pubs
I’m getting my cable disconnected because I don’t really watch it. The few shows I do watch, I can just torrent or whatever. That’s… Lost and BSG, really. And BSG is going to be off-air until 2008, so.
Bittorrent is the future of television, I swear. Between that and DVD… The thing about BT is that it’s global. I mean. Doctor Who’s starting up again in a few days, in the UK. Though it’s being picked up sooner than before, it still won’t show on Sci-Fi for months. Doesn’t matter if you’ve DSL!
There was a recent survey I read that said that the average person in the US has something like 130 TV channels available to him — and yet the average person only ever watches something like 6% of those channels. That’s foolish. Were I given the option to choose, say, a dozen channels that I actually felt were interesting (plus all of the local stuff — PBS is important), that’d be fine. Maybe a buck a channel, per month?
Plus a ten dollar flat fee, including all the local stuff?
You can’t even get Comedy Central here unless you pay thirty-something dollars a month — and to hell with that. The Daily Show isn’t worth that much to my life. They need a system where you pay for what you actually watch. Or intend to watch.
The whole channel system is a bit screwed-up anyway. Outdated. In the future, the ideal way this would work would be subscriptions to particular shows. Which would be delivered at certain intervals. And you could watch them whenever you wanted. And it would be worldwide. So if I wanted to subscribe to an obscure Indian show that was starting to gain popularity, I could do so.
Maybe the way it would work is you’d have a certain number of points to allocate in a given month. You could buy more, if you wanted. I guess it’s kind of like Netflix — pay more to get more DVD rentals at once.
If you found a show you liked, you could have the option of starting from the current episode or starting from the beginning. Likewise, you could splurge a bunch of points to watch the whole thing at once, or you could just go one episode at a time, a normal subscription, starting from the start.
This is the way television will work, eventually. DVD sets would still exist as compilations, the way they sell episodic games in boxes.
The tide is turning; people are starting to realize that the shows are more important than the networks. DVD is helping a lot in this. And actually-good TV being made.
One thing that helped was that DVRs like TiVo started breaking people from the habit of thinking of shows as being on a channel at a certain time. I always laughed at the various attempts to introduce TV-like “channels” to the Web–who needs channels, except for technical reasons having to do with a mid-20th-century delivery system?
And, of course, iTunes and many digital cable systems (e.g. Comcast OnDemand) are already selling shows a la carte. I’m not sure the pricing for what you get is really competitive with BitTorrent yet–they need to make the user experience better rather than worse, and have true global reach.
You know another thing that bugs me about TV? The couple channels that I would watch I can’t even get in my area. Or I need to sign a contract with a different and far more expensive service.
AND! cable companies have the worst customer service I’ve ever experienced. It’s funny seeing those companies that offer you like everything (phone+internet+cable+bread) jump through hoops to get you to have everything so that it’s reasonable, but if you just want cable alone it’s more expensive than having cable+hbo+phone services. I don’t want your damn phone services! I don’t want your bread!
Also, you gave me a great idea about Dr. Who. I should figure out what video format I would have to convert it to, to get it to run on my PS3 or 360.
How about the NBC-style thing where you can watch the shows on-demand on the web page for free, but with commercials?
Oh hey. I’ve got a Philips something-or-other DVD player that accepts basically every open and standardized file format. What I’ve done for shows like Life on Mars is just fill a DVD with the .avi files and throw it in the player.
Anyway, yeah. I think Doctor Who (in its current incarnation) has to be one of the most torrented shows out there. It’s certainly one of the more publicized ones. Back when Battlestar Galactica was broadcast in Europe before it hit here, I think it set the standard. Then there was all the media hubbub about the pilot to Doctor Who leaking several weeks before broadcast, and everyone said “oh! Good idea!”
Yeah. I’m not sure how digital cable or DVRs work, though I think it’ll have to be a systemic change on the actual TV end.
I’m imagining a system where, when you get the service installed, you’re given a menu with a bunch of popular shows that you might want to subscribe to, then off to the side a search function by title and by genre. Maybe a certain collection of popular shows would be pre-subscribed, for convenience. On future boots to the subscription menu, maybe it could have an Amazon-like system to judge, based on what shows you’re already subscribed to, what similar shows you might like.
Perhaps you can select a show and watch a five-minute preview to see if you enjoy it; if so, hit subscribe and it’ll ask how you want the show delivered. Keep the options as intuitive and uncluttered as possible. Let the user dictate a schedule, and give the user a calendar menu that shows when new shows will be ready to watch.
Come to think of it, this is sounding kind of similar to what I’ve heard of DVRs. Problem there, I guess, is it’s another expensive bit of equipment on top of all of the programming that I don’t want to pay for.
Sounds like a decent short-term compromise. I think there will have to be some deeper changes in the long term, though.
I think one key difference between watching a show week-to-week versus collected is the level of patience one has for … paused storylines. Non-ensemble episodes of an ensemble show.
You wait an entire week or more to watch a new episode, and if that episode ignores the things you want to see more of in place of something that seems … unnecessary, it’s a lot more frustrating when you can’t immediately jump into the next one. You have less patience for unsatisfying episodes.
It’s the difference between the chapter in a novel and, say, an issue of comic book. … Maybe that’s a bad example, although it shouldn’t be.
Check Demonoid.
I imagine writing a novel in serial format is a good way to teach you how to keep things flowing.
Talking about the complete inability to order on a per-channel basis is one good way to get a communications major to froth at the mouth.
If it wasn’t for televised sports I wouldn’t watch any television at all. A lot of that stuff gets broadcasted and archived on the web; however, it’s something where the lack of graphical and audio fidelity really gets to me. I can watch a Chinese satellite broadcast of the Champion’s League on my computer; I’d prefer to watch it on the TV though.
I’m frightened by the fact that someone would think it worthwhile to torrent things like that.
I considered saying something regarding serial-format novels, but then I thought… who does that anymore?
Ever read the New Yorker?
(Me Neither.)
I’m sure Nathan would approve!