How Bob Iger Saved Network TV - Blog Maverick - www.blogmaverick.com _
Interesting, commercial (excuse the pun), take on the Itunes TV deal with Disney/ABC from Mark Cuban.
Reeks of first steps to me - how long until we see a 'subscribe to the series' with auto debits from your credit card and shows downloaded automatically every week ala podcasts...?
And where's the netflix 'rent 3 movies at a time' feature - I'd love a $20 per month service where I could watch three movies from a queue. The next two movies would download in the background, but couldn't be viewed, as soon as I watch the first of my three active movies, the file gets deleted, and the new third movie gets activated and the next movie downloads. Simple, only requires a few gig of disk space, and no annoying wait to download a big movie file, by the time I've even ploughed through a single movie, the background download of the 3rd movie in the queue would be complete.
I honestly thought that this would be announced on Tuesday - maybe for next year when they've beta-tested the service with these tv shows :-)
Well, probably ages in the UK, as we can't access the TV features in iTunes. Oh well, back to Bittorrent, and better quality for Curb episodes. HBO, why oh why aren't you letting me buy your shows for a dollar or two?
Also noticed itunes now supports video podcasts...this is potentially a huge deal...prior to this, there was no integrated (to my knowledge) video playback software or device that handled video enclosures - it just dumped the video (and any other non music binary) file to a folder...now there's the ability to fire up an RSS feed, plop in video files and boom - you've got a wordwide audience who can subscribe and watch your videos in desktop software without hassle...It's kind of like giving everyone a free TV (pc not included :-) and handing out transmitters. Kind of.
Worth remembering Winer and Curry talking about video enclosures years ago, and Winer et al 'making it happen' with Userland's Radio - in fact Dave Winer just pointed out (via Kottke) that Apple has an rss feed for Movie Trailers , but as Winer points out, it doesn't include the trailers as enclosures...how annoying.
The HD trailers are something to behold though, and even on a fat pipe, the need to download in the background to provide a nice, seamless viewing experience.
UPDATE: I'd love to see the BBC get involved in itunes as a distribution platform - they currently encode their content in RealPlayer...and so have essentially put their distribution eggs in that basket. The BBC are trailing 7 day download caches and 'instant on' with their IMP trial, and so maybe the itunes distribution would compete with that...but the itunes would be a perfect medium - it's free software for a majority of platforms (no linux), and there's not the complication of a fee, plus Apple seem to do a good job of limiting access based on geographical location (a major issue for the beeb?).
