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ABC To Offer Full Shows Online
vitaly.friedman writes to mention an Ars Technica story on the ABC's newest bid to stay relevant in the Information Age. As of the end of this month the network will be airing certain popular television shows on the ABC website, starting the morning after their first broadcast. From the article: "All programs will be shown in their entirety, including commercials which cannot be avoided. That's a smart move on ABC's part, as it ensures that advertisers will get another shot at hawking their wares to an audience that might otherwise change channels during commercial breaks or fast-forward through them if recorded. Aside from being unable to avoid commercials, watching the programs will be similar to watching timeshifted content in that viewers will be able to pause, fast forward, and rewind."
After all the customer is always right, and with all media (google included) you have to remember that the advertiser is the customer t and you the viewer is the product being sold.
You can skip chapters, but each chapter includes advertising in the middle. There are also lots of product placements that, with the help of Google, will dynamically place products you want to buy into key scenes.
"Say, Denise, would you pick up that Lite-On 8X dual-layer DVD burner with Linux drivers? I say, I don't feel like myself without a nice Lite-On 8X dual-layer DVD burner with Linux drivers any more."
For more information, click here.
I wonder if Apple will still be charging a couple bucks an episode when viewers now have the choice of getting a commercial-loaded copy for free instead.
It'd be nice if the ad-supported version were available for free through iTMS, but that would probably require ABC to actually pay APPLE per download to cover bandwidth costs and overhead, which might be problematic.
Anyway, if Apple doesn't work out SOME kind of new deal, it seems safe to say their $2 iTMS episodes aren't gonna be selling very well anymore, except among the video iPod loyalists.
Check out the press release. They're using Flash 8 encoding to prevent it from being downloaded. Available Windows & Mac.
Episodes will be available at two resolutions, the better being 700x394 pixels at 700 kbps. I might have to start watching one of these shows just to support the effort.
Forget the morons above when they complain about "oh, it's the day after? WAH WAH WAH" or "Can't skip the commercials WAH WAH WAH".
Proof positive that you can always drive your point home by inserting Eddie Van Halen guitar licks into your conversations.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Maybe if advertisers stopped making commercials that are crap, they wouldn't need to lock us out of fast forward during commercials.
You whiny bastard. Seriously. These companies can't do anything right, can they?
All I see here is people complaining and getting modded up for it. As far as I'm concerned this is a great step in a great direction.
I think what it boils down to is that most people here just want shit for free, and will say anything to pretend that they have some valid objection with the system and that it warrants theft (or "copyright infringement" for the pedants).
Free/opensource software falls victim to the same tripe -- people pretend that they stand by the ideologies but really just want stuff for free -- and use the ideology as a guise to pirate non-free software like photoshop or Windows.
bleh.
For example, I won't even consider touching the video on commercial web sites (except google). Why? Well, it's not because I'm morally opposed to downloading a video from ABC or CNN. No... it's because their video always sucks to an unbelievable degree, to the point where watching it is a nightmare. Let's consider:
... etc. The point is, the reason Bittorrent is so incredibly popular isn't because people are so excited that they can get an episode of Lost without commercials for free. They could already do that -- VCRs are old hat. The great thing about Bittorrent is that it's incredibly convenient compared to any of these pile-of-garbage corporate offerings.
And that's the problem with this ABC thing. It, like all the garbage before it, sucks. The network that created the show is going to offer a vastly inferior experience, with more hassle, than some random guys using bittorrent.
If they wanted to do something innovative, and better, they would simply have placed MPEG4 files (or torrents to keep their costs down) on their web site, with the commercials. This would have been much cheaper and easier to develop for them, and would be a better experience for their users. But of course, they never will do this, because the industry is insane.