TV on demand

Hi TV Execs,

“Acquiring” tv shows in this day and age is not terribly hard.  It shouldn’t take much longer than 5 minutes on Google to find any recent episode of a semi popular tv series.  And these “pirated” episodes are actually high in quality.  Sure, there might be a few seconds missing here and there.  Or maybe some tearing.  Maybe the audio is out of sync.  Those are some minor issues faced by people who choose to download these episodes, but these are also things which are “nuked”, or fixed, very quickly in the “scene”.

Now lets imagine I used one of the current, existing methods of purchasing tv episodes online.  Firstly, I’m in Australia, so not all recent shows will be released to me.  Anything I do purchase, requires invasive DRM.  If I buy from Apple, I generally have to use iTunes or something similar.  The same holds for almost any place where I can purchase tv episodes, and most of these don’t even have recent releases.  So what I can do is pay someone some money, install their software, and then possibly watch the episode, assuming my internet is working and that the DRM servers are still running.  Oh, and I generally can’t watch it on my TV either, since apparently even me playing the episode on my TV is against your idea of copyright.

There’s nothing here that attracts me to your economic model.  I understand that making TV shows cost money.  You have to pay for writers, actors, special effects, editing, directing, make-up, hair, costumes, etc.  I get that.  But just give me something that’s usable by me.  Here, I’ll make it easy and give you a short list.

- Release the episodes at roughly the same time world-wide and media-wide.  That means the online downloadable episode comes at roughly the same time as the on-air TV show.

- Release it without any restrictive DRM.  Let me play it on any of my computers.  Don’t force me to run your specialised software.

- Use common and open standards for the audio and video.  H.264 is an open standard for video, with free implementations available.  Most/all recent media players accept it.  AVI is pretty much a given when talking about media files, so that’s a suitable container (although I won’t complain if you use Matroska).  Audio has generally been MP3 (even though it is encumbered by patents), but if you want something free I’d suggest FLAC.

- When I purchase the TV episode, I just want the TV episode.  Don’t place advertisements all through it.  Advertisements are used in free to air television, since viewers don’t pay anything.  If I’m paying for this, I don’t want to see ads.

- Use reasonable pricing.  A box set (DVD) of a season runs around $AUD50 for around 20 episodes.  That’s $2.50 per episode, something I’d be happy paying.

Do that, and I’ll start subscribing.