From Ars Technica. FOX and Fx are following ABC's path, and jumping into the downloadable television programs on a pay-per-download basis. The going rate seems to $.99 a show, but Fox is also offering pre-broadcast downloads too--that is, you'll be able to (for $2.99) download and watch a program before it actually airs. Way back when I didn't have a reliable TV source, I used to download Buffy the day before it aired courtesy of the Wildfeed. It was nice to be able to see the episode before everyone else, but I'm not sure exactly what the draw will be outside of the hardcore audience. This article brought to mind two things that I think are going to define television delivery in the next few years.
VOD and DirecTV: DirecTV is in an awful bind, that they need to work on fixing soon--they have no VOD capabilities. A good example of their reaction can be seen in the Atlanta market. The local cable provider, Comcast, offers VOD replays of Falcons games, as well as all sorts of other goodies. In order to combat the lack of football VOD, DirecTV put together the "Superfan" package, including things like the "RedZone" channel (flipping from game-to-game when a team gets inside the 20), and select teams' "ShortCuts" channel (basically a condensed game). However, as all things DirecTV, you're on their schedule, not yours. In doing a little searching, it seems that DirecTV is attempting to solve the problem via DVRs. New boxes would be distributed, with 160GB hard drives. One half you get for your own personal use, the other hald gets used for DVR capabilities. During the night, encrypted content would stream down onto your DVR, and you would be able to view it at your leisure. It's a solution, albeit not the most elegant. But I see VOD being the real leverage point that cable has over satellite (the advertising focus on reception during rainstorms is bunk).
Downloadable TV: This is already here, and like music, has both legal and probably not so legal alternatives. This is what the original Ars article talked about, and their contention was that "well, I have a DVR, why would I want to pay for a program?" I think the problem is that they're missing two important groups of people: those people who don't own a DVR (like me), and those who want to watch tv outside their home. The second group are people who own iPods and want to watch Lost on the train to work, or business travelers who like to sit with their laptop, waiting for plane and catch up on all the episodes of The Office they've missed. I've done the latter quite a few times. With current DVRs, there doesn't seem to be a legal and non-technical way to get the program from the settop box onto your mobile device, since the MPAA doesn't want you taking the latest episode of House and giving it to all your friends. This immediately makes the DVR argument point moot for those whose wish to view their content on a different device than their TV.
One problem that I've encountered with downloadable TV--and one area that I see being a good market to enter--is that you've got to go looking for the programs you're interested--there's nothing out there crawling the TV listing and grabbing the newest episode of lost when it's release. Well, there is, but it's not what your typical consumer expects from a DVR program. If there was a program out there that behaved like your average DVR (i.e. it gave you your listing, and you could set it up to record a show, series, etc. and it did so in the background). I've started playing around with something to that effect, calling it TorrenTV, since the primary means of grabbing content is via the BitTorrent network. The available content is most likely not legal, but I think that it would be a worthwhile endeavor to try and hook into the legal distribution means as well. It'd be sweet to be able to drop in a plug-in to TorrenTV, and you're immediately pulling down episodes of Lost via iTunes and being billed accordingly. Regardless of if my app gets any further than a prototype, I think this would be a good producttype to push--a software DVR that will go and aggregate the available content from all of these networks and allow the consumer to control their downloadable TV from one location.
