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Como todo ano sai a pesquisa de qual série foi mais pirateada nas interwebs, e quase como sempre, a campeã é da HBO. Em 2013 foi Game of Thrones, com 5,9 milhões de downloads de seu último episódio. Só que também, como sempre, não é tão simples assim.

Veja a tabela publicada pela Variety,com dados do Torrent Freak:

Há uma semelhança entre a 1ª e a 10ª séries, ambas são de canais a cabo com audiência restrita. Tanto a HBO quando a CW estão longe de ser “mídia de massa”, mas são canais com profundo apelo ao público geek. Por outro lado séries mais populares, como Breaking Bad e Walking Dead tem uma audiência televisiva muito significativa.

Big Bang Theory virou alvo de ódio entre geeks antenados hipsters que entendem muito mais do que você sobre televisão, então mesmo estando em 4º lugar, sua representatividade junto a espectadores convencionais é muito maior.

Note que há uma ausência significativa. House of Cards. A série da Netflix teve uma repercussão imensa, ganhou prêmios pra tudo que é lado e virou uma paródia sensacional no Jantar dos Correspondentes de Imprensa da Casa Branca, com participação de figurões de ambos os partidos:

COOOOOOMO algo assim não surge entre os seriados mais baixados?

Simples: do mesmo jeito que o Chrome não aparece entre os browsers mais pirateados.

A Netflix quebrou o paradigma na porrada, montou seu modelo de negócios, começou a produzir conteúdo próprio e obrou e andou pras métricas da velha mídia. Ela está se lixando pro número de telespectadores de House of Cards comparado ao número de espectadores de séries de emissoras convencionais.

Interessa o quanto os usuários acessem House of Cards, a fidelização que isso gere, e comparado aos programas requentados de sempre (eu sempre digo, sem NENHUM pingo de crítica, que a Netflix não é o cinema do shopping, é a locadora do bairro) o buzz que a série gera.

Portanto House of Cards NÃO aparecer entre os programas mais pirateados indica que o modelo da Netflix funciona e que quem quer assistir House of Cards, assiste… pela Netflix.

O resto, tipo Homeland, que tem mais gente assistindo online do que pelo canal convencional, ainda não percebeu que regular a distribuição não é bom para ninguém, e que quando o espectador quer realmente um conteúdo, ele vai atrás. Se for conveniente, cômodo e com carinho, como a Netflix, ele vai assinar. Se não for, vai na locadora do Paulo Coelho, mas ficar sem assistir, ele não vai, por mais que o Hulu adore enfiar aquele filtro babaca dizendo “esse streaming não é acessível fora dos EUA”.

Fonte: PL.

The post As 10 séries mais pirateadas de 2013 appeared first on Meio Bit.

Only a cynic could look at something like Ouya and not be impressed by its pluck. There it was, lacing up its tiny gloves and boots and throwing itself into the ring just as Sony and Microsoft’s heavyweight prizefighters were about to start knocking bells out of each other. The Ouya was the little console that could; Kickstarter’s 8.6 million dollar gaming baby.

At least, that was the Ouya’s promise. The reality of 2013′s first ‘alternative’ console was confused. The Ouya sold well as a concept, bringing new and existing indie titles to the living room with a try-before-you-buy system that sounded like a boon for consumers. No handing over cash to an unscrupulous publisher only to find you’ve bought a half-broken howler of a game; the Ouya was cheap, cheerful and on the side of the consumer rather than big business – a console for the masses. Unfortunately, the masses just didn’t seem that impressed with the Ouya or its developer’s promise of a budget game “revolution”.

With such a small install base, games on the Ouya sold poorly. Small studios with Android games ready to launch or already available on mobiles and tablets could port a version over very easily and perhaps net a tidy four-figure bonus for themselves, but developing exclusively for the Ouya (which is what the company wanted with its Free The Games programme, wherein it would match any Kickstarter donations for a game above $50,000 in return for a whopping six months of exclusivity) just didn’t make sense.

Nor did it get better from a consumer perspective. No matter how good the marketing bumf around the Ouya, what you were buying was an underpowered console running games on an outdated Tegra 3 chip. Early reviews reported sluggishness just in navigating its menu screens and lack of responsiveness in some games that made them frustrating to control. Had the Ouya launched two or three years ago that would have mattered less, but it launched in a year dominated by the impending arrival of PS4 and Xbox One. With both of those consoles plastered over every flat surface reachable with a step ladder, and Sony and Microsoft compensating for a lack of killer launch titles by talking up their power and graphics, Ouya looked more and more like a toy. How were people supposed to get excited about playing a port of Sonic The Hedgehog when Microsoft and Sony were showing endless loops of near-photorealistic sports cars sliding around tracks in Forza and Driveclub?

Then there were mobile games that sought to emulate console successes in the first place. ‘Serious’ games like Killing Floor and Shadowgun still sit in Ouya’s top ten titles list, but it’s an oddly roundabout way to play a first-person shooter, if that’s the sort of game you’re into. A mobile game aping the style of a console game that you can now play as a port on a console? It might be the best way to play Shadowgun, but it’s hardly going to be the FPS purist’s first choice.

Finally, there’s the uncomfortable question of how big the intersecting segment on the Venn diagram is of ‘people who like games enough to have heard of the Ouya’ and ‘people who don’t already own anything to play them on’. The Ouya sells in the UK for £99, and of games devices released in 2013, it’s one of the cheapest options (barring other Android consoles like that other damp squib, GameStick). But if it’s games you’re after first and graphical fidelity second, Amazon sellers will do you a second-hand PS2 for about £40, and games for pennies plus postage.

Where does this leave the future of ‘alternative’ consoles, then? Pretty squarely with Valve and its Steam Box.

No-one quite knows how the Steam Machines will work yet – we know there will be multiple versions made by different companies all running the SteamOS, but how different models will differ in price and power still hasn’t been laid out. Assuming the lower-spec machines launch at a similar price point to the PS4 and the Xbox One, Valve’s own next-gen consoles could have two significant advantages over both. Not fringe interest, technically-yes-it’s-better-on-paper advantages like the Xbox One handling eight controllers at once to the PS4′s four. But proper, game-changing, who-can-I-sell-my-console-to advantages.

Firstly, there’s the Steam back catalogue. Even if cheaper versions the box were to turn out less powerful than the PS4 and Xbox One, so what? The launch titles for both consoles range from OK to pretty good. But even if they were the best games ever committed to disk, delivered on the wing by an angelic host, there’s no way they could go toe-to-toe with the three thousand games Valve are promising for their Steam Machines. With neither the Xbox One or PS4 offering backwards compatibility, the pickings for early adopters aren’t just slim, they’re skeletal.

The second advantage will deal damage over time: Steam Sales. Sony and Microsoft’s current pricing structures for digital distribution are, bluntly, a joke – EA’s PS4 games were selling on the PSN for £62.99 at launch, a full £13 over the disc version’s RRP (and almost double what you can pick a new game up for with some deft Googling). The reason for these prices is speculated to be that high street retailers have enough sway with the companies to keep them artificially high – ‘don’t undercut us, or we won’t stock your game’.

Valve doesn’t have that problem. Not only could they theoretically sell Steam copies of new releases for PC prices (currently about £29.99 compared to £49.99 on the Xbox One or PS4) as they do now, but they’d be able to bring the prices even lower with sales. Suddenly a game that’s still £40 on Xbox One and PS4 is £5 on the Steam Box. Even Sony’s excellent PlayStation Plus service, with its Instant Game Collection, couldn’t compete with that.

The Ouya and its ilk have identified the problem of console gaming: that it’s expensive. But their model for tackling it is flawed; cheap consoles and cheap games aren’t a challenge to Sony and Microsoft, they’re a concession.

So we’re left with Valve. Bringing the current Steam experience to the living room won’t just challenge the PS4 and Xbox One – if Steam Machines can come close to matching them on specs and price, it would put them both, in terms of long-term investment and player experience, in second place.

The post State of Play 2013: Ouya falls flat, so where next for alt consoles? Valve could have the answer appeared first on Edge Online.

The HiRISE instrument would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets, such as Jupiter.

(YouTube link)

Kung Fury is a trailer that would like to be a real movie someday. Kung Fury is a cop who's also a martial arts master. He travels through time to defeat Hitler, with the help of Vikings -and dinosaurs! It's a sendup of '80s cop movies, with any movie trope that was ever (or might be) vaguely successful thrown in. I'd watch it. You know you would, too. Written and directed by Swedish filmmaker David Sandberg (Laser Unicorns), who also stars as Kung Fury. -via Daily of the Day

Classic video games from the 1970s and 1980s have been put online by the Internet Archive and can be played within a web browser.

(click the image for larger version, or click here for even larger)

Tools and tricks: Official HD texture patch, antialiasing (injected FXAA w/ texture pre-sharpening), free camera, time stop, time and weather control, custom FOV.

What a difference a quarter century makes. This comparison of Shanghai from 1987 and 2013 was posted the other day on the HistoricalPics twitter, and it shows just how much the Pudong region has gotten built up into something insanely futuristic.

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Check out this eye-popping behind-the-scenes making of Alfonso Cuarón's space spectacle Gravity. It's almost unbelievable how all this CG and motion capture transformed into that nail-bitingly realistic film. WARNING there are some major spoilers for the ending.

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Last year, we published a fantastic video by Fourgrounds Media Inc. called The Auteurs of Christmas which reimagined the magic of Christmas morning through the eyes of 10 famous filmmakers.  They have returned with a sequel for 2014: The Auteurs of Christmas 2, which features Christmas morning as directed by 10 more filmmakers: Charlie Chaplin, Quentin Tarantino, Terrance Malick, Alfred Hitchcock, Christopher Nolan, Jean-Luc Godard, Morgan Spurlock, David Lynch, M Night Shyamalan, Michael Bay. Watch both videos embedded after the jump.

The Auteurs of Christmas 2

Below you can watch the original video as posted by Germain Lussier on December 24th 2013:

Every family has a different version of Christmas morning, just as every filmmaker has their own unique style. Put those two basic facts together and you have this fantastic video by Fourgrounds Media Inc. called The Auteurs of Christmas. It reimagines the magic of Christmas morning through the eyes of 10 famous filmmakers. People like Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson (of course), Stanley Kubrick, Lars Von Trier, Woody Allen and Michael Moore. It’s a really funny, sweet little video, perfect for this Christmas Eve.

The post LOL: Christmas Morning, As Directed By 20 Famous Filmmakers appeared first on /Film.

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A closeup of Comet Lovejoy reveals a little known secret! Thanks to astrophotographer Lee Jennings for his holiday handiwork!

Best wishes to all for a wonderful holiday season from all of us at Universe Today!

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Post tags: Astrophotos, Santa

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Today we have some holiday-themed fluid dynamics: visualization of flow around Santa’s sleigh! This is a flowing soap film visualization at a low speed (author Nick Moore has some other speeds as well). Santa’s sleigh is what aerodynamicists call a bluff body—a shape that is not streamlined or aerodynamic—and sheds a complicated wake of vortices. Like any object moving through a fluid, Santa’s sleigh generates drag forces made up of several components. There is viscous drag, which comes from friction between the sleigh’s surface and the fluid, and form drag (or pressure drag), which comes from the shape of the sleigh. That wake full of complicated vortices significantly increases the sleigh’s pressure drag, requiring Rudolph and the other reindeer to provide more thrust to counter the sleigh’s drag. Speaking thereof, the visualization does not take into account the aerodynamics of the reindeer, who, in addition to providing the sleigh’s thrust, would also affect the flowfield upstream of the sleigh. This post is part of this week’s holiday-themed post series. (Video credit: N. Moore)

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Looking back on 2013, it’s hard to spot one overriding trend other than “great.” Like any other year, the superhero movies, sequels, adaptations and remakes were present, but most of them were disposable and forgettable. The greatness in 2013, not surprisingly, was from the original and unexpected movies. Films born out of the mind of talented, creative people which were executed to delightful and sometimes heartbreaking perfection. Those unique wonders of cinema make up the majority of my top films of the year, but don’t fret. There are some adaptations and sequels on there too. It’s a list that hopefully represents 2013 as one of the best in recent memory.

Over the course of the year, I saw almost 150 films that had theatrical releases. Below you can read about my ten favorites.

First up, here are ten films that just missed the cut, and therefore get honorable mention, in alphabetical order: A.C.O.D., Don Jon, Captain Phillips, Enough Said, Fruitvale Station, Lone Survivor, Nebraska, Room 237, Spring Breakers, The World’s End.

Now on to Germain’s top ten films of 2013.

10. Monsters University

Many don’t share my opinion, but I believe Monsters University was a triumph. Not just for Pixar, which was on a bit of a cold streak, but for animated sequels in general. A prequel to the already amazing Monsters Inc., MU somehow upped the stakes and emotion for characters we’d already come to know and love by making them younger. From its first scene, director Dan Scanlon let everyone know this was Pixar the way you wanted it – full of things kids latch onto with rewarding nuance for adults as well. If anything, Monsters University tries too hard and packs too much story but that’s a small price to pay for such a great movie. Read my full review here.

9. Her

Any year Spike Jonze releases a movie is a good year, and his latest film, Her, does not disappoint. Jonze’s sci-fi love story about a man who falls for his artificially intelligent operating system not only told a great story, it made us question some of our most complex human emotions. What does it mean to love? What is someone’s capacity for love? How do we quantify happiness? Beautiful writing coupled with beautiful performances make Her good but it’s Jonze’s concepts – of which the film is bursting at the seams – that make it great. Read my full review here.

8. Before Midnight

It’s difficult to imagine two actors who are more comfortable and lively in roles than Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are as Jesse and Celine. This is the third time the actors have played these characters, as directed by Richard Linklater, and they melt into the narrative almost making us forget we’re watching a movie. Before Midnight feels like a well-shot and edited personal home video as articulate adults discuss what their lives have become. Honesty is the film’s best currency and it pays off with incredible lows and dizzying highs. Read my full review here.

7. Gravity

Let me plagiarize myself from two entries ago. Any year Alfonso Cuaron releases a movie is a good year, and his latest film, Gravity, does not disappoint. Technically, Cuaron is working on a whole other level here, transporting his audience to space through stunning 3D visuals. However, it’s the human emotion provided primarily by Sandra Bullock that really puts you on the edge of your seat. Her physical peril is somehow dwarfed by her mental anguish and the way Cuaron brilliantly uses technology to convey this plight is nothing short of remarkable.

6. The Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese isn’t known for his comedy, but when he wants to make us laugh, he makes it look effortless. The Wolf of Wall Street is not only one of the funniest movies of the year, it’s one of the most disturbing. The film consistently make us laugh at awful things, but not feel awful about doing so. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill each give career-best performances as a pair of off-Wall Street millionaires as they help Scorsese push the envelope like he’s never done before. The result is masterpiece of tonal shifts, pathos and drug-enabled partying.

5. This is the End

Jonah Hill was in not one, but both of the funniest films this year. In This Is The End, he (along with Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson and about a dozen others) play themselves at a massive party as the world ends out their door. Co-written and directed by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, This Is The End is audacious, surprising yet incredibly intelligent and poignant. There’s no 2013 film I’ll be revisiting more as the years go by. Read my full review here.

4. Stories We Tell

Sarah Polley‘s Stories We Tell is more than just a documentary. On one level, it’s a way for the actress turned filmmaker to look back at her happy but dysfunctional family. On another level, it’s a commentary on the way films change how audiences perceive a story. And when the two are told in tandem, you’d be hard pressed for a bigger surprise in 2013. Polley wows with her storytelling, filmmaking and heartbreaking revelations. Somehow though she elevates all of that into a film that’s almost indescribable in its beauty and genre. Read my full review here.

3. 12 Years a Slave

Every year a film is released that is so powerful, so effective, so intense, you never want to endure it again. In 2013, that award goes to Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave. The theatrical experience of watching Solomon Northup’s true tale of being torn from his family and forced into a life of slavery is harrowing and difficult. However, McQueen’s lingering camera and stellar casting (from top to bottom, there wasn’t a better ensemble this year) ultimately make the film a revelation. It may be hard to watch, but you feel the characters and story so deeply, the entire film blossoms into a feeling of absolute beauty.

2. Inside Llewyn Davis

When I first saw the trailer for Inside Llewyn Davis, I wasn’t excited. It looked like The Coen Brothers had made a movie about a down on his luck folk singers and that just didn’t sound interesting. Leave it to the Coens, though, to take that basic conceit and make it so much more. Not only is Inside Llewyn Davis about the plight of a singer, it’s about the plight we all feel struggling with our dreams. There are also multiple moments of absolute hilarity, pure musical bliss and indescribable movie magic that elevate the whole thing above almost every other film released in 2013. The Coen Brothers make great, fantastic, timeless movies and Inside Llweyn Davis is be one of their best.

1. Short Term 12

Short Term 12 is perfect. There. I said it. After raving back at South by Southwest, I saw the movie multiple times after and cannot find an off beat. In Oscar-worthy performances, Brie Larson and John Gallagher Jr. play emotionally unstable young adults who try to help a home full of emotionally unstable kids. In that conceit, it would be easy to make a very depressing movie but writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton somehow makes a film that’s at times painful, uplifting, hilarious, and everything from one scene to the next. When history looks back at 2013, surely Short Term 12 might not be a major awards player, but it’ll endure beyond that thanks to fulfilling every requirement you’d want a film to fulfill. Read my full review here.

• 2014 Golden Globe Nominees Include ‘12 Years a Slave’, ‘American Hustle’
• Read Many of 2013′s Best Screenplays, From ’12 Years a Slave’ to ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’
• Angie’s 10 Most Anticipated Films of 2013
• Video: Edgar Wright’s Top 10 Favorite Films of 2013
• George Clooney, Julie Delpy, Jonas Cuaron and More Discuss Screenwriting in 50-Minute Video
• Quentin Tarantino’s Favorite 2013 Films Include ‘Gravity’ and ‘The Lone Ranger’