tv and music don't have the same problem.

Filesharing has complicated things immensely for the music industry, and everyone knows this.  The core issue is that money used to be made selling CDs (or records, or tapes...) and now the industry needs to develop new revenue streams to solve that problem.

TV never made money selling TV.  The money comes from advertising aired during the programs.  Again, this is obvious.

The thing is, making it dead easy to access something means more people do it, and that people do more of it.  The average music collection size has skyrocketed due to filesharing.  The average amount of TV that people watch is likely similarly impacted by illegal downloads.

If what you sell is eyeballs aimed at a screen, and more eyeballs are watching your content for longer, this is a good thing.  If you can't find a way to make money from these added eyes and hours, you have forgotten what your business it.

Dear TV,

You create filmed content, and then sell advertising based on the data you can collect for who is watching individual shows.

None of this has to be tied to cable distribution, or TV screens, time slots, limited availability, production realities, or what came before.

You attract eyeballs, and then sell them based on demographic information.  Focus on doing that, rather than doing the specific version that worked perfectly, before everything changed.

Sincerely,

Jon

eyeballs are screen agnostic (monetizing p2p television).

I'm consistently baffled about why pirating TV online is an issue.  Let's look at this logically:

1. TV is paid for (in part) with advertising sales.
2. Advertising is a matter of eyeballs, and metrics.  The number of people watching, and other demographic info, determines the price of advertising time, with past results dictating future pricing.
3. Piracy is fast, wide distribution, usually at no cost to the uploader of content.
4. The simplest option, with the minimum intrusiveness, usually wins.

If those four things are true (and I believe they are), I will never understand why television programs aren't distributed online, at time of broadcast, from the networks that broadcast them traditionally.

Eyeballs are eyeballs regardless of what screen they are focused on.  Whether I'm watching a show on a TV, a monitor, or an iPod, I'm still watching.  When I watch a program on my iPod, it normally doesn't have commercials; but only because I'm either paying for it, or it has been uploaded without commercials.  

If the first place to get a TV show I wanted to watch was from the broadcasting network, with commercials, I would get it there.  No questions asked.  Because the time saved in downloading something at 8pm from NBC rather than at 11pm from EZTV is worth a few minutes of commercials to me.  I would wager it would be the same way for others, provided the download was in an open format, with no copy protection.  This would be a product that competes with piracy, using the tools the content owners actually have: initial release date (usually), and best quality (almost always).

The interesting thing, is that there is a potential for a wider market of advertisers.  If google analytics can tell me which country my readers are coming from, it can probably tell CBS which country a visitor is trying to download How I Met Your Mother from.  Why can't there be dozens of versions of each show, each with localized commercials in the same break period?  Why can't online distribution mean that the same ad space can be sold to different companies in Canada, the US, and Uruguay?  It happens when signals are rebroadcast over TV, why not do the same online.

Instead of complaining about the internet stealing eyeballs, why not sell access to those eyeballs too?  Why not do the whole thing via bittorrent, at next to no cost?  Why not use the torrent download information from each localized version, and use that to justify ad prices?

The short version of why is because you're leaving money on the table, and because you won't stop piracy unless you give customers a better product than piracy does.  If you want to keep selling high quality versions without commercials, there will still be customers.  People will always be willing to pay for a premium version, or for a physical copy (DVD).  Monetizing content online can't be based on the idea that you can change behaviour, only that you can create a system that isolates value in that behaviour.  So get on it, despite the complications of clearing content in different countries.

Because the shortest version of 'Why?' is a desperate need to stay relevant.

[To point out: 1) Yes, I am aware that people can skip past ads in downloaded content.  They can also leave the room to get a drink, and often do.  No one uses this as an excuse to stop advertising on TV.  2) People could just burn DVD copies of the torrented shows.  People already do.  Buying a DVD is usually about convenience, quality, love of the content and special features.  3) There are probably technological issues with this.  I understand that, and this is why there are people smarter than me to make it work regardless.]

adding a social media layer.

I've had a very social media themed day.  I'm not going to go into the details, but I'm solidly in the headspace, so I'm going to talk about something cool I saw on PSFK recently - the addition of a social media layer, melded with competition, on top of vapid reality TV.  

I don't particularly like the Hills, but I'd be very happy to see this added to streaming TV online on a wider scale.  Lately I've taken to sitting in front of the TV with my iPhone, twittering, tumbling and IMing my way through whatever I happen to watch (normally about one show a week, considering bittorrent is my favourite station).  If I'm watching most things on my laptop screen, I'd like that comment layer.  More useful would be the ability to tie it into the social media services I already use - TV show based chats with my Facebook, MSN, Twitter, etc contacts would be interesting and beneficial.

The scoring part is something I find less useful.  I know many people are excited by the idea of getting voted up or down in a Digg comment thread, but I'd prefer to actually have a conversation.

That said, I'd love watching a deep-tagged episode of the Hills with the highest voted commentary popping up at the times it was made by each individual viewer.  Crowdsourced criticism is easy to see entertainment in.

watching the sky fall

Does anyone else feel like we're living in the ends times of content ownership as a business model? I've blogged before on my stance on content ownership (and copyright ownership) as a failing-to-failed business model in music, as demonstrated by the good folks in the music industry. Content ownership is only directly useful to content creators - for anyone else it's just a bunch of unnecessary hassle that complicates content management. Fighting over who owns the music is less useful than offering a service that creators are willing to pay for, whether in percentage or in a flat fee.

The WGA strike though, makes this feel like the entertainment apocalypse. Never before have traditional content channels seemed any less useful.

Cost of entry costs what these days? Well, that depends on how you define it. Cost of a decent camera, actors, etc, can scale based on what you want to achieve. But the cost of eyeballs is higher, and infinitely relative. You can either buy them with quality (which is immaterial and transient) or you can buy eyeballs from people who have them (advertising). One is free, technically, and the other is ludicrously expensive. Such is life.

The current structure of the entertainment system is based on a lot of things, arguably chiefly among them star power. But the reason networks and studios developed a power base, is the cost of entry, both in terms of creating content, and distributing it.

The issue is, that system has been running on intertia. And now we've torn down the financial support, and the distribution channel. This strike is both about payment for new content channels, and impetus to improve them.

This is what people do when the world is burning down, they fight over scraps. DVD revenue scraps, online distribution scraps, whatever. The same thing will happen when the actors renegotiate. Then the directors.

It's the same thing that happened in the music industry - when the world is run by guys nearing retirement, there's a lot less risk in looting than in learning how to deal with a new world.

The only real advantages that the film and tv industry have is the experience. Physical albums failed as an art form, but the music still had value. So they were separated. And the industry bigwigs blamed piracy, which is a rational reaction to removing the value from a product. Think about TV, and Movies watched on DVD, or in theatres. Is your experience that much better than it is through illegal content channels? Is that difference something that would be fixed by better speakers, a larger screen or projector, and higher quality digital files?

Although you will never have a home theatre that is better than a movie, you could get one that is better experientially when you include the bullshit of the excessive cost, the ads, the fifteen minutes of crap before the film actually begins. Same deal with DVDs. The extras are nice, so is the image quality. But the often unskippable ads beforehand? I'd rather just take it.

If you want to make money in this situation, you need to offer an experience that beats free as a price. You can't do that by putting restrictions on things.

And you can't make money by pissing off the people who supply the transient and immaterial source of interest, the quality. Because buying eyeballs is popular enough that you need a better hook than omnipresence.

maybe i'm amazed.

Off-topic, but I'm pretty sure I just saw a 9/11 joke on 30 Rock, a prime time network sitcom.

Yeah.

At the same time, the episode dealt with Thomas Jefferson sleeping with his slaves, Black soldiers on the confederate side of the U.S. Civil War, and sneaking into A.A. meetings to stalk a crush. So, maybe I should have seen this coming.

Still. 9/11 joke to close a sitcom set in NY? Ballsy. I am impressed.

on the obvious.

Very, very often, and depressingly, I run into an article that sounds very interesting, but end up finishing it with the thought 'and...?'

This piece, though written well enough, left me with that feeling.

Maybe it's because I'm one of the 20-something university students the article deals with, but it can basically be summarised as 'new methods of distribution change the way people interact with content.' This is, to someone of my generation, similar to a news bulletin that reads 'eating found to reduce hunger', and I hope most people would get the same response.

The article does make the comparison to DVD content, and the difference of experience that comes with watching a story in succession, rather than parceled out by the creators or corporations. Technology is about control, and being able to determine when and how you watch a TV show is worth 1.99 an episode, or 25 bucks a season.

"What will be interesting to see is how the iTunes model will eventually affect these 20-somethings’ viewing habits as they get older. [...] Whether through the “low-tech”method of waiting for DVD box sets to be released, or the instant gratification of the iTunes Store, it looks like viewing habits are being molded."

What's actually interesting, in my opinion, is not just the changing of viewing habits, but the changing of the model of communication, and the alteration of the social experience. Television creates cultural moments because it creates a situation where a large number of people are watching the same thing at the same time. In the 20-somethings of today, you can rarely have a conversation about the episode of heroes that aired last night, because three people are still downloading it.

The article mentions convenience, and scheduling, but misses the larger point. The target audience of many television shows is now unwilling to be told how to watch, when to watch, and even less willing to watch only once. We're used to having control over our entertainment and information, and television is a blip on the otherwise consistent evolution of entertainment content; where, at least to a point, the user decided how and when things will be done. When you see a play or a movie, you pick which showing, fitting it into your life. With a book, you read how ever much you want, whenever you want.

Television networks and cable companies have created a system that works well for them, and that model doesn't shift well. Content on demand means that product placement can't be supplementary television advertising, it means that you won't get viewers for crap just by placing it before or after something of high quality.

It's not that viewing habits are being molded. The issue now is whether the television business model will continue to be adapted to the way people interact with TV shows now, or if they will fall into an embarrassing strategy of harassing consumers to ignore technologies they don't approve of, like another industry based on entertainment content.

[Short commentary on end link: Is this happening? This is beyond idiocy, and far past the border into self-parody. I'd post on it at length, but I don't think I could do it without my head hurting.]