As this week’s BBC >Click show gets excited by the growth of TV torrenting, legal alternatives are finally presenting themselves.
The BBC is all ready to roll (I was a beta-tester back in 2005, although somehow failed to blog about it), but is having to go through a public value test. Ofcom last week published its Market Impact Assessment into the proposal.
As someone who works for a commercial operator, I completely understand some of the issues that Ofcom has, but I absolutely disagree with some of their headline findings/issues.
1/2. The concern that “series stacking” could lead to drop-offs in DVD sales. They’re worried about people saving up whole series and watching them back in one go. I suspect that this’ll drop from the 13 weeks to something like 4 weeks’ availability. You have to allow more than two weeks to make the service useful for people on holiday. DVRs/PVRs with greater capacity are going to make this a non-issue in the longterm anyway.
Removing “series stacking” altogether, as Ofcom suggests, would be fundamentally against the public interest. The example of the 15 part Bleak House is given. This was a BBC made-programme with BBC Worldwide/2Entertain releasing the DVD box set. I suggest that it’s unlikely that the full series would be released on a “to keep” basis, but the Ofcom report suggests that this shouldn’t be allowable one way or another. Frankly, I’m perfectly capable (and often do) of recording an entire series and then consuming it in large chunks over the weekend or whenever. I’d like increased flexibility to let me do this.
3. Ofcom’s worried about the audio book market and classical music market in regards to the BBC’s non-DRM’d audio proposal. It’s obvious in the BBC’s proposals that what they’re really talking about is continued availability of the kinds of programmes that are currently podcast.
The irony here is that the audio book market is burgeoning, yet somehow needs protecting. Much of the content they’re using is already BBC-based, with BBC Audio now one of the biggest players in the field. As things stand, once an afternoon play has been broadcast on Radio 4, unless it gets a repeat or very occassionally, a commercial release, that’s the last it’ll ever be heard of. If the writer’s famous enough, it might eventually show up on BBC 7, but that’s for famous actors and writers only. If the BBC can get the rights, then what’s the problem with making this programming available? Frankly, I’d actually pay for some of this unattainable material, but at the moment, there is simply no outlet. Even the likes of Audible are only really interested in high profile comedy and drama releases by big names – usually
And the classical music scaremongering is record company driven. I don’t believe that the BBC was proposing this anyway, but Ofcom is trying to put a clause in to prevent it one way or the other.
As a correspondent aks in this morning’s Guardian, “Is it Ofcom’s job to stifle public service innovation?”
In the meantime, Channel 4’s “4OD” has launched, and I’ve also tried out Sky’s Anytime service. I haven’t so far bothered with Five’s service since there’s no free programming on it from what I can tell.
The big problem with these services is that they each require a separate application to be installed – even when there significantly shared elements within the services, in particular the peer to peer technology from Kontiki.
4OD is largely paid-for rental of programmes, with the odd freebie given away. Since I’m not really predisposed to pay £1.99 for an episode of Deal or No Deal, I’ve only watched very little on it. Actually, just an episode of Trigger Happy TV that was free.
Meanwhile over on Sky Anytime, you get different freebies depending on subscription, as well as various pay per view opportunities.
Neither service is too clear about the fact that it is peer to peer technology, and like others, I found it really difficult to kill the sharing once I’d closed the applications. You really shouldn’t have to be manually killing individual processes. Downloading movies can really ruin your general internet experience. I couldn’t find any kind of throttling option with either piece of software.
Finally there’s the fancy new cool kid on the block – Joost (née The Venice Project), from the people who brought you Skype. It’s only in beta at the moment, but first impressions are pretty good with a user interface that doesn’t take too long to get to grips with. You can also close the program properly when you’re done (I’m always suspicious that I’m eating bandwidth when I’ve not shut the programme down fully). Joost is very different in that it streams almost immediately at a pretty good bit-rate. But there is a relatively minimal programme offering just now with behind the scenes of music videos and episodes of The Album Chart Show predominating. Worth watching!
One thing that is going to affect the UK market is the current prevalance of capped downloads.
In summary, the question is whether or not I’m willing to pay for a programme that went out free to air on television? The answer in most instances, even for a keen viewer like myself, is not. If I miss something, I tend to think of it as my own fault for not setting the video/PVR or being able to see it online. The US market is the one to look at, where viewers can indeed catch up with Lost or Heroes online with limited commercial interruption. And the same programmes are also available ad-free on iTunes for a fee. Which model is going to work?
The other big question is how to get that content from our PCs to our TVs in an easy manner. Yes plenty of half-decent video cards have video outs, but that’s a solution involving wires, and we’re living in wifi homes these days. Apple TV is a start, but there’s plenty of room yet to improve things. That’s not much use if I want to catch up with TV on the BBC’s smallish player.