So – Happy New Year first of all!
I’ve been slammed at the office and have not any real time to post, but more on that later…
During the holidays, I decided to check out Battlestar Gallactica while um, browsing online. I downloaded the first series for my iPod and started to watch it while commuting back and forth to the office. Turns out, it’s a really great show and I was hooked within a few short episodes. Since I had the whole season, I was able to watch as I wanted at my pace. This is not that new an idea, since DVRs have been around for a bunch of years and I’ve been a user since the beginning, but I actually had ALL the shows from the season and was able to dive right through commercial free.
I found myself doing most of my watching on my laptop connected to my TV or just directly while traveling. The quality is surprisingly good. It compares to my original SDTV Tivo which was definitely lossy, compared to non-Tivo TV, and certainly not as good as my HDTV DVR records now, but no worries here. The programming was compelling and fit my purpose. I’d certainly love to see it even better by the way, but would not expect that my iPod or iTunes for that matter would play HDTV downloads all that well – at least on my current laptop.
While watching the end of the first season, I saw that the third season was going to be starting in January (tonight actually) and got anxious that I was not going to be current in time, so I hit iTunes and purchased the second season. iTunes really nicely packaged it all, and soon enough all 10 shows were on my system. Well last night I watched the last episode of Season 2 and am completely jonesing for what’s next. I have no desire to wait for the show to begin airing again – assuming it’s available in my market’s cable system – but at this point have no choice.
This has led me to what I would presume is a fairly natural conclusion and something I’ve thought, but not believe – the broadcast model is dead. Downloads, legal or not are extremely convenient, portable and personal. I can define what I want to watch and when — of course assuming that the content that’s out there is worth watching.
The economics of PPV downloads is pretty tough. I paid just under $20 for 10 episodes in a lower resolution. While this was great for my instant gratification purposes it will probably not be the version I’d choose to watch in a home theater situation and I would choose either an HDTV download (if available) or DVD for my collection instead. I can’t justify buying all my shows this way either as it’s far too expensive when I add this to my existing monthly expense for cable (well over $100 which includes broadband access and the premium tier from Cablevision).
Intel’s new Viiv technology is pretty interesting and certainly has the vision to deliver against an on-demand broadband IPTV world. The hardware is capable of transcoding content on the fly which means you could download a very high quality version for local access and move a lower quality (smaller, compressed) file to your portable device, which might be an iPod or something similar. The release of the new Core Duo means you’ll be able to manage high def content on the go from your laptop and is an exiting thing to consider for my 2 hours of travel a day – not too mention the lengthier business travel I encounter. If Apple uses this technology as widely speculated and then takes the next steps with iTunes and their content partners, I’m there. In fact, consider me pre-sold.
My hope is that with DRM baked in, content providers will become more comfortable with using the broadband pipe and will opt to deliver a richer vision for content that does not rely on traditional models – like broadcast gets it first. I am far from alone is having the desire and wallet to pay for the privilege.
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