Anti-Sony FUD Rapidly Spreading across the internet over Netflix Streaming hiccup

This is such an example of bad journalism that it makes me want to scream in anger. So here’s the deal. Microsoft are launching a revamp of their Xbox user interface and part of the offering is the ability to stream Netflix movies to the Xbox. However, hours before the launch movies from Columbia Pictures were unavailable to be streamed to the Xbox but were available on other services. As Columbia is owned by Sony, people immediately began to jump to the conclusion that this was Sony deliberately trying to stifle the competition.

Except there are a few problems with this. First of all, only Columbia’s pictures are unavailable. The rest of Sony Pictures catalogue is still available. And secondly, Netflix has come out and said that there is no foul play at work here:

“Today, titles regularly come in and out of license and there is a natural ebb and flow to what we have on license at any given point in time.”

That however doesn’t stop multiple blogs running with the far more juicier version of events and painting Sony Management as some out of touch half baked childish schoolchildren, a stereotype that certain popular gadget blogs have been pushing for sometime. This in turn then is echoed by the numerous commentators who in the absence of any proof, and despite significant evidence to the contrary are still preferring to believe the stereo type rather than think with their own brains.

With the prominence of so called “gadget blogs” in both the technology and gaming space this kind of passing off opinion as fact is doing great harm to the publics perception of certain companies and technologies and this is just one example. For some reason Sony has gotten the rough end of the stick for the last several years from leading bloggers who’ve pushed their opinions into the mainstream perception of Sony. To be fair though one of the leading blogs Gizmodo has been fairly cautious in the way they’ve reported this. But annoyingly it is likely that the mainstream media will pick up on this story without even questioning it or trying to validate the baseless claims before reporting it. This crap has to stop.

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