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Network TV Downloadable Via iTunes
IconBasedIdea writes "Dallas Mavericks owner
and opinionated media entrepreneur Mark
Cuban blogs
about Walt Disney cheese Robert
Iger, and his recent deal with iTunes to allow TV episodes to become available for purchase and download. Granted, it was only a matter of
time, but someone had to go first, and it is apparently ABC. Could this help
niche shows stay alive longer? Will it kill traditional TV ads, long
on the downswing of effectiveness? Will we end up eventually paying
(or stealing) all of our future programming?"
let history be the judge
The resolution's going to have to be a lot higher than whatever an Ipod screen is, before I'll bother downloading to watch on my television.
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This is great but the only problem is the DRM means the content will be perminantly restricted. After some time it should become the property of the people, even when (if) the copyright expires the DRM still lingers controlling what you can do with the files.
:(
I dont buy itunes music for the same reason
I believe this to be a major milestone in the way we view entertainment - more significant then even the mainstream growth of PVRs. This is the first step in a whole new direction for the industry as a whole, 5-7 years down the road I strongly believe that the average American will pay for what they watch, not for a given channel. This will also have a major effect on television advertising - where do ads fit into this new model?
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
are they really serious about this? I mean the psp has better video capabilities and I still wouldn't use it to watch anything other than something mildly interesting.
did you forget to take your meds?
The loss of traditional TV ads might mean they have to actually focus on the quality of the programming... Of course, instead I will end up with commercials on my iPod.
Greatness. It comes in many forms, sometimes it comes in the form of sacrifice - that's the loneliest form.
I want that garbage traveling around with me, in my pocket!
Look out! I can watch "Just Shoot Me" and "America's Top Model" anywhere!
I pay good money to hide from this stuff.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
It's only five shows, "Lost", "Desperate Housewives", "Night Stalker" and two kids' shows, and it's $2 per episode... Is it just me or is it only available for iTunes muisc store customers who are in the USA?!
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
You will get the straight network feed recorded with network commercials and blank spaces for local commercials to be filled in. Or, all "network commercials" and no blank spaces. But the shows will still be cut and have the same running time - 30 or 60 minutes.
This will in the end just force advertisers to be more watchful and probably restrict their TV ad buying. This will mean less shows get made.
Alternatively, if you want to watch a remix/parody of current shows with a voice-over by some teenager who thinks his smutty remarks are the height of comedy, you will have lots and lots of that stuff to choose from. And some of it might even seem "professionally done".
And, of course, thanks to the pirates, it will all be free. You could pay, if you feel guilty, but why? Nobody else is.
So... does this mean that those people trading and sharing TV eps can no longer claim "they're free! how can you steal free stuff?"?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Free nightly news on iTunes, right after, or during the broadcast on the TV set. That to me, would be what puts the nail in the coffen for TV. But I don't expect that to happen. Reason I say free is because it has always been free. The people that have the bunny ears for their TV I think can still get ABC/NBC/Fox and watch the news for free. I know some people are going to jump on me and say news papers are not free, but you are mainly paying for the paper, and the opion parts of the paper, not the news part. Plus the newspaper has ads to help pay for its production. As for adds in the nightly news broadcasts on iTunes, I could deal with, as long as they are free downloads.
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We all know why Steve wants this so much, don't we? Many people don't have a broadband connection at the moment, so he first starts with music video's and TV programs, aimed at the tech-savvy adolescent market. They will soon want more, but by offering this low resolution video's Apple can get a feeling for the demand, as well as the technical problems they have to solve before taking the next step. Next step is higher resolution, and I will not be surprised if we can download Finding Nemo in DVD quality before 2006 is out.
One other thing: what I find amazing is that apparently the RIAA finds 1.99 for whatever music video a good price, and different prices for more popular video's were not mentioned.
-- Cheers!
At first i was very excited about this, but as soon as i realized a few things my enthusiasm quickly died down (i was thinking more for watching on a computer than an ipod). First the resolution is only QVGA, a quarter of VGA, not even analog TV standard. Second I started doing the math and realized that if i watch a reasonable amount of TV i am better off with cable or something similar and a PVR or TV tuner card. Hopefully though i would like to see this progress. It is still a big first step forward.
Jobs partnered with Disney in order to get some other things developed and Disney jammed their bullshit ABC televsion lineup down his throat in the bargain.
It's going to change/steal all of our future programming!
WTF?
The reason the programming exists in the first place is because there is demand for it. The fact that it's now being shown through a different medium is irrelevant to that demand.
And where there is demand, someone will find a way to make money off supplying that demand. Just simple economics.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
People seem to want to own copies of programming and are willing to pay to do so. Look at the large market in DVDs of television programs, some of which are heavily syndicated and aired frequently (like Seinfeld and Friends -- they never seem to be off-air). A downloadable version of programs is the next logical step. When the video iPods were released I forsaw this exact scenario. The use of iTunes will help this along, since there is brand recognition and folks will 'trust' the source and be willing to download it.
This could eventually spell disaster for marketing in the traditional sense but not for a while. I don't expect consumers will tolerate downloads thatr have ads embedded since they are paying a proce for that content. However, there will still be a demand for live-to-air programming for a long time. I can't imagine downloading the SuperBowl and watching it after the fact. Things like this will preserve television in its current form (or thereabouts) for the foreseeable future, I think.
However, I have to say, being able to download Lost and watch it at my convenience is a very tempting propect.
PVRs are poised to change TV quicker than podcasting. Per the article blurb above advertising on TV will have to change as PVRs allow users to skip over commercials easily. mythtv has changed the way a lot of people view TV. Personally I rarely watch "live" TV anymore, I much prefer to record a show, commercial flag it, and watch it when I want to watch it with the added benefit of not having to watch any commercials.
What I find particularly funny is that the ads on TV have started to mirror the spam in email, they all seem to be pushing viagra and variants. The PVR will allow users to reclaim thier TVs just like spamassassin allowed us to reclaim our email systems.
As to selling shows over the Internet, it may have a niche market, realizing you only need a small percentage of Internet users to make a reasonable profit. But to appeal to the widest possible audience such distribution of shows will need to be bundled with the cost of Internet access in some way as part of the $40/month this most cable services charge for access.
The problem is one of perceived value. Desparate Housewives, Season 1 costs $38 on DVD on Amazon. It's enhanced for widescreen which means it is encoded at 720x480 (some of which may not be used due to matting). The same content available from the Apple Music store is $35 for a 320x240 cropped version. The DVDs also come with a 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound. Unless you desparately, need to watch the show right now, it's a much, much better deal to just order the DVDs.
If you wanted, there are ways to rip said DVDs into a format playable on the iPod.
Even better, you could record the magnificent 1920x1080 interlaced MPEG-2 widescreen broadcast every Sunday going forward, it'll take up 10GBs of space which at today's hard drive prices is around $2.50 of space, and if you buy your tuner card before the broadcast flag gets rammed through there will be zero DRM encumbrances.
The value you are getting is: it's already pre-ripped and encoded for your video iPod. You can get yesterday's show for a semi-reasonable price. So this is good for people who just want to catch up with their stories and don't want to wait for the DVD. I'd be happy to get Curb Your Enthusiasm this way so I could cancel my HBO subscription. It'd save me a ton of money over the course of a year. (Don't tell HBO).
...for both parties.
Advertisements in their current form are different than they were 10 years ago. They're tested at regular speed and fast speed. Thought is given to logo placement early before one can click skip.
Yet the distributor doesn't care who pays, as long as someone does. iTunes should consider a survey ad system for buying points. Watch a 60 second ad, answer 5 questions, earn 50 points to use for purchase.
Also, piracy is counterproductive for true fans. If Firefly 2.0 gets on SciFi and 80% of you bootleg it, don't expect a third season. I'll never understand the people here who complain about lack of good content yet have 3000 songs from Limewire.
In the long run, offering multiple acquisition options makes sense. I'll pay a subscription for content I like. I'll pay extra for HD and DD. I'll pay extra for bloopers and outtakes, and maybe for getting it a few days earlier.
Content control doesn't bother me. As long as I can watch it on my TVs at home and on my PDA unlimited times, I'm fine with DRM. Shows requiring deletion after a week I just won't watch.
iTunes won't kill the networks. Freedom of choice will kill those unavoidable to provide what the market wants.
Until government regulates iTunes to protect the networks.
I know, its only going to be at 128x128, but I'd take Firefly any way I could get it. As the blurb said, if shows which deserve a wide viewing manage to hang on this way, then they stand a better chance of catching the imagination of a larger audience.
I never saw Firefly when it was on tv over here (Ireland), but I heard/read the buzz about it from the States on the Internet. If I could have downloaded it legally and had it on my iPod, I would have ranted about how great it was to all my friends (as I did when I eventually saw it on TV). I think a lot of people would be the same.
Will it kill traditional TV ads...?
Did DVD rentals kill ads? No. You actually *pay* to watch ads these days, as anyone whose ever rental a DVD at Blockbuster can tell you. Not only will you pay to download a show, but that show *will* contain ads. Whether at the beginning or in the middle (never at the end), there will be ads in the shows you pay for. It's like death, taxes, and Madonna. It's inevitable.
I hope this is a way to get a subscription for Red vs. Blue or any of the number of independent serials that will be available.
I am sure that this will have a greater impact on video than it had on music. - as far as dividing up the money pie.
Added Pressly: "Oh, and by the way, milk is nothing but liquid meat."
Why bother? Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
There are some channels where I'll pay to not have commercials and some where I won't.
Ideally, it should be a choice on every channel. For example, to keep the times in sync they could offer a more expensive alternate channel where all of the commercials are pushed to the end of the time slot and the show is shown commercial free followed by the same set of commercials.
I've not watched a single show on TV for years... Not because I'm repulsed by commercials per se, but because I don't usually want to wait for a show or movie to come on. With broadband, it's possible to stream medium (400kbps) to high (1000+ kbps) content on demand. I wouldn't mind streaming an episode of a show I want to watch, commercials and all, if it were free and easy to access (i.e. I would not have to wait an hour for BT to find seeds or for newsgroups to download and unpack the avi file.) If I could watch an episode of south park by going to www.tv.com/southpark and choosing an episode, I wouldn't mind having 10 mins of commercials before it plays, as long as I do not have to watch them during the show. This would make the show the ad revenue it needs to make money, and would not tie me down to "wait until 8pm, watch 5 mins of the show then 5 mins of commercials" etc.
As for paying for shows (I imagine something like $3-5 a pop), I wouldn't want to do that. If they offered a single-play, $0.50-$0.99, commercial-free licence, I wouldn't mind. But knowing the MPAA, they're probably going to want something like $2-4 per episode for a single-play licence. I'd rather download a season overnight.
The idea behind this is good, but as it is the custom of these things, I suppose it will be overpriced, low-quality, and will probably still play a commercial or two before the show. I don't think this will ever fly well in competition with free alternatives such as BitTorrent.
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
So if the RIAA sues for the music. The MPAA for the movies... Who's going to be doing the suing for the television industry? Is there a four letter acronym that we can expect to see future headlines for?
"Could this help niche shows stay alive longer?"
Maybe. A show like Firefly or Birds Of Prey that would normally draw a very limited audience and get tossed from broadcast TV quickly. Maybe this as a distribution model may keep these shows alive longer. But I don't know if that's enough to convince the PHB's that make these decisions.
"Will it kill traditional TV ads"
Yes. But they'll just pay for product placements. Problem solved.
"Will we end up eventually paying (or stealing) all of our future programming?"
Yes if the price is right (or the shows show up quickly enough on BitTorrent).
BTW, Mark Cuban was behind Broadcast.com and I think that there's a bit of self interest behind his thoughts.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Interesting stuff, granted it is off topic but interesting none the less.
So Fox owns the broadcasting rights to the show, but do they own the downloading rights?
Would this allow a producer to make a show, throw it on iTunes for $2 an episode, and then just continue to produce as long as they're making money? Sounds like a good way for fans to rescue worthwhile shows that are cancelled in place of "Who's Your Daddy" and the like.
As someone who regularly buys tv series of a few shows that I enjoy, I would be willing to buy said content based on a few peices of criteria.
1. it would have to be available in multiple size/screen resolutions - atleast the basics, and be availble in its original format.
2. the content (even if drm crippled) would have to allow me to watch any resolution show as many times as I wanted, still based solely on the first purchase (I buy a DVD, and I encode it to any resolution I want today, and maybe tomorrow, and perhaps again in three months when I've lost the first encode)
3. the content would have to be reasonably priced. I figure I pay somewhere between $30 and $40 for a complete season of episodes, depending on the show. Break that down between ~10 episodes, and I'm looking at roughly $3-$4/episode. If I am going to purchase a single show, commercial free, it would have to be comparable to this price.
4. the license and/or use of said content would have to be transferable. If I decide that I want to sell my copy of said content/media and relinquish my rights to it, I ought to be able.
I'm not a freak when it comes to DRM. I am all for fair use, and I truly believe the media companies ought to have some say in how their contents is distributed, as long as it is within the confines of fair use, I'm for it. If I buy a DVD, and decided that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be, I will either sell it to CDMax (or other retail chain) or sell/give to a friend. The same should apply for media purchased online.
Thats about all I can think of at the moment. Perhaps overly simplistic, but I'm looking at the lowest requirments. I would prefer that the media be playable on alternative OS' , but it would not be a requirement.
Harryk
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
The TV industry would get more business from me if I were able to purchase certain episodes. I don't have cable, because a) most of what I watch is broadcast b) the only other channels I *would* watch would be sci-fi/cartoon network/history channel. I don't want to have to pay for all that other crap. So, for the time being, I just use an antenna. So I don't get any sci-fi channel. But, if they sold TV episodes, I would likely buy some of them.
As most places have picked up on, the shows don't include the commercials. However, that's not saying they won't some time in the future.
It would have been nice if apple linked up w/ google video... or if only google had a gPod.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Episodes of the NPR show Cartalk was $3.95. I used to buy a lot of episodes. I'm a sucker for that show. Then the price was raised to $5.95 (or something like that) and then it just crossed over to not being worth it for me. $3.95 was rather expensive to begin with.
Comparing the price of a song with a TV show such as desperate housewives is a bit apples and oranges. But comparing a one hour radio show with a one hour TV show isn't. At least in my mind.
A TV show for $1.99 is worth more than a $5.95 radio show generally speaking. I hope that this will help push Cartalk down to $1.99 or even below.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
I read an article discussing the future of on-demand cable programming and the future of commercials. The article stated that on a regular TV show (IE NOT the super bowl, or big event etc..) the average was 1 penny per viewer per commercial based on the Neilson ratings. If the average TV show has 24-30 commercials per hour show and my wife and I watch the show together then we are looking at about 60 cents per show the producing channel makes in profits. I am very keen on the idea of paying 60 cents per show to never see another commercial, if the TV companies get the money they want, and I get the show sans commercials I want, it is a win-win unless you are a advertiser. $2.00 for a show at iTunes resolution is not a great deal, but if cable companies or iTunes step-up and tell ABC that they will charge a rate closer to the advertising rate then people would swarm to it. I am not suggesting they force payments on every viewer, but if they had a on-demand system or web system that let me purchase shows without commercials I could decide if I wanted to watch Free-ABC or Commercial-Free-ABC.
Just my 2 commercials worth of ideas.
Spacecase
The big deal with iTMS was that they got so many major record labels to sell music online. They convinced the labels that their DRM was good enough (far from perfect, but good enough that it's easier to post the rip from a CD) and so the iTMS catalog is enormous, with major-label content.
Now they've got a deal with one of the networks to sell TV shows. I wonder if they're planning to go from there to the rest of the networks. And then to a set-top box hooked into the Internet. It would be like a combination of a TiVo and video on demand: you don't have to set it in advance but it plays regular broadcast TV rather than movies.
Slashdotters will probably swear up and down that it's overpriced and they'd never pay that much for DRM content. $2 a pop is kind of pricey, given that you're used to getting it for free with your cable/satellite bill. If you're the sort of person who watches the TV every night from 8 until 11 then you're going to spend a lot this way.
But I wonder if such a thing might just work. It's like the ultimate a la carte. I got rid of cable because I was too busy to watch TV, but there are a few shows I miss and I'd happily watch $10 or even $20 a month worth of TV to have it come in commercial-free and on my own schedule.
This gets really complicated. As with music, there are many independent content producers who would love to use this to bypass the networks entirely. When 24 came out on DVD it was said that this was what they were really selling, and that the TV broadcasts were just advertisements for those DVDs. I wouldn't go that far, but it really does bring up a whole new avenue for artists to produce content (in this case, short-format video), get it to audiences, and pay for it.
I'm getting way ahead of myself. Apple's next step would be to secure agreements with the other networks (and to get the rest of ABC's programming.) But if Apple starts sending out mysterious postcards again some time next year it wouldn't surprise me to discover that they're hinting at a new iPod that you leave at home.
Here's my take on TV shows on any downloadable, pay medium. When it comes to television shows that are available on broadcast airwaves (like ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, not like HBO, SpikeTV or those), then you should not be required to pay for the content. You can put up an antenna for free and get the shows, therefore downloading them should in no way be seen as illegal. This hasn't come up in court (that I am aware of), but with my understanding of broadcast law, I see no way you could get into trouble for it. So, with iTunes charging $2 a show, which is all well and good, I will continue to download torrents of my shows for free. It's just another form of time/space shifting of the freely available content. Quality of the download vs. broadcast isn't even a point of contention, especially given HDTV broadcast signals.
It's not even cable TV quality. They downgraded it from what your VCR or TiVo would record...
(tv=500 vertical lines of resolution)
-everphilski-
It's an OK deal really. Provide the content for free and pay for its creation with advertisements. If we had to pay directly for content creation, what would our cable bill look like? The problem has been the creation of an inequity in the deal. More and more time going to commercials, and lower and lower quality of content.
Personally, I'd prefer it if the downloads were free and came with commercials. Perhaps you could be given a choice of commercials to be auto-inserted upon download. That way, the commercials in a sense become part of the content and provide advertisers an incentive to create more engaging commercials. Sure someone could strip out the commercials and provide a torrent link for divx...but why go through the hassle? Why download the file from an untrusted source for that matter?
The summary aludes to it, and no I didn't RTFA, but you also have to wonder what would have happened to shows like Enterprise or Firefly that had loyal fans willing to pay for that content. I really liked Firefly, but I'm not willing to pay $1.99 and episode for any show.
Anyway, just my $0.02
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
(How come when you need moderator points, you had them two days ago, but not now?)
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"Sufferin' succotash."
iTunes could be extended to allow people to burn the content they buy as a DVD. Imagine being able to pay $3-$5/episode for something like Firefly. That would probably be enough to really fuel the success of such a project. With technology what it is today, Apple could easily offer a service where they let people burn that content to DVD thus destroying the rental market and making a new alternative to downloading movies possible.
This technology if taken to its fullest potential could be what truly expands the movie industry for the next decade or more. If they work with Apple to create an alternative payment processing system that takes a fee of only $0.05-$0.20 per transaction the amount of money they could make on selling eventually a full length movie for $7.00-$8.00 on iTunes would be amazing and would allow them to undercut their hated ally Wal-Mart.
Btw, my dad bought one of those portable TVs back in the 80s and if you have ever seen one, you know why it was a failure. The display sucked and the reception sucked even worse. The iPod by comparison lets people have a gorgeous display and can hold hours of stored video.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I, Cringley on video ipod/itunes $1.99 shows
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Ultimately, the reason why this has more potential than the Casio TVs are because iPod is already a well established brand, and starting now (or whenever these iPods are released), anyone with an iPod that's not a nano or a shuffle will have video capability. They might not all use it, but I'm willing to bet that people who give it a try will purchase one, two, or ten shows that they can't live without.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
The advertising companies shouldn't fret, the internets are gonna climax this month.. :P
Hey, might this be a marketing model for a new "Firefly" series?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I watched a few episodes of Lost through iTunes the other day. The quality wasn't great, but on my iBook's 12.1" screen it was good enough. That H.264 codec makes even low-res video seem much better than you'd think. Would I pay $40+ for a season of a show on iTunes? Nope - I'd rather buy the DVDs and get the extras and better video quality.
What this represents is a step. The biggest hurdle isn't technical - it's legal and cultural. Apple could offer full-resolution versions of these shows at any time. They could do the same with movies. The technology may be in its infancy, but it's here today.
If Apple can prove that this works, we'll start getting things like a true video iPod, more shows, more networks, and wireless streaming of shows through an AirPort-like base station - or better yet the iMac with Front Row will morph into an Apple PVR/media center. And unlike MCE, that solution will look good inside and out.
Apple's testing the waters, making sure this thing will actually work before they throw themselves fully into becoming a media distribution company. They're making evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes, which is the way to go when you're navigating a legal minefield of IP law and business relationships. The networks are facing the possibility of drastic changes to the way their products are distributed, and dragging them kicking and screaming into the future just won't work.
I think had this new form of direct distribution been around, shows like Firefly, Wonderfalls, Greg the Bunny, etc that were well-written, well-acted, and deserving of viewer support but were killed by networks who didn't understand what they had would get a chance. Shlock like Joey, whatever other sitcom-of-the-moment, or the latest reality show may still get the big ratings, but more challenging shows could show a real bottom-line profit that would mean that the horribly flawed Nielson system wouldn't cause them to be prematurely axed.
But that will take some time, which is why the long-awaited video iPod is somewhat underwhelming - but make no mistake, this is just a way of laying the groundwork for what will be a revolutionary way in which we view TV.
at first i was thinking, "awesome! now i can download Lost legally! that's all i ever wanted". but then i read TFA...
problem #1: the files are only for use on the new video ipod.
eventually someone will figure out how to bypass the DRM and play it on a computer, but the screen size will still be tiny.
problem #2: it's only available to US citizens.
surely their biggest market would be people who can't watch the same content for (effectively) free on their regular television.
in short: buy some other portable digital video player (probably for much less cash than the video ipod) and simply download what you want to watch from elsewhere. or turn you pc into a PVR if you want to keep it legal.
sudo killall humans
In the case of "Thats so raven", lets hope it is not true.
I was actually supprised to hear its still on the air.
People like me, from the UK, and other internationals will be sad to learn that Apple doesn't want our money. They have Lost series 2 on the ITunes US store but won't allow us to sign up, they'd rather we use BitTorrent to view it... The PayMent options for the US store all check your address, so unless you have a US PO-Box and a US registered credit card then you're stuck.
:-/
I'm sure six months down the road Apple will add TV to the UK store but I bet even then that it won't contain the content that we WANT to see, instead it will contain content that was on TV a week ago...
Mac Mini PVR
-or-
Airport with AirVideo
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I agree portable TV is retarded, mainly because of the abysmal screen size, but that's totally not what this is about. It's about the ability to LEGALLY download television shows from the internet. You can watch them on your computer too ya know and the quality is surprisingly good considering it's 320x240 and only about 4MB/minute. I downloaded the latest episode of LOST to discover this. This is much more exciting than the fact that you can also watch said video on the new damn iPod. It will be amazing when we have the ability to download nearly all popular shows without commercials. They'll need to drop the prices slightly though, as $2/episode is a bit high. I understand that 200MB/episode is quite a bit of bandwith, what they need to do is build BitTorrent into iTunes and then all will be good.
Joseph?
I think that this is really just a stopgap measure for Apple. Its just not all the way there. Unlike the first ipods- which were great except the small hd space. I see the main problem in the downloads because they are at 320x240. Might look fine on a ipod, but sucks on a computer. AND we still (and possibly never) can easily rip our own videos into itunes. This is really the key- but near impossible. If Jobs convinced MPAA to allow itunes users to rip their DVD's we would still have to reencode them into 320x240 h.264. And on my mac mini this would take probably a day per DVD. A super chore with all the DVD's I own. Probably could take up to a year just to import them. Right now it is obvious, this is just a work in progress for Apple- lets just hope its not another newton.
Advertisers judge how many people their ads will reach when buying media time. These downloads now increase (indefinitely) that media exposure time and audience without further charges to advertisers. Sure, many will be fast-forwarded and otherwise edited, but that subtraction will be compensated by the multiplied exposure. Advertisers might find their rates increasing, as media publishers learn to demonstrate how much more they're buying in the "afterdistro" of these deathless downloads. And smart advertisers will convert most ads to "product placements", seamlessly embedding not just the products and logos into the main content, but also buying spoken lines, plot devices, and theme songs all the same as the "ad content" in their campaigns. God damn their soulless weasel hides.
--
make install -not war
the price is interesting too. I get a 30 min video with aac audio for $2. compare that to a 3 minute song for $1 or 45 minute album for $10. it makes the audio seem like a ripoff in terms of bits/dollar. I wonder how they can afford to deliver that much material and bandwidth for so little expense?
on the otherhand in terms of sheer bits/dollar a pvr+ cable delivers a lot more if you are not selective. of course you don't have the option of commercial free versions of broadcast video on cable.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
My "Prayer of Jon":
Pray, o' Lord, that You giveth thine Jon of DVD, the power to release thine TV shows from Satan's demonic, ravenous, malicious lock on ones and zeros, so I may become pure of spirit and download thine shows from ThePirateBay.
Amen.
I think this move by Disney and Apple will also have more drastic implications in another front, namely battle between Apple and labels on pricing of records in iTunes. iTunes first was just a big record store, but now by adding music videos and televisions shows, iTunes is becoming a content portal, a first stop to anybody who wants content from popular music to hit tv-shows.
The important thing here is that Apple is broadening their value generation base, they aren't anymore just a record store. They gather audience from music lovers to people wanting to watch tv, this makes iTunes have more people using it, and it makes iTunes more interesting market, giving Apple more power to negotiate with content producers. The move also makes sure that Microsoft and others have to play catch up with Apple, if they want to be a part of future content and media distribution landscape.
More speculative thing is, is Apple trying to build slowly vertically integrated media platform where people can computers, content players, software and services all come from Apple? Atleast to me it looks like it. The major question now is, can Apple and Jobs this time play it right and crap a near monopoly in content area, making Apple the next decades Microsoft?
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
Excuse me, but why do i have to pay to watch something that i already paid to have broadcast to my house? ( and had a right to record for timeshifting purposes )
I also had to sit thru those damned commercials, so really i paid even more then just the cable bill.
Its not like they had to do something special to digitize it.
Sort of like a 'greatest hits' CD.. just a scam to suck more cash out of you for what you ALREADY PAID FOR.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
For me I don't particularly care that a whole season is available. I'll get the DVD if I want the whole season. But let's say I've never seen Lost but have heard it's an awesome show. Going to iTunes and getting the first episode to watch, enjoying it, and then buying the whole DVD set is something I can see myself doing.
I've heard that Battlestar Galactica rocks but I'm hesitant to spend the money on the whole season or whatever is out now. Some sci-fi shows I just don't like (Star Trek for instance). If there was an episode of Battlestar Galactica on iTunes I would definitely get it and possibly get the DVD's then.
For some shows like 24 they have released a "first few episodes" DVD. What I would like to see though would be a DVD with 4+ episodes of different shows. 1st episode of 24, Alias, Lost, and Desperate Housewives for instance (yes I know different networks blah blah blah... work with me here!). I would love to go to the store and purchase a "1st episodes" DVD of TV shows that are already out. You can watch 'em then maybe find a show you'd like.
Either way would be fine for me and I'd imagine a few other people too.
Will we end up eventually paying (or stealing) all of our future programming?
The fact of the matter is, there's probably a lot more of us right now that steal our programming than pay for it, anyway. There was a statistic from Bell Canada given that they had sold 8million + satalitte recieves. In the same statement, they aknowledged that they had ~3million subscribers. Are the other boxes packed up in an attic waiting for a magical day? Nope. That doesn't even begin to cover the number of people who have "free" cable in their homes. As well as the number of people who download episodes of whatever it is they watch. For the most part, entertainment is stolen. It doesn't mean it's not profitable still, and doesn't mean that those people are ripping anyone off. I wouldn't pay to see certain movies, but I would download them if someone wanted to watch it at my place. Is anyone losing money? Nope, becaue I simply wouldn't have watched it. I know there's 5000 counterarguments to that statement, but it's true. People download so much music and video because it's readily available, not because they enjoy stealing.
... elipses...
Compared to the free torrents, the quality $2 iTunes download was extremely bad.
Can you post some information on the codec used in the iTunes download (MPEG-1/2,DivX,MOV/MP4,...) and the total file size so we can get an idea of the bit-rate used? Also, what resolution was the iTunes download? 640x480? 320x240? 720x480? and what application did you have to play it in?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
It's only five shows
It's been announced/available for 2 days now. It's a revolution in how we'll get TV delivered. All the other networks will look on, see that they're missing out, and clamour to get onboard, but this takes more than 2 days...
Give it time - rome wasn't built in a day, or even 2.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
You mean I can now procure TV shows from the Internet? I've been waiting for years to be able to do that!
sic transit gloria mundi
Water is basically free but they do bottle & charge for that. Think of it as you're paying for the service of capturing, encoding, and storing the episode for your access. Of course, there are people out there who are doing it for free - it's just not as convenient but perhaps better quality. You still have choice.
I am waiting for the day, Apple starts distributing movies. They could have 2 options pay-per-view ---> $0.99 == avg cost of DVD via netflix subscription buy the movie ---> $9.99 avg cost of dvd = $15 minus dvd buiding costs, cover costs, format costs.... will you pay that much for the movies ?
Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes.
What's the unique selling proposition of the iTunes Movie Store that would mean people would be willing to buy a TV programme for $2, infested with (presumably unskippable) ads, when they can tape that from the TV using their existing cable subscription (because this doesn't completely replace cable)?
I don't see it. Honestly, unless they keep the ads as unintrusive as possible, similar to that on a DVD (where the ads are usually at the beginning of the DVD and skippable in some way), I don't see people being willing to pay $2 for them.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:CABLE WILL HAVE NO ADS BECAUSE YOU PAY FOR IT!!
Or, you will pay for it and it will still have ads, just like erm, most subscription TV channels (cable or satellite).
11oneiii (etc)
It just occurred to me, after reading Cuban's blog, that Soap Operas may be the next download on the horizon. Think of all the millions of working women that tape or DVR their "stories" every day.
If they can get the day's episode and watch it at work on their iPods, all of us husbands that have to find something else to do while the TV is occupied can actually take control of our remotes again.
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
you can already buy TV episodes without commercials, on DVD. you just have to wait till the summer after the season is over. $1.99/episode of a TV show that is full season (say Lost) is financially a better deal than buying the DVD box set. yes, you lose some packaging and extras (maybe there will be some workaround in the future?). it is not unlike how buying an album from iTMS is generally cheaper than going to a traditional CD store. there have also been rumors for a while of a way to stream video to a TV from a Mac. either wirelessly like airport express, or some networked box thing. if we see it or not, i am sure there is at least one prototype in the Apple R+D cave.
also remember that these shows/videos/shorts are not just to watch on an iPod. they can be watched from your computer. no iPod needed, like for music. i know people that buy songs from iTMS that do not own any MP3 player at all. they just buy single songs and listen to them on their PC (not even Mac users). anyway, the idea of transferring to the iPod may be as much about loading it so you can take it to a TV in your house, or somebody else's. the idea of those exclusive shorts, home movies, videos and TV shows the day after they air might appeal to many people.
remember the new iPods cost no more than the iPods they were selling last week, and have bigger drives. you do not HAVE to use the video option, as you did not have to use the photo option or the contact list. as other people have posted, this also may be a way for cult shows to survive without a traditional TV outlet. it does not require an iPod, but just a Mac or PC with iTunes installed. that's for today, we knew this was coming in some form and Apple is not the only company that has been working on this. the real issue was what to sell considering how many people have broadband. everyone got hung up on selling/renting movies and stalled opening these new stores. was Apple jumping the gun? i would guess not since they have the infrastructure already in place for the music store, and the store makes a small profit as is. i am guessing in the future TV networks will be selling shows themselves with windows media DRM or some REAL product.
Doesn't Apple just break even on iTunes purchases already? The video functionality seems to be a great gimmick to get more iPods out the door - where Apple makes its money. Therefore why should Apple care wheather or not TV becomes popular on iPod?
"My wife and I watched 'Lost' from iTunes last night (rather than torrent the missed episode) on our television. Compared to the free torrents, the quality $2 iTunes download was extremely bad."
I don't really get that. People have been saying for a while now, that if someone (Apple, the TV networks, whoever) just offered official downloads of their shows at a good price and good quality, people would be all over it. And Steve Jobs showed with iTMS that the secret to success is to treat peer-to-peer filesharing as competition, and beat it with quality and convenience. TV via iTMS is clearly not trying hard in that department.
So I guess I'll keep downloading the weekly high-quality, HDTV version of Lost that appears on the Internet each week. After all, I can't get it on TV where I live. I'd gladly pay the network $1 a week to download it from them or iTMS instead, at equal or better quality; but that's not an option.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
A lot of his points about new television shows being marketed outside of television are already proven with the DVD market - which isn't much different from the download market when compared to commercial broadcast television. TV Shows could be directly targetted at this market (or download market) and bypass network TV entirely. The Family Guy and other DVD box sets shows how marginalized the broadcast TV market has become.
Aren't companies paying MORE money for TV ads? Meaning they're worth more to them because they are generating more revenue?
~jennifer.k~
A very rich tool mind you, but a tool nonetheless.
Look up. That's his point, going over your head.
Compare:
... to ...
... Company A is providing you with a service. You *don't* have to pay for it, but then they're not obliged to give you that service either. Grow up.
"Excuse me, but why do i have to pay to watch something that i already paid to have broadcast to my house?"
"Excuse me, but why do I have to pay for this taxi cab when I have a fully-working car at my house ?"
"Excuse me, but why do I have to pay to buy this book, when I have another copy sitting in my house ?"
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
That's the thing with this .. you can't burn the episodes on CD-R or DVD-R!
What need's to be asked, is iptv will itunes bring iptv into the mainstream?
The movies from the iTunes Store have no ADs. Read the fscking article!
The real story is downloadable TV content with good quality at a good price.
By making the whole announcement about video iPod, Jobs is avoiding a clash (or premature announcement) with the movie studios about downloadable movies. Instead, he is making a case for how downloadable movies could work, using TV content as a proxy.
With the whole FrontRow bit on the new iMacs, he is also starting (stealthily) the assault on the living room: what is FrontRow but a potential alternative to Windows Media Center Edition? Sure, there's no built in HDTV frame grabber, there's no DVR, but almost all the parts are in place. Through in a 30" Cinema Display and a Mac Mini and you have an all-Apple digital hub (the Mini) ready in your living room ready and waiting to deliver content--whenever it is ready.
Now that I've written it all out, this has echoes of "if you build it, they will come..."
No, you need to think, your examples are not at all related to what I'm saying.
And if you think they are related, then you are an idiot.
And furthermore, they are obligated to give ME any service i want.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Since when is water free? Not the kind you drink in town. Maybe if you ladel some out of the mississippi. Even well water is not free--you bought it when you bought the land. the only free water is rain.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I, for one, would gladly pay less for TV shows with commercials. 99 cent episodes with commercials means it would be economically viable to use rather than cable. I don't know if I'm unique, but I often multitask when watching TV, and commercials aren't such an issue, as I just focus on something else.
When i download episodes of Get Smart, i don't think i'm stealing. There isn't a channel that plays it any more (where i live) and it's not on DVD (I would love to buy it). Also, i doubt it will be available from this service as well. and this is just one example show, but there are others
Beta tested, Mother Approved
Last i heard, the cable companies must also pay for the 'right' to broadcast.
Guess where part f that money comes from? Why, gee, its my cable bill.
Agreed, a large part of my bill goes to the transmission hardware/support, but not all. Some goes to actually pay for content.
Commercials are ADDITIONAL payment.
Or were you not around when cable was commercial free and was the major selling point? Until they got people on board of course, then out came the commercials for even more revenue.
Ether way, i paid for the content, they should not be sticking it to me twice like this. And 'bandwidth cost' isnt an answer to that. They already have the bandwidth, which is f-ing paid for already ( by me ).
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If you're watching Lost and Mythbusters (to pick two random shows), that's ~8 to 10 episodes a month, depending on the month. That's $16-$20 right there, and you're only watching two shows a week. This isn't a cable replacement, and if you watch that few actual shows, you're probably better off waiting for the full season's on DVD, you'll get much better quality, and for pretty close to what it would have cost you to download those 320x240 versions.
I really hope the videos will include subtitles or closed-captions for people who have hearing problems and/or only know different languages. I was born deaf.
I fear that the American Disability Act of 1995 (which require subtitles or closed-captions on all videos being sold and television shows in America) will not apply on those videos because the videos are being transferred over the internet instead of being sold on tapes and dvds. If they don't include subtitles or closed-captions, I will be extremely pissed and I will not be the only one... There are over 30 million Americans who have hearing problems and we all NEED subtitles/closed-captions.
LOST Season 1 DVD at amazon: $38.99
LOST Season 1 at Best Buy: $49.99 LOST Season 1 on iTunes: $1.99x24=$47.76
I think consumers are going to be turned off by the fact that they can just get the DVD for the same price or less. That said, I'm sure the people who come home and miss the show once or twice will download it. Or the ones who can't wait to watch it all at once. They might even lure in the people who won't make big buys but will shell out the same amount a dollar or 2 at a time. But I think they need to price below the DVDs to really get it kicked off.
That said, just the idea is definately enough to get me to install iTunes on my media center box back home. And, you know, I might shell out a buck or 2 for a few shows. Just to see what I think. I hope there is an option to burn to DVD though.
I do security
Why couldn't this have been done eight months ago? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/27/214022 3&tid=214
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
I own all of the Pixar feature films on DVD. My kids love them. They also love all of the short films that are included as bonus material. Now, as far as a "fair use" of this material, I've burned a special DVD that contains ONLY all of the short films that would have required a lot of time, attention, and DVD juggling to watch in a row. They love watching ~30 minutes of just the shorts, and that's about enough time (in my opinion) for a TV break.
I was interested to see that they've got them for download, but at 320x240, the quality just wouldn't be the same. I'm glad they are included as bonuses on the DVDs at much higher quality.
P.S. Parents, check out Animusic for another ~30 minute diversion (animusic.com).
Come on, be serious. a DVD is not the same as a download.
I paid for the content, which is *already* digital. I already paid for bandwidth to get it to me. They already store it digitally, on hardware my bill/commercial watching paid for.
I did not pay for the shiny disk or pretty packaging. Nor am i asking for something so ludicrous as 'a free DVD'. Get real, and think out side your little pathetic box before you speak.
Just as a side note, besides that rational reason above, *i* have a right to do what ever the hell i want. Just so happens that in this case others should the right too. Because its 'right', and being screwed twice for the *same thing* is wrong.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just as iTunes music is priced incorrectly (it should be about 10 cents/track).
NetFlix delivers a DVD to me for about $1 (including round-trip shipping). For TV series, that's typically about 4 episodes of the show (plus extras), or about 25 cents per episode for non-DRM material.
In addition, TV shows are frequently posted for (illegal) download within an hour of broadcast, obviously at zero cost.
That's the existing market the TV studios are trying to enter.
I don't do business with iTunes, because I don't think songs are worth $1 to download. For example, I recently heard Gary Jules version of the song Mad World on an episode of CSI. Downloading the song is $1 on iTunes, or I can NetFlix the DVD of Donny Darko for that same $1, which also has the song. Oh, and a whole movie, some other good songs, and more.
If the TV studios want to charge $1 for a download of a DVD iso, that's fine. Why pay more for less?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Is pay-per-view on the PC for live events. More specifically NHL hockey. I live in a blackout region, so even if I subscribe to a 50 dollar per month satellite package, I still cant watch NHL hockey until the playoffs. I also dont want to buy Center Ice which is every damn hockey game of the year for 120 bucks. I just want my teams games, the ones I have time to watch. Id pay 5 bucks per game to get streaming video of it.
Granted, it was only a matter of time, but someone had to go first, and it is apparently ABC.
. aspx?type=hotStocksNews&storyID=URI:urn:newsml:reu ters.com:20051012:MTFH94947_2005-10-12_22-32-00_N1 2587305:1
The reason ABC went first is they're owned by Disney, and Disney is dying for a new deal with Steve Job's Pixar.
http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle
Whatever the reason, hopefully the other networks will follow suit, and not just exclusively with Apple. I would be more likely to buy a TV show for $1.99 than a single song for $0.99.
Dish network has a pocket dish that allows you to copy shows from your dvr and take them with you. You don't have to pay for the shows. You can store music, movies, photots and games. www.pocketdish.com
Shortest. +5, Insightful. Body. Ever.
By. Definition.
No, no. The whole point is that while there's more chaff than ever, thee's more delicious wheat as well. Meaning that you'd only be hauling around "America's Top Model" if you liked that sort of thing.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
anyone else unable to watch episode previews in itunes? Jobs seemed to do it really easily all i get is a brief freeze in the application then nothing.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4337692.stm#
Watch the video on this page marked: "Watch a discussion on the significance of the new iPod"
BBC News is already working on making 24/7 audio and video news available for free download, starting next year. Oh and, no ads. Just news.
Will we end up eventually paying (or stealing) all of our future programming?
God, I hope so. Maybe then:
- the competition will shift from serving up eyeballs to advertisers and towards producing decent shows
- people will limit their viewing to something they actually find interesting, instead of channel surfing
- and most importantly, active interests/hobby will be able to stand on a more even footing with the always-on, always-free insanity box.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I think that everyone here is overlooking the most important aspect of this. Content. Right now, if a TV show does something that "some" people don't like, they can get it pulled off the air by calling the advertisers or FCC. With this system, companies/people/anyone could produce a show HBO style and not care if you see Janet Jackson's boob for 1/10 of a second. You could see TV the way creators want, not the government, advertisers or people who want to push their views of right and wrong on you want.
there are technical issues preventing seamless use of free recorders.
If by "technicial issues" you mean the use of drag and drop to move videos onto the excellent Archos video players, than I guess you may be right.
Archos has been at this a lot longer than Apple. Its version of the "ipod video" (as in, small screen with backward-looking enslaved-to-old-audio-paradigm form factor) was the Jukebox Multimedia, released back in 2002. The newer generations of players released since then are a way better. It's nice to have a single device that will happily play back so *many* formats at once. And the video-in jack to do easy quick'n'dirty analog->digital recordings doesn't hurt for snarfing content either.
Da Blog
The more I read what people think of the new products Apple released, the more I see that everyone is missing the point. It's all about video iPod to everyone, but I think that the new iMac with Front Row and the Apple Remote are more telling about the direction Jobs is taking the company. Imagine, down the road, Apple releases an iMac in size and resolution comparable to lcd televisions with a built in tv tuner, or at least a mac mini with the remote and a tv tuner that can connect to an existing tv. Then imagine if more studios allowed shows and movies to be sold through iTunes (which may need a name change to something like iMedia). Then people have one source for their digital media, music, photos, movies, TV shows, DVD's, etc. Instead of taking Microsoft and Sony's approach of making gaming systems that offer these features, take something people already store their media on and give it a remote, software, and a pretty packaging. I can see Apple eventually offering TV shows and movies in a larger format if strides can be made in internet infrastucture and in signing movie/TV companies on board. The current offerings are merely to test the water, to see if the time is right yet.
I think downloadable tv/radio program (podcasting) are transient technology. It's like floppy vs ftp, email vs snail-mail, newspaper vs online versions - the main difference is that the enabling network and technologies are coming up quickly in the near future (vs the time between the invention of snail-mail and email). Remember a few years ago I used a Palm and has software that can download stuff every time I sync it (Avantgo?). With WiFi hotspots and 3G wireless this will become less and less necessary.
I don't think anybody's mentioned this on this thread, and I just thought of it, so I could be talking out of my printer port, but it seems like this could well be the demise of the Nielsen rating system (though not for the company). Those 1950s throwbacks at Nielsen would each sell a kidney for the kind of data that iTMS gets from purchases/downloads.
I refuse to get cable so in order to watch Lost I have to wait until someone throughs it up on USENET. That sounds like piracy, but I only download it for free because there aren't any ways for me to give ABC money to watch the episode. Now there is.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
video, and just "downgrade" it when you send it to your iPod, much like they do with your photos on the iPod photo. It's pointless to have 3 megapixel pictures on your iPod photo(unless you are using it as a storage device) since it wastes so much power in loading, so iTunes will convert your entire photo library to iPod size, while still leaving the higher quality pictures on your machine. Why can't they do this with video?
Monstar L
It's like having a pocket-sized TiVo
Actually, given that Tivo's main advantage is its ability to *record*, I think that the Archos PVPs, with their simple analog video-in jack, are a closer match. So as well as all the digital options for content, if you want to just grab some damn video, all you need is to plug the Archos into a video feed and hit "record". Low-tech, but acceptable, and I believe still protected by Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios.
And further, given Tivo's reluctance to enable free movement of content off the devices, I think a closer analogy for Archos is not Tivo but ReplayTV, with its DRM-free show sharing and ease of moving content between devices and over networks.
The video ipod is classic Apple: as much as possible a one-way street from Content Owners through Apple to Consumers, with the ipod remaining as tethered as possible to a Mac/iTunes for operation. Making it harder than it should be for ipod owners to create and share their own content.
For myself, I prefer more autonomy.
Da Blog
Like you said, it's if you want it now. You can't get it on DVD until the end of the season. I don't think it's concidence that the two big shows offered are pretty serial, meaning what happens each week matters next week, as opposed to episodic. That means there is a big value to finding out what happened on a show if you missed it, before viewing the next one.
And as someone else mentioned below, ABC broadcasts in 720p, which is 1280x720p 60fps non-interlaced. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if it was only 30fps or even 24fps, since most HD content is created for 1080i (and thus converted), and a lot even comes from film.
Additional note, the picture quality on Lost, although better than DVD, isn't particularly good. Law and Order looks better, CSI looks far better. I don't know how Desparate Housewives looks.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Copies of most "classic" books are available for free in U.S. communities from libraries. Yet, you can find them on the shelves of most bookstores.
People just like to own things they enjoy.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
We are seeing many things here.
/ac
(1) What some people don't realize or remember is that the new iPod is a music player first, that the video capabilities are just an added bonus.
(2) This new player is, IMO, obviously a test unit, to see if there actually is a market for "video on the go"... or downloadable video (tv shows, etc.). If there is a strong demand for portable video (your own or purchased), you can be sure Apple will come out with a better unit (bigger screen, etc.) in the next few months. Hopefully, they will also offer better content (i.e. higher resolution) too.
(3) If there is no mass demand for its video capabilities and that Apple has to drop whatever video ambitions it might have, customers are not caught with a dead-end product, they have a perfectly capable, pocket-size music player.
(4) This unit is also a low-risk way to try to coax the content providers into the area of legit downloadable video. If Holywwod (sp?) besides ABC does not want to play ball, Apple does not loose much, because it is still a music player catering to a healthy market.
(5) I think that technology is not quite "there", in the form of a low-power, high-speed hardware H.264 & MPEG-4 decoder that could provide, say, 640x480 @ 30fps playback hours on end in a *small*, battery-powered form-factor. I think that heat dissipation, power consumption & COST of current hardware are still a problem here and go a long way in explaining the design of the new iPod.
(6) I also think that Jobs did not announce an even more capable unit in order not to cheeze off customers who just bought a new 60GB iPod, say, two weeks ago. I do not think anyone is feeling ripped off or left behind the times; I know I am not (got a new 60GB iPod a few weeks ago). This was just a customer-management move to preserver good will towards Apple & the iPod "platform".
There are far more than just technological considerations here. You have a "chicken and the egg" problem with legit, downloadable video content, as well as the paranoia/greed of the MPAA to deal with. You still have to consider the possibility that portable video might just be a niche market for SlashDot readers (surprise, not everyone is a geek). You have to consider what your average Joe Shmoe is willing to put up with, i.e. size/weight/battery life/price. Finally, you have to ask, *what* does your average consumer want to watch in the bus/plane/etc., i.e. what sort of market is there for portable video?
Whilst it would have been nice to see a "vPod" with a bigger screen, maybe its time has not yet arrived. I don't know. I guess we will have to see.
A tiered system:
1. Watch the show, but it has the ads. This is free (especially for what I would term "essential" shows - news broadcasts, political debates - yes, have a "thanks to a generous donation by Corporate Fucker, maker of things that Fuck you Well, and generous taxpayers like you" at the beginning/end of the debate, just like PBS).
2. Watch the show, but pay a subscription (aka, like cable) for little-to-no ads (yes, I know there will be some ads, but if there were just one at the beginning and at the end, after I paid for it, it would be more palpable). If you want specific feeds, it's a different cost. For example, if all you care about is Sci-Fi channel, maybe that's $10, or a bundle of common shows is $30-$40, with special channels being extra.
3. Pay per episode, no ads, $2 apiece (maybe $3-$4 if it's a 2 hour special).
With a tiered system, there would suddenly be not just more convienience of watching when *I* want to watch, but also more possibility for smaller shows. As Mr. Cuban mensions, suppose that a small show - and let's take Firefly - had 50,000 viewers. All of the sudden, that's $100,000 per episode potential. Not a lot according to Hollywood, but that could be enough for a small show on a cheap budget.
All of the sudden, there could be *more* competition. Yes, boo-hoo, there would be more money out there and the cable and satellite industries would be regulated to nothing more to bandwidth providers. I feel so bad for them, and the FCC is all but dead in the water for regulation. (After all, if I seek it out, if it isn't on "public airwaves", the religious extremists fuckers who don't want to see Janet Jackson's nipple can just screw themselves. No, wait, that would be sinful as well, wouldn't it?)
A lot of this stuff is pie in the sky, but like player pianos, then radio, then television, then cable, I think that entertainment is about to make another huge shift. And, odds are, we'll have to (as Mr. Doctorow said in a recent episode in "TWiT") "drag them kicking and screaming to the money tree" - but eventually we'll all get what we want.
I'm just curios to see: will it take 10 years of studios "getting it", or 50 years while they fight it?
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I think paying for ringtones is fuggin' absurd. But there are people willing to spend $30/mo. just on ringtones. I'm not going to pay $2 to watch an episode of anything ABC puts on TV, but if I were addicted to Lost I just might pay for portable access to the show. Portability is big for many people, because they want their media at a time and place of their choosing. As the MP3 revolution has shown, the quality of the output is less of a factor than the convenience.
Time will tell if there's much of an audience for iTunes TV shows, but I think their pricing isn't going to turn too many people off. The other factors will be more important, in my opinion.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Someone may own rights to the rain water. You can't collect it in many parts of the world.
It's great that Jobs is getting the ball rolling, but I'm not sure I like the direction it's going so far...
Content that used to be free ($$$ and free of DRM) is now $1.99 and DRM crippled.. (Music Vids and Pixar Shorts) Part of the DRM is no burning to DVD, even if the res was high enough... It's not, far from it...
Sorry, but anyone that would pay for that has way too much money on their hands, and far too little sense... Their stupidity will no doubt doom us to this $hitty restrictive offering for a long time.
I'd be more than happy to pay $1.99-$4.99 for content that was higher res (good enough to look good when burned to DVD [via iMovie and iDVD perhaps] ) and allowed me to burn to disk.
Let me download the ep of Surface i missed and burn it to DVD for later viewing on a TV (since my Mac is in my office, not my living room).. Let me download the latest ep of Carnevale and burn that to DVD... Hell let me download all of his Steveness's Keynotes and burn them so my father, who's eyesight isn't up for viewing the keynotes in streaming pixilated glory, can watch what's going on inside the company he owns so much stock in... And let me put it on an iPod Video (once they bring back FireWire to the thing) and I'm a happy camper.
Offer that at a reasonable price... The content, the quality, and true "FairPlay" DRM, usable DRM, more than I'd like, but at least *reasonable and FAIR* DRM.. I'll be a customer.
As it stands right now? Not getting one red cent from me.
Not sure what SJ is smoking these days.. To think this is a reasonable video offering, something we'd want.. I want some, I'd like to see the color of the sky in his world.
Shrug.
Very disappointed.
My TV is HD; why should i PAY to watch itty bitty video-quality clips on my PC?
I think this will make a huge impact on the industry as compared to music and movies.
being addicted to a TV show (or getting into a TV show in the first place) is like crack. If I miss an episode (or get into a show late into the season) -- it is a very time sensitive issue. I either miss out on it and become "lost" or wait for the DVD a year or 2 later.
Compare that to some musty old (non time sensitive) copy of a Rolling Stones song. That song was there 20 years ago and it will be there 20 years from now -- in the same never changing format as the first time I heard it on the radio.
$2 an episode is the right price.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Actually you can get the season for $35 on itunes.
Civilian Capital
Slashdot: where repeating an article in a post is "+5 Insightful"
"First off his wife helped him come up with the e=mc^2 theory, yet she received no credit for it. In the original publishing of the theory in 1905 she was credited with co-author credits"
It's not uncommon for great men to give their wife some credit. How many times have we seen emmy winners thank their wife for their support and give them credit for where they are today? Same concept. Do you have any further proof besides the co-author credits, maybe notes in her own hand-writing?
"The kicker is that after his divorce from the woman who helped make him famous, the guy married his cousin. Yup, his COUSIN!!!!"
As for the cousin fucker thing remember the time period. People lived much closer to each other then so families grew up all in the same area and you spent a lot more time together. It wasn't uncommon for cousins to marry each other.
Besides, he was a physics professor, something tells me he didnt hang out at the local bar picking up chicks.
and remember, he's freakin Einstein, if he wants to fuck a cousin or two go for it! There's a lot worse things going on by people not nearly as famous like Michael Jackson and Catholic Priests.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Free nightly news on iTunes, right after, or during the broadcast on the TV set.
You already get the news for free on the Internet in text format, and much faster than you'd be able to get a video download. Seriously, is it that much better for you to get your news from a talking head that you'd wait to download it rather than just read it now?
That you are a f-ing useless blob of human debris.
Whoops, ill be modded down for telling the truth..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
However, if you missed this week's episode and don't know anyone who taped/Tivod it, or maybe you've been wondering about the show and just want to watch the pilot to see if you want to watch the rest... Well, then maybe you'd want to download it this way.
Honestly, if you do watch these shows every week, why would you then go and download them from iTunes? I don't think that's what it's meant for.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
People will watch broadcast TV anyway, and TV companies will get advertising revenue anyway. Downloading episodes is no different to recording TV shows on video tape. No one looses anything from the free distribution of recorded TV shows.
The TV companies will not make any money from me by trying to charge to watch what will eventually be shown on a free TV. If they attack me, and attack my right to record TV material, they will only serve to damage themselves. Remember the examples of the RIAA, and the MPAA. Since they shot themselves in the head with nonsense DRM and copyright lawsuits, I've not bought a single product from any of their members, and never will again until the public apology is forthcoming for their disgraceful and monopolistic price fixing and criminal racketeering.
Why bother with physical media? Burn to a CD image, and extract from that.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Just like those new DVDs where - despite having paid for the disk - you still have to sit through ten minutes of unskippable previews and advertisements for other releases.
Businesses are continuously struggling to increase revenue. In addition to the traditional ways - increasing sales and reducing costs - they're increasingly looking at leveraging their existing product to generate additional revenue. In the UK, for example, rail companies turned their information lines into premium-rate services, so that each call to find out about train times generated income for them. In the same way, using the distribution medium - cable or DVD - to carry ads, which earn ad revenue, makes commercial sense.
Moreover, it's almost guaranteed to happen because the business is set up in such a way that they can only perceive the benefits, not the negative effects. They can see the extra money that the ad revenue adds to their bottom line. They can't measure the effect of consumer dissatisfaction, because any decline in sales can be attributed to many other possible causes.
How many times have we seen emmy winners thank their wife for their support and give them credit for where they are today?
I don't know for sure but I think it is about as often as we see aspiring physicists submit groundbreaking theories to scientific journals and give their wife co-author credit.
Or perhaps as often as we see authors give co-author credit to their wives because they happen to discuss some minor plot elements in the process of writing a book.
It just doesn't happen!
Keep in mind that his wife was also a physicist and mathematician. It is not like she was a nobody, she was his intellectual equal.
Watching TV gives you something to talk about at the water cooler the next week. If you miss episode 5 of any show, you can't follow the conversation for a week. Worse, if you miss an episode of Lost you might misunderstand something every week for the rest of the season. That's the draw of shows like Lost, 24, etc. Studios and advertizers like that, much more than they like those folks that miss a show and decide to wait to watch it on DVD. The reason is that when you're watching the DVD you're not talking about the show at the water cooler, because nobody else is watching it then.
The beauty of this sale scheme is that you can decide to check out what everybody is talking about AFTER the shows have aired and still CATCH UP. That could lead to stronger growth in high plot shows, and therein lies the pony for the folks at ABC.
The iTMS charge is just paying Apple to do something ABC doesn't want to do itself for fear of upsetting it's affiliates.
Bandwidth. A QVGA file downloads a lot quicker than a VGA file. iTMS is all about instant gratification: the gratification isn't that instant when you're waiting to for a download of a 30 fps x 640 x 480 video to complete. The technical limitations on the iPod itself will probably be easier to overcome than the problem of waiting for everyone to get 20 mbps to the home so they won't complain about download times.
Will Mark Cuban ever shut up? All good questions.
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish and he'll wipe out the species.
What this should foster is cable breaking out of the mold of bundling channels together into 'must buy' packages. If you could pick up a single show as an itunes subscription, like a radio show podcast, then pressure might come to bear on the cable companies to allow ala carte subscriptions. When that happens the market will show what the value (and cost) is of the ESPN channel compared to a 60's rerun channel. No more $50/month cable TV bills if you only want the local PBS channel, Discovery, SciFi, and IMC.
What happened to actually having decent writing. I'm getting back into animation becasue the writing isn't half bad, and while many animations are very simillar, some dumb. That's also true of the live-actions stuff. And what bakes my noodle anyway is that so far Toon Networks (in the US anyway) is able to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Americas next ____ American ____ etc. I want a TV system where by I get to say pay for what I actually watch, witch at the moment is just sci-fi channel for Farscape etc. (hey that black and blond chick is a babe), Toon network, and comedy channel. Can I get that please? Can I also get only tech TV, PBS, and G4? Cause all I gota say is holy cow, most of what's on US TV is terrible. The news is horrible (it's sad when BBC1 does a better job of covering US polotics than ABC-and they have their facts strait) I want that please. Somone hand me my penile tv. ---sorry just a little to much coffe this morning.
As a deaf person, I rely on closed captioning to enjoy TV and Movies, I was looking forward to the new video iPod, as then I'd have a decent excuse to buy one and look cool like all the hearing folks. However, it occurred to me that ITMS video content probably will NOT have CC information and/or the iPod will not be able to decode it.
I suppose one could always create their own MPGs with the subtitles visible, though, and load them onto the iPod (assuming, of course, that you can), but how readable would they be on such a tiny screen?
TV has been popular because it's a very cheap way to get mass media. If you don't subscribe to cable, it's less expensive than a newspaper subscription, and comes with as many laughs and information sources if you have good local stations like most people have in Canada.
The decline of TV is near, because when a company like Itunes takes over TV "broadcasting" we'll see people moving away from watching TV in the evening as their primary source of entertainment. Since gathering with neighbours is out of the question because of the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt that suberbia thrives on, the Internet and interactive gaming will probably be the wave of the entertainment future. Just look at today's 8 year olds, and see what they find when they go online - it's online games and IM. That's what it could be like for most adults once they turn 25.
Ther are some constants to human entertainment throughout the ages and they are:
gathering
music
dancing
alcohol
being an audience
playing games
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Your assesment is correct as far as the numbers go - but while $139k an episode may not hold up Firefly it would be more than enough of a budget for all kinds fo shows.
As for Fireflyi tself why do you think only 40k people would pay for episodes? I'd imagine more like a few hundred thousand people would be willing to pay. Then it starts to become cost effctive even for them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I really hope that Public Broadcasting takes notice of this. I would really love to get my PBS shows via the internet, and I wouldn't mind paying for them in this manner. I think it would really help support the stations (probably better than the money-making drives they do make) and their content lends itself to this sort of scheme. Plus it would expand the PBS shows available, instead of just the ones my local PBS decided to pick up.
Does anyone know how PBS broadcasting works? Do they pay the local cable companies to carry the channels? Do the cable companies pay them? Since PBS shows are accustomed to operating without commercial advertising (beyond the good ole "Brought to you by... Company X, making wodgets since 1000 BC, and viewers like you!" opener/closer), and they create a lot of 'atomic' shows that have no future in DVD distribution, I would think they would be eager for a market like this.
I'm just really excited by the prospects of a movement to the internet and a by-show charge as a distribution medium for television shows. iTMS will be able to compile much better viewership statistics than Nielson does, although without the advertising they are pretty much useless except as a way to inform the networks of what we really want to see. What's even better is if all the networks get on board, as well as independent productions, we will finally have a democratic television system. I'm tired of not being able to see such-and-such show because Comcast decided that the channel wasn't the right fit for my geographical area.
The only things that would not work for this distribution is news and sports. I don't know about any of you, but I stopped watching the television news a long time ago - the internet is a more reliable and more varied source of news. I can quickly check multiple news companies and overseas and get all angles on a story much better than being plopped in front of the FoxNews propaganda machine. So that's not a problem. C-Span fans might rejoice in downloadable content - and I would have to think they could provide the congressional proceedings and other c-span fodder for free. Sports will always do best as a live broadcast over cable, but I can see more events moving into pay-per-view format or some sort of season pass for your team.
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
(The Beatles)
The thing that holds me back from most streaming video is that it isn't closed captioned. I tend to watch TV with the sound off because if I turn the audio up to a level that I'm comfortable with, it blows away everyone else in the room. With the tendency of organizations moving towards streaming video, hard of hearing and deaf individuals are being left behind. Federal law in the US mandates that all televisions above 13" include a closed caption decoder chip. But that doesn't help me watch the streaming video of a white house press conference in Real Media. And unless ITMS offers some similar service, it won't help me enjoy a download of my favorite television programs.
I pay $5.99 a month for TIVO services to record TV shows, movies, etc for as much as my TIVO hard drive can hold from my Satelite company. Via USB or Ethernet I can copy those media files to my PC Desktop or Laptop and any video player I want (like the Sony PSP which gets a better resolution than the Apple iPod, or the Creative Zen Vision which has the same resolution as the Apple iPod, costs the same, plays MP3 and other media files, and has more features than an Apple iPod, and some Microsoft Windows CE (Windows Powered) devices with 1.8" hard drives that have video and audio features).
$5.99 for unlimited downloads, compared to iTunes which charges how much per media file? I mean why should you pay an arm and a leg to watch Network TV programs when for a low monthly fee you can record as many as you want and download all of them to some portable video player?
Did Apple even bother to research their competition? They are hardly competitive, more expensive, and have fewer features. They are also, not first, in this area either.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Remember why iTMS got so popular in the first place? People were used to downloading free songs from Napster et al, but iTMS offered higher-quality, less buggy, legal music files at a time when the RIAA was suing people left and right.
Now, the TV shows they're selling are competing with free torrents. But unlike their music store, the iTunes video files are much lower quality than the free option, and the legality doesn't matter so much since (to my knowledge) there hasn't been a huge public campaign of suing people for downloading TV episodes. And to top it off, the price is about the same as retail DVDs.
Why would I pay for this? If I want to watch Lost, I'll get the torrent and watch it at decent resolution. If I'm a stickler for legality, I'll wait a couple months and rent the DVDs for $3 apiece (or buy the set for $40).
I'm hoping that this is only an initial foray, and that eventually Apple will be selling significantly higher-res video on a lot more shows. Until then, Netflix and BitTorrent are doing just fine by me.
Pro Duct Place Ment
... or the ads that are computer-painted into the slots behind MLB batters ... the best advertising will simply melt into the programming itself.
It ain't that hard to do and will is WAY more subliminatlly coercive than any interstitial could ever hope to be. Look at the NFL field-painting
Not copyright infringement. Big difference. You take $100k from a bank, they no longer have $100k. The problem with the industry is that they count every download as a lost sale and therefore theft. A lost sale is not theft. If i go into Best buy, look around, and dont buy anything, they cant charge me with theft, can they? And even if a lost sale were grounds for suit, i bet hardly any downloads constitute a lost sale. Personally i have about 500GB of downloaded TV shows on my computer. If i weren't able to download any of these, would i have bought the DVDs? Well, in fact i have bought some of the DVDs, but i still have the eps on my computer since its usually more convinient. Would i have bought every one of these shows? Nope. I'll agree i have something i didn't pay for, but it doesn't constitue a lost sale. And anyway, im a leach, so i'm not commiting contributory infringement or whatever they call it...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
As an animator myself, I would certainly say that most of Pixar's work could qualify as "great art."
While I was quite satisfied with the viewing experiance of Lost on iTunes, even on my 23" monitor, the quality on the Pixar short I got just didn't impress me. Part of the charm of Pixar's imagery relies on the ultra-clarity of the image.
Yup...
ow well do they interact with a Dish Network receiver?
I don't know. I use software, Media Center (J River, not MS!) to do this. Specifically, it's Media Scheduler daemon, which will record video or radio on order. Then I synch the files to portable devices. MC will also transcode library media on the fly to serve up to clients using variable bandwidth, so it's a treat to log in over the Net and watch a stream a show or a tune. Or I just let ReplayTV grab the shows and copy them across. RTV stores them as MPEG2 but it's a snap to run virtualdub on them to convert to XVID.
I have heard that Echostar, now a 25% owner of Archos, has rebadged the Archos players to use with its DVRs. So I guess the theory is that you set your Dish to grab the shows, then just synch them straight to the Archos. The advantage, I imagine, is that the Dish and the Archos probably use the same codecs so there's no recoding needed, the speed of USB2 and the small hard drive becomes the limiting factor in how quickly you can synch. I'd imagine Dish has wrapped them in some annoying DRM though.
Da Blog
with more people becoming aware of "pull" type content people could make tv shows like we make web comics now.
this is to remind me to update my Sig
this advantage would be destroyed if someone opened another TV show store that supported Archos devices
/. carried this a few days ago: Echostar, 25% owner of Archos, OEM'g Archos PVRs to use as portable players to synch with its Dish recorders. I imagine they are using their own DRM.
Da Blog
Pro Duct Place Ment
... or the ads that are computer-painted into the slots behind MLB batters ... the best advertising will simply melt into the programming itself. NASCAR has known this for decades and is, to date, master of the art.
It ain't that hard to do and will is WAY more subliminally coercive than any interstitial could ever hope to be. Look at the NFL field-painting
Without that software we'd be adding song ratings on the ipod itself
Assuming Ratings were not available (they are!), let me tell you how I'd do it in Media Center, my favourite jukebox software.
Define new custom tag: MyRating. Click the radio button so "MyRating" embeds within files and updates during Library changes.
Optionally: set it to update Library setting from device files setting, if newer.
Create new Smartlist with MyRating >=3, say.
Synch.
That's about it.
Of course, you would have to create the Smartlists using MC itself and define the playback statically because the iPod is a closed system with very little configurability available to the end user. For myself, I prefer more control over my playback devices, and the option of open source.
does knowing a movie is gonna be out on DVD six months after hitting the movie theater stop people from going to the movies? Not really.
Box Office is a money loser for Hollywood. It breaks even on DVDs and cleans up tidily with TV and syndication. The box office kabuki is just to add a bit of pizzazz to the TV launch. And in fact, the Box is declining rapidly and becoming more and more of a liability. The release window has now shrunk to 3 months or so for Thanksgiving movies. The studios make no money from popcorn sales, which is all the multiplexes care about, and most of them went bankrupt several years ago anyway. It's a death spiral.
Da Blog
You need to research the TIVO Hacks that are out there.
I have ReplayTV. I don't need to engage in remote control shenanigans and time-consuming hacking to network share or stream my shows or auto skip adverts. ReplayTV just works, out of the box, no fiddling required. No DRM. Wife-approved.
Da Blog
You are completely turned around on this. You make it sound as if the new iPod is inferior to a TiVO because it can't record inbound programming. I admit, the new iPod has not yet been provided a catalogue of programming as diverse as a TiVO connected to basic cable. But, the major advantage of the new iPod is that it allows the user to do the programming in the first place. In this sense, the iTMS/iPod video download model is superior to a PVR model.
Typical example of a so-called free market competition where for consumers, it's a lose-lose situation (hopefully commercials won't start appearing in iTunes-purchased TV shows as well, as they appeared on cable TV...)
Pause your rage about this for a moment to compare this situation to satellite TV from Astra, Hotbird & co. where tons of commercial channels from EU, Middle East, North Africa &c. are available for free... albeit with commercials.
I can finally enjoy old episodes of the ABC classic, "Manimal"!
My head hurts now. I am going home...
Coderz 4 Life
What do you mean "will we"?
-nArf
Does anyone know if there is an app out on the internet similar to Hymn and jHymn to strip the copy protection on the new iTunes video downloads? This would be extremely helpful for transporting downloaded TV shows onto other playback devices. I sure as hell don't want to have to burn my videos to DVD and then rip it just to get an unprotected .mpg
Because after the initial golly gee whiz effect wears off no one. NO ONE will have the slightest interest in this. iPod is built for the ADHD generation. No one will sit there for 43 minutes watching a TV show on it. Not when you can get just about everything on DVD in Blockbuster.
The most successful story of web commerce is Amazon.com. And in those days it just sold books, cyberspace medium used to sell dead tree media. If that is not a paradox, what is? New technologies make it possible for people to fit more things into their day.
The sales engineer at my company are buying PSPs to keep up with things while they are enflight, on customer sites, and/or foreign countries. To paraphrase Bruce Sterling, "The future is mass market customization" - a trend away from Industrial Revolution style cookie cutter packaging.
Eventually home is where your data is. And all the activity in XML/RSS space is pointing in this direction - meta data of your life. You can see the pattern everywhere, be it news/news alerts, Tivo, iPod, Flickr - meta data that lets you access previously structured organization of data, randomly, quickly and most importantly "individualised".
Prediction: There will be just more TV shows as there are now podcasts - something for everyone.
Cable controls the rate at which you view the show, and therefore if they put in advertisements most people will watch them. But no one watches the ads on things on shows they have recorded, and no-one will watch ads on video downloaded off the internet. If the vast majority of people skip ads then they will not be a tenable form of income for the cable company and will not be used.
If I want to get an episode of Lost on my Archos device, I have to get ABC, and I have to have the forethought to set up recording before it airs.
Most DVRs will record entire runs of shows (including repeats, if you want) and only delete them when you run out of space or on pre-designated schedules. At least, that's how my ReplayTV works and I assume the Dish boxes have something similar.
And as for downloading shows, maybe I've been spoiled for years, but with the ReplayTV's Poopli, I get to snarf thousands of available shows straight from the hard disks of other ReplayTV owners. It's pretty sweet. I still prefer BitTorrent though, for one major reason: HDTV quality downloads, and my 10MBps RCN download pipe.
Da Blog
In this sense, the iTMS/iPod video download model is superior to a PVR model.
No, it's superior to *some* PVRs (Tivo), but not to others (ReplayTV). My point remains that with a good PVR I can record what I want, or share what I want, and move it to whichever device I want. With Apple's model m I rely on its downloads, or on the kindness of strangers, or I shell out to pay for Quicktime.
Da Blog
You need to move away from the financial asset world and look to the world of creative/artistic content for hire. Direct syndication of production costs to willing consumers. You buy in, you get first view dibs plus extras. Assume the content will be pirated so you are paying so the content maker will produce, not so you own any real longstanding rights to anything.
Under this model (bespoke content production) content filters (individuals who can pick good programs and have artist contacts) become hinge points, developing prospective content and marketing it to consumers. Consumers will not want to deal direct, so they will go to top-line aggregators (like networks but with no distribution marketing etc, just pull money in and pick the best content to invest in). The aggregators will function like todays networks but on steroids...only a few of them will be players, with niche aggregators forming for narrow content areas.
So not much will change except that the big infrastructured, proprietary content factories will slim way down (most likely split, with content makers wanting to produce for the whole universe, and content filter function taking up role as super aggregator). This has been the trend for a while now...most shows produced by stand alone houses for ABC HBO etc, look at BBC which now farms out its content production abilities to HBO (ROME) ABC (?) (THE OFFICE -- ALTHOUGH THIS IS MORE A LICENSE FUNCTION BUT SAME IDEA).
The video ipod is classic Apple: as much as possible a one-way street from Content Owners through Apple to Consumers, with the ipod remaining as tethered as possible to a Mac/iTunes for operation. Making it harder than it should be for ipod owners to create and share their own content.
I don't think that the iPod was ever intended to create content. Maybe you're thinking of a video camera? (If you want an audio recording device, there is an accessory for the iPod, but seriously, that's not what you want to use for creating anything other than oral notes. You're better off getting a proper tool for the job, rather than using an MP3 player.)
As far as denying users the opportunity to create content being a hallmark of Apple, I entirely agree with you, as I have never heard of Garage Band, iMovie, iDVD, Final Cut Pro, Motion, iPhoto, etc.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Will I have to pay again when Apple decides to increase the quality and rerelease an episode I've already purchased? Also if anyone at Apple is reading this I would gladly pay for NHL-games. Imagine watching a game on your way to work. Sweet.
I already get all my tv from the web. perfect quality, ads already removed, about an hour after they air. I wouldn't pay a dime for it either. if this makes the networks go belly up, so be it, i don't really like tv that much anyway. people will always pay to go to a theater, so the idea of telling a story with video is in no way endangered, so screw the networks, who needs their garbage anyway?
-and occasionaly a giant moose.
i only checked desperate housewifes; while it is 23x1.99, the whole season sells for 34.95. and the differennce is: i have no tv, but i would like to check out some episodes before buying a season (or going to the library); or just getting one occasionally via itunes. don't care about the video ipod; always have a laptop while traveling. but that soesn't matter; i still may get one, just because it is thinner and has a nice screen.
Not as long as it's still being broadcast over the air for free. Sure, you could pay $2 for a 320x240 version of "Lost"... or you could get an antenna and a set-top box and watch it at 1920x1080 for free.
As long as you can do that, there's nothing immoral or unethical about sharing or downloading TV shows. You're simply using someone else's recording equipment instead of your own (with their permission), just like borrowing someone else's notes for a class you missed.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
I really want to put the biggest IDE hard drive than I can find into my TIVO
While I do know someone who just finished putting 2 400GB Seagates into their Replay box, I take a looser approach. DVArchive is a Java client that uses uPNP to impersonate a Replay over the network. So any attached disk storage with a CPU that can run Java appears as a virtual ReplayTV and can be used to store and stream shows. I have a 1TB media server that does double duty for audio and ReplayTV, and a HTPC with 500GB that serves up basically nothing but RTV content and its own video captures. Because RTVs are so network friendly, and can be controlled easily from any web browser, I find I tend to treat them more as loosely coupled capture cards that happen to be in a fancy box more than anything else. The drives within the ReplayTVs themselves? Kind of like a local temporary storage cache. MediaMVPs or modded XBoxes make good front-ends if you want to avoid the HTPC route. With VideoLAN you can stream right from the Replays, through DVArchive, and over the net. Of course, you're going to need a really fat pipe, so I usually convert into XVid and serve up using Media Center - it can do some intelligent bandwidth throttling based on the client's pipe.
Da Blog
I can say that the vast majority of content out there is 4:3, not 16:9.
There are perhaps 20 HDTV channels, and a few shows that are letterboxed. Only primetime shows, Leno and sports are perhaps in HDTV, all other programs (including all reality shows in primetime and 7:00-8:00 shows) are in 4:3. Also there are hundreds of SDTV channels.
1.85:1 and 16:9 content don't look bad on the new iPod screen (I've seen them), 2.35:1 is pretty brutal.
So, you may thing TV is going to widescreen, but it will be a very long time before the majority of content is in widescreen. Cable channels show mostly reruns and cheap content, and neither of those are HDTV.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I really wish it was NBC doing this... Then maybe we could get new episodes of "Inconcievable". What a great show, and a great idea! They just didn't give it a chance. I wonder if an "Inconcievable" movie will come out?
Pffffhahahahahahaa!!!
Sorry, couldn't make it through that one...
Perhaps now you noisy handful of "Firefly" fans know what you sound like to the rest of us...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
So they do have season discounts? If that is so than I can see this working but iTunes is STILL absorbing my music library, (installed it 5 hours ago).
I do security
Not a revolution in how TV is delivered. This doesn't mean Firefly or BSG or any other cult show is going to have value and suddenly break out like some College Radio band getting hot. At best it puts a few extra dollars in studios pockets.
Let's review: from radio to TV, the sellers have been the networks, and the customers the sponsors. Demo slicing and narrow-casting takes you only so far (the non-existent male audience on TV has movie studios abandoning the formerly lucrative Thursday night ad market on TV). Mass audiences allow sponsers to reach lots of eyeballs (or ears back in the days of radio). That's the origin of the soap opera; sponsored by soap makers pitching soap to housewives back in the thirties.
Independent producers, Fox or whoever, gamble that the show will last long enough to sell on: syndication rights, foreign rights, and now DVD streams.
Example: Firefly sold around 1 million DVDs. Margin is about $10 per DVD for Fox. So that means about $10 million in gross. About what Sci-Fi paid for it, syndication wise. CSI, a much bigger show, is estimated to bring in over a BILLION in gross profits, most of that from syndication sales. DVD sales for CSI are a minor component of that money.
When you ask people to shell out $35-55 per box set DVD there better be a lot of value there. I don't see people shelling out what they can watch for free on syndication to the degree that the money matches the back-end syndication deals. Or buy via downloads. Value and convenience just aren't there IMHO, and won't be for some time.
Pop music is different than TV; people traditionally bought singles until recording companies phased them out as much as possible. There's usually only one good song and buying a single song even on dialup is not that much of a headache time/money wise. MOST folks still are not on broadband; and don't see the need. For a iTunes type revenue stream to change the economics (producers gamble on syndication payouts; sponsors cover PART of the cost by buying ads; it all depends on enticing viewers to watch) you'd need a much cheaper and faster broadband available to everyone, like South Korea. We just are not there yet.
HBO is available to nearly every US household, yet only 30% have it. The value just isn't there for most people. Particularly since males have basically fled TV. I don't see teen boys desperate to get their latest episode of "Desperate Houswives" on their video iPod.
Everyone else here already knew that. You act like you've just discovered a big hidden secret. Here's another one for you sparky: Marrying cousins not so risky. You know who else married a cousin? Charles Darwin, FDR, Jerry Lee Lewis (When she was 13), the first Prime Minister of Canada, and Lewis Carroll to name a few.
In Australia $50-89 month for paytv or $35 Mo all-you-can-eat from the local video store (especially attractive to trailer trash with hatchlings - swapped between vans of course!)- or the 'club' for big events. Unless you are a sports addict, paytv or cabletv is for the birds, or will be 'churned' when reality sets in. $0.75 per TV show one marginal limit, ok 0.99 tops. To execs wanting more 'you're dreamin'. When 'product' is offered at 40% less than Amazon prices - it will then become a no brainer, THEN all ducks will be in a line for earned windfalls.
Look up. That's his point, going over your head.
Odd there's nothing there , oh that's right - because none was put fourth.
If that sort of content free post is more your level, just let me know if I use to too many big words for you. You'll have to add your own bangs though.
Who are you responding to? I never said the movies at the iTunes store have ads. RTFCYRT.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.