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CBS Hosts Ad-Funded TV Series, Incl. Original Star Trek
eldavojohn writes "On Friday, CBS launched a TV Classics section to their ad based online service. Which means that Trekkies can now watch all three seasons of Star Trek: The Original Series online at the expense of a few commercials. Alongside this CBS is offering all of MacGyver, Twin Peaks and even three seasons of the original Twilight Zone. A side note, they seem to work perfectly fine in Linux. "
This and Hulu make me very happy. It takes a bit longer to download than bittorrent, but I don't find the ads obtrusive (so short), the quality is good enough for me, and the option to stream live is handy.
I imagine they don't like you downloading it but sometimes I don't have tubes, and as the commercials aren't annoying I don't bother removing them.
Now if only they carried programming I liked more...and here we are:-)
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
It's quite possible they sold the foreign rights to Trek long before the Internet came along...
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Imagine you are an international TV station guy who just purchased airing rights of Star Trek and when you browse slashdot, you see this story, click and start watching the series you just purchased for $100K or even more. That is the issue.
well there wouldn't even be a startrek TNG without TOS and its "cheesy" effects.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
One problem is probably regional sublicensing, so it's more contractual than copyright, but there is copyright involved. CBS might have sublicenced the distribution rights series to other companies based on country or region, and they can't just violate those licenses. These contracts predate the popularity of using the internet for video, and they can't just go back on them without consequences.
They might have some problems selling ads for non-US viewers too, there's no sense in selling ads for viewers in the UK for products that are as yet only sold in the US.
Well, if they can tell via IP address or whatever what country a viewer is coming from wouldn't that allow them to serve country specific content rather than just blocking them?
Or if that's not how it works, they could have a neutral start page and then have people select the country they're from and ta da, targeted advertising.
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The effects might look cheesy now, but they were much better than anything else on TV at the time. If you really want to see cheesy effects, watch the original Dr. Who sometime, or Blake's 7, for that matter.
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