In a groundbreaking deal, America Online is expected to announce today that it has bought 30 TV series from the Warner Bros. library to launch a free ad-supported broadband TV network, to be dubbed In2TV.
The AOL-Warner Bros. deal marks the first time traditional TV programming has been made available over the Internet on such a large scale, and it promises new opportunities and threats for advertisers, syndicators and competitors.The news comes on the heels of other industry-changing deals: Last month The Walt Disney Co. announced plans to sell ABC's hit shows to iPod owners via Apple Computer's iTunes. And last week CBS and NBC made deals to put some of their programming on-demand via Comcast and DirecTV, respectively.
This is cool--though, I wish they would allow for downloading and not just streaming. Sometimes people want to watch things without having access to a 'net connection. Can't stream without a connection. In fact, I'm a little confused about this hesitation to allow downloads.
I guess the paranoia is about people easily sharing downloaded shows so friends don't have to pay for the shows, themselves. The thing is, it's already pretty easy to share shows.
After all, it's a simple process for most of us these days to record something on our DVRs, transfer that something to our PC and then share it with friends. Hell, it's not that difficult to run a direct line to your PC to capture the show directly on your hard drive, making it available to others instantly. So, that excuse for not allowing downloading doesn't hold that much water.
The next excuse is that no one wants to download an entire show or movie right now. It takes too long and the quality is lousy.
First, I know maybe two people who actually care about picture quality. I don't get the business-world's obsession with picture and sound quality. Sure, color and stereo were obviously good ideas. But digital TV versus analog? I bet the average TV watcher couldn't tell the difference (and if they could, they wouldn't be willing to pay more for it). Dolby does sound great, but only home-theater fanatics bother with it. So, can we just cut the quality crap? I'd watch a TV show in black and white if it was well written and I think if the show is good, people don't mind a little pixelation. Enough with the quality excuse.
Second, if it takes so long to download a show, why have movie companies been freaking out for years about bootleggers? According to some industry estimates booters have been "robbing" the movie industry of millions of dollars. Sounds like there are plenty of people who are downloading movies. Hell, look what happened when Apple started offering legal music downloads. People actually bought them!
But here is the business world, dragging their feet (big surprise).
Years ago, when AOL first merged with Time-Warner, I thought this was going to be a great thing. I figured AOL would be streaming Real Media versions of Warner shows within the year. Nope! Now that downloading is practical, they're just now catching up to what they could have done in 2001.
Remember that old slogan of UPS? "Moving at the speed of business."
That's not something to brag about.
And for the record, the iTunes Music Store does not sell downloadable videos to iPod owners only--anyone can download videos from iTMS and then watch them on any device that Quicktime will run on. MAN, media people are fricken morons!!
No comments:
Post a Comment