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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?
If someone were to watch TV for 18 hrs/day, 7 days/week, that's ~540 hours/month. Skipping commercials, that's about 800 hrs/month of programming, or 1600 episodes. At $0.0014 per episode, this guy must be paying only $1.12 per month for cable. He would be nuts to pay $1.99 for a single show.
Meanwhile, in the real world, someone who is paying $60/month for cable and watching TV for 40hrs/month, might find $1.99 for a show quite reasonable.
Why stop there? Why not provide the latest episode online for free in case you missed it or prioritized something else (or two something elses if you have a dual-tuner PVR, or three something elses if you recorded two shows and watched a third already-recorded show)? That's what NBC does with Heroes. But why not go even further? NBC provides all episodes of the current season of Friday Night Lights online for free. CBS has done the same thing with Jericho. There are probably other such shows out there provided online for free by the parent company that I just haven't stumbled across (I watch and enjoy Heroes and Jericho, and though I haven't watched it yet I ran across Friday Night Lights by accident).
Yes, these videos are streaming-online-only. Yes, it sucks to have to watch them in a browser rather than on your big screen TV. However this does bring up an interesting question -- if time-shifting is legal, as the courts have held up, and if time-shifting could imply a necessary format-shifting (from broadcast format to tape or disk, for example), might not this new behavior by CBS and NBC actually allow you to time-shift and format-shift not by watching the videos online but by downloading them in a more big screen-friendly format (say, DivX, playable on any HTPC) from a bittorrent tracker somewhere? Seems like a gray area to me. Obviously it would only apply to shows where the full episodes are available for free from the parent company, so shows like Battlestar Galactica or 24 are out. But for the shows I mentioned and others like them, it's definitely an interesting question, unfortunately probably only answerable by a court somewhere.
It does make you wonder how CBS can justify selling Jericho on Xbox Live Video Marketplace for $2/episode when they provide the exact same content online free of charge. Just food for thought ...
Whether you agree that $1.99 or $2.99 per show is a good deal, directly paying for shows allows something amazing to happen. * It allows audiences to pass money DIRECTLY to television creators. * And that model is more honest and fairer than the advertising model which currently dominates broadcasting. It is a way better model, and better TV would be the outcome. It has the power to transform the type of shows being made because it makes television-makers directly accountable to their audience. Program makers would not have to pander to the needs of the network or the advertisers, but would put the audience first. Shows which have a small enthusiastic audience would not be dropped. Reality shows would have to stick in advertising land, because no-one would pay for that crap. Of course the networks and advertisers are fearful of being cut-out of the market. So while they still have power, they'll attempt to drive the prices of download TV ever higher. This is going to get interesting. C
"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...)
Yikes! That's over 1/2 million PT Barnums born per year!
I'd have thought the number would be much smaller...