You’ve got to be kidding:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19297373
Netflix is about to destroy Lovefilm
Here in Sweden we used to have a service called Brafilm, which, like Netflix, would send DVDs to your home. You could subscribe to having one, two, or three DVDs at home at the same time.
This was great, as Netflix customers also noticed, before Netflix started offering streaming video.
Eventually the Swedish company got bought by a British counterpart called Lovefilm, which in turn was bought by Amazon. This boded well, with hopes that some of the video downloading and streaming features from Amazon would show up here.
That hasn’t happened. The Swedish Lovefilm has added a handful of streaming titles, but just a few. Until this week there wasn’t one I wanted to see. But now they are offering “The Artist”. Unfortunately when I tried to watch it on my iPad, all I got were error messages in the browser, pointing out that the iPad lacks Flash. There is a Swedish Lovefilm iPad app, but it is useless. It looks like you can search for films and add them to your mailing list, but that’s about it.
I wrote to Lovefilm and asked about this, and was told “The streaming function unfortunately doesn’t work in the iPad for exactly the reason you write, the iPad lacks Flash. You can stream our films either on a computer or on your TV from a computer”.
But I don’t want to be told what I already know. I wanted to hear something like “we’re working on improving the app”. It’s not as if this is a technical problem. The British Lovefilm iPad app includes streaming. How hard can it be to port this code to the Swedish app?
The reason this is important is because I can watch stuff from the iPad on my TV, either via Airplay to our Apple TV, or by directly plugging the iPad into an hdmi port. I’m not about to carry my desktop computer downstairs to the TV to plug it in. (And who wants to watch a TV program or a movie sitting at a desk in front of a computer?)
If Lovefilm doesn’t fix this soon, they will be out of business. Netflix has announced it is launching in Scandinavia by the end of the year. And there’s already a Netflix app on our Apple TV screen, just waiting to have an account hooked up to it.
Raoul Wallenberg and Lidingö
Last Saturday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust. He was born in his family’s then-summer house, here on the island of Lidingö.
This is the statue “Raoul Wallenberg’s Deeds” at Lidingö Centrum, next to the public library and perhaps 100 meters from City Hall.
In connection with the anniversary there have been some interesting articles in the press here. In Dagens Nyheter, columnist Henrik Arnstad comes up with a new revisionist view that Raoul Wallenberg actually did very little, it was the Swedish government that sent him to Budapest that did so much to save the Jews. To a certain extent that must be correct. But it aalso seems like a pathetic attempt to counter the conventional wisdom that during World War II official Sweden did everything it could to please the Nazis, until it was obvious they were going to lose. That criticism was the reason then-Prime Minister Göran Persson hosted his Holocaust conferences, trying to counter that image.
And no matter how much support Wallenberg had from Stockholm while he was in Budapest, as soon as he was captured by the Soviet Red Army, official Sweden turned its back on him. Wallenberg had diplomatic immunity, a fact that was ignored both in Moscow and Stockholm. When his support group protested to Sweden’s foreign minister Östen Undén that his Russian counterpart was lying about Wallenberg, the long-serving foreign minister could only express incredulity.
And certainly there was little support for his activities among some of the Swedish people, even in the town of his birth. Lidingö is an affluent, conservative community. In the same newspaper, journalist Erik Eriksson, who grew up on Lidingö and has written a novel about Nazism on the island, writes how he was invited to give a talk there on the topic. He spoke of Nazi rallies in the auditorium in the high school my children attended, pictures of Hitler on the walls of his neighbors’ home, lists of more than 200 Nazi supporters on the island, far more in much larger Swedish towns.
Sadly, the response from some of his listeners was just as incredulous as Foreign Minister Undén. One man said he hadn’t noticed anything like that during the war, another said something about having heard that Jewish capitalism was behind the bombing of Germany during the war so it was natural that Germans wouldn’t like Jews (I’m still trying to figure how why something that was supposed to happen during the war could create pre-war anti-semitism), while a third just said it wasn’t nice to spread such nasty thoughts.
Still, around 100 people came to Wallenberg’s birth house Saturday morning, not an easy hike for the elderly, so perhaps that says something too.
100 years since the birth of Raoul Wallenberg
Olle Wästberg speaking at the Raoul Wallenberg commemoration
Today marks what would have been the 100th birthday of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust during the last months of World War II. When the Red Army liberated Hungary he was arrested and taken away to die in a Soviet prison.
There are commemorations around the world today, and one was here on the Stockholm island of Lidingö, at what is left of the house where Raoul Wallenberg was born on August 4, 1912. Among the 80-100 who attended were members of the Wallenberg family, including his sister Nina Lagergren, and representatives from the diplomatic corps. In the photo is the first speaker, Olle Westberg, who is in charge of Sweden’s celebrations during Wallenberg year 2012.
Raoul Wallenberg’s sister Nina Lagergren (in blue) and other members of the family
Ironically this is the day the neo-Nazi English Defence League and their Counter Jihad movement chose to hold a march in Stockholm (trying to get participants in Pride Week to join their pogrom against Moslems.
Sweden beats the depression
Sweden was the centerpiece of the Colbert Report on June 18.
First of all, Stephen continues his campaign to take over the #sweden twitter account. He thinks he can do it better than people who actually live in Sweden:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Operation Artificial Swedener – Sweden’s Response | ||||
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Then, Nobel Economics laureate Paul Krugman explained why Sweden is doing to well dealing with the current depression/recession, with all its welfare state, as opposed to Ireland, which despite doing everything the austerity economics are calling for, is doing poorly:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Paul Krugman | ||||
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But no one important wants Greece to leave the euro
Greeks go to the polls this weekend to choose a new parliament. And it seems like the entire world media are calling it a choice between staying in the euro zone and leaving. But I don’t see how the pundits are arriving at that conclusion.
True, the leftist party Syriza wants to renegotiate the terms of Greece’s deal with the EU, calling for more stimulus and less austerity. But that’s the same message being heard more and more everywhere, except from Angela Merkel (who is on track to lose the next German elections).
No one in Greece is calling to leave the euro, they want to stay in the single currency.
In fact, no one in the EU wants Greece to leave the euro, except for a handful of backbench British Conservative MPs and a handful of conservative British newspaper pundits. I listened to one of the latter, from the Daily Telegraph, on the BBC World Service this morning. His message was that while “everyone else” is warning about how awful it would be for Greece to leave the euro, he thinks it would be great. And he has a whole checklist of other countries he thinks should leave the single currency too.
It really seems like there is a lunatic conservative fringe in Britain who, since they aren’t in the euro, don’t want anyone else to be either.
But no matter who wins the Greek parliamentary elections, there really doesn’t seem to be a plausible scenario which ends with Greece going back to the drachma. Just wishful thinking from people with what the Swedes call “skadeglädje”, taking pleasure in someone else’s suffering.