Monday, April 26, 2004
Until now the furthest west I've been was Detroit. That all changes next month when I head to California. Hopefully the state can postpone its imminent slide into the pacific. I am leaving on Friday, May
21st, and departing for New York City on Monday night, the 24th, where I will be staying until Saturday, when I head back to buffalo. If you are in any of those cities and we haven't planned to hang out let me know.
Monday, April 19, 2004
Lately I am wondering what I am doing with my blog. Should I keep going, and if so what should I write about? As many of you know, I am an expert on P2P file sharing. If there is a file you want, I can find it for you. From now on file-sharing is going to be a major topic here, but not the only one. So enjoy my first foray into the subject.
Why can’t you legally download TV shows?
Television has always been dependent on ad revenue. You watch commercials and in return receive free content. This business model works just as well on the net as it does over the airwaves or over cable.
Currently I can download any show I want for free, without commercials, and often before the show has aired in my time zone. There is even an RSS feed that tells me when torrents are available for the shows I like. This is all illegal of course, but the fact that it exists proves that there is a large market. Now here is the kicker, if the networks put the shows online with commercials, the illegal market wouldn’t last long because it would always be faster to go to the stations web site and find the show, then to search IRC or bit torrent forums. If you missed the last Simpsons, you could go to Fox.com, and get it, commercials and all.
So why hasn’t this happened? Well the way the TV works there are both local commercials and network commercials. So one file with the commercials included wouldn’t make sense. I shouldn’t see ads for a car dealership in Texas, and someone in Texas shouldn’t see ads for NYC metro-cards. However, they could let you download the file and stream the commercials to you if they used their own media player technology. Not only that they can track what you watch and have better targeted ads and additional ratings data.
With cable since you have to pay for the programs, it might be a more difficult sell. However, you can just require a subscriber number to download content. So only people who have channel x can download its content. (I would just make it all free, but I doubt HBO would like that too much.)
Right now the way I watch TV is the same as the way people who own Tivos do. I watch what I want, at the time I want, not when it happens to be broadcast. Except I don’t own a Tivo, and the networks should be happy, because they don’t want people to own a commercial skipping PVR, but they are not happy, and I can’t legally download their shows. Well fuck em, I am going to do it anyway, it is their choice to lose money because of it.
Hell, maybe you can even get some people to pay a small fee for the ability to skip commercials. You might be able to generate additional ad revenue. Plus by shrinking the market in illegal downloads, you push that market further underground. The more legal broadband content available it is less likely people will seek its illegal counterpart. This is unquestionably good for content providers.
The last two objections I can think of are that having free downloads might cut into DVD sales for hit shows, and that it would cost money to set this up. Currently illegal downloads are cutting into DVD sales, and you only need to make the last few episodes available for free, not the whole series. If anything this would increase the sales of DVDs, and knowing what shows viewers watch would let networks make special offers to likely buyers further driving sales.
With regards to the cost, I would think the offering TIVO like services undercutting the PVR market would be worth any investment necessary to start this service. In terms of the massive bandwidth, I would suggest that they implement a bit torrent like network to distribute the content.
So what are the odds something like this will happen? Next to nothing, it would be very hard to convince local affiliates, and to amend the distribution contracts signed for each show broadcast. TIVO will eventually destroy the broadcast advertising market, and at that point it will be too late. Another prehistoric business model heading towards extinction in a technological burst of creative destruction.
Thursday, April 15, 2004
For those who are still unaware I've been sick the last couple of weeks. Fortunately it only took a short-course of antibiotics to bring me back to the picture of health. While my body and spirit may have recovered, my apartment, the victim of my infection-induced sloth, still requires a bit of healing. Worse still, my damn loan-consolidation application, half-filled out for weeks, is still not done. If interest rates were to rise, as they likely will in the next week or two, and my application still hasn't been processed, this will be one expensive illness.
At least now that I've regained the will to move the last remnants of the harsh Buffalo winter have passed. Finally it's nice enough walk to and from work every day. It's only about a mile each way, and I can use the exercise. Enjoy your health!
