David Emery OnlineTV Models
17 January 2007
In an interesting twist to the ongoing change in TV broadcasting, Fox is bringing out a DVD of the first 4 episodes of 24 almost straight after they aired. It’s not too expensive – $14.98 – but seems to cement the idea that TV shows are something you charge for, as opposed to the traditional advertising subsidised model.
Obviously this ties directly in to digital downloads of TV shows; 24 is on the iTunes Store at $1.99 per episode, and is dominating the charts at #2, #4, #5 and #6. However, this obviously isn’t good enough for Fox for catching up people that missed the first episodes, hence the DVD.
It’s interesting to see that Fox are going down the pay-for-tv route almost exclusively – with the DVD being a stake in the sand declaring their intentions. This is in stark contrast to other US TV stations such as NBC, who are offering free, ad supported streams of their shows as soon as they air. Which of the two models is going to be more successful in the long term hangs on some key factors, chief of which is how people are actually going to watch these things.
With downloads from places like iTunes, or things like the Xbox 360 Live Store their are already solutions to getting the content onto a TV, and more are coming in the form of products like the TV. Ad-supported streams, however, still have no working model to get them viewable on the big screen, which is going to be vital for mainstream adoption. I guess this is where things like Joost (formally The Venice Project) come in, running either on PCs connected directly to a TV or running on some kind of set top box.
In my brief dabblings with it, Joost is quite obviously designed to be used with a remote rather than a keyboard and mouse – in fact, I think the interface as it stands at the moment really suffers from it if you’re using it from a PC. It’s also quite obviously targeting people like NBC or Fox as it uses a quite outdated “Channel” model, which doesn’t make sense from a “internet” point of view – YouTube et al have done away with that – but does completely make sense if you’re NBC trying to get your content on the internet.
In the end, if a decent model can be found to bring advertising supported free shows to the internet – either streaming or for download – then this will win out over the pay-per-show concept. Pay-per-show won’t go away, but it’s replacing DVD sales of TV seasons, not the original broadcast which is where the real interest lies.