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Apple's Moment — Consumers Want To Download To TV
ack154 writes, "With so much recent news surrounding Apple's upcoming iTV system, their timing may be nearly perfect. Ars Technica gives the rundown on a recent report, released from Accenture, stating that about half of users surveyed across the globe are now looking to get downloadable videos, movies and other content onto their TV. Based on the article, if Apple can get the right combination in features, price, and usability, many consumers may be ready to eat it up. Macworld has more speculation on Apple's potential living room dominance."
No kidding! Just as people were trading around digital music for years and years before the labels had the bright idea to try and sell it that way, the powers that be are finally catching up to all the P2P traders of TV episodes.
Personally, I only follow a couple of shows, and all my TV content for the past several years has been either DVDs (watched on a computer,) downloads (P2P-style,) or authorized streams (bless you, Adult Swim!) I haven't owned an actual television for years.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I'm still waiting for free TV online to take off. Just like you can sponsor TV shows with advertisements, so you can sponsor online content with them. Let users select what they want to watch when they want to watch it, then stream it to them. Put in a few advertisements on the interface or even inside the stream, and you'll be collecting revenue.
This sort of thing exists (at least it does in the Netherlands), but it doesn't seem to be taking off. For me, the reason is that I haven't yet found a service that I can use. Most of them are all MSIE & WMP and ActiveX required - and we refuse to even try to give you service if your system fails the test. There's no way I'm going to install all that crap on my system, but I can't imagine it would be too hard for content providers to use more interoperable technologies.
I would love to be able to watch a movie whenever I feel like it, without having to depend on one I like being broadcast in the few hours a day when a few TV channels broadcast them. I'm sure this goes for plenty of othe people, too. Right now, many people are getting their DivX movies from the shady corners of the net, but who wants to wait for hundreds of megabytes to finish downloading, hoping that the quality will be ok, subtitles will be in sync, etc. etc. if they can get free movies off reputable sites, and start watching right away?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So, which is cheaper Tivo serivce or buying all my content from the iTunes Store?
Say there are 4 shows I really like @ $2 a show for 20 episodes = $160. That is $13.33/mo
Say there are 8 shows I really like @ $2 a show for 20 episodes = $320. That is $26.66/mo
Yes, ease of use and the cool factor will be a draw; however, economics will be the driving force.
Which model is kicking ass in the legal music word: buy your digital music or subcribe to a service and "rent" the music?
P226
>It's cheaper and easier for me to watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica on SciFi rather than wait two weeks for iTunes.
2 weeks for BSG ep's? If i remember corectly last seasion they were available the next day (BSG is the only reasion i started using itunes since i gave up my dvr i had to watch ep's somehow and firday night isn't allways the best time for me to watch tv)
I could be wrong but at least for me, and almost everyone I know, this is an astonishingly pointless product. I can pay a couple bucks an episode to watch videos on my TV or I can just record it, no matter when it's on, for $5 a month on my DVR...and that's assuming I don't use a computer for that function in which case there probably a monthly fee at all. In fairness I can't imagine paying for an itunes video at all. Any show I want to see I can tivo and if I'm on a trip I can, oh I don't know, wait a couple of days. Clearly I'm not the target market!
I stream high quality video over my wireless LAN to my PowerBook all the time. As long as the buffer is set to 1 second or more I have no problems at all.
Developers: We can use your help.
iTV is a great idea (or a great implementation of an existing idea), but I have one major problem with it; it needs to look the same as other AV equipment. This seems to be a recurring problem with all the tech companies that try to create an AV device. They create these designs that while looking great, just don't fit in with the rest of the components. Please lets have a version that is 19" wide that comes with either brushed aluminum or black, and give it a LCD display so that you don't have to have the damn TV on to browse your music collection.
Hell, that would probably save me money. I'm one of those weird people who watch little enough television that if I could pay for the shows I watch by episode, it would be cheaper then paying a monthly cable/satellite bill.
I'd love to see some kind of tiered pay structure set up. For example:
I doubt the networks would go for it, because it would cut into DVD sales. (Never mind that it would increase overall sales and end up making them lots and lots more money in the end. Remember, they're stupid.)
But if Apple had enough boxes out there to start developing their own content (i.e. pay television and movie studios to develop good-quality content exclusively for them), not only would they revolutionize how we all watch television, they would revolutionize the entire entertainment distribution medium. There's no telling what kind of major impact it would have on television networks and cable/satellite companies.
Of course, you can probably shortly thereafter count on cable/satellite companies paying lots and lots of money to Congresscritters so that they'll legislate what can and can't be shown via iTV, lest they lose major marketshare. (A la the way cable companies legislated what television networks I can and can't watch via DirecTV here in Atlanta. "Sorry, if you want to watch the New York ABC station, you're SOL!") Hopefully by that time though, Apple will have made enough money to fight that kind of fire with bigger and hotter fire.
At any rate, this is definitely an idea that is right on—not ahead of its—time, and I'll be one of the first in line to get a new iTV. Really exciting stuff!
As someone who works for a "content provider" to Apple, let me say that Apple Support is 100% correct. In our case, as a music content provider, the blame trickles to the music labels and then the artists (and from there who knows where). But Apple is by far the most responsible of the group, they tell us _exactly_ how long it will take to process new digital content (and it takes a long time usually, a few months). If content providers do not supply Apple with the data they need with enough lead time, it will take longer than people expect. Apple is doing the best it can at this, but there's simply nothing they can do when they don't have the content in time.
All of these problems will be solved if the device streams the compressed file and then performs the decompression itself- the Airport Express does not do this. Audio/video synch wouldn't be an issue because they're both coming out of the iTV. Press a volume key and the volume changes instantly, because the iTV would handle that. This would also greatly decrease the load on the network and the remote Mac.
The thing is, you aren't really paying for the channels themselves. What you are doing when you pay Cableco for basic is the cable infrastructure & maintainance, not the channels.
You can still get a la carte with analog C-band satellite. It's gradually going away as channels move to digital C-band, but as I said in another post, I paid $9.99 to get Comedy Central for a year. I do have to buy five options (channels or channel bundles) at a time, so that's about $50/yr.
and I scream a big "DUH" to the world. I have been doing this exactly for over a year now with my own hardware because itunes refuses to deliver in a format that is high resolution. Sorry but on a 32" SDTV itunes video content looks like crap. double the resolution and it looks good. So I have a couple of mythtv boxes living at relatives and friends homes recording CableTV for me and feed the shows back to me over broadband at night. works great. I get my Tv shows I want, dont pay for cable or sattelite as it sucks. and my friends and relatives get a free to use PVR that I support for them.
when I worked for comcast 2 years ago I told them that broadcast and CableTV was dead and ala-carte tv shows were what people wanted. I was lauged out of the meeting that I had no idea what people wanted. Nobody likes the 90% crap that is streamed over sattelite and cable. they have a small number of shows that they like and want them on their timeframe.
On demand in resolutions that are decent are the future and if apple doubles or triples their resolution then they might have something.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Don't know about the rest of you, but when I watch 24, or Lost or any other drama they are usually shown once a week. However if you miss that one episode you're screwed because every episode leads to another episode. This would be fine except for the fact that if you don't see this one episode you're lose the thrust of the story, and every episode is important to understanding the show.
So let's say you're driving home at 6:51 and you're car breaks down, you're show is on at 7:00, you've missed it, so either you have two options, download the episode (legally/illegally) or skip the rest of the season because you don't want to spoil yourself.
But wait what if we have DVR? Ok that works.
Come home at 8:00 all mad at the mechanic for overcharging you and find that there was a cable outage and your DVR didn't record the program, you're still in the same place.
The way TV shows works now the only option is to have something where you can see the episode so you can keep watching the show so the advertisers will keep paying for advertising. The part I disprove of is the fact that they charge you for the right to watch the show again, and will scream bloody murder if they find out you downloaded the episode for free, personally I find the system to be broken and Apple is only a stopgap.
Why do TiVo, when you can MythTV? Spend $50 on a PVR-150, and record all the shows that you want. Drag them onto your laptop when you get around to it. That, and the other 90% of MythTV really makes the television something interesting again -- it's got shows I want to watch.
Plus, it eats the commercials -- how cool is that?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Not only that, it doesn't have to be a large storage hard drive or something particularly fast (10gb drive at 5400 rpm should work fine) as long as it's reasonably small.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
While I probably won't use iTMS for video content, I have been continuously archiving several hours of various tv shows onto my new 80GB iPod ever since it arrived last week. Not only am I ripping content from DVDs I own, I've also been collecting up several shows onto a digital video recorder and then transferring that content onto my computer for export to the iPod. This has proven to be a great solution for keeping an organized collection of shows you can't otherwise through other sources.
In my case, the bulk of my collected content has been animated shows that are currently very difficult to obtain, such as "Rocko's Modern Life", which have yet to be released on DVD.
However, being an animator myself, having the ability to archive and organize large amounts of animated content serves a purpose beyond simple entertainment. It allows me to access any scene, in any episode, of any show on demand, and then lets me examine the scene in question for ideas that I can use within my own work. This is extremely useful, since I no longer have to interrupt my workflow to locate examples of various techniques used in the industry. As long as I know what episode and approximately where in the episode the scene I need occurs, I can bring it up in a matter of seconds.
I could see this having applications in other fields as well. For example, auto manufacturers could create a video-database of how to repair/replace certain parts of a vehicle, and then allow auto mechanics to store this database locally onto an iPod style device. Then, as the mechanic is working on a vehicle, if something comes up he can't quite figure out, he can simply pull out the device in question, go to vehicle's manufacturer/make/model in the database and bring up video relevant to the problem he's trying to fix. It's definitely not something cool like "augmented reality goggles", but it's certainly a step up from having to climb up out of the pit, and then flip through a 1,000+ page book to locate the needed info.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Yeah, I'm dreaming all right, dreaming about getting rid of a stupid monthly subscription that gives me 200 channels I don't want just so that I can get the few shows I actually watch.
Honestly, I have no idea what percentage of the market Apple's iTV (whatever it is actually called in the end) will get. Given that only around 10% of households use DVRs, it probably will not be much at first. What I do know is that things are going to change dramatically once this technology becomes easy-to-use and the average consumer becomes aware of it. Yes, the cable companies will have to respond to Apple and others that will sell programing via downloads. Maybe they finally will have to offer a la carte pricing. I am all for that.
And, I resent how the cable companies have fought cable card techology. Unless they give me choices I want, I will happily bolt.
Still, it's the wrong way to do it - it should be packaged as a 640x480 file (not quite, but close enough, and you've got to account for all the square-pixel PC displays...) with a widescreen/AR/anamorphic flag. That way, the player gets to decide how to play it - centre cut (with or without P&S vectors), letterboxed, or both (14:9).
.mov, .mp4 (based on .mov), .mkv, etc (.avi doesn't, but let's not go there...)
Most modern codecs support such flags in the bitstream, as do modern container formats - MPEG (codec & PS/TS/ES),
(This is something the feckin' idiots in the US ruined for the rest of the world. Why not learn to set the display mode properly in your DVD players, rather than bitching about black bars or tall skinny people on your 4:3 TV's - forcing distributors to letterbox perfectly good 16:9 & 2.21:1 content into a 4:3 flagged frame?)
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?