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ABC Affiliates Grapple With TV-Show Downloads
Carl Bialik writes "By making an episode of 'Lost' available for download last week just half a day after it aired, for a $1.99 charge, 'Apple may have helped open a Pandora's box for the media business,' the Wall Street Journal reports. The president of the association representing ABC's affiliate stations sent a letter to the president of ABC, reading in part, 'It is both disappointing and unsettling that ABC would embark on a new -- and competitive -- network program distribution partnership without the fundamental courtesy of consultation' with its affiliates. While the extent of Apple's TV downloads is limited, the Journal parses the potential impact: 'if downloading episodes over the Internet proves popular, analysts believe Apple will get permission to offer shows with better-fidelity pictures. Any success Apple has won't go unnoticed by other online media powerhouses with expanding video initiatives like Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which could all help extend TV downloading to more viewers.'"
Itunes has 90% of the market because they have more music than anybody else. That's the thing about the long tail. You have to have A LOT of stuff in order to capture that last 50% of the market. Example: Last night I was looking for Julie Miller on Yahoo (my service of choice because I'm cheap). Two songs. Itunes has her whole catalog, four CDs worth.
I certianly wouldn't want to buy any of these right now, sure the bit rate is good for the iPod video, or even a computer screen, but blowing them up on a TV must suck!
Most TV's have worse resolution than the average monitor. These are acceptable, but not great for either.
Combine that with the fact that an average season (22-24 episodes) would cost $43.78 - $47.76 and I would much rather spend that money buying something that can be displayed on my TV!
Full seasons cost less than the price of all their episodes, just as full albums cost less than the price of all their songs. These episodes do end up undercutting DVDs, but not by a lot. The strength of this offering is in the instant gratification, easier portability, and granularity. Just as many people want to buy just that one song they like from an album, many people also want to buy just that one episode they missed or a TV show.
I assume the DRM is FairPlay
So they say, although seeing as FairPlay is an Apple trademark term, FairPlay could be something different for video than audio. I expect it will be the same or very similar and hopefully, locked down to the same degree,
Desperate Housewives commands $350,000 for a 30 second spot. There are 17 minutes of commercials in 1 episode, which means there are 34 commercials in each episode.
That comes to $11.9 million per episode. That means 6 million people need to purchase each episode in order to match what ABC currently gets from advertisers.
Somehow I think the people talking about the death of broadcast TV are a bit pre-mature.
What on *earth* have the execs at the affiliates being doing the past few years that they've missed the fact that the music business in is absolute turmoil over digital distribution? They can hardly claim that they were so busy producing Reality and Car-Crash TV shows that they didn't realise the inevitability that they were next and Hollywood is going to follow.
You (along with everyone else) have apparently completely forgotten about the concept of VOD. In fact, there is nothing new whatsoever about downloading TV shows! I've got about 50 different channels on my cable box that allow me to do this whenever I want to, and at higher resolutions than iTMS.
The downloading, and the idea of digital distribution, is not new at all. And you're way, way off if you think the affiliates have not been working with the networks on this for years now. The only thing that's new about iTunes and TV shows is the act of putting it on an iPod. Is this really so revolutionary? I would argue that it's not. True, the iPod has never had video before, but plenty of other devices have, and I've been able to download episodes of my favorite TV shows for years now over my cable company's digital VOD system, transfer them to my PC and put them on whatever video device I want to.
Now, you can say "but it's going to bring downloading to the masses!" Well again, VOD is already quite popular. Almost everybody has it (whether they even know it or not) and all that's missing is a quick and easy way to transfer those shows to a portable device (sans PC). But that's a trivial thing to add - all cable boxes these days have high speed data ports of one type or another, and the cable industry's just been waiting for a reason to use them. Well, this might be it - if the cable industry feels truly threatened by iTunes, watch for them to open the floodgates.
I'm not arguing that what Apple's doing isn't a good thing or that it won't push the industry forward. But I don't see how downloading episodes of Lost for $1.99 a piece at 320x240 resolution beats what I've got on my cable box, which has thousands of TV shows available at any given moment for free. (Or at least for no more than I pay for standard cable service.)
In the future, you're more likely to keep your cable company and use them for downloads than you are to switch to iTunes. The TV networks have been pushing VOD forward for years and while iTMS may hasten the transition, the cable and network TV industry are pretty well prepared.
As far as I see it, the only anti-competitive behavior apple's shown is their proprietary encrypted-AAC fileformat.
AFAIK this was a requirement by the record labels before they would permit digital distribution of the music files. So is the anti-competitive behaviour Apple's or the RIAA cartel's?
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World