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An Essay On Subscription Television
dpu writes "Who would pay $1.99 to download a television episode that only costs about $0.0014 to see on cable? This is a short essay on the current and past state of subscription television, and a hope for the future. It skips a lot of points that the thinkers among us might care about, but it does the math and drives a nail into Big Content's pinky toe."
Who would pay $1.99 to download a television episode that only costs about $0.0014 to see on cable?
Why pay $14.99 for a novel when you can walk out of the library with it for free?
Content creators need to be assured of recompense for their work. Until someone comes up with a better way of assuring payment for digitally-reproduced work, the system we have is...all we have.
I haven't RTFA, but I could give three reasons.
1. You're paying not to see commercials
2. You're paying for the convenience of seeing whenever you want
3. You're paying for the infrastructure needed
The prices are high as they are with any "new tech". As I see it, this is still an "early adopter" price.
I also question the maths involved here. Is he watching cable 24/7 to get those prices?
It's funny how on the one hand we hate targeted advertising because it's an invasion of privacy and you can't trust the security of the data that a company keeps about you; and on the other hand, we hate untargeted advertising just as much for spamming us with irrelevant and annoying messages. I wonder if it'd ever be possible to register our data and preferences with some sort of trustworthy neutral party, and have advertising routed through them so that the business models that depend on it can still survive while we're not bored to pieces or abused by marketting companies.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
How about- just not get *any* advertising.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
If average person watches TV for 4 hours a day, that is 120 hours a month. With $60 a month to Comcast that means it 50c per hour of TV, with ads. If you consider that ads run anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes out of hour, lets say at average 20 minutes, you get about 80 minutes of TV for a dollar, which is subsidized by ads. I don't know how much Comcast pays to the content providers and how much ads will pay. But you are willing to pay at average 50c per TV show episode, while watching ads. So you are paying 4 times as much for no ads. Now for the author of the article and for me, if you watch about 4 shows at average, that is 20 episodes a month at the $60 for Comcast this makes $3 per episode. I think that looking at it this way, iTunes pricing is a steal. Not counting the fact that there are off-season periods when you still pay subscription to Comcast, but don't pay anything on iTunes.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
If I could pay $2 per episode for content that was guaranteed to be ad-free, DRM-free (or free enough that it doesn't hinder my fair use efforts), persistent (meaning it doesn't get deleted out from under me), and included added-value content like commentaries and behind-the-scenes features, I would.
Oh wait, it's called buying it on DVD.
And until these newfangled methods of obtaining TV can provide what those shiny coasters can provide, I'll stick with buying the shows I want to watch repeatedly on DVD, and PVRing the ones I only want to see once.
The same reason people are willing to pay 99 cents for a music file they could download free from Kazaa, or willing to pay $3.99 for a gallon of milk at the gas station they could buy for $2.50 at the grocery store just a few blocks away.
It's shocking news to both content providers and pirates, but most people have money in their pocket and they don't mind spending it on things that they like when it is made convenient to do so. They are particularly happy to spend more when it saves them time and gives them a guarantee of quality, both of which are major motivators of buying songs/TV shows rather than simply getting a radio or cable hookup.
Keep in mind that if you want to watch particular shows and don't have an infinitely flexible schedule, you'll need to include the price of a TiVo or something similar to make sure you're recording all those "cheap" shows. And you'll have to wait for a rerun or a DVD to be released if you missed an episode.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Thats fine. I'm more than happy to pay for content. I'm not happy to have my time wasted with advertising. Which is why I use commercial skipping, ad blockers, and do not subscribe to any newspaper or magazine that has ads. In addition, if I see an ad for your product, I refuse to buy it. Advertisers are the scum of the earth- they steal your time which could be better spent watching your TV show, reading your magazine/webpage, listening to your music/radio show, etc. The whole profession ought to be outlawed.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Of course a big part of the reason that cable is so cheap per show is that they show advertising. To answer all those people who are bitching about having to pay for cable when it has commercials I want to point out that you pay a relatively small amount for quality (and many not so quality) cable shows because of these commercials. Sure you can argue that the locally inserted commercials by the cable company are a needless waste (but remember cable has far fewer customers than phone so they must split up the cost of their network over fewer people) but if you want big budget shows with high production values you either need to charge the way HBO does (10-15 bucks per channel per month) or fund them with commercials.
.2c. Given a 30minute program has 6 minutes of commercials that means about $1.20 of commercials (I suspect this might be a hit high but still roughly on target). Throw in the costs of the lost commercials from reruns (how frequently have you seen the same program a second time?) and the $1.99 price begins to seem relatively reasonable. Remember the viewers that are being lost to download aren't the people who are leaving their TV on while they do something else, they are the valuable viewers who are watching closely.
I suspect others will point out that the amount the advertiser is paying per viewer is much smaller than the cost of say an iTunes download hence it should be economical to have relatively cheap commercial free download, e.g., each downloader just needs to cover the total amount an advertiser would have paid to get commercials to you. From my quick google research it seems likely that the cost per impression in the male 18-34 age group (also the download group) it is about
If you are willing to watch commercials in your download then it's a different story but if you aren't you have to ay to replace the money the commercials would have brought in.
Also these sort of pay per show model is only ever going to be an alternative to the normal model never a replacement. Sure we will pay for commercial free versions of our favorite shows we follow but most TV watching is done casually (I wonder if there is anything on) and no matter how much you bitch about commercials I doubt you would pay to watch a show just because you had 30minutes to kill but you will watch a show with commercials for that reason. We vote with our actions and those say we want a flat rate model that lets us watch shows for no extra cost when we feel like it.
It's just the same way that people bitch about ads at the start of movies but no matter how much people bitch they never go spend an extra $2 to go to the theater with less ads.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
"when did we start paying for advertising?"
Ironically, you've always paid for advertising. So now you're both paying for the advertising (if you buy the product), and then you get to pay to watch the advertising (on TV).
So basically you're paying to watch something you dont want to watch, which you yourself paid to get produced, just so you can watch something else you didnt pay to get produced (well, except you did pay to get it produced when you paid for the advertising by buying the advertised product...).
Somehow I suspect that this may not be the most optimal method of funding the things you do want to watch... (which might be a tangent to the articles point...)
Between my wife and I, we watch the following shows on a regular basis: (Winter): - Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with commercials) - Rome (HBO, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with no commercials) - The Office (NBC 1/2 hour, 12 hours per year with commercials) (Spring): - The Sopranos (HBO, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with no commercials) - Big Love (HBO, 1 hour, 26 hours per year with no commercials) (Year round): - The daily Show (Comedy Central, 1/2 hour, 150 episodes per year with commercials) - The colbert report (Comedy Central, 1/2 hour, 150 episodes per year with commercials) All told, that adds up to 416 hours that we actually care about per year. I'd estimate that we also watch about 100 hours or so of miscellaneous stuff (discovery health and the occasional sci fi miniseries). We'll round here and say 550 hours of programming per year, total. This would cost us $1100 from iTunes or whatnot, but it costs us $720 from comcast. In my case, the numbers are highly skewed because I watch the daily show and the colbert report; if I didn't, iTunes would be a much better deal (assuming that there was a really great way to get the content to my television set, of course). "Season passes" to most of the shows I listed above can be bought from iTunes for $30-50 each. I'd gladly pay $350 a year for the 7 shows over what I pay for comcast. -
Ever hear of movies? They're kinda cool. You pay $7.50 or so, and get to watch a story uninterrupted by commercials. Quite often, movies cost double digit millions to make, and some even triple digit millions. I would guess it would be possible to profitably sell copies of TV episodes for $2 each because they cost a mere fraction of the cost of movies. Anyway, you should check them out -- you'd then see there was a model other than advertising which is apparently profitable.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Competing with free means two things. First, you need to provide a quality product. No commercials, high definition, good bit rate, no DRM. Then, you have a product that is as good or better than free. The reason I don't buy DVDs is that when I want to watch a film, I want to watch a film and not commercials etc. 99 hours of "bonus content" generally does not add any value for anyone except hard core fans. I don't really care how they made the trees in LOTR.
The second thing big content needs to do is get the price right. People pay for their internet connection, cable TV, maybe a premium Usenet account etc. because they want to download content. So, like it or not, they already paid and can get TV for no extra cost. If you want more money out of them, it had better not be too much and you had better make the buying experience damn good (i.e. very high speed downloads, no special software required). It has to be simultanious with the first showing on TV too.
Oh, and never forget, just because you spent a lot of money making it doesn't mean it's worth a lot. Your content has to be good, not expensive. Make old BBC Horizon programs from the 80s available for 20p, and I'll bite.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"I watch about four different television shows on a regular basis - Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, and typically a current reality show (which is Grease: You're The One That I Want right now)"
*blink*
OK - of all the content on a full menu of cable or sat, this is the sum total of what you find compelling?
I know there's no accounting for taste, but you're hardly their typical demo.
Most of us are paying full price for a house and really only using three rooms and reallly only for a half the day at best. What's up with that raw deal?
You pay the $1 or 2 to listen or watch whenever you want, as often as you want. No one's holding a gun to your head, and it's an alternative to buying DVR etc. This is a vaguely similar argument to the music sedction, usually pointed at Apple - thet they're "forcing" you to adopt their model. Wrong. There are many music providers. being the market leader is not the same as being an unregulated monopoly.
Which leads us to the cable company. They deregulated cable AFTER the wires were laid down, and unlike the local telcos who are merely the custodian of the infrastructure and must let anyone send their info over the copper, the cable companies have no established way of letting anyone else down the coax. The satellite system is similar - as long as the financial agent owns the pipe, it's their ball and they can go home.
About the only thing I'd change about any video delivery model is make sure it's a la carte, for the sake of scaling down rising cost. The industry is claiming that it will cost a bajillion dollars per person to do this, but that's what they said about seat belts, air bags, ABS, flying car^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H personal cell phones and DVD players.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Because some people are actually willing to support the producers of shows they like so that such shows can continue to be produced. Also, there are many people who would want to stay on the right side of the law unless it is too costly (monetary and resource). The amount of money we are talking about per show is very small to most people.
Personally I would gladly pay $2 per show directly to the producer in order to be able to watch it when it is 'aired' in good quality.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
this really irritates me. if you download a full season of a show (itunes for example) you sometimes pay 40 - 60 dollars for a season. the prices on downloads are a rip off. if they (they meaning all of them, itunes, microsoft, and all the content providers) cut their prices in half, people (especially me) would download 3 times the content. i liked macgyver when i was a kid, and i wouldn't mind downloading a season and watching it, but not for $60. am i wrong??? do you all think that season 1 of macgyver should cost as much as a brand new episode of 24??? or another example is battlestar galactaca. the original episodes are as much as the NEW scifi channel episodes. it's about sqeezing as much money as they can out of every consumer.
in the words of dave chapelle........ "greedy bastards!!!"
That's not so bad. Here in Canada we have this steaming pile of shit called the CBC that we pay for, yet they still show just as many ads as any other network.
every buy a DVD these days and try and skip the trailers and adverts and crap?
at least the movie itself is continuous and lacks adverts. oh wait, what about product placement? go look up how much it costs to have one of your products made highly visible in the latest Bond movie.
and don't get me started over the merchandising. my son is into Pixar's Cars; he has the dvd, t-shirt, pyjamas, models and even napkin/serviettes! At least we held off buying most of it until it was no longer premium priced.