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.'"

Comments

Advertisement Woes

[digid]

Advertising, in my opinion, is a huge reason behind the controversy. The traditional distribution model allows media outlets to force consumers to have interrupted commercial sessions. With a single point of exit media outlets can statistically figure out how much viewership they have and set appropriate advertising rates. Now that ABC has broken the mold its causes much concern among affiliates on the future of advertising rates and whether they can still drive as much revenue. Of course I'm just speculating.

Most of national advertising rates fluctuate as they are based off of current Nielsen ratings which samples viewing habits year round. However local advertising rates are set for a yearly basis based off the TV audience during a specific period 4 times a year(Sweeps Week). With a smaller audience watching TV through this traditional method local affiliates lose a huge chunk of ad revenue.

Re:Choice

[Spy Hunter]

Really the ones you should be thanking are ABC. They had the balls to finally let somebody try real Internet distribution. Miraculously they didn't form a cartel with the other big networks to make unreasonable demands, they didn't go around "consulting" everybody to see if they thought it was a good idea, they put their biggest hits on the line, they didn't include ads, and they agreed on a quite reasonable price. ABC had all the power here and they did the right thing with it.

As for Apple's part of this deal, I downloaded Lost and my first impression was that iTunes is a terrible video player, at least on Windows. Not merely bad, but terrible. It crashes, it freezes for a second or more every time you click on something (including the seek bar, which makes it practically unusable), its user interface is completely unsuited for video, it glitches when it's not the top window, it seems to choose random brightness/contrast settings for each video (or perhaps that's just bad encoding), when downloading and watching videos at the same time it randomly pauses and skips for periods of 5 seconds or more (invariably at an important moment in the dialogue), I could go on and on. And of course you can't use any other video player because of the DRM (which AFAIK hasn't been cracked yet), unless you have a video iPod (I don't). I downloaded a BitTorrent copy to compare and the quality was *far* better, not to mention that it was in its native widescreen format (showing more of the action), and I could use a video player that didn't suck.

I still plan to buy Lost as it comes out to support legal TV downloads and because I have faith that Apple will soon fix iTunes, but when I want to actually watch those episodes I'm going to use BitTorrent.