GameStop, the video game retailer, has recently released their fiscal year 2010 report and business is a boomin’! The company announced a record sales year in the neighborhood of $9.47 billion.

The litany of posts and pontifications about cord cutting continues unabated, yet few people take the time to actually look at what’s really going on. The Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro recently touted the benefits of ditching cable, but in the same breath admitted that it works best for people who a) don’t watch much TV, b) live in an area with great OTA reception, c) don’t watch live sports much, and d) don’t mind relying on DVD rentals to catch first-run movies. This isn’t to say that the cable industry doesn’t face challenges from online video. It’s just that the challenge is somewhat different from what’s being reported.

I would think that most of us would agree that there are certain less than acceptable ways of talking in the public square. Now even less than acceptable language, even that of the coined “hate speech” variety of communication is still protected speech. The philosophy of deterring certain types of speech through government regulation is something that I and many of my colleagues feel is a 1st Amendment violation. Most notably is the Fairness Doctrine which continues its journey via Mark Lloyd, and the Internet version suggested by Cass Sunstein creating “Internet sidewalks” of opposing viewpoints across the Web.

Craig Engler, GM and senior vice president of Syfy Digital, provides The truth about TV ratings, online viewing and sci-fi shows, debunking the idea that sci-fi gets shortchanged on the viewer count because a high proportion of its audience is tech savvy and uses alternatives to conventional TV. In fact, the counting systems are sophisticated, [...]

Netflix published their ISP performance metrics that managed to fool the media into reporting the data as some kind of broadband performance metric. But the results probably reflect Netflix’s inadequacies rather than the ISPs’ because the numbers are probably related to the amount of peering bandwidth that Netflix purchased from the ISPs.

Netflix and its CDN partners want the media and the government to pressure and force consumers to subsidize Netflix to the tune of thousands of Gbps of free bandwidth. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is misleading all of us when he says that Netflix already pays their share of the bandwidth costs and that they deserve free server capacity.

Video Game Industry in North Carolina NC Now – UNC-TV January 21, 2010 Length: 6:32 UNCTV presents an episode of NC Now that looks into the burgeoning gaming and computer sector in Raleigh, North Carolina.  North Carolina has become one of the top areas for the games industry, with claims that the industry has grown [...]

Taking a look at “bots” in popular MMO’s like World of Warcraft and the legal fall out from their creation and use.

The authors look at a new push by the FCC to promote a retail market for set-top-boxes as directed by Congress in Section 629 of the Communications Act. The authors point out the failure of the previous attempt, CableCard, and examine the new attempt, “AllVid”. With AllVid, any multichannel video program distributor (MVPD) would provide some type of adapter which would be a proprietary connection for all retail market televisions, DVRs, media PCs, Internet television devices, or any other device for use in this arena.

Dr. Peter Raad is the Executive Director of the Guildhall at Southern Methodist University. It is a graduate level game design program where students are taught through a multidisciplinary approach. Raad and Glassman discuss the ramifications of video games in American culture.