The UpStream

Tired of the same boring halftime show at the Super Bowl? Is "lights turned off because drama" just another played out scenario to you? Well, if you're looking for an alternative during the excruciatingly long halftime show, then you may want to look towards YouTube to fill those 45 minutes.

YouTube, in an attempt to maintain relevancy and market share, has decided to spin up a halftime show of its own in order to show off some of the website's offerings. Harley Morenstein from the crazy popular EpicMealTime channel on YouTube will be heading up the event as emcee, and the program will contain musical guests, skits, stunts and fake Super Bowl advertisements.

YouTube Space LA will play home to the video-streaming performance, where Morenstein will be joined by the likes of Freddie Wong, Toby Turner and others. In total, all of the creators' channels total more than 60 million subscribers, which YouTube is hoping will help them make this show a success. The site is banking so heavily on this being a hit that it has even thrown up billboards in major metropolitan areas in order to bring more attention to the event.

Google's managing director of brand solutions, Suzie Reider, said that she thinks it'll be interesting to compare the stats of YouTube's show with the ratings from NBC's halftime show.

It's a really good place to showcase our celebrities, our talent and our creator. It will be fun afterwards to see what was Freddie Wong's draw compared to Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz.

Reider also added that the show will be more geared towards those who will be watching the Super Bowl for the ads, rather than the game. So if you're in that group, then this might be something you'll want to bring up on your mobile device while the rest of us see how deflated the Seahawks can get.

I'm curious myself to see how well this does against NBC's star-studded performance. Do enough people still care about YouTube to visit an appointment-based show on an on-demand site? YouTube Live hasn't seen too much success in total viewer count, and that may end up trickling down into the YouTubeapalooza on February 1st.

When Netflix announced their price increase last year, there were a lot of doubters. Many people, including investors, believed that the rate hike could lead to existing customers leaving the service. They also believed that a higher price would actually incentivize new customers to opt for other services, such as Amazon Prime Instant Video or Hulu Plus.

As it turns out, Netflix was right and critics were wrong. Customers are often willing to pay a slightly higher price for a higher quality product or service. In fact, customers are willing to pay a higher price for a product or service of equal or lesser quality so long as they believe the product is superior. Starbucks learned this lesson themselves when increasing their prices last year.

The thing that is important here is that premium brands, either in reality or in perception, enjoy certain privileges in pricing. For a company in this position, it is insane for them to not exercise that privilege. A great example of a company taking advantage of their marketing position is Apple, who has always charged far above market value for fairly pedestrian products. If customers didn't believe that Apple offered a premium product they could never get away with their pricing model.

Because of the new pricing from Netflix, they saw an incredible fourth quarter. Their profit margin rose a full point to 13%, with revenue growing 35% year-over-year. This growth comes during a year in which new costs arose, including Comcast charging for direct access, and a rollout of Super HD to everyone. Netflix has also spent money on a new slew of original programming, making it a more attractive option than its competitors, whose original programming is in less quantity than Netflix.

Were you offended by the price increase, or did you accept it because of the content available on the service? Let us know in the comments.

In early 2010, Verizon announced that they would slow down new FiOS installs at some point in the future, with the plan to stop new markets. Even though 2 years later they began ramping up again, it was only a matter of time before they completed their planned expansion. This week, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said that they were nearing the end of new construction, saying,

I have been pretty consistent with this in the fact that we will spend more CapEx in the Wireless side and we will continue to curtail CapEx on the Wireline side. Some of that is because we are getting to the end of our committed build around FiOS, penetration is getting higher.

As the XLTE install has continued, and the speeds of wireless has gotten closer to that of wireline services, it makes sense that Verizon would want to focus their attention there. Wireline services are definitely not a growing industry, while wireless services are. This is especially important to a company who, as part of the same conference call, announced a net loss of $2.23 billion in the last quarter of 2014.

In regards to the overall health of existing FiOS subscriptions, Shammo said,

In broadband, we added 145,000 net FiOS customers in the quarter and 544,000 for the year. We have a total of 6.6 million FiOS Internet subscribers, representing 41.1 percent penetration... Overall net broadband subscribers increased 59,000 in the quarter and 190,000 for the full year. In FiOS video, we added 116,000 net customers in the quarter and 387,000 for the year. We have a total of 5.6 million FiOS video subscribers, which represents 35.8 percent penetration.

While this is good customer growth, it does not pay for the expansion of FiOS, or even the maintenance of a copper network. Hopefully they will use the money saved to speed up the expansion of XLTE, and even the 3G retirement plans, which will make room for more bandwidth. That will allow for Verizon to compete in a market that Clear tried to create - a wireless-based home Internet plan. Clear's network wasn't prepared to support the demand, though a renewed vigor from Verizon could make their network capable.

This is the end of an era: after 6 years of running within the US, Nintendo has announced that they will be ending their Club Nintendo rewards program. For those unfamiliar, the program rewards coins for performing certain actions, such as registering games or completing surveys. Those coins can then be used to purchase Nintendo-related items, such as Virtual Console downloads or clothing items.

While an interesting idea in concept, the implementation has always left a lot to be desired. Coins were rare, and difficult to collect enough of to be eligible for any reward that mattered. The best rewards were reserved for gold or platinum members, which was even more difficult to become. Those who were eligible for rewards were often left without them because of timelines and other odd requirements that were missed.

The program will be phased out in stages between now and July 1, 2015. New products will no longer be eligible for Club Nintendo rewards beginning now. March 31 will see the end of earning new coins, either for registering products whose codes you already have or for taking surveys, as well as the end of new sign-ups. June 30 will see the end of redeeming any remaining coins, with all data vanishing on July 1.

While it seems like a loss, it isn't so much. Club Nintendo will be replaced by a "new program" which, hopefully, will work better than the current implementation. With the new program, one can hope that the Japanese-exclusive rewards, the ones that everyone always actually wanted, will come to and end and we will see prizes in the US that people actually want.

A little over a month ago, I gave some predictions on what Microsoft would present at this week's Windows 10 event, as well as some of the stuff I personally hoped to see more of. Luckily, Microsoft did not disappoint, even one-upping me on some of the categories. They even announced a product within the embedded family that I don't think anyone could have possibly anticipated.

They even outpaced themselves on releasing the next version of the technical preview - build 9926. During the event, the team said the next build would be made public sometime next week, but it was released at 1PM Eastern on Friday. That is less than 48 hours after the event's end, making it an extremely quick turnaround. While the build does not include everything from the presentation, it is fairly close.

Main System

At the bottom are the quick actions - buttons like in current Windows Phone that allow you to get to certain features or disable radios quickly. The system settings portion of the Charms bar is now here, along with the ability to interact with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc. The 4 most common can be customized like in Windows Phone, but all are available from the expanded menu.

The whole top portion is the notification area. All of the toast messages that display, either from Modern or desktop apps, will be available here until you dismiss them, or you launch the calling application. An enhancement over Windows Phone and the previous build is the ability to dismiss individual notifications from an app instead of being forced to clear all notifications as a group. Just like with the phone, though, there are certain types of notifications that I never want to stick around, but perhaps that will be solved in the near future.

One of the nice revelations about Windows 10 was about pricing. It will be a free upgrade for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 for the first 12 months after release. If you don't take advantage of the free upgrade during that timeline, you will presumably be required to pay a standard upgrade fee. Obviously, the smart idea will be to get the free upgrade information while you are able and upgrade later if that is your plan.

Missing from that list are two Windows platforms: Windows Phone and Windows RT. Most Windows Phone 8+ devices will be compatible with Windows 10, though a list is not available. Microsoft intends to bring the OS to all Lumia devices, though I do have some doubts about any older 512MB devices, such as the 520 and 620 series. Windows RT, on the other hand, will not be quite so lucky. An update to RT will be released that will bring many of the Windows 10 features to the devices, without actually bringing Windows 10 to the devices. In conjunction, the Microsoft Store no longer has any Surface 2 devices for sale.

For all of the information on the rest of the Windows 10 announcements, hit the break.

Microsoft acquiring Minecraft has definitely caused a small rift in the gaming community. Some thought this meant the Mojang studio was selling out, while others believed this could mean bigger and better things for the game. Luckily, Microsoft is fully committed to Minecraft and has been pushing it towards mobile devices with full force. The game has still grown since the purchase, too, with Minecraft breaking yet another record.

First, the record. Minecraft already owns a number of Guinness World Records, including the largest indie game convention, the first country modeled at full-scale in a video game, the most popular beta game and the most-played Xbox Live game. Now, sales have been so big for the game that it's earned the right to be called the best-selling indie game at over 16 million units. Pretty impressive stuff, and I only see more records in Minecraft's future.

Switching over to mobile, as Microsoft promised, there is no change on the commitment to getting more people on board with Minecraft: Pocket Edition. At only $7 on iOS, Android, Kindle Fire and Windows Phone, the title has now eclipsed 30 million downloads, which is a remarkable number for a paid mobile game.

Mojang's blog post included some humor, mentioning that 30 million is bigger than Texas, 23 times hotter than the sun in summer time and is more than the observable universe, because science and math and stuff. More importantly, the 30 million downloads more than justifies Microsoft $2.5 billion purchase for the franchise. Clearly, the Minecraft machine is showing no signs of slowing down, and with full support being passed down to the mobile version of the game, the money train won't be stopping any time soon.

It should be noted here that these sales now place Minecraft: Pocket Edition as the second highest-grossing iOS game worldwide, well ahead of popular titles like Game of War and Candy Crush Saga. For comparison, 18 million copies of Minecraft have been sold for the PC, over 12 million for the Xbox 360, 1 million for the PS3 and 100,000 for the Vita. Mojang did not create the console edition themselves, and instead, licensed the title out to 4J Studios.