Blog Torrent and TiVo for the Internet

Chris Holland writes "On the heels of the recent launch of the preview release of Downhill Battle's Blog Torrent, Nicholas Reville further articulates his vision of a "TiVo for the Internet" in an interview by James Enck for The Broadband Daily. Nicholas touches on the P2P promise, various players, revenue models, and the healthy challenges coming Big Media's way."

Comments

This is already being done

[digThisXL]

It's called ReplayTV + Poopli

ReplayTV DVR: http://www.digitalnetworksna.com/replaytv/default. asp

Poopli Recordings Free Swapping Service: http://www.poopli.com

Karma whore, comin' thru!

[Anonymous Coward]

mirror here

Archive.org

[Anonymous Coward]

I find archive.org is Tivo for the internet, its great to find drivers from old companies that have gone out of business.

Its just a shame they dont combine google+archive, now that would rock!

slashdotted but link on mirrordot

[randalx]

The site seems to be slashdotted. you can still read the article here.

This mirrordot.org site seems to be doing the trick really well. Is this sanctioned by Slashdot? Anybody know if slashdotted sites are okay with this. Just wondering as I haven't seen a discussion on this service yet.

Not "Tivo for the internet"

[Em Ellel]

Tivo for the internet was just a bad way to phrase it - it is more of "tivo on demand via internet" type of thing. They are talking about being able to download and watch what you choose rather than record it from tv. It *should* be the furture, but we are talking bypassing channels, distribution chains, advertizing, cable/satellite providers, etc. So too many people stand to loose too much money to allow this to happend. So I am not holding my breath. That being said, I would be willing to pay $1 per episode for shows I watch if I get the show without commercials on my terms (a.k.a. Tivo-esque interface, ability to store for future playback, etc)

-Em

Re:Not "Tivo for the internet"

[arasinen]

$1 per episode is the part that is going to trip any of this up.

I'm not sure. I've thought about TV distribution via Internet for a few weeks now. During that time I've also compiled some statistics about how much shows cost.

In the USA practically every show I studied remained under 50 cents per episode per viewer household. The most popular shows were also the most expensive, but the prices seem to go hand in hand. I couldn't find a single show that cost over a dollar per episode. (ER might have, but I didn't find reliable data on the budget.)

That's just the US population. Factor in the rest of the world. Canada+Mexico = 130 million people ie. half of the US market. EU = over 300 million ie. bigger than the US market. If a series has only a few hundreds of thousands of viewers globally, it probably doesn't have a huge budget either. (It's hard to see how such a series would survive today.)

Amazingly this applies in other countries as well. The Finnish TV shows I examined cost less than one euro per viewer. I'd really like to do a more comprehensive study some day to confirm that the scheme might work.

Re:Not "Tivo for the internet"

[Soulslayer]

1 Neilsen point is approximately 1 million viewers. An expensive genre TV show (like Star Trek: TNG at 1.5 million an episode in the late 80's through mid 90's) averaged around 10 points per first run episode. Or approximately 10 million viewers. If those viewers all purchased your program at $1 a show you are talking about revenue on the order of 6.7 times the cost of the show. And a yearly haul of over 200 million (net).

According to a November 1992 issue of "California Business" article, Paramount's annual first-run TNG gross advertising revenues are about $90 million, with production costs in the $31.2-$36.4 million range. Net annual advertising profits are between $30 and $60 millionA, without even counting the $70 million+ in licensing and affiliate station fees.

This would suggest that if even half of the TNG audience had tuned in at $1 an episode Paramount would have made more than it did through traditional advertising revenue.

And there is a middle ground between no advertisements and the deluge we are subjected to today. Use of lead in and out "sponsor" style advertising (like you see with more expensive PBS programming like NOVA nowadays) can still generate significant additional revenue.

Wrong preposition

[michaelmalak]

I thought the same thing too when I read "TiVo for the Internet." Nicholas Reville evidently used the wrong preposition. He meant to say "TiVo on the Internet."

What's really confusing is that Nicholas envisions peer-to-peer video authoring and sharing -- like video blogs, but not shared on the web (because that would require too much server bandwidth) but rather shared as a Torrent. The word "TiVo" does not capture the aspect of independent authoring -- "TiVo" implies time-shifting Big Media.

So, Nicholas, the appropriate elevator soundbit would be, "P2P video blogs".