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Study Says No Future for Video iTunes
eldavojohn writes "Reuters is running a story on a study that claims "Online video sites that sell shows and movies such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes will likely peak this year as more programming is made available on free outlets supported by advertising." Many channels have wised up to offering their content hosted from their own sites for free — with commercials — to cut out iTunes as the middle man. End result? Predictions that services like iTunes-Video have no future."
Actually, iTunes shows are not without commercials. Many of the shows have commercials embedded in the movie file. What they are is without commercial interruptions. Commercials are placed on the tail end of the video where you can choose to watch them or shut off the playback. This is vastly superior to the DVD solution of, "you MUST watch these commercials every time you turn on this DVD."
I don't know about anyone else, but I actually like seeing occasional advertisements. Especially things like movie trailers and new show promotions. My problem is that I don't like being forced to watch them repetitively. iTunes gives you the best of both worlds in that respect, and in a way that is unlikely to offend the die-hard anti-commericalists. (Dare I say it? Anti-commercial Nazis?)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I think it's pretty obvious that downloaded shows make a lot of sense at the moment. So do DVDs of shows - it's convenient and you can use them offline.
Imagine a future, though, where wireless broadband is cheap and ubiquitous. Subscription websites generally do poorly and people are willing to sit through advertising in order to get something they want for free. If I can tab to another web site during commercials, I probably don't care that things are delayed for a couple minutes.
Eventually, the issue will be about time. Some people's time is valuable enough that they'll purchase the DVD or download the series. For the masses, the commercial approach is fine for them. Personally, I think it's good to have choices.
There was a time in our history when the world-as-you-knew-it was the same one that your parents knew, and would be the same one that your children would know. The division of social classes, their economic wants, their means of fulfilling those wants, their cultural values, etc., did not change over one, two, or even three generations. In that environment, the concept of the "economic man," and the whole business of making predictions based on the science of economics, had some genuine effectiveness to it.
In these times, all the above listed factors change every decade. Not only do we know very little about what world our children will face, we know very little about what our own values, needs, and means will be in the next ten years. Because of this rapid pace of change, by the time any sort of economic model has enough data upon which to base predictions, all the data no longer apply.
Therefore, as far as I am concerned, all such analysis are little more than crystal-ball review.
The risk-takers are the ones who shape our world from one decade to the next, and the unknowns are just too high to say with confidence which risks are worth taking. There are no safe investments, but the betting window never closes.
As an example on this, let's take myself.
I love watching LOST, but I am awful about actually sitting down and watching it when it is on TV. I always miss it.
Back during Season 2, I was still catching up. I really wanted to watch the episodes that I missed. I had missed a lot of them. So, I figured $2 is worth the price of an episode. I went to iTunes, and I bought about 12 episodes of Season 2 to catch up to where I needed to be. It was really cool, the quality was good, and I was pretty happy with it.
Fast forward to now.
I still miss LOST regularly, but I don't buy it from iTunes anymore. I go to www.abc.com, and I watch it online. I can watch it in full screen, and I just have to sit through a 30 second commercial a few times per episode. I consider that a free trade, considering that if I was watching it on TV, I'd have to sit through FIVE MINUTES worth of commercials several times per episode.
The only issue I have with the ABC content is that sometimes the streaming isn't quite fast enough, and the video feed can get locked up. I don't have to deal with that on iTunes. Also, you can only go back 4 episodes. So, if I missed an entire season, I couldn't get it on ABC.com. However, I would imagine that ABC has something in the works to rectify this situation.
In summary, I'd rather watch a few commercials than pay $2 for an episode if I am given the choice.
UNLESS
I want to burn the episode to DVD to watch later. THEN I want a high quality digital copy with no commercials, and I'd pay $2 for it. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn't allow you to burn video to DVD, so I can't win on that front at all. If Apple can get rid of the DRM requirement on their downloaded videos, to let you burn them to DVD, I can see a market for them. Otherwise, eventually the free content will win.
You know... My first internet connection was on two leased line 9600 bps modems. We had a Siemens server running SINIX and a couple graphical workstations running Collage. My first post-web home connection was my trusty 14400 US Robotics I already used for BBSs. I still have it and it still works.
Of course, it was before the web.
In ten years, my home internet connection became five hundred times fatter. If we disconsider clever compression techniques that could be invented in the meantime, we can imagine that a 10-fold increase would be required for HD movies to be feasible.
Just seeing how fast broadband was adopted here in Brazil (first at 256Kbps and these days in the Mbps-range) accompanied by a sharp drop in prices, I can't imagine not having a link fat enough for HD content delivery in 5 years.
People tend to forget that whoever offers video subsidized by commercials will do whatever they can to prevent you from skipping them.
I think that the videos you will be able to purchase on iTunes will still cater to the normal Apple audience: those who can pay a little more for a whole lot more convenience.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
TV is dying because Cable is so damned expensive if I want anything more than the bare minimum. It is especially expensive for me because I don't want to use them for internet and phone. They've pushed to far with the bundling. To get your money's worth, you need to go all or nothing. So I chose nothing.
I can take out/skip the commercials. That is no problem anymore. A TiVo or similar woudl actually be more convenient than downloading. It is just so much cheaper to just manually download the 5 or so weekly shows that we watch, Netflix the movies (ondemand had a terrible selection last time I checked), and get the HD PBS over the air.
Of course, when I say "download," I mean bittorrent. So I guess I'm cheating a little bit.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death