It's About TV, Not Movies
2006-09-20 10:24AM PDT/Home
I had one of those ah-ha moments, watching of all things, a TV show called Eureka. Only I wasn't watching it on TV, I was watching it on my computer. Eureka is this quirky show on the SciFi channel about a small town filled by the government with super geniuses to come up with major scientific advances. The iTunes store had the pilot as a free download a couple weeks ago, and I finally got around to watching it last night. What a great show!
All this time, I had been focused on movie downloads and right under my nose, the real action was happening with TV. Only I was too dumb to see it. Now don't get me wrong, I think movie downloads will become more interesting, at some point, but for now it is sidelined by the DVD business. There's really nothing all that compelling about buying a movie you download verses buying the DVD. Quite the contrary, there's lots of reasons to buy the DVD over buying a download. Not the least of which is that they've already stored a backup for me (the DVD itself). And that's before we get into all the digital rights malarky.
So why TV? Let me count the ways.
Item 1: Downloaded shows are shorter! Without all the commercials, an hour show is only 40 minutes long. This has lots of advantages from, hey I don't have to watch the commercials, to hey, I don't have to spend as much time downloading stuff. They also cost less. $1.99 for a TV show, vs. $9.99 or more for a movie.
Item 2: TV ain't free. Cable costs money. If I wanted to watch Eureka on the SciFi channel for "free", I'd have to pay a heck of a lot more than I do now per month in cable fees. I have basic cable: $15/month. I'd need to get digital cable which is $60/month to get SciFi. The difference between $15 and $60 is a lot of money. One month difference in fees more than pays for me to pick up the entire Eureka series off of iTunes at $1.99 a pop. I believe Amazon's unbox service is similarly priced.
And from where I sit, that's about all I want off the SciFi channel. Americans spend $100 or more per month on Cable. Could we see people turning off cable services, because they're replacing some with download services? It doesn't take a lot of people doing this before the download services see some real revenue.
Item 3: The download services make a show available shortly after release on TV. Usually within the week. If the studios release a DVD compilation of a season, it is months later. Months even after the season is over. So the download services will capture the "catch up" effect. As a show becomes more popular, people can buy the back episodes so they know what's going on. I knew Eureka was something I wanted to see, because the CocoaDevHouse boys have been talking about it.
With movies, the DVD comes out what, six months after the movies release? With a release to the download services sometime after that.
I wonder how many other people will come to the same conclusion I did while watching Eureka? Keep my cable basic basic. Cherry pick the good shows from channels I don't want on iTunes, as well as use iTunes to catch up on a good series. Finally, keep my Netflix account for movies. At least for now.