For the first time, users will be able to go to a dedicated area of the site and view clips from Nine Network news and current affairs programs and lifestyle shows.The move heralds the advent of time shifting - the term to describe the phenomenon of consumers, not networks, choosing when to watch a TV program.
ninemsn chief executive Martin Hoffman said: "I'm not expecting people to watch a two-hour movie or a whole program . . . it's about information snacking, catching up on something. It's not about to replace the video (recorder)."
Of course, my rant below is mostly talking about series, Buffy, Spaced, Futurama etc...
Yesterday's rant...
I've been noticing a bit of extra chatter around the web lately on the legality of downloading TV shows from the web. There have been a few stories on Slashdot and a few well known bloggers directly linking to bittorrents to download current TV shows.
Downloading TV is nothing new. People were downloading Southpark, Futurama, The Simpsons in crappy realvideo format five+ years ago. I suppose the explosion of bittorrent has helped bring the concept to the front. It's the obvious next step after Napster and downloading music once everyone starts getting more bandwidth and 200 to 600 Meg doesn't sound so big.
The arguements for allowing the downloading of TV shows are familiar.
Immediate arguement thrown back is:
Point being, the TV network makes money from the adverts, but do they own the content they're playing. Who is really losing out? The TV network pays the creator of the content for the right to play their content. Then the content is onsold to cable, then to another country. If you download it you bypass all of that. They make no money.
Even ignoring that, the TV channels argue it's far to easy to skip ads if you watch it on the computer. But then, they don't even like VCRs do they?
Obviously we'll see (are seeing, have been seeing) a lot more product placement in TV shows. It's difficult to fast forward product placement, and even when the show is pirated, the creator still makes money.
Not that long ago (before DVD took off) you could almost argue that it was OK to pirate TV because it's too hard to purchase TV shows. These days you can buy a season of a TV show for +-$60. In Australia it would probably cost you more in bandwidth to download a full season of TV.
Other better arguements for downloading are the differences in schedules between different countries. Australia is often a whole season behind the US. Australian TV is often terrible at showing TV shows, missing episodes, delaying playing some episodes and cutting great chunks out of episodes. If you watch stay up until midnight to watch Angel, only to have some problem at the channel cause the audio to drop out for five minutes, I think it would be acceptable to download and watch.
I think we'll obviously see a crack down. It's ultimately no different to downloading music, except the idea of buying TV is a lot more foreign to most consumers than buying music is. It's harder for them to see it as something that isn't free.
But what we're really seeing is that consumers are losing patience with the free-to-air concept and are taking control of what they want to see. The technology is there for them to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, without waiting for their local TV to show it. It's becoming easy to use and more mainstream. And unlike music heard on the radio where they are usually promoting a CD you can buy, TV first shown on TV is often years away from release on DVD...