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Viacom Nudges Some Premium Content Online, For Free
amplt1337 writes "Debates about the profitability of 'free' continue to rage, but at least one major media conglomerate — Viacom — is pushing forward with releasing paid-for content for free on the Internet. Of course, the prospect of free and easy full-length Daily Show episodes has caused some tension with cable providers, who pay a hefty premium for a heretofore-exclusive right to distribute the conglom's content (there are obvious parallels with the conflict between labels and musicians). What strikes me as really interesting is that even an old, entrenched company like Viacom has enough vision to see the opportunity for increased profits through free distribution — provided they can control that distribution (see their YouTube lawsuit) and have discretion over just how free they go. Of course, the NYT itself has had its own experience with expanding access to previously fee-based content ..."
Free is all well and good, but all too often it leads to crappy ads and abridged enjoyment.
I'd still gladly pay for this content -- just not $2 per episode that I'll only watch once. What I can't imagine I'm alone in really wanting to see here, and what I have yet to see tested, is a nice, simple subscription model like Netflix that lets me pay a single monthly fee to watch a reasonable amount of new programming.
Netflix almost offers that right now for a number of shows, except that the streaming of shows is tied to their DVD release, so you can't watch anything until the season's over. But all that's keeping them from becoming a genuine alternative to broadcast viewing is a bit of licensing, for which I'd gladly pay a few more Washingtons a month.
All things considered, isn't skipping a few beers each month worth not having to deal with ads?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
I love the daily show and the colbert report. I had been watch TDS since cason daily was hosting it even. Two years ago I was paying $40 a month for essentially those two shows.
But I quit watching during the writer strike and coincidentally I moved and started working more during that same time.
When the episodes had come back, I didn't get the memo and didn't want to go through the hassle of catching up on the week or so of shows I'd missed using bittorrent.
So I just quit watching. To viacom: you want to know why? Because it would just kill me to watch something so good by myself (or occasionally with a lady) and not be able to send friends links to particular segments on youtube. You want to selfishly hoard all your copyrighted content? Fine by me. I just won't watch it (even though I'm paying for it in some way). I won't tell my friends about it. And I won't buy anything on the commercials I'm not seeing.
Jon and Stephen could do better. Personally I'd like to see them operate without viacom and have control over the content, but I know the challenges in making that work and making it profitable.
given that Comedy Central's media player sucks monkey balls and is probably turning a whole bunch of potential viewers off of watching their content there, they don't just outsource this to Youtube? Can't they come to some sort of profit-sharing agreement? Youtube has a model that works. They have fairly unobtrusive ads that don't wind up crashing my computer (unlike CC). People already go to Youtube. I've never heard anyone say they like CC's site. CC could, if it wanted to, post the Youtube content on their site. So why can't they just negotiate some sort of a deal where Youtube can host the content and CC takes a large chunk of the ad revenue? Why can't they leave Youtube alone?
I could see that as the reason. What will probably happen is like the relationships that labels have with online music stores.
Advertising is put in the video, Youtube gets a cut, Viacom gets some.
As far as the loss of free copies...I could see some arguments. For one, if you want to pull an episode (want to drum up DVD sales or something), you can do that if you publish the content- you can't just pull other copies. They probably want copyright information included, station, producers, etc.
Personally, I'm glad that Viacom is embracing such an idea. I don't mind a little advertising if the quality is consistently good, in sync, and I can send friends links/bookmark shows without worrying that they'll be pulled for copyright in five minutes.
What people are gonna learn real soon is that the Daily Show doesn't need Viacom any more than a musician needs the RIAA.
Viacom, like the RIAA, is only powerful because it controls a distribution system. But as far as delivery goes it makes about as much sense to deliver content via a one-way pipe to a dumb terminal (which is what television basically is) than it does to deliver music on plastic disks via the Interstate.
Right now many cable companies are also ISPs so increasing Internet bandwidth is likely viewed by them as a conflict of interest because greater bandwidth is likely to draw viewers away from television to a more competitive Internet. But as time goes on consumers are gonna view more and more content on the net.
Looks like Viacom vs. YouTube are the first shots in the revolution of old tech vs new.
Frankly, just releasing material IN A NEUTRAL FORMAT and delivery channel would be more than sufficient. In other words -- no ITunes lock-in. It doesn't even have to be free as in beer. IFO would pay a modest, reasonable charge for each episode of Daily Show, as long as I could get it in a neutral format (video podcast, say).
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Yes.
One of the projects I'm most proud of was to build the supporting infrastructure required to transform a gaggle of several thousand work from home translators who specialize in medical translations into a coherent team, then to build infrastructure to allow them to be integrated into the corporate structure of several of the worlds largest pharmaceutical and medical equipment manufacturers as though they were just another internal department. I think I did pretty well for a guy working out of his living room.
It brings me a great deal of satisfaction knowing that somewhere out there, some kid I'll never meet didn't die today because of medicine I helped bring him.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
So?
There is a remedy in law for Viacom: tell Google to take down the offending content.
If Viacom doesn't like the law they subverted democracy for, they really shouldn't whine like a spoiled child.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The internet as we know it is dying. If the ISP's have their way, everything you see will be their choice at their price.
The writing is on the wall. If we don't stand up and do some really loud screaming, the net will slowly erode to another service similar to cable television. The same rules will apply : the more you wish to see, the more you will pay.
I remember the "good old days" when the usenet was the large part of the internet (before www ). The wailing that would go on if anyone had the audacity to post anything of a commercial nature. It was great! Now look at it.
I only recently discovered hulu, so maybe it's the solution I'm looking for.
I don't have a TV, and recently I've been experimenting with watching TV on my computer. A number of networks have some of their shows online, available via Flash players (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, etc.). Some problems I immediately noticed were:
1. Most sites are heavily Flash-based, making it very difficult to navigate (or bookmark) the content you care about. I understand using Flash for the actual player, by why the navigation elements?
2. Having to go to 3 or 4 different sites to watch the 4 or 5 shows I care about was really inefficient. Each one has a different format, navigation style, and player.
3. Keeping track of what I've watched and haven't watched was somewhat annoying. When you watch normal TV, you just watch whatever they play. But when you're watching online, you have to keep track of which episodes you've seen (for each show)... and somehow find out when new episodes of your shows have aired. The sites do a very poor job of making it easy to find this out. You usually have to go all the way to loading the player, watching an ad, and viewing the start of an episode before you can figure out if you've already seen it. (So, of course, I would use Wikipedia to keep track of all this information.)
Clearly what is needed is a site that unifies the experience. Hulu might be that site. It groups content from multiple networks, so that you don't have to go all over the place. It provides cleaner navigation (mostly HTML), and RSS feeds for keeping track of things you care about. I also notice they have optional user accounts... so I'll be interested to find out if that allows you to keep track of shows you're watching, and maybe even get recommendations?
There are still many ways in which the viewing experience is not optimal (it's Flash buffering, after all: you can't save it to watch later, and network congestion kills it... especially if you try to watch fullscreen). But convergent sites like Hulu are, in my opinion, an important step towards actual "on demand" convenient web-television. (Of course, it's still ridiculous that downloading via bit-torrent would give me the same shows, in a timely manner, at higher quality, and without ads.)
What the hell does any of that have to do with copyright?
It's simple. If we take copyright law off the books, we can give a copy of the entire sum of human creativity to every man woman and child on earth for a penny each. And, we have the practical means to actually do it.
If we don't take the copyright law off the books, it would cost billions of dollars for each disc each, and we would be unable to do it, not due to any practical barrier, but because of an unfortunate side effect of the clumsy mechanism we're using to look after the creative people in our society.
When you get down to it, your copyright comes, not from any power that you hold over us, but from our recognition that it's worthwhile to support creators like you. If there was another political/economic system to support you, and give you even more support than you're get right now, but through a different mechanism, what would your problem be with that? Wouldn't that be better than the status quo?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth