Mk

It's actually not as bad as it sounds. I'd wager that the vast majority of people that are interested in Newsday are automatically subscribed.

I go to newsday.com occasionally, and this is the first I've ever even heard of a paywall.

Optimum online is virtually the only decent broadband provider for most if not all of long island. Verizon DSL is horrendous out here, and FIOS has very limited penetration.

Who knows what kind of kickback theyre getting from optimum.

Newsday is hardly a bastion of journalistic integrity, but who is nowadays?

The short reply to Elohim:

If hundreds of sites can provide multi-gigabyte PC demos for free, its hardly costing nintendo anything to store and distribute.


The long reply:

Maintaining the Distribution System:
All of the roms in the VC catalog don't even add up to a single gigabyte, and all of the ROMs ever released for all the systems the VC support only add up to a few gigabytes total. The backbone of the system could also most likely be measured in megabytes. Backup and storage of the data is absolutely trivial, NOWHERE near a large building. Splitting the cost between every game paid and downloaded its several cents at best, most likely less than one cent.

Credit Market: Credit cards companies usually charge between 3-5% of the purchase price. Again, several cents.

Stores:
The profit margin on consoles, games and accessories for the store is pathetically low. Even 10% is being generous, its far less than that for the actual console itself. I'd wager that most points are bought online anyway, so again, its a trivial cost.

Cost of Printing:
Mass produced plastic cards, sheets of printed cardboard and a magnetic strip. In quantity, costs near nothing to make. A few cents at most, and again, nothing if bought online.

Cost of Data Keeping:
Again, this isnt massive amounts of data that requires racks of storage, absolutely nothing like gigabytes of redundant file storage for 60,000 people. Trivial.

Customer Service: Necessary sure, but I highly doubt VC games are the primary source of customer service incidents.

Marketing: Spamming a once a week email hardly costs them anything as well.

Bandwidth costs: Their bandwidth costs for VC games are a joke compared to most websites. The bandwidth costs for a single transfer of the largest VC game is probably a hundredth of a cent.

.........

I think you all get the point. Overall, per game, overhead costs are probably a dollar per game at absolute most. And most of these are fixed costs (labor), so if they were to sell more games, the overhead per game would go down - their total costs would not raise too much.

There are no supply and demand issues as bandwidth is the absolute most trivial cost of all. They are simply setting the price at the point at which they believe theyll make the most money.

IMO what they really need to do is focus more on selling points, and less on selling games. What I mean is, $10 should get you 1000 points, $20 should get you $2500, $50 should get you 7500 points, etc. At this point theres more games in the system than most would have time or money to buy them all, and bulk pricing would get people to open their wallets much easier. The occasional buyer probably wouldnt mind buying a $10 game here or there, but the hardcore collector type would absolutely drop $50 at a time instead of picking and choosing.

JCA-

I could move the composite pin, but I really dont want to - the pins are VERY delicate, and I smiply don't want to risk screwing that connection up. Wii in composite is better than no Wii at all.

As of right now, I'm not actually removing the stock grounds - I'm splicing into them. I have all three spliced into right audio right now IIRC. I'm trying to keep it as stock as possible, just in case, and I also don't want to screw around with adding new grounds if I can avoid it.

You say to move the two new connections onto the composite ground...but theres THREE new connections, when you consider that the old composite becomes one of the new components. I was thinking it'd be better to splice them all separately IE - Y with composite video, Pb with right audio, Pr with left audio.

You're saying it's better to just connect the grounds for Y, Pb and Pr all to the single ground that used to be composite video? Theres three unknown pins, but all that is needed is 5 grounds technically - one of the three mystery pins has got to be the chroma signal for s-video (Y/C)...assuming the Y signal is the same for s-video and component?

I didnt have the right size paper clips on hand, but did manage to hack something together with smaller ones just for proof of concept. Right now, I have just the Y/luminance connected because I have to jiggle it to make contact - I connected all 3 of the grounds for the new cables to the ground for the right audio...think it'll be a problem? Should I bother separately grounding all of the comp cables?

5ftassassin-

XM is known to transmit music channels at 32-48kbps depending on the station. Two stations are a FULL 64kbps...wow! Talk stations much less. Incredible isnt it? In 2006, we pay for the sound quality of 1976.

Sirius is generally regarded to have slightly inferior SQ to XM. I imagine the bitrates are quite similar.

80-100kbps is FAR off.

I wouldnt count on much of an upgrade either, because the laws are against them on both sides. The FCC on one side, physics on the other.