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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?"
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/
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
> However, even at bargain bin prices, it's not worth it. $5+ for a movie that's 20, 30, 40, 50 or even 60+ years old is not worth it.
Woow. That's an impressive statement.
25+ years old: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/
30+ years old: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0068646/
40+ years old: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0059578/
50 years old http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0038650/
60+ years old http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0022100/
Saying that any of those movies are not worth 5$ bucks just shows the world what a moron you are.
Cheers,
--fred