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The Napsterization of TV
Lefty writes "This article in today's Boston Globe talks about the napsterization of TV shows and how the PC as a media server is going to make it happen. Burning TV shows to CD/DVD, e-mailing your friends TV shows, streaming TV over the Internet -- all things the dedicated set-top boxes can't do... The article talks about Snapstream, a PVR competitor to Moxi and ReplayTV, that runs on the PC and has media server capabilities. from the article: "Already you can find a great deal of pirated video material online. If SnapStream gets installed on millions of PCs, there'll be plenty more. And the TV moguls will find themselves knee deep in the digital acid bath.""
until kazaa stopped my linux client from working. I was d/ling whole series of television shows that I want to watch, but either 1) don't get the channel or 2) simply can't catch the episodes in the right order through syndication/reruns. That includes Farscape, Red Dwarf, Stargate SG-1, Dark Angel, and others. And the best part was, *every* episode was out there. Now, however, I'm a junkie in search of a fix. I broke down and started installing all the windows p2p stuff on my kids computer, but can't find a single decent replacement to kza.
Morpheus (supposedly the same thing) comes back with much fewer hits than was I was getting, and the connection seems to be worse (dropouts, "connecting" hangs, etc). winmx seems decent, but there is either no results, or the one person that has it is queued up to 11 or 12. Any given gnutella client (bearshare, etc) is plagued with the normal gnutella problems (large bandwidth usage, slow searching, limited results). Jumping on irc (dalnet) is almost useless, as the queues are jam-packed, and you have to sit there all day, just to get in a queue 20 people long. Am I missing something? I'm obviously not the only person interested in getting tv shows off the 'net (the point of the article), so there has to be a resource out there that I'm missing. What is it? And (please oh please), let there be a command-line linux client!! The ability to start screen, kick off a session of kza, go to work, check in on the progress, add some other things, go home, check up on it again, redo some searches, back and forth, was priceless. Bring back kza! Please!
/whine mode off....
The main damage the television networks suffer from the 'Napsterization of TV' is the commercial time. Most of the TV shows you find on programs like Morpheus have the commercials edited out. I can only speculate on the reasoning, but my guess is that they are edited out to make the download time shorter.
How could Television networks fight this? It's simple: Provide streaming content from their website. Let's say that UPN provided a streaming version of Enterprise, for example. They could release it 24 hours after the show is initially aired. (This way, the original broadcast still has commercial/timeslot value) The requirement is that I have to fill out information about myself so they can target ads to me. Then, what they do, is when the server streams down the show, it inserts in ads targeted to my demographic at the same time that the original broadcast aird commercials.
This provides an interesting new twist to the Ad model. Not only is the demographic more far reaching, but it's no longer tied to a time-slot. If somebody discovers Enterprise 2 years into the show's run, they'll likely go back and watch the first episodes to get up to speed. This means that those commercials get aired again.
Current streaming technologies require several seconds of buffering, so it isn't worth trying to skip past them. And since I can start watching immediately, I have no need or desire to get them on a file sharing program.
With this model, not only could the networks minimize 'damage' done by these programs, but they'd also provide a potentially profitable service that works even better.
Heck, if they wanted to make even more money off it, they could charge a $2 fee to see an even higher quality stream of the video, or something like that. I wouldn't care about that for the Drew Carrey show, but I'd likely pay that to see a higher quality version of Enterprise since the sets and effects are so much more interesting to look at.
"Derp de derp."
Well, it's a matter of a long time. For one thing, the bandwidth and playback needs of TV are far higher than those necessary for Napster to take off. Traded MP3s sound decent to most listeners, and are small enough to be shared easily over a LAN, and painfully over a 56K. Warez enthusiasts may share video today, but it's too slow and far too low quality to be a competitor to TV and movies.
For another thing, part of the ritual of television is that it's tied to time. I'll sit in front of my TV on Monday evening and watch football but would never think of downloading a Falcons-Buccaneers game from 1994 to watch on a Wednesday night.
Besides, television is free, and there's already far more of it than anyone could watch. Are fans going to hoard Futurama or Bullwinkle episodes? Sure. Will that make a dent in serious TV watching? Not in this decade.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
By the time you get done editing the commercials out of a 2 hour TV show -- you will finally feel like you are getting your money's worth out of that new Athlon :) In other words: It takes a steady hand and a little patience and alot of spare time to make these edits. (and then more time to Archive to CD) Some people may get off on this kind of stuff -- but after about 5 episodes of the Simpsons and another handful of Seinfield and Threes Company -- I was burned out -- and my fingers hurt...)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
>But, the same thing can happen to TV now if it all goes free
I seem to recall a strange time... I think they called it the "60's" "70's" or "early 80's", I can't remember which. At that time all TV was free to anyone.
I don't recall this being seen as a serious impediment to making money, however. I'm sure there were different economic forces at play then. Like giving the people what they want and then they'll watch the ads. You know, like ads that aren't so loud you wear out the mute button, or so long you can make a pizza while you wait for them to end, or so obnoxious you turn to another station each time they advertise the latest in feminine hygiene problems? And programs that are popular, action packed, and varied, like A-Team, Airwolf, Mission Impossible, and MacGyver; in contrast to being nothing more than offensive standard grade pablum, like AllyMcBeal or [insert latest crappy sitcom ripoff where some lame ass actor comes out of the closet here] or [insert stupid show where everyone risks their life for a crappy prize] or [insert latest "real life" TV show]? I seem to recall that at this time music video station showed (gasp!) music videos! And that 2 hour movies weren't cut to 1 hour!
>Hey, who needs cable? You can just get stuff off the 'net.
Who needs cable indeed? My BUD dish picks up all sorts of commercial free wildfeeds (makes Enterprise worth watching!) 100% legally. My 40 ft. offair antenna picks up the other 50% of programming worth watching. And you legally can watch DirecTV for free in Canada, for the 1 or 2 stations that you just can't get (period -- they aren't on Canadian satellite, or Canadian satellite only offers an inferior version -- thanks CRTC!).
I haven't paid for programming in months, and I've been doing it legally. I even get the same selection of programming that most in North America enjoy, probably more (I get the Nasa channel...). Not that it matters much, because I won't be watching a big name network TV show at all this week (they put the SuperBowl on instead... I guess that is actually popular, though, so I can't complain too much about that). Maybe I'm just living in a time bubble where TV doesn't suck?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
It's a clever idea, but the affiliates also make money off the shows.
Example: A certain number of spots are reserved for the local affiliates, who sell them to whoever, often its local businesses like the car dealership. There are some businesses that actually go around buying local time in large regions for regional products or for companies that want to be more discriminating about their media buys.
Anyway, the point is that UPN couldn't stream the content to end users without pissing off affiliates -- this is part of the reason that its taken so long to get networks on satellite dishes and why you can't get, say, LA affiliates if you live in Minnesota.
They may be able to do something that compensates the local affiliate for the spot views they lose, but it'd be complex math as the value of the spot time is directly related to the Nielsen/Arbitron numbers they get for that show. Ideally they would just show you the local spots, but that would be really complicated (insuring that all stations sent digital versions of their local spots for merging into the stream, etc). Another way may be to do a national spot and divide the revenue by the number of local station regions that had streamed viewers.