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

Tivo For The Internet?

[wcitechnologies]

Your cache?

Karma whore, comin' thru!

[Anonymous Coward]

mirror here

Maybe Slashdot needs it

[Anonymous Coward]

I keep getting 503 errors.

Up next...

[TheFlyingGoat]

- refridgerator for the Internet
- shoehorn for the Internet
- cable box for the Internet
- "Pure Funk" cd for the Internet

A Tivo for the Internet is about as useful as the above. Use your browser cache, IM history, email storage options, etc.

Re:Up next...

[Woogiemonger]

A Tivo for the Internet is about as useful as the above. Use your browser cache, IM history, email storage options, etc.

Well, Tivo doesn't merely record TV shows. It also finds shows you might be interested in and takes the liberty to grab those. So what this Tivo for the internet could do is basically watch what sites you visit, and if you accidentally click on a kiddie porn link, it brands you as a pedophile and helps you get arrested. I, for one, would feel completely safe using it :)

Already there

[The Ape With No Name]

You should see what Micah Beck is doing with IBP. Can anyone say "Distributed PVR?"

My mom the haxx0r

[Big Yak]

I'm continually suprised at how many people are jumping on the .torrent and eMule bandwagon. Over Thanksgiving, my mother (not a techno-elite) told me that she had a secret... and was pirating Audio Books off the internet using such tools. It completely blew my mind that my mom though of herself as a "hacker" and loved the idea.
What ever happened to the days when my family couldn't even understand the basics of web pages? I guess that when the tools are so incredibly useful, and so easy to install/operate, it quickly becomes a prevalent technology.

Re:My mom the haxx0r

[nadadogg]

The day my mom mentions using bittorrent, I'm going to shed a tear in joy. She's barely email-capable now, that kinda change would be like a paradigm shift without a clutch!

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?

Re:tivo for the internet, and blog torrent

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Yes, but everybody else probably realises that downloading TV shows via bittorrent is theft, no different than stealing someones purse on the street, do you do that as well?

Bah, humbug.

In a regular purse-snatching, you get to have a purse, the wallet within with the pention money, a set of dentures and some arthritis medications and of course you get to leave the old lady in tears on the sidewalk (bonus points for knocking the walker over). In the bittorrent "purse snatching" you get no such benefits. You get the purse and for some strange reason the lady gets to keep it too. Where is the fun for us villanious thieves in this?

Bittorrent already does this?

[bbeebe]

FTA: We ultimately want to see internet TV Channels that download video in the background and let you watch at your convenience (a TiVo for the internet).

Why do you need internet channels when there's a perfectly legimate tv network already in place? I use Azureus as my Bittorrent client with a plugin to import any torrents from an RSS feed that match my criteria. Although I've never actually used TiVo I think the basic premise is the same, record the shows you want automatically and watch them whenever you have time.

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.

1 comment and /.ed

[JemalCole]

No google cache of this one - whoese browser cache can we use as a tivo for this web page?

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!)

content creators

[maskatron]

I like the fact that they are trying to make p2p easier for content creators. Once this has been done and a quality filtering process has been established...look out TV. I agree that something like this could make a dent in TV. Not overnight, of course, but the impact will be felt over the next few years.

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"

[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.

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".