Streaming services like Netflix and Peacock have already found multiple ways to aggravate paying subscribers this week.
The streaming industry has been heating up. As media giants rush to establish a successful video streaming business, they often make platform changes that test subscribers' patience and the value of streaming.
Below is a look at the most exasperating news from streaming services from this week. The scale of this article demonstrates how fast and frequently disappointing streaming news arises. Coincidentally, as we wrote this article, another price hike was announced.
We'll also examine each streaming platform's financial status to get an idea of what these companies are thinking (spoiler: They're thinking about money).
Peacock's raising prices
For the second time in the past year, NBCUniversal is bumping the price of Peacock, per The Hollywood Reporter (THR) on Monday.
As of July 18, if you try to sign up for Peacock Premium (which has ads), it'll cost $7.99 per month, up from $5.99/month today. Premium Plus, (which doesn’t have ads), will go up from $11.99/month to $13.99/month. Annual subscription pricing for the ad plan is increasing 33.3 percent from $59.99 to $79.99, and the ad-free annual plan’s price will rise 16.7 percent from $119.99/year to $139.99/year.
Those already subscribed to Peacock won’t see the changes until August 17, six days after the closing ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics, which will stream on Peacock.
The pricing changes will begin eight days before the Olympics' opening ceremony. That means that in the days leading up to the sporting event, signing up for Peacock will cost more than ever. That said, there’s still time to sign up Peacock for its current pricing.
As noted by THR, the changes come as NBCUniversal may feel more confident about its streaming service, which now includes big-ticket items, like exclusive NFL games and Oppenheimer(which Peacock streamed exclusively for a time),in addition to new features for the Olympics, like multiview.
Some outspoken subscribers, though, aren't placated.
"Just when I was starting to like the service," Reddit user MarkB1997 said in response to the news. "I’ll echo what everyone has been saying for a while now, but these services are pricing themselves out of the market.”
Peacock subscribers already experienced a price increase on August 17, 2023. At the time, Peacock's Premium pricing went from $4.99/month to $5.99/month, and the Premium Plus tier from $9.99/month to $11.99/month.
Peacock’s pockets
Peacock's price bumps appear to be a way for the younger streaming service to inch closer to profitability amid a major, quadrennial, global event.
NBCUniversal parent company Comcast released its Q1 2024 earnings report last week, showing that Peacock, which launched in July 2020, remains unprofitable. For the quarter, Peacock lost $639 million, compared to $825 million in Q4 2023 and $704 million in Q1 2023. Losses were largely attributed to higher programming costs.
Peacock’s paid subscriber count is lower than some of its rivals. The platform ended the quarter with 34 million paid users, up from 31 million at the end of 2023. Revenue also rose, with the platform pulling in $1.1 billion, representing a 54 percent boost compared to the prior year.
Sony bumps Crunchyroll prices weeks after shuttering Funimation
Today, Sony’s anime streaming service Crunchyroll announced that it’s increasing subscription prices as follows:
The Mega Fan Tier, which allows streaming on up to four devices simultaneously, will go from $9.99/month to $11.99/month
The Ultimate Fan Tier, which allows streaming on up to six devices simultaneously, will go from $14.99/month to $15.99/month
Crunchyroll’s cheapest plan ($7.99/month) remains unchanged. None of Crunchyroll’s subscription plans have ads. Crunchyroll's also adding discounts to its store for each subscription tier, but this is no solace for those who don’t shop there on a monthly basis or at all.
The news of higher prices comes about a month after Sony shuttered Funimation, an anime streaming service it acquired in 2017. After buying Crunchyroll in 2021, Funimation was somewhat redundant for Sony. And now that Sony has converted all remaining Funimation accounts into Crunchyroll accounts (while deleting Funimation digital libraries), it’s forcing many customers to pay more to watch their favorite anime.
A user going by BioMountain on Crunchyroll said the news is "not great," since they weren't "a big fan of having to switch from Funimation to begin with, especially since that app was so much better" than Crunchyroll.
Interestingly, when Anime News Network asked on February 29 whether Crunchyroll would see prices rise over the next two years, the company told the publication that predicting a price change for that time frame would be improbable.
Crunching numbers
Crunchyroll had 5 million paid subscribers in 2021 but touted over 13 million in January, (plus over 89 million unpaid users, per Bloomberg). Crunchyroll president Rahul Purini has said that Crunchyroll is profitable, but not by how much.
In 2023, Goldman Sachs estimated that Crunchyroll would represent 36 percent of Sony Pictures Entertainment's profit by 2028, compared to about 1 percent in March.
However, Purini has shown interest in growing the company further and noted to Variety in February an increase in “general entertainment” companies getting into anime.
Still, anime remains a more niche entertainment category, and Crunchyroll is more specialized than some other streaming platforms. With Sony making it so that anime fans have one less streaming service option and jacking up the prices for one of the limited options, it's showing that it wants as much of the $20 billion anime market as possible.
Crunchyroll claimed today that its pricing changes are tied to “investment in more anime, additional services like music and games, and additional subscriber benefits.”
Netflix starts killing its cheapest ad-free plan in June
In January, Netflix shared plans to eventually kill off its ad-free Basic plan in “some” of the countries where it sells subscriptions with commercials. Netflix said it would start pulling the plug on this plan in Canada and the UK. This week, UK subscribers reported receiving notice that the plan, which costs 7.99 pounds per month, would no longer be available as of June 4.
At that time, Netflix will automatically move relevant subscribers to its cheapest plan with ads, which is 4.99 pounds per month.
“You’ll save 35% with our new monthly plan,” the email starts off in big letters, as reported by TechRadar.
Netflix hasn’t confirmed that it will bring this change to the US, but it is expected since Netflix previously stopped selling the ad-free basic plan in Canada before doing the same in the US. If Netflix kills the plan in the US, long-time subscribers would be moved from an $11.99/month plan without commercials to a $6.99/month subscription with commercials. They’ll have the option to go ad-free again but for 29.2 percent more at $15.49/month.
Subscribers in the UK who already know they’ll be affected have shared their outrage:
“Great, so we either have to sit through ads every so often, or pay twice as much to get the Standard/Basic experience that we already do now (albeit only for another few weeks)? Nah, I think I'll pass, Netflix. Cheers, though...,” TechRadar senior entertainment reporter and apparent Netflix subscriber Tom Power said on X (formerly Twitter).
@Netflix How can I put this simply? Oh yeah: Fuck you for pretending like you're 'saving' me 35% by eliminating the basic plan and forcing me to either watch adverts or pay 2x as much. I'll just unsubscribe, thanks.
After dominating subscriber counts, Netflix turns to ads
Netflix, like many streaming platforms, has been blunt about getting people to watch its content with commercials because it yields a higher average revenue per user (ARPU). When Netflix announced that it would start killing its cheapest ad-free plan in January, it happily noted that “the ads plan now accounts for 40 percent of all Netflix sign-ups in our ads markets."
Netflix's Q1 2024 earnings report shared this month showed that the streaming firm added more subscribers than expected for the quarter for a total of 269.6 million.
Netflix is also one of the few profitable video streaming services, reporting $2.3 billion in profits in Q1 2024. Its ARPU increased from Q1 2023 ($16.18) to $17.30.
A letter to shareholders dated April 18 reiterated Netflix’s interest in “scaling ads to become a more meaningful contributor to our business in ‘25 and beyond” to drive “additional revenue and profit pools.” Netflix even said it would stop reporting ARPU and subscriber numbers. Ads, whether yearslong subscribers like them or not, are a central part of Netflix's business now.
Fubo cuts 19 channels
Sports streaming service Fubo on Tuesday announced that it cut 19 channels on April 30 because it was unable to reach what it considered a fair deal for these channels with Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).
Here are the networks that Fubo users suddenly lost access to:
American Heroes
Animal Planet
Cooking Channel
Destination America
Discovery Channel
Discovery Life
Discovery Family
Discovery Familia
Discovery en Español
DIY
Food Network
HGTV
Hogar
Investigation Discovery
Motor Trend
OWN
Science
TLC
Travel
In a statement, Fubo claimed it offered WBD "market rate" for the channels but WBD "did not provide any counteroffer and insisted on continuing to offer us above-market rates for its content."
"Fubo views Warner Brothers Discovery's refusal to engage in good faith negotiations as another example of its abuse of massive market power that ultimately limits consumer choice," Fubo said.
WBD responded with a statement of its own, telling The Verge, in part: "We have been and remain ready and willing to work diligently with Fubo to reach a fair market agreement. We proposed an extension of our current agreement, with no changes or price increases, that would allow Fubo to continue carrying these networks, and it is unfortunate that Fubo has decided to alienate their own customers in this way.”
As the companies point fingers, though, the people losing out are viewers, who have not heard of any price drop since Fubo announced it's cutting the above-listed channels from the service. A Fubo representative declined to comment on pricing when reached by Ars Technica.
"That is a LOT of channels to be dropping to not have a corresponding price break, or at least be adding some additional content to compensate," a Reddit user named chrispdx said about Fubo's announcement.
If they aren't carrying the same channels as was agreed when signed up for the service, and not having to pay for WB channels, than they should offset the cost on customers in decreasing the price of the service.
Fubo is worried
Fubo and WBD have had an increasingly contentious relationship. In February, Fubo filed an antitrust suit against WBD, The Walt Disney Company, (which owns ESPN), and Fox Corporation over the trio’s plans to launch a joint sports streaming app.
The lawsuit accuses the proposed app of being "anticompetitive" and would create "insurmountable barriers" that limit consumer choice. The suit accuses the companies of forcing Fubo to license dozens of unwanted channels by bundling them with sports content. A Fubo rep declined to comment on how much losing the 19 WBD channels, which largely seem unrelated to sports, affects Fubo's value proposition.
Fubo ended 2023 with more subscribers than ever, 1.1618 million, and a 29 percent year-over-year increase in North American revenue ($402 million total), with ad revenue specifically growing 14 percent throughout 2023. The company's ARPU also rose in North America to $86.65 in Q4 2023, compared to $75.20 in Q4 2022.
However, Fubo wasn’t profitable last year and strives to be so by 2025. Fubo's antitrust suit details why it thinks WBD, Disney, and Fox's planned joint venture threatens its business. In Fubo’s Q4 2023 earnings call, founder and CEO David Gandler claimed Fubo would "may have been able to break even in 2023" if it didn’t spend an “estimated $200 million-plus" on "content consumers don’t want" before turning to discuss the joint venture that he claimed is "an attempt to monopolize the sports streaming industry and eliminate competition."
Fubo will announce its Q1 2024 earnings on May 3.
Subscribing to a headache
We expected 2024 to bring change to streaming services, perhaps even in the former of mergers and acquisitions, but the speed at which they disrupt their prices and services is enough to give us whiplash.
In a seemingly desperate push, many streaming services seem to prioritize revenue and profits ahead of building the best streaming service for customers. Too often streaming services make negative announcements with nothing positive to balance out the bad news.
We could go on about how this might force people to reconsider their subscriptions, but we should publish before another service makes yet another policy change.
We can now hear one of the largest and most ancient living organisms on Earth whisper with the tremble of a million leaves echoing through its roots.
The forest made of a single tree known as Pando ("I spread" in Latin) has 47,000 stems (all with the same DNA) sprouting from a shared root system over 100 acres (40 hectares) of Utah.
Here, this lone male quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) gradually grew into a massive 6,000 metric tons of life, making it the largest living organism in the world in terms of mass.
After possibly 12,000 years of life on Earth, this massive plant, whose tree-like stems tower up to 24 meters (80 feet), surely has plenty to say. And recordings released this year let us 'hear' it like never before.
"The findings are tantalizing," Lance Oditt, founder of Friends of Pando, said when the project was unveiled in May.
"While it started as art, we see enormous potential for use in science. Wind, converted to vibration (sound) and traveling the root system, could also reveal the inner workings of Pando's vast hidden hydraulic system in a non-destructive manner."
Sound artist Jeff Rice experimentally placed a hydrophone inside a hollow at the base of a branch and threaded it down to the tree's roots, not expecting to hear much.
"Hydrophones don't just need water to work," Rice said. "They can pick up vibrations from surfaces like roots as well, and when I put on my headphones, I was instantly surprised. Something was happening. There was a faint sound."
"What you're hearing, I think, is the sound of millions of leaves in the forest, vibrating the tree and passing down through the branches, down into the earth," Rice explained when he presented his recordings to the 184th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, as reported by The Guardian.
The hydrophone also captured the thumps from tapping on a branch 90 feet away, even though that sound was not audible through the air at that distance. This supports the theory that Pando's root system is interconnected, but a proper experimental setup would be required to confirm the sound wasn't traveling through the soil.
Such shared root systems are common in colonial quaking aspens, but the size and age of Pando make it unique. While quaking aspens can reproduce through seeds, they seldom grow from them as pollination is rare since large aspen stands are usually only one sex, being clones of the same individual.
Friends of Pando invited Rice as an artist in residence to try and better understand this strange, enormous entity. Oditt hopes to use sound to map Pando's tangle of roots.
"The sounds are beautiful and interesting, but from a practical standpoint, natural sounds can be used to document the health of an environment," said Rice. "They are a record of the local biodiversity, and they provide a baseline that can be measured against environmental change."
"Friends of Pando plans to use the data gathered as the basis for additional studies on water movement, how branch arrays are related to one another, insect colonies, and root depth, all of which we know little about today," said Oditt.
Sadly, this magnificent tree is deteriorating, leaving researchers concerned that Pando's days and all the forest life it supports are numbered. Human activities, including clearing and slaughtering predators that keep down herbivore numbers, eat away at this ancient being.
All the more reason to listen to 'The Trembling Giant' while it can still share its secrets.
Roku CEO Anthony Wood disclosed plans to introduce video ads to the Roku OS home screen. The news highlights Roku’s growing focus on advertising and an alarming trend in the streaming industry that sees ads increasingly forced on viewers.
As spotted by The Streamable, during Roku's Q1 2024 earnings call last week, Wood, also the company's founder and chairman, boasted about the Roku OS home screen showing users ads "before they select an app," avoiding the possibility that they don't see any ads during their TV-viewing session. (The user might only use Roku to access a video streaming app for which they have an ad-free subscription.)
Wood also noted future plans to make the Roku home screen even more ad-laden:
On the home screen today, there's the premier video app we call the marquee ad and that ad traditionally has been a static ad. We're going to add video to that ad. So that'll be the first video ad that we add to the home screen. That will be a big change for us.
Wood's comments didn't address the expected impact on the Roku user experience or whether the company thinks this might turn people off its platform. In December, Amazon made a similar move by adding autoplay video ads to the home screen of the Fire OS (which third-party TVs and Amazon-branded Fire TV sets and streaming devices use). Fire OS users who disable the ads' autoplay function will still see ads as "a full-screen slide show of image ads," per AFTVnews. Some users viewed the introduction as an intrusive step that went too far, and Roku may hear the same feedback.
During Roku's earnings call, Wood also said the company is testing "other types of video ad units" and is looking for more ways to bring advertising to the Roku OS home screen.
This comes after recent efforts to expand ad presence on Roku OS, including through new FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) channels and by putting content recommendations on the home screen for the first time, per Wood, who said the personalized content row "will be, obviously, AI-driven recommendations."
"There's lots of ways we're working on enhancing the home screen to make it more valuable to viewers but also increase the monetization on the home screen," he said.
Roku’s revenue rise
Roku saw its average revenue per user (ARPU) drop from $41.03 in Q3 of its 2023 financial year to $39.92 in Q4 2023 (in Q4 2022, the company reported an ARPU of $41.68). Last week, Roku reported that ARPU, a key metric for the streaming industry these days, rose to $40.65 in Q1 2024. Meanwhile, Roku's active account count rose by 1.6 million users from the prior quarter to 81.6 million.
"Roku has a direct relationship with more than 81 million Streaming Households, and we are deepening relationships with third-party platforms, including [demand side platforms], retail media networks, and measurement partners. Our business remains well positioned to capture the billions of dollars in traditional TV ad budgets that will shift to streaming," an April 25 letter to shareholders [PDF] authored by Wood and Roku CFO Dan Jedda reads.
Like many streaming companies, a shift toward ads has resulted in higher revenue potential and user discontent. In its Q1 2024 results, Roku reported that revenue for its Devices business reached $126.5 million, compared to $754.9 for its Platform business, which drives most of its revenue through ad sales, representing a 19 percent year-over-year (YoY) increase. Overall, revenue rose 19 percent YoY to $882 million, and Roku's gross profit grew 15 percent YoY to $388 million.
But growing revenue doesn't equate to an improved user experience. For example, an Accenture survey of 6,000 "global consumers" noted by The Streamable found that 52.2 percent of participants thought that streaming platform-recommended content "did not match their interests." Similarly, an October TiVo survey of 4,500 viewers in the US and Canada ranked "streaming apps / home screen / carousel ads" as the fourth most popular method of content discovery, after word of mouth, commercials aired during other shows, and social media. While Roku is a budget brand associated with more affordable TVs and streaming devices, excessive ads could make people reconsider the true price of these savings.
Despite people's ad aversion, Roku intends to find more ways to drive advertising opportunities. Among those ideas being explored is the ability to show ads over anything plugged into the TV.
I’ve done that in the past going back to MythTV boxes and tuner cards, and may have to again. Also looked at nvidia shield, but they’re getting long in the tooth
Ever since the Defense Department procurement scandals of the 1980s, the $600 hammer has been held up as an icon of Pentagon incompetence. Immortalized in the "Hammer Awards" that Vice President Al Gore's program to reinvent government gives out to waste-cutters, this absurdly overpriced piece of hardware has come to symbolize all that's wrong with the government's financial management.
One problem: "There never was a $600 hammer," said Steven Kelman, public policy professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. It was, he said, "an accounting artifact."
The military bought the hammer, Kelman explained, bundled into one bulk purchase of many different spare parts. But when the contractors allocated their engineering expenses among the individual spare parts on the list-a bookkeeping exercise that had no effect on the price the Pentagon paid overall-they simply treated every item the same. So the hammer, originally $15, picked up the same amount of research and development overhead-$420-as each of the highly technical components, recalled retired procurement official LeRoy Haugh. (Later news stories inflated the $435 figure to $600.)
"The hammer got as much overhead as an engine," Kelman continued, despite the fact that the hammer cost much less than $420 to develop, and the engine cost much more-"but nobody ever said, 'What a great deal the government got on the engine!' "
Thus retold, the legend of the $600 hammer becomes a different kind of cautionary tale. It is no longer about simple, obvious waste. The new moral is that numbers, taken as self-explanatory truths by the public and the press, can in fact be the woefully distorted products of a broken accounting system.
The root of the problem is as old as the Republic: Federal accounting has always been primarily concerned with making sure money was spent as Congress directed-not with making sure it was spent wisely. Historically, explained the Pentagon's deputy chief financial officer, Nelson Toye, DoD's bookkeeping systems were designed to "be able to satisfy the Congress that we were good stewards of the funds entrusted to us: We didn't overspend, we did spend it on what you asked us to, we didn't spend money to buy things you told us we couldn't buy." In the past, Toye said, "there has not been a requirement for DoD or any federal agency to routinely collect the costs of its assets and report those costs."
But a necessary change is under way, said Richard Eckhardt, deputy director of financial management for the Air Force Materiel Command, which does most of that service's shopping. "We've been very good at putting budgets together and writing budget justifications," he noted, "but in an era of declining budgets, we have to understand what our costs are." That means government must borrow business techniques to track the true costs of its activities.
The Air Force Materiel Command, for example, has broken its activities into eight "business areas"-from base upkeep to information systems to flight testing-and assigned to each a general as "chief operating officer." These generals, said Eckhardt, are "in different stages of developing cost-accounting systems"; of devising numerical measures for output (always difficult for the government, which doesn't sell anything); and of experimenting with "activity-based costing," a popular private-sector technique that pulls business processes apart to find the cost of every step.
Bookkeeping based on congressional appropriations makes such cost-finding immensely difficult. Functions that in practice are inextricably intertwined are often paid for by totally separate line items in the budget. New weapons are bought with one "color of money," existing weapons are maintained with another, and the personnel who operate them are paid with a third. In fact, to save administrative costs, military salaries and pensions are all paid from one central office. As a result, said Eckhardt, among commanders "there's a tendency to view military labor as free, because you're not making any expenditures from your installation [budget] to pay those people."
The National Reconnaissance Office, which runs satellites, has an even more confusing payroll: Some of its personnel belong to the CIA, some to various military services, some to the office itself-and each of these contingents is paid with a separate appropriation. The office used to use three incompatible accounting systems, too, but after 1995-96, when investigators found $4 billion languishing unspent in various accounts, it has introduced a unified system, using standard Momentum software from American Management Systems Inc. Vincent Dennis, deputy director for resource oversight and management, crowed that for the first time in the agency's history, "in March of '99, we will have an auditable financial statement." Even so, he admitted, with salaries coming out of three different congressional appropriations, "I'm not at the position where I can allocate those personnel costs."
Personnel is not the only cost arbitrarily broken up by the DoD's line-item budget. Many warships, planes, and other weapons systems depend on critical components-such as radars and anti-missile jammers-that were developed under separate programs financed by separate line items. Whether those subsystems are counted as part of the larger system's cost depends on what the meaning of cost is.
"There are all types of costs," said the Pentagon's Toye, "and people need to be specific when they ask." A Tomahawk cruise missile, the kind that occasionally lands on an Iraqi target, costs about $750,000--if bought new in 1998, now that years of manufacturing experience have driven down the price. Any missile actually fired today, however, was bought at a higher price earlier in the production run, and has been stored, serviced and shipped across the seas, making for a total cost, by some estimates, of nearly $2 million a missile.
Conversely, said defense analyst Loren B. Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a conservative Arlington, Va., think tank, the $2 billion-per-plane figure cited by opponents of the B-2 stealth bomber includes the program's high research and development expenses--which must be spread over only 21 planes--plus spare parts, maintenance and future inflation. Said Thompson: "What would it cost me to build one more bomber? . . . $700 million."
Interpretations, admitted Toye, compound the problem: "It is indeed possible to go into two different program offices, and use the same terminology, and come out with some components in, or some components out, that weren't treated that same way in a different office." In other words, different agencies may apply the same technical definition of cost to the same weapon and come up with different numbers.
Under whatever definition, a weapon's cost rarely reflects the expenses of the headquarters that supervised its development, since those administrative offices are funded under their own line items. And many administrative offices, in turn, depend on support services--such as legal counsel and computer support-that are themselves financed by separate appropriations and are therefore often ignored in computations of a given office's cost of doing business. Unlike the private sector, said the Kennedy School's Kelman, "the government, in its own internal cost accounting, . . . typically doesn't fully account for overhead; sometimes it doesn't account at all for overhead."
"How do you allocate the cost of carrying inventory, for example?" asked John W. Douglass, recently retired assistant Navy secretary for research, development and acquisition. "Generally speaking, the service only pays the price of [buying] the part in their cost models. They don't show the cost of carrying that inventory."
Such accounting arcana are bread-and-butter issues for Douglass now that he heads the Aerospace Industries Association of America Inc., whose members want more military service contracts-which they can win only by showing they can perform a given service at lower cost than the military could do it in-house. But when the public and private sectors compete, said Bert M. Concklin, president of the Professional Services Council, differing accounting standards mean that "the government's costs are elusive, at best."
The Air Force Materiel Command conducts many such competitions, said Eckhardt, and it uses Pentagon and Office of Management and Budget guidelines to "take all those sources of overhead [and] make sure all the costs are included." The OMB's competition guidelines, for instance, start by accepting most federal cost estimates and then add on an estimated overhead rate. But the Pentagon's true overhead "may be more or less than the government rate," fretted Lisa G. Jacobson, director of Defense audits in the accounting and information management division of the General Accounting Office. "DoD's business operation seems to be very inefficient, in general."
Jacobson felt so strongly about Defense's inefficiencies that she took the unusual step of testifying, not as a GAO representative but as a private citizen, before the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board. She was hoping--vainly--to have the board require the Defense Department to report the price it initially pays for any given piece of equipment, implementing a common private-sector standard called "historical cost."
"I don't pretend that we have precise historical costs," said Toye, who represents the Pentagon on the accounting advisory board. "After six years and three months, we are [free to discard] records [of particular purchases]. But in terms of meaningful cost information, reasonable cost information, I believe we have that."
"I don't know how Nelson Toye can give you that data [on cost information]," complained one Senate aide. In an investigation of military books, he said, "we couldn't find most of the records"--not just records of transactions more than six years and three months old, but "of things that were just paid, or of things that hadn't been paid yet." And if the basic records are in such disarray--if the Pentagon cannot even account for the true cost of a hammer--then, critics warn, any attempt to install sophisticated commercial accounting will be a castle built on sand.
"I would disagree," countered Toye, "with the statement that there isn't hard, actual, auditable data out there. I believe it's there [even if] the department may not be able to summarize that and report it in ways that individuals want us to." The problem for the Pentagon is that those "individuals" of Toye's are the citizens.