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

Tivo For The Internet?

[wcitechnologies]

Your cache?

tivo for the internet, and blog torrent

[Prophetic_Truth]

looking at the title, doesn't it dawn on everyone that TV episodes are already widely available via torrents?

TiVo is essentially a buffer

[YetAnotherName]

So a TiVo for the Internet would be ... a buffer? That's it?

OK, so you could "go back in time" and see how a web page changes over time. To do that for every web page is going to take quite a bit of storage. And I think the folks at The Wayback Machine do a pretty good job.

You could also schedule web pages to be "recorded" so you won't miss them when you're out? Huh? I suppose if you wanted to read yesterday's edition of the online New York Times it might be handy, but online periodicals already have online archives.

TiVo makes sense for TV since it's a streamed medium. We don't need TiVo for blogs, webpages, Usenet, and so forth. (A TiVo plugin for iTunes would be nice, though!)

Re:Not "Tivo for the internet"

[MrAndrews]

$1 per episode is the part that is going to trip any of this up. Let's say we can take for granted something like the "long tail" and say that WORLDWIDE, there are hundreds of thousands of fans of a particular show. Let's say that every single one of those (let's call it 500,000) pays $1 to view an episode. That means that the content creator is earning $500,000 for the episode. An average episode of an average show costs far more than $500,000. In some cases, that's hardly a dent in the salary of a big star (which would be part of why you'd be inclined to pay for the episode in the first place). In other words, each episode is almost guaranteed to work in the red. Loss of traction there.

Now the arguent can go that we'll have online purchasing plus regular TV broadcasting of a show (with advertising as usual), which should give you the best of both worlds. But truthfully, would you bother buying an episode if you could watch it on your big screen TV for "free"? So let's say that half of the potential viewers would rather watch it on NBC than downloading it for $1. Now you have $250,000 earned, and all of a sudden the online distribution method is looking truly useless.

So to fight that, to get traction, you raise the price of a download to $5. That means off those same 500,000, you're now earning $1.5M. Woo! But still, not that much. Plus, no one is going to buy an episode for $5. That'd be something like $130 for a show in a year! Buy the boxed DVD at the end of the season and you're doing better (plus special features). So the show would never take off. Dead in the water.

Really, broadcasting has an iron grip on the "TV" world. You can't effectively distribute a series if you make people pay for each episode. The system that governs TV right now works too well --- especially with things like DVDs and Tivo added to the mix --- and no one will try anything new because there isn't as much profit in it.

I'm not saying I don't agree with your sentiment. I would love to be able to buy episodes like that, too... but there's no good way to transition from what we have to what we want, and there's no good reason for anyone to even try.