Sorry, I accidentally erased the first line of my comment: None of the competition will matter if YouTube implodes before they can eat marketshare... the quickest way to lose marketshare is to appear to be doing a bait-and-switch, which may be where they're headed.
The problems for YouTube aren't easy to overcome. They've got a reputation for being free and easy to use, which is really the problem. If they decided to implement a poster-frame ad at the end of each video to generate revenue (like Revver does), they'd be dealing with money, which would immediately necessitate making things harder to do. For one, the identity of the uploader would be more important, as would the possibility of Daily Show clips getting some random uploader cash. On top of that, advertisers are very picky about where their ads appear, so while they might be happy to have 10,000,000 impressions, they wouldn't be happy if half of them came from sites that were otherwise porn-related (well, not necessarily). The administrative overhead of doing ads would probably undercut its value, and the friction it creates would make people move to free-er sites.
Maybe they just need to create a second class of user, verified accounts, where they can put ads on their videos*. I figure they've got to do something soon, because their reputation is about to eat them alive.
* this assumes that single-frame ads at the end of videos are not offensive. YMMV.
That's true, but that's the flaw, I guess. Online folks prefer tip jars to payment-required setups, and unfortunately that's the primary audience for internet-based artists. If you assume 99% of people won't pay for things they enjoy on principle (maybe partly because of being abused by RIAA types in the past), it's still more lucrative to have that 1% of the head rather than 1% of the tail. What's needed is for people to either start voluntarily paying for things they value, or for internet artists to use the web to somehow snatch part of the less-free-minded offline world. We tend to preach one thing and practice another round here, which leaves our homegrown artists with warm fuzzy feelings but no food to eat.
This is a growing concern of mine... that after a few years now of developing an internet culture, we still look starry-eyed at the Old Media folks as if they're something to admire. We should be creating our own stars, pimping our own projects, eating our own dogfood. The web's a massive engine for exposure (possibly exceeding what Hollywood can do), but we have no aggregators dedicated to our own stuff.
It's one of the great failings of our internet world that we still can't create a viable alternative to the major labels. If you think of all the technology and interconnectivity we've got going, the frictionless transfer of art and the (relatively) easy means of payment... how are we NOT outselling any of those companies? Like you said, even people who KNOW are really dreaming of moving to the legacy world. The legacy world SHOULD be adapting to the internet domain and their rules, but it's working the other way around.
The thing is, someone from the web world needs to become hideously rich and famous without leaving the web, and that'll prove it can be done, and folks like your friend will change their mind and stick around.
It's either irony or payback that the RIAA - which complained bitterly about tech companies disregarding their investments during the filesharing boom - are now giddily disregarding the investments electronics companies have made in producing the next generation of audio systems. I mean, it's not like they weren't aware the discussions about new standards were going on. I think they're purposely keeping at arm's length so they can claim they didn't have a say in the implementation. It's like making an architect promise to make an invincible fortress, and then not participating in the design, because you want any potential failure to be entirely on the architect's head.
The good part is that it looks like the RIAA is at least partially aware that DRM is destined to fail, because they seem to be setting someone else up to take the fall when it does. It's like the silver lining on a very, very dark cloud.
Thanks again. Switched it down to 116%. 110% was too small (felt weaker than the body text) so I just kept sizing it up until the letters looked nicely anti-aliased in Safari. Very scientific, I know.
Yeah, I put very little effort into the js aspect except to ensure that without JS, all the content is visible by default. All the JS does is hide bits in a slick way. Ideally the collapsed areas would be flagged in user prefs so you could always have the sections collapsed etc. And it'd also be nice to NOT have it roll up when it loads the page, but I'm not that up on my fancy js solutions to fix that right now:)
Thanks! Changed the titles to be 120% of normal (was 140% before). The red tab on the left is a "mysterious future" article. Probably looks odd being the second in the list.
It's so white... almost want to put an Apple logo on it and listen to music on it. Yeep.
I think you're right, but the other side of the coin is that the site needs to run slash at the end of the day, so while you may be able to dream up the most fantastic ways to re-imagine the content for the site, it may be impractical to implement. Last time I dabbled in that stuff, you really didn't want to muck about with how the server draws the page... you just want to re-skin it and run away. I haven't checked, but I would guess that most of the entries don't fiddle with the HTML much, just the CSS.
I'd love to see a completely re-done concept of a slash-type site, but it'd require a proof-of-concept at a lower level than just eye candy, unfortunately.
The contest is a bit complex that way... it's not feasible to cram all the info that slashdot incorporates into a Web 2.0 Digg-style website... it's just too much to do. In that way, the current layout and execution is almost as good as it gets. I tried a heavier re-alignment of content on the page but it got a lukewarm review (not surprisingly, I could definitely see it causing seizures if used too much).
Based on comments in the journal entries and elsewhere, I think the majority of people are after a polish on Slashdot, not a redesign, and the ones listed here very much reflect that. They're great incremental upgrades, which is probably all that can be done without doing something horribly wrong to the site as a whole.
Do you think they would, though? A better-quality version that pre-dates the rest of them, and the only difference is a watermarked Coke logo in the corner... I'd say the majority of folks would grab THAT torrent rather than the one that appeared an hour later. Ripping groups work more on the basis of serving the masses... my guess is they'd just drop that particular show from their "to do" list once they lost the edge. Exactly how inconvenienced are you willing to be to avoid ads?
Don't get me wrong, I do all my work straight into the computer now too. I definitely agree that (especially when older) they're going to be expected to type 150 wpm and jump through hoops that I can't even imagine... but in the early years, before they need to write out their book reports double-spaced in Times New Roman... I think there's a really vital connection to be found in writing words out with a pencil on a paper, fitting the letters on the lines, dealing with erasers, with smudges, with all the trickiness that computers help eliminate. There's a value in having to overcome obstacles like that. They're tiny little obstacles, but I'm pretty sure they help shape personalities.
One thing that happened just recently: my older daughter wanted to translate a word from English to Japanese. She got her dictionary and was struggling a bit with where to find the English word, and I thought to myself: I have a widget that translates automatically, and I could get her the answer in a second. Better yet, she could use the widget and translate things on her own, and think of how much faster things would be for her. And then I stopped and realized that if I give her that tool, no matter how fantastic it may be, she'll never fully grasp how to use a dictionary, how alphabetical order works, about any of the tiny little skills that teaches you.
Some day she WILL use that widget (or something far cooler and more automatic), but for now she has to struggle with the paper like I used to, because I'm afraid there's something lost in having everything be so easy.
Indeed. I have two girls, both young, and they are both interested in computers. Our rule is that you can't use a computer to do things that crayons and paper do just as well: you read words on books, you write stories on paper, and you draw pictures in one of the hundreds paper pads stacked in the closet. Both kids have learned how to open iTunes and find the "Kids" playlist when they want to get their Raffi fix, and they use iSight for video chats to their grandparents, but otherwise they're entirely non-computer monkeys. I know that when they need to use computers, they'll already have the basic concepts mastered through osmosis. You don't want to raise technophobes, but you can't let them limit their existence to the online world so young... there's too much can't be reached with a mouse.
I definitely appreciate what you're saying about the discussion getting off-track and becoming a flame-fest about the submitter rather than the story, but in those cases, it could just be that the story wasn't as interesting as it seemed. I know in a lot of BB cases, I just find the "he is an alias for [slashdot editor du jour]" thread and ignore it entirely. The people who want to go over the same conspiracy fluff again can do it, and the people that don't can hopefully parse through it. I know you feel like you have to focus the attention, but I don't think there's a reasonable way to do it. It's all about precedent, and you can't revise content without getting burned.
In a "normal" media world we'd know these super-submitters inside out by now. We'd have pictures of them at the corner store, walking the dog, who they're dating (ha!) and what they ate for breakfast. Transparency helps cut down heroes and villains, I think. But I don't see that kinda thing happening with overly-successful Slashdot posters:)
I haven't seen it written anywhere yet, but one question I've seen raised is who pays for this blunder? Let's say that I'm an artist who had that DRM on my CDs. My cut of the CD sales is already tiny, but now what they're saying is that I not only have to give back the money I earned from the original sales, but I'm also going to have to give away another CD's worth of money, too. A proper punishment for Sony would be to need to guarantee payments to the artists for every copy of every CD, even if it was called back because of DRM. Otherwise they're just passing the hurt on to the artists.
The **AA deals with fantastically larger volume and giant marketing machines. These guys can probably look forward to a thousand or so paying customers. $1,660 a month isn't that much to live on, split among all the participants. If they were asking for $15/episode, THEN you have a cause for complaint. As is, they're small-fry producers trying to do something cool... RIAA comparisons don't come into it at all.
I don't know about their particular situation, but it's a real stinker to get anyone in a normal company to sponsor ANYTHING related to video on the web. At least in a meaningful way. They don't seem to value it the same way they would a show on TV, for some reason. And when you're talking about making 4-5 minute episodes with that quality of animation, you don't have much room to play around. At the start, caution is key. $2.99/episode may seem like a lot, but if they can get enough people to buy it like that, they'll get their footing, and I'm sure you'll see the price balance out over time.
I thought it was a pretty nice day today. I much prefer the summers to Ottawa, too. I don't know what your experience is in the rest of the country, but I figure Ontario is a much cheaper place to live than Victoria. This place is a bit of a pocket of high prices, but definitely not the norm.
The private health insurance bit is true, but I think you're muddling the whole country together. For those of you in Ontario: in BC, you have to pay for your MSP (equivalent to OHIP) every month like a bill. I didn't appreciate how it worked till I got here (in Ontario they just take part of your taxes for health care, so you don't have to feel like it costs you anything directly). It makes the idea of private health insurance a lot more appealing, because right now you pay $80/month for crappy service. Not that you'll die from the crappiness, but it won't get as luxurious as it might in the US, if you had the money.
That said, we have a great free press here (if you look for it, just like in the US), outside of Shawland there are great internet options, and tobacco SHOULD be more expensive because it helps people stop thinking it's a necessity of life:) [Just be thankful you're not in Ottawa, where smoking is prohibited just about everywhere but the darkest corner of your garage]
I wish more tech-minded folks would move to Victoria, so we could start a company or something. Telecommuting is a lonely way to work.
Not that I'm in any way an expert, but I tried to do something like that last weekend (for good reasons, I tell ya, good!) and it didn't work. iTunes seems to really check over the file you're grabbing, so unless there's a vulnerability in the mp3 player itself (embedding bad stuff in media files etc), I'm thinkin' it won't work.
The problem is that Apple is not the one aiming to charge more for music, they're being bullied by the major labels now that their distribution contract is coming to an end. So they're faced with "the wholesale value of this song is $1.50", and may be considering raising prices* to avoid losing money... You won't get anywhere complaining to them because they're not going to be in a position to change it. The labels are. And the labels won't listen, because they don't care. What's more, if you boycott iTMS, you're going to help reduce Apple's dominance in the online music business, which will... aha! make the major labels the kings of the hill again, as it should be. Perfect little plan they have here. The iPod's inability to play WMA is probably the only kink they have to work out.
People that listen to [major pop band] will most likely pay $2 for a song, because they just don't care as much as you do. The labels know this, and they want Apple to let them get at that money. On the other hand, songs from [not a major pop band] will probably get cheaper, and my guess is that's the band you're after anyway, so you probably won't notice the difference. The biggest danger in all this is for not-so-smart smaller labels and bands to opt for $2 songs so they appear to be as "hot" as the big acts.
If you want things to settle out nicely, in this case, stay quiet and play the market strategically. Making noise will do more harm than good.
* I still haven't read anything that says that Apple absolutely HAS agreed to variable pricing. This almost sounds like the labels trying to outflank Jobs by getting his shareholders onboard indirectly.
I wasn't convinced that you'd be able to find enough people to buy videos at $1.99 each, especially at that low resolution. I figured the fact that Apple hadn't announced any stats for two weeks meant that they'd failed miserably and would be re-thinking the pricing/quality issues. And now this.
It probably won't make CBS, Fox, NBC or the other networks join in, but this kind of response will help fiendish web videographers get financing for their projects. Everything you could possibly imagine will be produced, just to cash in on the hopefully-will-be craze.
I apologize in advance for the further decay of Western Civilization.
If you consider the lead time for making a series of 10-15 min scripted drama episodes is about 6 months or so, and you consider that a whole bunch of producers want to get in on the action before the spaces next to "Lost" on iTMS fill up... I think you'll find that in the spring, this whole market of mobile drama will explode in a very big way. I know I've got a burst of work since Jobs announced the Video iPod, at least.
On the other hand, I betcha Star Trek will be absent from the lineup, because it would make too much sense to do what you proposed...
I am under the impression it's entirely due to bandwidth costs. A song is typically much smaller and probably eats less bandwidth and general processing cost than a movie, even if it is just a 30-minute black and white mono file. My guess is the extra dollar is at least partly there as a buffer to offset transmission costs.
Almost certainly, yes. Contracts from the main network and the affiliates tend to take into account just about every type of distribution imaginable and the amount of time that ABC has to wait before trying each. For example, they probably have to wait till late summer to bring out the last season's DVDs. That's probably why the episodes are so small... there's likely a note in the contracts that says that any webcasting or streaming of any part of episodes cannot exceed a certain size, so as to not undercut affiliates.
It'll be interesting to see which way ABC goes with this. If enough affiliates balk, they may drop iTunes. On the other hand, if enough affiliates balk, they may just increase the quality for iTunes and make out better with direct purchases.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I accidentally erased the first line of my comment: None of the competition will matter if YouTube implodes before they can eat marketshare... the quickest way to lose marketshare is to appear to be doing a bait-and-switch, which may be where they're headed.
The problems for YouTube aren't easy to overcome. They've got a reputation for being free and easy to use, which is really the problem. If they decided to implement a poster-frame ad at the end of each video to generate revenue (like Revver does), they'd be dealing with money, which would immediately necessitate making things harder to do. For one, the identity of the uploader would be more important, as would the possibility of Daily Show clips getting some random uploader cash. On top of that, advertisers are very picky about where their ads appear, so while they might be happy to have 10,000,000 impressions, they wouldn't be happy if half of them came from sites that were otherwise porn-related (well, not necessarily). The administrative overhead of doing ads would probably undercut its value, and the friction it creates would make people move to free-er sites.
Maybe they just need to create a second class of user, verified accounts, where they can put ads on their videos*. I figure they've got to do something soon, because their reputation is about to eat them alive.
* this assumes that single-frame ads at the end of videos are not offensive. YMMV.
That's true, but that's the flaw, I guess. Online folks prefer tip jars to payment-required setups, and unfortunately that's the primary audience for internet-based artists. If you assume 99% of people won't pay for things they enjoy on principle (maybe partly because of being abused by RIAA types in the past), it's still more lucrative to have that 1% of the head rather than 1% of the tail. What's needed is for people to either start voluntarily paying for things they value, or for internet artists to use the web to somehow snatch part of the less-free-minded offline world. We tend to preach one thing and practice another round here, which leaves our homegrown artists with warm fuzzy feelings but no food to eat.
This is a growing concern of mine... that after a few years now of developing an internet culture, we still look starry-eyed at the Old Media folks as if they're something to admire. We should be creating our own stars, pimping our own projects, eating our own dogfood. The web's a massive engine for exposure (possibly exceeding what Hollywood can do), but we have no aggregators dedicated to our own stuff.
Wow, I went horribly off-topic there.
It's one of the great failings of our internet world that we still can't create a viable alternative to the major labels. If you think of all the technology and interconnectivity we've got going, the frictionless transfer of art and the (relatively) easy means of payment... how are we NOT outselling any of those companies? Like you said, even people who KNOW are really dreaming of moving to the legacy world. The legacy world SHOULD be adapting to the internet domain and their rules, but it's working the other way around.
The thing is, someone from the web world needs to become hideously rich and famous without leaving the web, and that'll prove it can be done, and folks like your friend will change their mind and stick around.
It's either irony or payback that the RIAA - which complained bitterly about tech companies disregarding their investments during the filesharing boom - are now giddily disregarding the investments electronics companies have made in producing the next generation of audio systems. I mean, it's not like they weren't aware the discussions about new standards were going on. I think they're purposely keeping at arm's length so they can claim they didn't have a say in the implementation. It's like making an architect promise to make an invincible fortress, and then not participating in the design, because you want any potential failure to be entirely on the architect's head.
The good part is that it looks like the RIAA is at least partially aware that DRM is destined to fail, because they seem to be setting someone else up to take the fall when it does. It's like the silver lining on a very, very dark cloud.
Thanks again. Switched it down to 116%. 110% was too small (felt weaker than the body text) so I just kept sizing it up until the letters looked nicely anti-aliased in Safari. Very scientific, I know.
Yeah, I put very little effort into the js aspect except to ensure that without JS, all the content is visible by default. All the JS does is hide bits in a slick way. Ideally the collapsed areas would be flagged in user prefs so you could always have the sections collapsed etc. And it'd also be nice to NOT have it roll up when it loads the page, but I'm not that up on my fancy js solutions to fix that right now :)
Thanks! Changed the titles to be 120% of normal (was 140% before). The red tab on the left is a "mysterious future" article. Probably looks odd being the second in the list.
It's so white... almost want to put an Apple logo on it and listen to music on it. Yeep.
I fixed the botchiness of the scaling and tried a different approach. Comments appreciated!
http://www.dustrunners.com/slashdot/indexb.php
I think you're right, but the other side of the coin is that the site needs to run slash at the end of the day, so while you may be able to dream up the most fantastic ways to re-imagine the content for the site, it may be impractical to implement. Last time I dabbled in that stuff, you really didn't want to muck about with how the server draws the page... you just want to re-skin it and run away. I haven't checked, but I would guess that most of the entries don't fiddle with the HTML much, just the CSS.
I'd love to see a completely re-done concept of a slash-type site, but it'd require a proof-of-concept at a lower level than just eye candy, unfortunately.
The contest is a bit complex that way... it's not feasible to cram all the info that slashdot incorporates into a Web 2.0 Digg-style website... it's just too much to do. In that way, the current layout and execution is almost as good as it gets. I tried a heavier re-alignment of content on the page but it got a lukewarm review (not surprisingly, I could definitely see it causing seizures if used too much).
Based on comments in the journal entries and elsewhere, I think the majority of people are after a polish on Slashdot, not a redesign, and the ones listed here very much reflect that. They're great incremental upgrades, which is probably all that can be done without doing something horribly wrong to the site as a whole.
Do you think they would, though? A better-quality version that pre-dates the rest of them, and the only difference is a watermarked Coke logo in the corner... I'd say the majority of folks would grab THAT torrent rather than the one that appeared an hour later. Ripping groups work more on the basis of serving the masses... my guess is they'd just drop that particular show from their "to do" list once they lost the edge. Exactly how inconvenienced are you willing to be to avoid ads?
Don't get me wrong, I do all my work straight into the computer now too. I definitely agree that (especially when older) they're going to be expected to type 150 wpm and jump through hoops that I can't even imagine... but in the early years, before they need to write out their book reports double-spaced in Times New Roman... I think there's a really vital connection to be found in writing words out with a pencil on a paper, fitting the letters on the lines, dealing with erasers, with smudges, with all the trickiness that computers help eliminate. There's a value in having to overcome obstacles like that. They're tiny little obstacles, but I'm pretty sure they help shape personalities.
One thing that happened just recently: my older daughter wanted to translate a word from English to Japanese. She got her dictionary and was struggling a bit with where to find the English word, and I thought to myself: I have a widget that translates automatically, and I could get her the answer in a second. Better yet, she could use the widget and translate things on her own, and think of how much faster things would be for her. And then I stopped and realized that if I give her that tool, no matter how fantastic it may be, she'll never fully grasp how to use a dictionary, how alphabetical order works, about any of the tiny little skills that teaches you.
Some day she WILL use that widget (or something far cooler and more automatic), but for now she has to struggle with the paper like I used to, because I'm afraid there's something lost in having everything be so easy.
Indeed. I have two girls, both young, and they are both interested in computers. Our rule is that you can't use a computer to do things that crayons and paper do just as well: you read words on books, you write stories on paper, and you draw pictures in one of the hundreds paper pads stacked in the closet. Both kids have learned how to open iTunes and find the "Kids" playlist when they want to get their Raffi fix, and they use iSight for video chats to their grandparents, but otherwise they're entirely non-computer monkeys. I know that when they need to use computers, they'll already have the basic concepts mastered through osmosis. You don't want to raise technophobes, but you can't let them limit their existence to the online world so young... there's too much can't be reached with a mouse.
I definitely appreciate what you're saying about the discussion getting off-track and becoming a flame-fest about the submitter rather than the story, but in those cases, it could just be that the story wasn't as interesting as it seemed. I know in a lot of BB cases, I just find the "he is an alias for [slashdot editor du jour]" thread and ignore it entirely. The people who want to go over the same conspiracy fluff again can do it, and the people that don't can hopefully parse through it. I know you feel like you have to focus the attention, but I don't think there's a reasonable way to do it. It's all about precedent, and you can't revise content without getting burned.
:)
In a "normal" media world we'd know these super-submitters inside out by now. We'd have pictures of them at the corner store, walking the dog, who they're dating (ha!) and what they ate for breakfast. Transparency helps cut down heroes and villains, I think. But I don't see that kinda thing happening with overly-successful Slashdot posters
I haven't seen it written anywhere yet, but one question I've seen raised is who pays for this blunder? Let's say that I'm an artist who had that DRM on my CDs. My cut of the CD sales is already tiny, but now what they're saying is that I not only have to give back the money I earned from the original sales, but I'm also going to have to give away another CD's worth of money, too. A proper punishment for Sony would be to need to guarantee payments to the artists for every copy of every CD, even if it was called back because of DRM. Otherwise they're just passing the hurt on to the artists.
The **AA deals with fantastically larger volume and giant marketing machines. These guys can probably look forward to a thousand or so paying customers. $1,660 a month isn't that much to live on, split among all the participants. If they were asking for $15/episode, THEN you have a cause for complaint. As is, they're small-fry producers trying to do something cool... RIAA comparisons don't come into it at all.
I don't know about their particular situation, but it's a real stinker to get anyone in a normal company to sponsor ANYTHING related to video on the web. At least in a meaningful way. They don't seem to value it the same way they would a show on TV, for some reason. And when you're talking about making 4-5 minute episodes with that quality of animation, you don't have much room to play around. At the start, caution is key. $2.99/episode may seem like a lot, but if they can get enough people to buy it like that, they'll get their footing, and I'm sure you'll see the price balance out over time.
I thought it was a pretty nice day today. I much prefer the summers to Ottawa, too. I don't know what your experience is in the rest of the country, but I figure Ontario is a much cheaper place to live than Victoria. This place is a bit of a pocket of high prices, but definitely not the norm.
:) [Just be thankful you're not in Ottawa, where smoking is prohibited just about everywhere but the darkest corner of your garage]
The private health insurance bit is true, but I think you're muddling the whole country together. For those of you in Ontario: in BC, you have to pay for your MSP (equivalent to OHIP) every month like a bill. I didn't appreciate how it worked till I got here (in Ontario they just take part of your taxes for health care, so you don't have to feel like it costs you anything directly). It makes the idea of private health insurance a lot more appealing, because right now you pay $80/month for crappy service. Not that you'll die from the crappiness, but it won't get as luxurious as it might in the US, if you had the money.
That said, we have a great free press here (if you look for it, just like in the US), outside of Shawland there are great internet options, and tobacco SHOULD be more expensive because it helps people stop thinking it's a necessity of life
I wish more tech-minded folks would move to Victoria, so we could start a company or something. Telecommuting is a lonely way to work.
Not that I'm in any way an expert, but I tried to do something like that last weekend (for good reasons, I tell ya, good!) and it didn't work. iTunes seems to really check over the file you're grabbing, so unless there's a vulnerability in the mp3 player itself (embedding bad stuff in media files etc), I'm thinkin' it won't work.
The problem is that Apple is not the one aiming to charge more for music, they're being bullied by the major labels now that their distribution contract is coming to an end. So they're faced with "the wholesale value of this song is $1.50", and may be considering raising prices* to avoid losing money... You won't get anywhere complaining to them because they're not going to be in a position to change it. The labels are. And the labels won't listen, because they don't care. What's more, if you boycott iTMS, you're going to help reduce Apple's dominance in the online music business, which will... aha! make the major labels the kings of the hill again, as it should be. Perfect little plan they have here. The iPod's inability to play WMA is probably the only kink they have to work out.
People that listen to [major pop band] will most likely pay $2 for a song, because they just don't care as much as you do. The labels know this, and they want Apple to let them get at that money. On the other hand, songs from [not a major pop band] will probably get cheaper, and my guess is that's the band you're after anyway, so you probably won't notice the difference. The biggest danger in all this is for not-so-smart smaller labels and bands to opt for $2 songs so they appear to be as "hot" as the big acts.
If you want things to settle out nicely, in this case, stay quiet and play the market strategically. Making noise will do more harm than good.
* I still haven't read anything that says that Apple absolutely HAS agreed to variable pricing. This almost sounds like the labels trying to outflank Jobs by getting his shareholders onboard indirectly.
I wasn't convinced that you'd be able to find enough people to buy videos at $1.99 each, especially at that low resolution. I figured the fact that Apple hadn't announced any stats for two weeks meant that they'd failed miserably and would be re-thinking the pricing/quality issues. And now this.
It probably won't make CBS, Fox, NBC or the other networks join in, but this kind of response will help fiendish web videographers get financing for their projects. Everything you could possibly imagine will be produced, just to cash in on the hopefully-will-be craze.
I apologize in advance for the further decay of Western Civilization.
If you consider the lead time for making a series of 10-15 min scripted drama episodes is about 6 months or so, and you consider that a whole bunch of producers want to get in on the action before the spaces next to "Lost" on iTMS fill up... I think you'll find that in the spring, this whole market of mobile drama will explode in a very big way. I know I've got a burst of work since Jobs announced the Video iPod, at least.
On the other hand, I betcha Star Trek will be absent from the lineup, because it would make too much sense to do what you proposed...
I am under the impression it's entirely due to bandwidth costs. A song is typically much smaller and probably eats less bandwidth and general processing cost than a movie, even if it is just a 30-minute black and white mono file. My guess is the extra dollar is at least partly there as a buffer to offset transmission costs.
Almost certainly, yes. Contracts from the main network and the affiliates tend to take into account just about every type of distribution imaginable and the amount of time that ABC has to wait before trying each. For example, they probably have to wait till late summer to bring out the last season's DVDs. That's probably why the episodes are so small... there's likely a note in the contracts that says that any webcasting or streaming of any part of episodes cannot exceed a certain size, so as to not undercut affiliates.
It'll be interesting to see which way ABC goes with this. If enough affiliates balk, they may drop iTunes. On the other hand, if enough affiliates balk, they may just increase the quality for iTunes and make out better with direct purchases.