[opendtv] Was [] Re: News: Northwest Station Pulls Signal In Retransmission Battle
- From: Philip Hodgetts <philip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 15:57:41 -0800
Hi Craig,
Long time no direct communication at least. I'm still lurking on Open
DTV, even if it's not really core to my interests because there's a
lot of good brains there (and some... better left unstated!). But a
recent post of yours has prompted me to write and maybe update you on
some directions we've been taking.
The word on the street is that broadcasters are asking for $1/mo per
subscriber, although it is unclear that any have actually attained
this goal. Even if the station was only asking for $0.50 per month,
what justification is there for this, other than the reality that
everyone is jumping on this bandwagon and screwing the consumer?
The only good news in all of this is that they are building a
classic house of cards, that may fall down under its own weight if a
new channel of distribution is able to bypass them.
That's what caught my attention! Mainly because I think we're going
to be contributing to the "new channel of distribution" through some
developments. Two items that might interest you. We found a way
(patent applied for) to do commerce in an RSS feed. That was about 18
months ago and we've been working to bring klickTab Inc
www.klickTab.com to market as a service.
Immediately it will enable charge per item for "podcast" feeds.
What is more interesting and one of the reasons this is all taking
longer than expected, is that the vision keeps expanding, and is now
behind a new venture call the Open Television Network (and yes, we
own opentelevisionnetwork.com).
Anyone with content can add it to the main index with quality
metadata. The metadata is used to allow customers/viewers to build
their own channel. OTN's slogan is "The World's favorite channel:
Yours". Initially focused on Mid-tail and long tail content, and
"hits" that have faded, because frankly, I don't want to deal with
dinosaurs who want to lock content down.
For $70 per month I can buy a lot of content, especially if my cost
is apportioned reasonably. The actual cost to create and deliver
even the most expensive content to my home is measured in pennies,
not dollars. CBS estimates that a set of eyeballs generates about
$.035 to $.050 per hour. I would gladly pay $0.50 to watch a one
hour show WITHOUT commercials.
And 50c for a "quality hour" of TV is about my price point too. Maybe
75c for something really good, but for an hour show, 50c is about
right. For "disposable" television (news, Daily Show et al) more like
10-25c for a half hour.
As an experiment with eating my own dog food, we've been entirely off
any TV service (no OTA, no cable, no satellite) since we moved to
Burbank in February. A slight drop in TV watching (I don't put on
Letterman at night because I can't but I don't seek it out either)
but overall not too bad. Not a mainstream experience for sure, and
while I'm looking forward to the Appletv for some easing of the
signal flow, a lot of what we're watching is in DivX's Advanced
Simple MPEG-4 video with MP3 audio in an AVI. Repacking into .mov
isn't hard, but we don't know if iPod or Appletv will handle advanced
simple or not. Testing is in order.
I guess we'll see you at NAB when I might (targeting) have first
draft of a book I'm working on done... working title is Television
3.0. (1.0 was broadcast, Mark 2 was cable, satellite and time
shifting by VHS and PVR and 3.0 is complete customer choice,
recommendation engines and totally flexible delivery via IP, mostly
not rtsp).
Cheers
Philip
--
Philip Hodgetts
Managing Editor
Creative Planet's Digital Production BuZZ
Talk Radio for Digital Production, Post Production and Distribution.
Writer: Syndicated news feed for
The ProApps-Hub
DigitalProductionBuZZ.com
2-pop.com
GovernmentVideo.com
theSchubinReport.com
Videography.com
OSXFAQ.com
Tapeonline.com
tiptoefilms.org
Broadcast Correspondent: Inside Mac Radio
Producer: The Schubin Report
Contributor:
www.lafcpug.org, www.kenstone.net, creativecow.net
Edit Well magazine
"The present and future of post production business and technology" blog
http://www.philiphodgetts.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:
- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org
- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word
unsubscribe in the subject line.
Other related posts:
- » [opendtv] Was [] Re: News: Northwest Station Pulls Signal In Retransmission Battle