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Can iTunes Resurrect Old Time TV?
An anonymous reader writes "With iTunes selling a couple of popular TV shows now there has been significant hesitation from other television producers to follow suit and put their content on the Web. It has also sparked activity from the actors unions who want additional compensation for what appears online. But there is also existing content that stands to be revived in this new context, older television shows from the 50's and 60's that have been squeezed out of the traditional broadcast by popular shows of more recent vintage. It was suggested to a producer who is presently digitizing 27 episodes of a 1950's show called Captain Zero to offer it up on iTunes for a buck an episode. Is this an opportunity for these old shows to strike while the iron is hot and while the owners of more contemporary content are caught like deers in a headlight? As the Captain Zero article points out purveyors of old time radio programs have enjoyed a significant revival by embracing web-based technology. Why not old time TV?"
Have you seen the bargain DVD rack at your local Wal-Mart?
You can get entire seasons of old TV for a buck....
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Programmers are not compensated for every copy of their software they develop for their employers. Actors are no different.
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson got paid an average engineer salary to develop unix, yet only Bell Labs and now the open group make money off of every copy sold. They agreed to work for x amount a year.
http://saveie6.com/
If you want me to be a customer, you need to offer me several things:
+ I don't want to view it just on my ipod.
+ I don't want to be able to view it only with Quicktime.
+ I don't want to have severe DRM limits that hamper my ability to store and watch the content any time I want on any device I want.
+ I don't want to pay through the nose for the content.
+ If I watch it on a non-iPod device, I want higher quality downloads available.
+ You should have at least the selection that Netflix does. Even if you're just the "Netflix of television".
I'm one of those consumers who is not opposed to paying for information/entertainment/data on any real basis other than I want it to be affordable and flexible. Don't place silly restrictions on me that hamper my enjoyment and don't charge me so much that I have to seriously think if each download is worth it.
Also, isn't most of the content they're talking about already public domain? Hell, some of it can be downloaded from the Internet Archive already.
Could not agree more with the premise. In a world where content is king, it continually amazes me that the vast piles of old TV programming out there can't find a market. Online delivery at low prices strikes me as the perfect delivery channel.
I assume the overhead is low and, in an era where new, expensive HD content is raising the bandwidth bar, these old 4:3 shows would be light on the pipes and relatively easy and cheap to deliver.
I for one would happily pay to see old episodes of shows like The Saint or The Prisoner without having to pay for a whole additional tier of cable TV service just so I can get channels like BBC America (and then hope they run the shows).
Listening to Podcasts like "Soap Detectives" has gotten me into listening to old radio shows lately and I'm amazed by how entertaining they are.
On demand, online delivery of old TV content sounds like a sure winner to me.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
Also, isn't most of the content they're talking about already public domain? Hell, some of it can be downloaded from the Internet Archive already.
Not in general. No TV is old enough to enter the public domain naturally. What happened with some programs and movies (even such famous movies as the original "Night of the Living Dead") is that they were never officially copyrighted or were incorrectly copywrited during the time when copyright was not automatically granted.
The interesting thing with doing this, is that the amount of bandwidth needed for these older shows is far lower than that of the modern programs, such as Lost. Many of these older television shows only need to be encoded in greyscale and given a mono soundtrack. This could be a great, yet, inexpensive way to give the itunes video store some credibility.
8==8 Bones 8==8
It will be interesting to see however, considering the grumbling of the music execs about the 99cent fixed price, whether we will see an ownership type system like iTunes (I understand the vagaries of the copy protection on iTunes- I am being general) or a subscription system like Yahoo Music. With the subscription, I would be like cable I guess, with different levels and channels available, i.e. subscribe to HBO and get to watch movies whenever (sort of like Adelphia in demand), or subscribe to TBS and get the whole Segal and Dirty Harry catolg etc....
When you stand back and think about it, we live in amazing times consumer-technologically. 5 years ago I thought burning my own CDs was awesome- now I have my iPod with thousands of songs hooked up to my car....
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
They need to realize that, with those old shows, they have a very different market. The amount of people who desperately want their old shows to the point that they'll pay what they would for a recent one is very low, while the amount of people who will say, "Hey that was a kinda cool show. I'd like to have a copy of that for a couple of cents," is very high. And, since the entire show has already had its run and made its money, selling them at $0.25 or $0.50 a show instead of $1 per episode is still making a profit.
Naturally, I'd consider paying a half-dollar an episode for one of the good slightly old shows, like The Prisoner or The Six Million Dollar Man.
I see a market for this, driven by the need of someone, somewhere, who wants to see an episode of some older TV show, or even a current TV show that doesn't have mass appeal. Appeal that's in the upper 20% of overall demand that is.
iTunes is a very effective distribution medium, and has helped the careers of many a smaller label / band, and even moved significant amount of back catalog.
Currently the networks are marketing to the top 20% in terms of demand, and ignoring the remaining 80% because they don't have the broadcast capacity.
Teaming up with iTunes they do. Another example of The Long Tail .
I see this working.
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I can download all of the Wile E. Coyote episodes uncensored. It kills me that they see a need to hack the shit out of the classic looney tunes cartoons to protect kids from viewing violence. It was okay for a whole generation of children and adults alike and now suddenly it's not okay, so they need to censor them.
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Just like with the music store, the big money is in the back-catalog sales. There are hundreds of thousands of TV shows from the 20th century, and only a few of them live on in syndication the way that the Andy Griffith Show or I Love Lucy have. There's only so much room in broadcast and even satellite TV schedules, so most of those old shows just sit on a shelf, making no money at all for their owners.
I know there are hundreds of episodes of old cartoons I'd love to get, for a start.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
if I could buy the whole seriese sands canned laugh.
Having the seasons 1-8 (9 will be released in Dec, IIRC) on DVD behind me on the shelf:
you can have that right now.
I don't know about the RC1 release, but for the RC2s (1 or 2 seasons of mine are the German DVDs, most are from the UK) I can assure you that they all contain a "laughless" audio track.
Each RC2- season box contains 3 discs with 8 episodes each (sadly, no bonus materials) and sell (at amazon) around 25 pounds(UK) or 20-27 Euro (German, also cotaining laughterless English track).
Judging from the comments at amazon.com (20$ a season) you can turn off the laughter on the RC1s too; at least on the early ones (I checked season 1,2 and 7; BUT 7 didn't list two english tracks so you might want to take a closer look).
So you can get them already for 0.85$-2$ per episode,.
For what it's worth, my local library (Arlington, VA) has complete collections of the old Avengers, Secret Agent, and I Spy (the one with Bill Cosby) on DVD, plus a lot of other BBC stuff -- Poirot Mysteries, Monty Python, various mini-series, etc -- some HBO series, and quite a few old (and not so old) films. My point is that it's worth checking out libraries in your area before looking into cosmetic dentistry.
I think ultimately what we need for IPTV is for the internet to become everyone's video collection, everyone's DVR timeshifter. The technology is ripe for that.
There are many shows that are so voluminous that the only practical way to consume them is with an all-in-one jukebox with a beefy search engine behind it (think google video indexing closed captioning).
Think of these long-running shows:
The Simpsons
Married with Children
Bonanza
Gunsmoke
Doctor Who
Cheers
Imagine also being able to dig into old news shows, like every episode of 60 Minutes, 20/20, or Nightline.
Imagine being able to watch any old airing of the Tonight Show back to the earliest B&W days based on a search for a celebrity guest. For instance, you could line up all of Tom Hanks' appearances and watch his fro shrink and his hairline recede.
DVD is fine, but it is just not practical to reserve the shelfspace to own it all. And DVDs do little to help you get from "gee, I wish I could see the episode where Ricardo Montalban guested on Gunsmoke" to it actually playing on the screen. You have to go figure out the episode number online, then find the right disc, pop it in, wait through the ads, navigate through the menus, and go. The convenience at the macro level is not there, just as maintaining a large audio CD collection is a drag.
So much of our content viewing habits these days is a result of search results. That's the whole idea of web surfing. So the ideal video viewing experience, to me, is to sit down casually and just improvise search terms until you come up with interesting enough results. You won't know what you want to watch until you see what comes up. Or you have the preference engine (ala Amazon) do it for you.
Instead of using the web to index information about media, it could index the media directly and let you jump right into it.
For instance, let's say you typed in a particular line or phrase like "Do'h" and every instance where Homer says "Do'h" pops up with the timecode right in there. You might even be able to set up in/out playlists for custom highlights reels.
Really, this stuff is all doable technically. Google video is a good proof of concept. It's purely a matter of working out the DRM and the business side of things.