Netflix CEO gets $1.5 million pay cut, stocks remain low

Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, got a lump of coal this Christmas as the company's board chose to halve his stock options. Hastings has been at the helm while mismanagement of the company is widely attributed to the exodus of both subscribers and stock holders. Despite losing roughly $1.5 million from the decision, he will maintain his $500,000 base salary. 

Although it had a strong start in 2011, Netflix's stock price plummeted this summer and continued to fall for the course of several months. Once soaring to its peak of about $300 per share, stocks began to dive after a series of missteps left the company slack-jawed and investors disappointed.

A price hike set the stage for Netflix's decline earlier this year, creating unintentional animosity between the company and its less forgiving subscribers. The increase was purportedly aimed at helping Netflix cover the costs of producing its own original content, a la HBO, and maintain deals with content companies. Customers began leaving.

Shortly afterward, Hastings announced that he had listened to numerous customer complaints. Netflix attempted to deftly maneuver its subscriber's heartstrings as the CEO offered both a sincere apology and a solution to the problem. In order to give subscribers lower rates, he reasoned, the company needed to keep its costs down. Netflix decided it would be spinning off its costly, by-mail movie rental service into a separate enterprise named Qwikster. This puzzling brand name became the butt of jokes for every late night comedy show. The bold move was pitched as an earnest one, though.

Customers were less than thrilled about being forced to maintain two subscriptions with two separate companies if they wanted to enjoy both streaming and by-mail options. This time, investors spoke up and stock prices began to fall rapidly. 

After about a month of generating ill-will toward Netflix, Qwikster was scrapped and more apologies were made. Fast forward a bit and subscribers find that Netflix lost its deal with Starz (and Showtime), a major source of its newest, mainstream movie content. Netflix announced a deal with Dreamworks right before the Qwikster fiasco but the deal will not bear fruit until 2013.

This seems to be a particularly scary time for Netflix. HBO Go is picking up steam, Starz has announced plans to stream its own content and stock holders have definitely lost confidence in Netflix's direction and leadership. Despite the circumstances though, Hastings announced he intends to repair the image of the company "brick by brick" and suggests we'll see a stronger Netflix in 2012

Accelerate x.264 1080p movies over the GPU Guide

Watching 1080P x.264 / MKV videos completely decoded by your graphics card
An accelerating GPU Video Acceleration Guide

Yours truly is a big movie buff, I like to playback high-definition content, preferably at 1080P Full HD. But face it, to be able to decode such content in a flawless manner, you will need a lot of raw processing power.

One of my more recent dillema's is that you can playback for example BluRay content fairly easily with software like PowerDVD, assisted by the graphics processor on your graphics card. Such a great feaure, as that GPU can do marvelous things when it comes to handeling that content. The problem with 3rd party vendor software like PowerDVD is however complex, if a file format or file-container is not supported you can't play back that content assisted (accelerated or enhanchanced) by your graphics card. And that's a waste of the GPU and definitely your CPU load.

Much like MP3 was up and coming many years ago, one of the most popular formats is x.264 (not to confuse with h.264 itself). x264 is a free and open library for encoding H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video streams.

The x.264 format is often synonym with Matroska MKV, a media file container which often embeds that x.264 content, a much admired container format for media files. Especially the 1920x1080p movies often have some form of h.264 encoding dropped within the x.264 format. As a result, you'll need a very beefy PC with powerful processor to be able to playback such movies, error free without frames dropping and nasty stuttersm as PowerDVD or other PureVideo HD supporting software by itself will not support it.

There is a way though. Today we are going to open up and investigate this topic, we'll show you how you can accelerate x.264 content nearly 100% accelerated and post processed (enhanced) with nothing other than your graphics card.

Why use a graphics card you might ask ? Well, first off, there are many software solutions at hand, the fantastic ffdshow, which is an open source DirectShow decoding filter with excellent image quality. But for it to be able to handle 1080p, you will need fairly decent hardware, especially if you flick on filters like image sharpening. Another option is to purchase CoreAVC, which is a codec that allows extremely efficient x.264 playback, assisted by your (preferably) multi-core processor. CoreAVC is extraordinary, however on bigger HD TVs you'll notice that this codec forfeits a little on image quality.

Running into CPU (system) bottlenecks or forfeiting on image quality is not something we should accept in the year 2009, especially when we have modern graphics cards that could easily handle this content.

Companies like ATI and NVIDIA have been evangelizing that their graphics cards are the best thing invented since the wheel was discovered, especially for that high-definition content playback. See, the graphics processors in your (reasonably modern) graphics card have excellent decoding, accelerating and post-processing (enhance image quality) functionality as they have dedicated core logic built in to the GPU to do exactly that.

ATI Radeon cards starting at series 3000 for example have the a UVD HD (Universal Video Decoder) engine embedded in the GPU. It's a small piece of core logic designed to handle smooth high-definition movie/content playback.

The same can be said for GeForce graphics cards starting at series 8000. GeForce series 8000 (GTX 320|640 and prior excluded) and newer have an updated version of the PureVideo (VP2) engine, allowing high-quality high-definition content playback.

But here's the thing, while both formats are really good, they do not support anything that is not officially supported by 3rd party vendor software like PowerDVD and WinDVD. As a result your hands are tied and you are extremely limited in utilizing UVD and Purevideo only for DVDs, WMV(HD) and Blu-ray disks. And we feel that poses an issue, as the other 80% of the content out there thus can not take advantage of these HD processing video engines.

As a result, you must use some sort of codec or filter forcing the decoding, acceleration and post processing processes over the CPU, and that CPU load will be tremendously high and certain image quality enhancements [can or] will be lost. Decoding and accelerating media content over the CPU is intensive, expensive and not at all optimal.

I believe in the evolution of new and open standards. XVID, DIVX, h.264. VC-1 and now x.264/MKV need native support.

What would have happened if we would have never embraced the MP3 format for example ?

What the majority of us would like to see ...

My personal vision of a Home Theater PC (HTPC) is using software like using Media Center and a remote control (point, click and play), then sit back, watch and enjoy 1080P high definition content, whatever the file container format is.

MKV and x.264 filter transcoded content has got to be the biggest and best open file container format available on the web. It is a revolutionary format, but is just not supported natively by your graphics card, forcing you to revert back to software like FFDSHOW or CoreAVC. Meanwhile you have GPU in your PC picking it's nose, while that GPU easily could handle the entire decoding processes, with very small use of system resources and power consumption.

There is however a way to get x.264 working in a nice symbiosis with your graphics card. And though it's not as charming as having a remote control in your hands and starting up that movie with Media Center, it is a great way to watch high definition x.264 content, accelerated and enhanced by your GPU.