TV A Go GO

I think the idea of offering basically disposable TV for single item licence fees ala Apple is going to be a constrained market. Most of what people watch on TV they consider disposable. It is saved for a while and deleted. Obviously, fans will pay extra for high-quality, boxed DVD sets, as has emerged in the last few years.

But back to my point, for the vast majority of people, TV is disposable. I suspect that the prospect of dealing with fiddly little per-item licence fees will be off-putting. There’s a reason why most people who watch pay-per TV pony up to setups like HBO for content aggregation.

Therefore, I suspect if the whole legal download video market takes off it will quickly develop content aggregators, who will licence material from content providers. They will sell it to people as subscription services, ala Napster/Yahoo/Rhapsody. Of course, for fans, there will still be the option to pay extra to obtain an unlimited use/”eternal” licence.

I’d love to see a breakdown from the subscription companies as to how many of their tunes are downloaded on temporary licences, versus unlimited pay-per licences.

I suspect Apple would love to get in on the subscription model (after all, .Mac is a huge money earner for it), but currently lacks the software mojo. It took MS several painful years to get Janus to a stage where it kind of works, most of the time.

There are those people who say “But Apple will NEVER do subscriptions – Steve has said that over and over”. Well, he was also crapping on fancy Flash players (cue “Nano”), and personal video players. Apple craps on everything it either does not currently sell, cannot currently make, or has yet to figure out how to make money from.

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