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TV and Movies On YouTube?
CNet is running a story speculating on the potential for full-length television shows and movies on YouTube. Google has been looking for ways to improve the popular but unprofitable video-sharing site, including some experiments with movies that exceed the typical 10-minute limit. Incorporating a system similar to Hulu could draw the interest of more advertisers.
"[Mark Cuban] wrote that Hulu is crushing YouTube in revenue per video and revenue per user primarily because 'Hulu has the right to sell advertising in and around every single video on its site,' Cuban wrote. 'It can package and sell any way that might make its customers happy.' YouTube doesn't have the same luxury because it can advertise only 'on the small percentage of videos on its site that it has a licensing deal with.'"
There is nothing stopping the traditional advertising model working in this distribution model. Show say a tiny Coca Cola (or whatever) logo in the top left corner of episode or movie that you are showing, and the advertiser would be happy!
I think this could be a win win situation for everyone, and could also spill over into the p2p distribution market en masse.
That's my hope anyway, as I'm sick and tired of internet distribution channels being demonised as for pirates only... meh
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
Perhaps Youtube should look into some of the most popular videos uploaded to their site. For example, if lots of people want to upload short 2-3 minute clips of the Daily Show and the Colbert Report to Youtube, maybe that says something about their popularity? So, instead of deleting it due to copyvios, maybe they should try a little harder to sign a deal with Viacom to get those shows hosted, with ads. That'd solve two problems right there -- less people uploading the copyrighted material, and more ads for them.
Have you watched any of the longer-running more established youtube 'series'? They all have popup-on-screen ads on them
The big issue here is that the size of the window is so freaking small. Watching more than a few minutes with something that small is just painful, and the 'Full Screen' mode, even with their new HD player, still pales in comparison to hulu
-nick
Don't worry, the studios will be sure to make the viewing experience just as unpleasant on youtube as it is on Hulu. Why would they take such an awesome idea and TOTALLY FUCKING RUIN IT by constantly pissing the eyeballs off? Seriously. They are still trying to treat Hulu as a broadcast medium. You can only see 4 random episodes of any given popular show at a time. Or worse. They will have the entire 2nd season of a show up. But none of it makes sense unless you've seen the first season, which isn't available, and you can't use it to "catch up" either, cause the show is well into its 3rd or 4th season. Every time I go to Hulu to watch a tv show, I get annoyed and remember the reason I canceled my cable.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Remember, Mark Cuban also claims to have made his saving throw to disbelieve the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA. If I were Google, I'd rely on my own attorneys for legal advice, and not some self-important blowhard who pretends that important legal concepts don't exist when they don't protect his own financial interests.
1. Cost of Production
2. Cost of Distribution
3. Customer Price Sensitivity and General Interest
1. Cost of Production is still high and will remain high, though the bang for the buck is certainly increasing. While I don't enjoy police procedurals, you'll note that the production values are easily eclipsing movies in all but ginormous action set pieces. Shows like the original Battlestar Galactica were prohibitively expensive even with recycled special effects. The new Galactica, while the scripts still suffer from cranial-rectal inversion, it looks fantastic. Hollywood would have had an impossible time churning something out like that with models, Babylon 5's CGI looks dated now. Fans in their bedrooms are turning out CGI better than what a professional studio was doing ten years ago. Funny point: when that new B5 Lost Tales DVD was being put together, the new effects crew was scrambling for models. All of the original files were turned over to WB as per contract and were lost. The fans stepped in and provided a station model better than what was in the original show. You can only imagine what we'll be seeing in another decade. Still, it's going to cost money to put a proper show together and that will be the biggest barrier to entry.
2. Distribution. The Internet is a dagger in the heart of the conventional network business model. The suits are desperately trying to coopt it. Right now, the Internet's biggest vulnerability is that service is provided by telecoms and cable companies so the suits are looking to these companies to serve as gatekeepers. The suits would like to see the Net tamed into a comfy AOL model, putting up barriers to entry, filtering people only to approved and partnered sites, making sure they can start extracting profits again. I'm not sure if what we're looking at here is Tienanmen Square or the fall of the Berlin Wall -- I don't know if efforts to stop democratizing forces will succeed or fail. If they do fail, the networks will fall into ever-decreasing relevance.
3. Price Sensitivity and General Interest. The vast majority of people are casual fans of whatever they're into, they're usually not obsessive geeks. Miss an episode of a series? Not care if you don't see it? I never could understand that. But I'm a geek. Geeks are the ones who were buying Trek on tape back when it worked out to something like $10 per episode. DVD's finally made it feasible to distribute archived shows from the past and distribute new productions directly to the customer. While there have been direct-to-video schlockfests for years, Disney being a prime offender, there hasn't been as much interest in distributing things like episodic television content directly to DVD. Of course, with digital distribution, the DVD angle becomes only an interest if someone wants to keep the show permanently.
I suppose you can also throw a fourth category in here, generational adaptation of technology. People my parent's age would tape a show and play it back, not fast-forwarding through the commercials. Even more likely, they'd not be able to figure out how to record it and just watch it live. But the younger the viewer, the more readily they will adapt to the new technologies. Fast-forward another decade and you'll see middle-aged people perfectly acclimated to watching content on their laptops and ipods and cell phones. And I think that this sort of independence of choice in both content and viewing behavior will create a demand that the suits will be unable to control.
Right now there's really a conversation going on between viewers and content producers/distributors. The producer/distributors are saying "Shut up and pay what we demand, you cunts" and the viewers are saying "no thank you. We don't want your commercial-laden television, we don't want to pay $12 to go watch a movie that has 20 minutes of commercials in front of it, we don't want to be limited to just your approved content. And what you have that we like, you charge too much or you dick with show's creator to mess it all up."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
The studios screwed themselves on this one.
Really?
Hulu seems like an awfully nice compromise between watching "regular TV," and sifting through piles of low-quality crap on sidreel.
The general scheme is that you get excellent quality full episodes in a legal manner endorsed by the content producers (for which they get paid!).
In return, you have to watch a 10-30 second ad in each slot that would normally have a 4-5 minute commercial break on TV. In the end, this works out to about 2-3 minutes PER HOUR. For free and legal content, this seems like a fantastic compromise that mostly benefits the consumer.
Of course, if they increase the ads, my approval will be somewhat diminished, but in its current form, Hulu rocks.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Google has more than enough money to develop their own shows, or just outright purchase an existing major show like House or The Office.
Imagine if Google purchased House and put all the full length episodes on Youtube, and then continued the series, allowing the episodes to only be viewed on Youtube and then eventually released on DVD. They could completely revolutionize the way Tv is done and make a bundle in the process.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Yea, I actually love Hulu. It lets me watch the Colbert Report whenever I want, and the commercials really aren't too bad. Honestly, my main objection to television is I have to work on THEIR schedule, not that there are advertisements. I don't block ads (that aren't pop-ups) on the Internet for the same reason. I like "free" content, and as long as your sponsors hawk their product in a way that is reasonably unobtrusive, I don't mind one bit.