Rain City Story

A Studio Finally Gets It

With so much good TV on this year, Amy (and our humble Tivo) hasn't been able to keep up. If the Tivo can't keep up (she won't let me upgrade the DVR to a Linux based MythTV system until I produce a ring, but that's a topic for a different post), the shows must be obtained from other sources. So that's where I come in. I fire up Scrapetorrent and can find just about any show and using Azureus, I can get a HDTV quality digital copy in under 30 minutes or less.

Just last night, a crisis was averted by me being a Hero and downloading the latest episode of Heroes (warning: link contains unsolicited audio) sans commercials. Oops, I just admitted to committing a felony and under current U.S. law, that makes me worse than a terrorist. But here's the thing, I don't want to do it this way, I want to obtain these shows legally or compensate the studios in some way. I-Tunes you say? Screw that. Their incredibly restrictive DRM is their way of thanking me for paying for the content. If I lost the copy or worse yet, I-Tunes is updated in the future that breaks the current protection scheme, well, it sucks to be me. So, no thanks, I'll be a pirate.

For about two years, I've always been wondering why a studio doesnt make it's shows available online with commercials. If they used Flash or a proprietary embedded player, they could control the content and it would be a better product than you can pirate. If you can't sue the hell out 'em and make 'em stop, compete with 'em. Looks like a studio finally figured out.

Now comes news from Disney-ABC that content producers have had a revelation: instead of simply trying to squash piracy, it might be more productive to understand and compete with it. Earlier this year, ABC launched its embedded video player on a two-month trial basis. It was an instant hit (about 7 million episodes viewed in their entirety) and did well enough for the network that they elected to bring it back permanently in September after working out a way to compensate affiliates who were being cut out of the revenue pie.

"So we understand piracy now as a business model," said Sweeney in a recent analyst call. "It exists to serve a need in the marketplace specifically for consumers who want TV content on demand and it competes for consumers the same way we do, through high-quality, price and availability and we don't like the model. But we realize it's effective enough to make piracy a key competitor going forward. And we've created a strategy to address this threat with attractive, easy to use ways to for viewers to get the content they want from us legally; in other words, keeping honest people honest."

The shows ABC is offering aren't the bottom of the ratings bucket either, Grey's Anatomy, Lost, Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty (I think she's actually pretty hot) among others. The player isn't full screen but it is in 16x9 format and the quality is excellent. You don't need to download some spyware riddled software but you do need a broadband connection.

I applaud ABC for finally getting a clue and hope they offer more content this way. Show them support by watching a full show. I think you'll be impressed.