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'Roll Your Own News' DVDs Now Shipping
theodp writes "Amazon.com and CBS have partnered to offer a la carte news clips on custom-made DVDs. Pay $24.95 and you'll get 10 clips or 90 minutes, whichever comes first. Not too surprisingly, CBS News seems to have the best coverage on the new service."
This is like those advertisements at the end of PBS shows that charge $24.99 for a VHS tape of the show you have just seen. I always wondered who the hell bought that crap.
The usefulness of this service really depends on the licensing. If you can do whatever you want with them then I could see some cool 60 minute techno remixes (OK, they wouldn't really be cool, but at least someone might find the clips useful). However if they are licensed anally (as I suspect they will be) then this service is useless. Not surprisingly the article doesn't say.
Philosophy.
For all those doubters out there, take a minute to actually look at the service CBS and Amazon.com are offering. This isn't about getting a DVD of yesterday's 60 Minutes broadcast (we all have MythTV for that, right?), but rather for finding copies of older news stories that certainly aren't going to be broadcast again. Personally, I think the move is genius for CBS. Rather than collect dust, they're offering up these old clips for a very reasonable fee. It's a perfect example of a mega-corp actually adjusting to technological advances and embracing them. If you think about it for 30 seconds, it's really a perfect medium for the syndication of millions of archived newsreels.
Browsing through some of the clips, there's actually some really neat stuff available that would otherwise have been lost to the general public and appears to be a worthwhile trip down nostalgia lane. For example, their political section has a vast array of news clips from the 2000 Presidential election. There are a couple of pre-9/11 snippets on gas prices, and even what appears to be a segment on the Segway. Plus there's a wide variety of interviews with people like Neil Armstrong, Jonathon "Fatal1ty" Wendel, Jon Stewart, and J. K. Rowling dating back to 1999.
There's probably a rather large potential market for this kind of stuff too. It's certainly not the kind of thing you'll find a torrent for or dig up on YouTube. I know there are some interesting documentaries on there that I would certainly be inclined to purchase. And aside from the academic environment, I could imagine buying one just to get a look at how stuff used to be (and to give to your grandparents years later). As of now, there isn't much older footage (I think late 1999 is as far as it goes back), but hopefully this is just the tip of the iceberg. If they offer much older stuff I'd definitely invest in a compilation of those big historical landmark broadcasts (e.g. Pearl Harbor, Cuban Missle Crisis, etc.).
On a side note, it'd be even cooler if someone like ESPN got into the action with this. I'd die for the ability to buy old baseball and football highlights and such. Just my $.02
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