Bits: Netflix Allows Americans to Share Viewing Choices with Facebook Friends

Netflix

You no longer have to ask your friends what they are watching on Netflix. Instead, you can now simply peer over their digital shoulder.

Netflix announced Wednesday that it will begin offering United States customers the ability to connect their Netflix account to Facebook to see what their friends are watching on the video rental service. They will also be able to share their own favorite videos.

In a blog post on the company’s Web site, Cameron Johnson, director of product innovation at Netflix, said that the latest sharing feature would offer two main views: customers’ favorite videos and those that they have recently watched on the service.

“You’ll see what titles your friends have watched in a new “Watched by your friends” row and what they have rated four or five stars in a new “Friends’ Favorites” row,” Mr. Johnson wrote. “Your friends will also be able to see what you watch and rate highly.”

For people worried that a secret show will appear in their Facebook timeline for all to see, Netflix gives people explicit options to decide what they share to Facebook.

“You are in control of what gets shared. You can choose not to share a specific title by clicking the “Don’t Share This” button in the player,” Mr. Johnson wrote.

The sharing feature has been available in other countries for some time. But before Netflix could enable it in the United States, the company had to persuade Congress to amend a 1988 law, called the Video Privacy Protection Act, that prohibited video service providers from sharing customers’ viewing history without their consent.

It’s unclear whether American consumers really want to see what their inflated social networks are watching on television. Although the idea sounds great, if your Aunt Mildred is watching World War I documentaries, and your nephew Luca is watching SpongeBob SquarePants, your social feed might not be very useful.

But investors thought the news was great for Netflix, sending the company’s shares up 7 percent in midday trading on Wednesday.

Raw Data: Americans Paying More for LTE Service

BERLIN — Does LTE, the superfast wireless service based on Long Term Evolution technology, cost too much in the United States? A recent study by the research arm of the GSM Association, a group based in London that represents mobile operators, suggests that may be the case.

The LTE network run by Verizon Wireless, the U.S. market leader, went live in 2010, shortly after Sweden turned on the world’s first LTE networks in December 2009.

Through June, there were 27 million LTE subscribers in the world, about half of them in the United States, according to TeleGeography, a market research firm based in Washington. South Korea is the second-largest market, with 7.5 million users, and Japan, with 3.5 million, is the third, according to the company.

LTE services are available in 21 European countries and used by 1.5 million people, TeleGeography says. Germany has the most users there.

A comparison by Wireless Intelligence, a unit of the GSM Association, suggests that being in the biggest LTE market has not brought low prices to U.S. consumers.

According to the study, Verizon Wireless, which is a joint venture of Verizon and Vodafone, charges $7.50 for each gigabyte of data downloaded over its LTE network. That is three times the European average of $2.50 and more than 10 times what consumers pay in Sweden, where a gigabyte costs as little as 63 cents.

Brenda Raney, a spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless, which is based in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, said the Verizon Wireless LTE plan cited in the study also included unlimited voice minutes, unlimited text, picture and video messages shared among 10 different data-capable devices and a mobile hotspot on the smartphone. Having a data-only plan, Ms. Raney said, would reduce the per-gigabyte charge at Verizon Wireless to $5.50 — still be more than twice the European average.

Calum Dewar, the Wireless Intelligence analyst who made the comparison, said there were several reasons for higher LTE prices in the United States.

First, U.S. operators like Verizon sell LTE as part of a larger mobile package, whereas European operators increasingly sell it as a stand-alone service at a lower price. U.S. operators are phasing out unlimited data plans, which is causing the price of data to increase above their levels in Europe, where a similar shift began two years ago. And you can buy LTE on a pay-as-you-go basis, often from virtual network discounters.

But another big reason for the trans-Atlantic discrepancy in LTE costs, Mr. Dewar said, is a difference in the levels of competition. Europe has the greatest number of operators selling LTE: 38 of 88 operators worldwide. Even small markets like Austria, Finland and Portugal have three LTE operators.

Until July, Verizon Wireless and AT&T Mobility were the only U.S. operators selling LTE nationally, Mr. Dewar said. And Verizon Wireless, which began selling LTE service in December 2010, has largely had the U.S. LTE market to itself in setting prices. In June, Verizon Wireless had 11.6 million LTE customers, and AT&T Mobility, the next biggest U.S. seller of LTE, had 750,000, according to TeleGeography.

The LTE comparison mirrors the trend for other types of mobile services, like 3G, which also tends to cost more in the United States.

U.S. consumers who bought mobile service through contracts spent $115 a month for 3G service, according to a survey conducted in May and June of 6,000 consumers in 12 countries by Ernst & Young, an accounting firm. In the Netherlands, the average was $51; in Britain, $59.

J. Scott Marcus, a senior Internet technology adviser at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from 2001 to 2005, said European telephone behavior had developed in an environment of high prices, while U.S. habits had been shaped by low prices for landline and, initially, mobile service.

As a result, Europeans tend to be more restrained in calling and mobile surfing than Americans, said Mr. Marcus, who is an analyst at WIK-Consult, a research firm in Bad Honnef, Germany, owned by the German Economics Ministry.

The higher prices are slowing the adoption of smartphone services, according to Jonathan Dharmapalan, Ernst & Young’s global telecommunications leader.

“The No. 1 reason for customers’ discontinuing their use of a smartphone service or not taking the option is the fear of overspending,” Mr. Dharmapalan said.

Most Americans Are Wary of Being Tracked Online, Study Says

BERKELEY, Calif. — As marketers, browser makers and government regulators spar over efforts to let consumers limit custom advertising online, a new study suggests that Americans are largely unaware of what that means and have a strong aversion to being tracked online.

The majority of Americans surveyed by researchers at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, which is part of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, do not want information collected at all about which Web sites they visit, according to the study, which is to be released at the Amsterdam Privacy Conference on Monday.

Most of them said they did not find online advertisements useful. And nearly 90 percent said they had never heard of a proposal by the Federal Trade Commission, known as a “do not track” mechanism, that would let users opt out of having their personal data collected for the purposes of serving tailored advertisements.

The digital advertising industry has resisted efforts to limit behavioral targeting, pointing out that the free content available on the Internet, including social networks, is powered precisely by that kind of advertising.

Browser companies have introduced do-not-track icons for their users, and Microsoft has gone farthest by making it the default setting on its latest version of Internet Explorer.

There is still no agreement on whether a do-not-track button on Web browsers would send a signal that information about a consumer’s browsing history should not be used to tailor advertisements — or should not be collected at all. And it is up to each Web site to honor a consumer’s request or ignore it altogether, because no law requires sites’ compliance with users’ wishes.

The Berkeley survey, financed by a grant from Nokia, presented a series of multiple choice questions on the telephone to 1,230 Internet users in the United States.

The survey asked respondents: “If a ‘do not track’ option were available to you when browsing the Internet, which of the following things would you most want it to do?”

Sixty percent said they prefer regulation to “prevent Web sites from collecting information” about them; 20 percent said such a tool should allow them to block Web sites from serving up ads; and 14 percent said they would like it to “prevent Web sites from tailoring advertisements” based on sites they had visited. (The remaining 6 percent said they did not know or declined to answer.)

One in five told the researchers that they believed advertisers were not allowed to track people when they browsed medical sites. Four in 10 did not know or declined to answer, while a third correctly said that they could be tracked by marketers.

The survey also asked how useful consumers found search and banner advertisements. Two-thirds said they found it “never” or “hardly ever” useful, while 30 percent said “often” or “sometimes.” Eight-five percent said they “never” or “hardly ever” clicked on an advertisement.

Data mining companies have grown increasingly sophisticated at analyzing consumer behavior both online and offline, through bits of computer code online or loyalty cards and nascent mobile payment options at brick-and-mortar stores. Such data is extremely valuable for advertisers, along with digital platforms like Facebook and Google that survive on advertising dollars.

The authors of the study argued that the Federal Trade Commission’s proposed mechanism was “a modest intervention.”

An industry-supported group, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, wrote a vigorous criticism of do-not-track proposals in a blog post last week, arguing that “nontargeted advertising” generated less revenue and that “less revenue means less free content and services for Internet users.”