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Google Video Store Announced
acid06 writes "Engadget and BusinessWeek covers Larry Page's talk at CES regarding the much anticipated Google Video Store. The rumours proved to be true and they're really going online with CBS to sell commercial-free episodes of their series. Deals with NBA, Sony BMG and Greencine.com were also announced." From the BusinessWeek article: "The video providers have the option of offering content on a download-to-own or download-to-rent basis. In a sign that content owners will likely pursue different approaches through Google Video, the National Basketball Association will sell broadcasts of its games one day after the event for $3.95. Meanwhile, public television staple Charlie Rose will post his interviews the day after a broadcast, allowing a free streaming for the first 24 hours then making it downloadable afterward for 99 cents each. Meanwhile, CBS is selling episodes of its popular 'CSI' and 'Survivor' series at the standard iTunes price of $1.99 per download."
So Apple, and now google, have video offerings. Video blogs are popping up all over.... and microsoft is just getting around to launching a music store (that, by the way, isn't even open yet).
] I realize that Microsoft expects to be able to dominate by competing brutally on price, and by leveraging the xbox platform, but how much of a head start are they going to give Google?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
There is a whole world out there, and I just hope that Google comes to the party and starts selling videos beyond American shores .
We're dying out here in Australia, our local content providers suck arse. They swabble over stations, muck about the times, cut shows mid season, cancel whole seasons, are usually up to 18 months behind the US in delivery. Its beyond contempt.
We are entering a brave new world in video delivery content, finally, a medium that puts the consumer in charge of the loungeroom. Lets only hope that offshore countries are also in for the ride.
$600 per year for cable. However I watch a lot more than just 5 or 6 shows. The cost per show has to drop significantly before this would be attractive for me, especially considering the poor video quality compared to my TV.
...Linux support?
For a company that is internet based and uses Linux heavily on the backend, I'm kind of surprised they don't support Linux more in their product lines to give back something to the community that helped them start up.
I browsed through pack.google.com but didn't see any mention of a Linux offering now or in the future. I'd love to see Google Earth and Google Desktop on Linux, not to mention the video stuff.
Anyone heard anything about this?
Most tv shows have a budget under a couple of million per episode. Most tv shows do not make a profit until they hit syndication, which usually requires around 100 episodes in the can.
TV show downloads have the potential to make first run TV shows profitable up front, no need for syndication. But pricing levels of $1 or $2 per show for non-niche shows are beyond reasonable.
Take a look at "Lost," one of the most expensive shows on TV today, they've been doing around 20M viewers per episode in the USA alone. If only 10% of those viewers go to pay-for-download that's $4M per episiode, which is already turning a profit never mind the commercial fees for the remaining 18M viewers still watching it over the air with commercials. At 20% of the audience or just 4M viewers, the revenue becomes $8M which is probably significantly more profitable than any show ever in the history of US broadcasting.
Thus these big-name, big-budget shows should tend to be priced closer to 20cents per episode if there was real competition. Similarly, the shows with smaller audiences often have much smaller budgets (for example an episode of anime usually costs $200K-$300K to produce) and should still be inline with pricing in the 15-30 cents/episode range.
Don't even get me started on video quality - itunes video is far too low resolution, I believe a pseudo-HD resolution of around 960x540 ought to be an absolute minimum considering that MPEG4/AVC1/H264 can do that reasonably well in about 500MB.