How much is a TV episode download worth?

Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 7:16 am

I would pay for it.. probably $2-3 tops.

I couldn't figure out how to vote though.

Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 9:37 am

IH wrote:

I would like to ask you the same question as posted by this article: What's a Downloaded Episode Worth? With the relative success of iTunes in selling music on a per song basis for $1 each, how much demand is there in paying for download of high quality TV content, bypassing traditional cable network fees?

With TV related searches ranking high on isoHunt.com, the answer to this question should be interesting. To help make this poll as accurate as possible in reflecting thoughts of the P2P community, vote for the maximum price you would pay for a downloaded ep, before you have to resort to the low tech tv remote.

Also, please do share your thoughts on why you would want to pay for downloading TV content, when it's free on the TV set (after network access fees if unfortunately you live in places like North America). Or why you won't pay anything if that's the case.

For reference: An old season of Stargate in DVD box set costs as cheap as $16, while new seasons costs more than $50. A season is 22 episodes each.

Goes to show you that some will buy anything. SiFi channel going to have miniseries month in April so warm-up your VCR's. And don't that make you MPAA's mad lol. Laughing

Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 11:52 am

Quote:

For reference: An old season of Stargate in DVD box set costs as cheap as $16, while new seasons costs more than $50. A season is 22 episodes each.

That's not a season. That's just the first disc of the season, containing the pilot and episodes 1-4.

Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 2:28 pm

I think that the cost should be somewhere between 0-.25 cents.

It's very hard to compare a tv episode to an itunes song, because while the song is $1, you will most likely listen to it over and over. I only watch tv episodes once, unless it's been like ten years since I've seen the show, but that's different. I don't want to spend $30+ dollars on something I'm just going to delete off my hard drive as soon as I've watched it. If I have multiple series, the costs can quickly go up and I'll just give it up all together.

You have to remember that watching tv looks worse on the computer and the sound is usually off too. Downloads come out week(s) later than current episodes and usually remain an episode behind than on tv.

While it's true that tv shows have commercials, I was never one to watch them. I flip the channel to a different show until my program pops back on, avoiding the commercials almost entirely. If I was still allowed to fast forward through commercials, then I wouldn't mind them being included in the download, but I just might be anal enough to edit them out myself so that I don't have to keep getting up and fast forwarding.

Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 2:55 pm

Not living in America up until a couple of months ago we had to pay $25/gig for traffic - now "unlimited" for $65/months but they then drop speed to 512 but that may end as more people use torrents..

anyway product placements in tv shows IMO would help producers. Having President Barlet prefer a paricular coffee etc can pay big bucls - it is used all the time in movies.

I do prefer to download though as I can sollect the full set before watching. I would hate to see one show a week or month - much raterh have the whole season or seasons then watch when wanted.

Radio is free on teh Internet wih tNetscape radio and AOL if yo have basic service and you an record all you want for free. Do not know why TV producers do not have download links. Wouldn't Nike pay to have superman (Smallville) wear thier shoes or shirts - or have the midget oen of the women on Housewives only drink Lipton tea? - most of us now have a cap from our ISPs and have speeds less tehn 10MB but ins a few yers when caps are lifted and we have 100MB speeds - a 750MB divx will take 1 minute - to think the MPAA is complaing now- ha they need to step up and provide a reasonably priced service with fast dwonlaods or they will miss out. ATT used to be big in telephone - with a cost of call form Moscow to USA at $3.50/min - smarter people came in and now VOIP calls cost 5 cents and ATT is almost unknown. A new memroy card is out but not priced yet - 120 Gig - it may be $5k now but when it cmaes down to $100 or less which it will - folks will just be traiding.sharing colections by coping full cards. - I have seen a show Dead Like Me and they meet in a waffle house - why is it not an Ihop or Dennys or whatever is popular or in a Starbucks - that build in product placement would sure pay off.

Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 7:20 pm

metro1 wrote:

anyway product placements in tv shows IMO would help producers... I have seen a show Dead Like Me and they meet in a waffle house - why is it not an Ihop or Dennys or whatever is popular or in a Starbucks - that build in product placement would sure pay off.

True, movies have used product placement to add a swift boot to their budget, but nobody's ever relied exclusively on product tie-ins. Plus you'd be VERY hard-pressed to convince a company to buy an expensive product tie-in for an unproven medium.

Mind you, using it to earn a bit of cash on top of ads would be a good idea, too.

Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 1:55 am

If I had to pay, I would probably pay about $2 AT THE MOST. Personally I agree with most everyone else who voted tho, I would rather pay nothing and have commercials or maybe like 50 cents and have fewer commercials.

The main problem with paying for TV content tho is the same problem that is supposedly plagueing the music industry. There are several secure formats like the one itunes uses, and Sony's ATRAC3, and MS's WMA, that allow you to download the content and give you the license to play it but nobody else. But at the same time there are the other formats like MP3 and Ogg Vorbis that arent so secure and dont have licensing. You just download and go. The only real way for the pirates to be stopped is not for the various industries to flex their legal (and monetary) muscles at the users, its to do so at the people and companies making players like WinAmp (im talkin about nullsoft before they got bought by microsoft) and at groups or organizations like the ones that made the MP3 format. If the music industry would see that then the number of people that download MP3's would decrease significantly even from what it is now, because there would be fewer players to play them on and the players wouldnt be as easy to use.

The only real way for TV program pay to download to succeed as well as music pay to download has is for them to charge about $2 per episode (around $44 for a full 22-episode DVD minus bonus features) and not put commercials in there. Although for the users that dont mind watching commercials if they can pay less (such as myself) they should charge about $1 per episode. They can still get their money for the full DVD by selling it, or even by selling the bonus features of the DVD's for an additional $5 or so. But of course even if they come up with a secure video format (and im not talking about WMV) there will still be the problem of MP4, DivX, XviD, etc being pirated, but at least they will have something to offer to those that want to download legal shows, as opposed to the way it is now where the only way is to either borrow the DVD from your friend, buy it yourself, or download it illegally.

The only problem I can see with having commercials in a show and having it cost less than the commercial-free show is that people can use their player to skip past the commercial (see Sony vs BetaMax), but they could always write the "secure tv format" to where when the player reads the file, it disables its fast forward and rewind controls, or better yet have the file specify where the commercial is and have the player disable those controls for that portion of the file, so that you can still replay a certain part of the show if you want to, but cant skip the commercials.

At any rate, the TV and Movie industry need to come up with a solution fast if they want to have any chance of recovering their supposed lost profits. I personally would be happy with an iVideos store from apple that has all of the DVD's currently available, and then later on having the TV industry make shows available for download immediately after they are aired. Seeing as I dont watch too many of the shows that are currently on TV like Stargate Atlantis, I wouldnt mind being able to _legally_ download the original Stargate SG-1's previous seasons dvd's right now, bonus features and all. I should also add that I would download the whole DVD, bonus features and all, but the appeal isnt so much that I'm downloading it, its that I can get parts of it with the money I have NOW and each time I get paid I can get more, instead of having to get it all at once, and having to be set back $50 NOW, which is the main draw for people like me.

Another note I just thought of is that the main draw to pay to download music is that if an artist releases a crappy CD with 1 good song, you dont have to pay $15 to get all the crap, just $1 to get the song you like. That wouldnt really work for the TV industry because with TV you either like the show as a whole and want every episode, or you dont. Like I said I want every episode of Stargate SG-1, but cant afford a whole season's DVD set all at one time, so I wouldnt mind getting say 5 episodes with the money i have now and then 5 more with the money i have 2 weeks from now, and then 5 more 2 weeks after that and so on.

Speeddymon

P.S. Comments welcome at removethispart-Speeddymon-removethisspamfilter "at" yahoo "dot" com

NO FLAMES PLEASE, if you disagree with something I said your comment can go here for everyone to see.

Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 6:48 am

I personally think it should be free because if theres ever a chance you can provide entertainment to a mass amount of people easy, and for a bare minimum of $40 a month, people should FULLY embrace it and it should always be kept free.

Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 4:39 pm

Personally I download episodes because they air on U.S networks a few weeks before the U.K (24 for example is about 6 weeks behind)

Plus if I download it I can choose when i want to view it... where as on TV i have to use a VCR or wait for a repeat episode. Mainly the time difference though, as with movie releases the producers get burnt if they dont do simultaneous world wide releases.

Also for advertising discussions, I dont mind ad breaks on tv as its a break for me too, product placements in TV/Film is a poor idea in my eyes, as markets differ globally (and this is a global market). We don't get Liptons tea here or half the other brands you do aside from global brands. Also, I feel it detracts from the story and it feels cheapened, keep ads to the break, not in the story.

my 2pence

Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 8:26 pm

diamondscan wrote:

You have to remember that watching tv looks worse on the computer and the sound is usually off too. Downloads come out week(s) later than current episodes and usually remain an episode behind than on tv.

You really need to discover BTEfnet. They've got episodes of current series almost always within 24 hours of the airdate. The quality's very good, and if the sound or video have any significant problems, the release gets nuked and a new proper is put up. I'm also in a place where there's no HD broadcasts, so pretty much everything I download will be higher quality than what's on TV (and the shows that have HRHD releases look very, very nice). I invested in a projector and nice speakers about a year ago, so quality issues do make a difference to me, and I really don't see a problem with the quality of current downloaded episodes.

As for the cost of these episodes, I think there should be varied levels of pricing depending on what sort of rights you want. $0.50 for a single viewing of a single new episode seems fair, while you could buy rights to it for, say, $2. A whole season of either option should be slightly discounted. Older shows would be at the discretion of the distributor, but would probably be cheaper for less popular shows, and about half the cost of new episodes for the most popular old episodes.

Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 11:02 pm

A simple reply with my opinion:

I would pay no more than $1 for "a la carte" episodes, or maybe $20-$30 for a membership for a season download. Or, I would pay maybe $40 if I had unlimited downloads.

Bandwidth would be an issue - I would need high speed access all the time.

Adverts should only appear *maybe* in the beginning and the end of the show, not during. If they wanted ads in the middle, drop those prices above probably by half or more.

And the episodes should be available at time of broadcast, and be kept available 6-8 months after broadcast, if not indefinately.

My two cents.

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 2:55 am

I Would Never Pay For a 41 minute to 43 minute Shows Ever . A reminder these Shows Are not 60 minutes . If P2P Start Charging Over Downloading Shows , Then I Would rather much Use A VCR , Get there For Free And Cut The Commercial Crap myself. It Would be A Shame If They Did Try To Charge , As I read Before On One of The Post , 2.00 Movies And 99 cent Downloads LOL What Does This All Mean . No Real Value on these Shows Eh . What About Mzk. WHATEVER!

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 8:14 pm

i say nooooooooooo.......

Why pay for something that pays for itself?

And i thank the owner of this site for helping us fight the man.

Think of when u buy something and it sucks and ur stuck with it.

I Love this site.I hope it never goes down.The owner is a hero in my eyes.
I brag about this site alot.

Isohunt rules!!!!!!!!!!!

MPAA or MPPA you got pwned!!!!!!

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 8:42 pm

now to be real a sec,

They get paid for the ads already.If alot of people d/l more ads come to them that pay more.IE* NBC during Freinds.
I could see 3 bucks a month for every show that network has.
but when you got a VCR and people out there that would record it and make it free on a site they prob pay for i dont see me wanting to pay for something the ads are.Now could we pay our Cable Co .50 not to see any ads?No,and with out the people that watch,Ads would'nt pay crap to the network.

Ahhh i guess im just not so lazy that i cant set the timer on my VCR.
Burn it to disk,and enjoy....

You pay the network to watch the show already.
Why cant we just share it with our friends without the Man taking us to court and taking everything we own?

Like i said if i was into a show,and it had a fansite.I'd be one of those guys that would have it all on disk and wouldnt mind sharing it with people that wanted it.Screw 1.00 a show.Thats a rip.You can see a movie for that.....

Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 11:22 pm

Q: What's the worth of a TV show to the average broadcast watcher?
A: The cost of the electricity to power the television

Thanks to the BetaMax ruling of the early '80's, at least in the USA, downloading TV shows is considered 'time dilation', granted the MGM vs. Grokster case to the US Supreme Court will be an interesting debate, the presidence of time dilation has already been set. Fact is, unless you don't watch TV at all (999 channels and not a one has anything thought provoking on them), you have already paid your dues to the networks.

I have a TV tuner set in my PC, I can set it to tune in to the channel and record at the click of the mouse or set the timer to do it automattically. Afterwards, I just cut out the commercials with simple editing tools. Granted, there are few shows that are worth watching anymore, our voyeristic society sitting on our asses and being force-fed what some mega-corp wants us to see or know leaves little to desire...let alone the thought of paying them to be given the 'privilage' of watching thier filth.

This is also easily done for music broadcast on a PC radio tuner and recording from stations that don't do voice overs on the songs they broadcast (ie. non-clearchannel et. al) and editing it accordingly.

The industries already freely distrubute the material across the air waves and through your body this instance, might as well take advantage of it as it is completly and utterly -LEGAL-, though granted IANAL.

Call me jaded, call me abhorently biased and out of touch, or call me completly grounded with an understanding this side of crystal clarity, I care not....simple fact remains, a dying medium that is grasping at straws in the wake of the internet (ie. RIAA & MPAA) that no longer can force feed us thier out of touch views and whims to the unsuspecting public will not be cried over by quite a few, least of all by me.

-Drack

...why, yes, I do regularly read /. ...