Leo Laporte is well known for his “frugal” ways when it comes to the business. Everything that can be free or could be free is used over anything that costs money. He hires the worst people as well, likely due to not paying well enough to attract and keep exceptional talent.
Let’s create a list of miserly decisions Soup has made in the past. Please contribute in the comments if you can think of more that we should add.
- Skype is used over superior commercial products, while complaining constantly about Skype.
- HexChat is used over Textual because it’s free. When Leo finally gave up and bought Textual, he complained that it’s 5 dollars.
- IRCcloud is used because Leo is too stupid to figure out how to connect to his IRC’s ZNC bouncer. He complained that he needed to pay 5 dollars per month.
- Twitch, Ustream, and BitGravity are all used because they’re free or cheap.
- Flosoft is used to stream only in cases where it is absolutely necessary. It is not advertised on the site and exists solely to service HLS mobile clients, like iOS. It is run from a server in France rather than a real CDN. Leo hates people using Flosoft because it is the one streaming provider that actually costs him money.
- He has no IT person on staff. He has to rely on contract personnel and his own idiocy to try to solve problems — or alternatively blame his problems on trolls.
- He refuses to pay for mobile apps for TWiT. Apparently the mobile platform isn’t big enough to matter to Soup. He leaves that to developers to create apps for free that make Leo money and cost the developers time and money. He then berates those developers on-air if a viewer has a problem with an app.
- Willful copyright infringement. He sticks ads on live streams from other companies while sending DMCA requests to YouTube for clearly fair-use content.
- The number 2 host, in terms of airtime, one Father Robert Ballecer, works for free. Leo makes a “donation” to the church for his time, but the fat priest would work for free due to his fat ego anyway.
- He got CUNY to pay for his New York Studio as well as the equipment in Petaluma required to send/receive the high-quality video. The taxpayers of New York are funding the dotNYC show currently in beta. We can’t wait to see them slap ads on it to make TWiT money while sticking the people of New York with the bill.
This brings us to the latest announcement. Leo Laporte literally wants you, the viewer, to pay for his streaming bandwidth. The concept itself is galling.
The BitTorrent announcement has a bit of humor in it as well:
TWiT: The TWiT.tv Netcast Network with Leo Laporte features the #1 ranked technology podcast This Week in Tech, along with over 20 other top-ranked online shows.
TWiT hasn’t been the #1 ranked technology podcast in a really long time. It’s likely been years at this point.
Leo has finally figured out how to get his few remaining fans to directly pay for his streaming bandwidth. Soup and CeHO Liza Kentzell Laporte must be very excited.