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From the cassette to ?the package,' or how to do streaming without Internet in Cuba

Document Citado por Related
Vincent
AutorRegina Coyula
Páginas113-116

Page 113

See note 45

In 2008, MySpace was losing the social media race to Facebook, which only reached 200 million people, and had just launched its platform in Spanish. That same year, Cubans were inally able to have a legally registered cell-phone line, the irst desktop computers appeared in stores and DVD players were the latest craze. We were so removed from technological novelties that nothing seemed to happen, but in 2008 this disconnected country incubated one of the most innovative (and controversial) ideas for accessing audiovisual entertainment: El Paquete (The Package).

The weekly Package is a terabyte of material in a portable disk drive that covers a broad spectrum of topics. This diversity has guaranteed its current popularity, since it is hard to ind enough content to satisfy for an entire week from the most cultured to the most popular entertainment, from the most demanding to the most banal. Since the legal expansion of private employment categories in 2010,[1] The Package includes advertising about these businesses, in addition to serving as a platform

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for new music and video clips, which was its initial purpose according to one of its founders.

For this illegal, yet tolerated business, whose magnitude is impossible to calculate, those who distribute The Package adopted a mechanism born from the illicit rental of Betamax, and then VHS tapes, namely home delivery. It is also distributed in pirate sales points (an activity oficially registered as "disk purchase and sale", approved in 2010) or through a broad wired network, also illegal, known as street net or snet. Originally conceived by gamers, today it also supports The Package, chats and as much trafic as it can support in bidirectional and multidirectional communication.

The price of The Package varies. Freshly made, "wholesale" distributors buy it for 10 CUC[2] and sell it to retailers for 2 CUC, who in turn re-sell it for this same price to their own network. Some folks have a stock of USB drives or they use the drives their customers bring and ill them "a la carte", generally with high demand programs such as TV series, game shows, reality shows, soap operas or action ilms. The price of this modality luctuates, depending on the capacity of the drive, between 10 and 40 CUP. Downloading The Package from the snet is free, as it is all trafic in this network. The proliferation of USB drives has "democratized" the way free content is shared and the notion of...

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