Loading ...The future of Video Content
By way of Vastly Important News, here’s a piece by Newsfactor about a rumor of two popular consumer media technologies teaming up together – Tivo and Netflix.
Media content companies have been dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet age. Part of this was a concern that people would illegally copy content and share it with friends, thus killing the huge profit margins that these companies use to stay big and keep getting bigger. Napster and others arose mainly because these companies could not get it through their head that the vast majority of people who buy music want to buy it in a legitimate way, but if you make it not only a lot cheaper, but a easier to obtain, many of those people will simply opt for that way, whatever the legal implications. Apple’s iTunes finally started to erase this wrong thinking by offering individual songs legally for download via a copy-protected file format, and surprise, surprise, they’ve had some great success!
Movies are a slightly different animal because one can’t separate a movie into scenes and sell these separately. DVD’s changed the way movie companies distributed movies perhaps because these companies were nervous that the new technology would flop with consumers like Laserdisc unless they were given other advantages. Instead of charging $80 for the first three months so that only video stores or true aficionados would invest in a movie initially, the prices were set at a much more reasonable level. While some single DVD’s still are released for $30 or $40 or even more, the majority now seem to be going for well under $20, and if you walk into any electronics chain, or even grocery store at this point, one can easily find a sizable collection of DVD’s for under $10.
Despite massive decreases in profits, the music industry still is having a hard time learning a lesson from video. While iTunes and now similar services from Wal-Mart, Sony (no longer available), and soon Microsoft are starting to make some headway, it still will cost you $10 or more to buy an album. You would think the music folks would cut the consumer a break and take a bit more off for the saved expense of creating the CD itself, plus all the packaging and shipping.
So, if this rumor pans out, it could allow video to eclipse music yet again. Netflix and Tivo have already developed huge fan bases around them, and have changed the way Americans consume their video content – both movies and TV. Tivo has made filtering all the junk on TV to a person’s preferences making watching TV actually LESS time-consuming. You don’t have to wait for something to come on or even study a schedule anymore, because if your TIVO knows your preferences, whether by guessing or by you programming it, a backlog of programs of interest to you will simply be on your TIVO when you next check. Similarly Netflix satisfies the urge in many of us to watch movies that we’ve always wanted to see, but missed for whatever reason. It’s use of lists to do this is great because any time one hears of a movie one wants to see, it goes on the list and you don’t have to think about it after that – it will come to you as part of your subscription. Whether it happens in two days or two months depends on where you rank it on your list. The subscription model has worked well for both Netflix and Tivo, although with Tivo you never have to give your content “back” if you don’t want to, you simply need to get it off of your Tivo (either by deleting or by saving to some external source) in order to make room for more if you fill up your Tivo’s entire hard drive. With hard drive’s getting bigger and cheaper, though, this becomes less and less an issue as time goes by.
Combining these two technologies may be a very successful consumer product, but it does have some drawbacks with the current state of technology. The main issue is that the vast majority of Tivos out there record in standard definition 4:3 non-widescreen. There are Tivo’s just starting to come out this year that allow for high-definition recording that would be necessary to due true justice to DVD, but these devices are still priced upwards of $1000. Maybe this, as with the case of most new technologies, will come down significantly over the next year or two and no longer be an issue, but what about all the older Tivo boxes? Will they be upgradeable? Probably not. Then there are all the special features of a DVD. Tivo can simply record a video stream; it can’t translate a DVD menu system as far as I know, so these features, if included, would have to be just tacked onto the end of the stream. What about commentary tracks? Does Tivo have the ability to record multiple audio tracks with one video stream?
I don’t have all the answers, but part of that is because while being a fan of these technologies, I don’t use them myself. What? The gadget guy doesn’t use this stuff? What kind of hypocrite is he? Yes, I admit it. I do intend to eventually adopt these technologies, but since I recently purchased a high-definition TV with HD satellite service, I did not want to pay yet another $1000 for the only Tivo option that would have allowed me to record shows in HD. As far as Netflix, I did try them out about 6 years ago when they were first starting and they didn’t have the lists and monthly subscription they do now. It was all ala carte. But as some of you may know, I also manage a DVD website, and as part of that receive quite a few DVD’s for review on that site. I would say well over half of the upwards of 400 DVD’s I own I haven’t watched! So for me to start renting more DVD’s would be ludicrous.
In a year or two HD DVD’s (or Blue Light depending on which format you think will win the new format war), and cable systems have started showing movies “on demand” and of course there is always pay per view. Eventually everything should be on demand, that is one can download it and watch it as soon as desired. Just like the web works. You want to see a web page, you enter the address and go to it. Such stream-of-consciousness viewing is something people want, even if not all of them quite know that yet. The mindset of the web, especially on a higher-speed connection, will seep into other forms of content. There are some big hurdles to get over before this becomes reality, such as storage and bandwidth issues, but if there’s any guarantee it’s that if people want it, they will build it. Technology marches forward. A lot depends on the innovation, inventions and discoveries that are still unknown to the general public, or haven’t even taken place, but eventually bandwidth and storage will cease to be of any issue – until the next level of content begins arriving in a decade or two that involve the tactile and olfactory senses too!