I have a confession to make: I have not yet seen The Hobbit. This may seem strange to you if you've read my previous post about Tolkien, since I made it plain that I have been a Tolkien fan for a long time; but since I also said in the Postscript that I wasn't too happy with the Peter Jackson films of Lord of the Rings, it may not seem so strange after all that I haven't rushed out to see The Hobbit. But I do have a report from a friend who has seen it, and who has been a Tolkien fan as long as I have, and based on that report, I'm not in any hurry to see it. This post explains why.

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This is just a quick note to confirm that it's official: the media industry is lame. YouTube recently deleted more that 2 billion fake video views that were created by Sony, Universal, RCA, and other media companies. This violates YouTube's terms of service, of course, which is why the fake views were deleted. But that's a minor point compared to the big question: how lame do you have to be to generate fake views to make your videos appear to be more popular than they actually are? Remember we're not talking about a few teenagers shooting home videos; we're talking about the biggest media companies in the world.

But even that isn't the full extent of the lameness. Remember that these are the same companies that complain loudly about "pirated" videos being posted on sites like...YouTube. As I have blogged a number of times before, the reason these companies are having these problems is that they are either unwilling or unable to change their business models to give their customers what they actually want. If this is their attempt to try and fix that, they need to think again.