for live content as well.
efuquen 11y ago
For $20/month you can get ESPN & ESPN2 and about 20 other channels (Food Network, HGTV, Cartoon Network, Discovery, History Channel are a few of the main ones I use) streamed via Sling TV. For another $5 you can add a few more Sports channels.
- te 11y ago
  Serious question: can I record streams from Sling TV so I can watch on my schedule and skip commercials?
  - verisimilidude 11y ago
    There's no way to skip commercials or record shows. Sling does offer an interesting alternative: each channel is accompanied by an on-demand section of recent broadcasts, meaning you wouldn't need to record anything because it'd already be available for streaming. Sadly, support for this is inconsistent between channels. I signed up for Sling TV over the summer to help get me through long sleepless nights with a newborn. It's an interesting service but there are lots of little problems like the above. I dropped it around Thanksgiving.

profeta 11y ago

ironically, the only station not following the old-US media book is going away because they followed their business model.

Grishnakh 11y ago

I'd also like to add that Al Jazeera's most likely viewers are obviously going to be pretty liberal, and therefore younger and much more likely to be cord-cutters. Basically, their best demographic is going to be Millenials, and those are the most likely to not have a cable subscription. They really shot themselves in the foot with this move.

avn2109 11y ago

I thought Al Jazeera was run at a loss as a propaganda expense by the Qatari government. Is that untrue?

largote 11y ago
Most of their articles and videos seem to be quite objective. Might be run as a way of raising awareness (every once in a while) of Middle Eastern progress, but I certainly wouldn't call that propaganda.
- geowwy 11y ago
  Their reports on Israel and the Syrian civil war are a very one-sided. http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/middleeast.html http://www.aljazeera.com/topics/regions/middleeast.html
  - espadrine 11y ago
    They try to be objective, but nobody blames any media for siding against ISIL. As for Israel, I feel like Al Jazeera isn't one-sided; there simply are more articles about Palestinian deaths because there are more Palestinian deaths. Even when around 20 Israelis across a few attacks died at the end of last year, with each death heavily reported around western media, a comparative death toll puts it into perspective: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2015/10/mapping-dead-latest-israeli-palestinian-violence-151013142015577.html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2015/10/mapping.... It seems that one side simply has better weapons, and so, causes more deaths.
Albright 11y ago
No, it is entirely true.
geff82 11y ago
Might be. But it does not matter that much. A sheikhdom is something else than your regular dictatorship. As long as you stay away from critizising the ruler directly, you can talk about pretty much everything (depends on country of course). Dubai/VAE, for example, feels like an "ok" free country to me, even if it is an absolute monarchy.

aagha 11y ago

No, they didn't. Part of the terms of them being able to buy Current and retain broadcast rights with the existing networks was a requirement that AJ stop online streaming. Without the deal, they would have lost all the distribution Current came with.