Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
The iPod does have an advantage, though, over those pocket TVs. I can download the episodes I want, and watch them anywhere and at any time, without worrying about reception. It's like having a pocket-sized TiVo built into your miniTV with a video out to watch it on a normal TV if you like.
This is not about portable TV, this is about legitimate, for pay, TV downloads. I downloaded the season premiere of Lost this morning, it's playback quality was perfectly acceptable, full-screen on my 19" monitor. For the life of me I don't understand why Apple is marketting this as Video IPod only. It works great on a PC with I-Tunes. I too think the video IPod will be a market failure, but for-Pay TV downloads have a great future. Screw the cable companies. I only want to pay for the shows I watch, and I want to watch them on my own schedule.
Apple, when are you going to get the Sci-Fi channel on board? I want BSG downloads.
If TV shows are free, why do TV studios need budgets?
TV shows have never been free, up until now they've been subsidized entirely by advertisers, and in the case of cable channels, by cable subscribers.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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
Fine, as long as the maximum damages sought for copyright infringement by the MPAA is set at $2.00 for every 45 minutes of video copied.
After all, that's what it's "worth" now, right?
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
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!
Then don't get one? I think that's a pretty obvious answer, rather like I hate radio so I got a portable CD player and then an MP3 player. I didn't go out and get a radio to only sit around bitching about it.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Aren't companies paying MORE money for TV ads? Meaning they're worth more to them because they are generating more revenue?
~jennifer.k~
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!
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..."
Lost, Season 1 is going for $38 on Amazon.com. That's for 24 episodes, so right about $1.50 per episode. And that's for 720x480, nice packaging, and discs that will probably last longer than any media on which you back up another file. As of now, for $2, you get a single-serving episode at 320x240. You get no packaging, and you can't just pop it in your DVD player to watch it. The only real benefit is that you get to watch it /now/ if you either can't get ABC (our OTA signal is really snowy) or happen to miss the show, you can get it on-demand.
To me, this is a ripoff. Particularly for shows like Lost and Housewives, where the stories are serial and build on previous episodes. I don't mind listening to music out of order or even only listening to one track from a CD, but you'll never hear someone say, "Hey, that 5th episode of Lost was really outstanding, I think I'd like to have a permanent copy of that on my computer." This is all the more relevant as TV shows make it to DVD just a few months after the end of a season.
You're paying more for less just so you can get it now. If you are serious about TV, you'll have a PVR to time-shift TV and you'll buy DVDs for archiving. If you aren't serious about TV, you'll certainly never buy the episodes online.
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.
Although I agree that for-pay-download TV has a bright future I sure wish guys like you would stop giving the providers the idea that this level of quality is acceptable. Why were folks like you telling Apple that its dowloadable music sounds "just as good as CD"? Why are you insinuating something similar for this?
I understand what you're trying to say, it's "watchable". Fine. Big Macs are edible too. But at the dawn of HDTV, why are we settling for Big Macs when you can buy a Porterhouse at your local Best Buy?
If you like this stuff, by all means tell Apple they're going down the right track. Just don't try and ruin it for those of us who appreciate high quality but telling Apple that QVGA is "as good as" broadcast TV. It's not.
TW
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.
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'm not sure I agree about portable TV being retarded, but I agree that the most overlooked aspect of this is that this is a new distribution model for TV shows. Haven't we (slashdotters) been asking for this? Whenever the stories have come up about bittorrenting TV shows, how many times has someone said, "It's not about stealing, I just want easy access to the show. I missed an episode." You know, people saying that they don't want to wait for the DVD, or it's not offered on DVD, or it's only on some channel that I can't get, or I just want to time-shift it, or whatever. The claim is always, "If someone would just make it easy to get the show I want, and watch it when I wanted it, I'd be willing to pay!" Well, here it is. Download when you want, available the day after it airs, watch it as many times as you want, it's here.
Whether you like Apple or iPods or whatever, it's a pretty big deal.
You're paying more for less just so you can get it now. If you are serious about TV, you'll have a PVR to time-shift TV and you'll buy DVDs for archiving. If you aren't serious about TV, you'll certainly never buy the episodes online.
But what if you're only serious about a handful of shows? Right now, there are precisely two shows that I watch on TV. I watch them via broadcast, then download each week's episode for watching later if I want, and then I buy the DVDs later when they are released, dumping my archive for next season's shows. To go your way, I'd need to buy a PVR setup, and then add about another 30-50 $/month for the cable/satellite so I could record my shows with good quality. It's just not worth it.
Now, if I could buy and download those shows in high quality right after they're aired, I don't need to wait until the DVDs are released to own a legitimate copy, and I have the ability to watch the episodes any time after the download, and I'm paying less than I would with your solution. Of course none of the shows offered now are high quality video, or anything I care to watch, but it's a step in the right direction.
-30-
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
My views:
Someday I'll own a PVR.
Today, I own a computer.
Perhaps, in a season or two, I'll want the complete collection for Lost.
Today, I just want to catch up a bit on the background.
Perhaps, in a year, I'll be able to shell out $70 for two seasons of a show. Today, I'm more than willing to shell out a couple of dollars of 'expendable' money to get a few episodes as they come out.
This isn't a hard concept. People buy small when they want big all the time, if they didn't places like Rent-A-Center would never even be in business.
Sure, this isn't the 'perfect' medium to you. It isn't meant to be, it's meant to be the 'good enough that I don't feel ripped off' medium for everyone out there who aren't sitting around figuring out how much they pay per episode for a DVD set, who aren't sitting around calculating how much more they spent on their furniture because they got it from Rent-A-Center instead of purchasing it outright.
And for that purpose, I think it's hit the exact right spot.
You're free to use your Tivo/MythTV/crappy old VCR/whatever. Or you're free to pay Apple $2 to package the show neatly for you. Or you're free to throw your TV out the window.
What exactly are you whining about?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You're not the first person to make this mistake. Our legal system does not work this way because there must be a deterrent. If the penalty is fixed at the value of what's taken (or "infringed upon," for the pedants), then copyright violation, theft, embezzlement, and so on are zero sum games.
If you're not sure what I mean, imagine what would happen if the law were changed so that if you robbed $100K from a bank or stole $100K from your employer, your only risk is that you'd have to pay the $100K back if you were caught.
The wikipedia article on damages probably explains it better than I can. Scroll down to the "Punitive or exemplary damages" section if you don't have time to read the whole thing. I hope this helps.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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.
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.
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