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Tuesday, June 20, 2006
It seems that $1.99 just isn’t cheap enough to entice the masses. When Steve Jobs nabbed Hollywood for some content, he was pushing for cheap downloads and thought he had that at the two dollar mark. However, ABC just completed testing free online viewing of its shows at abc.com and the results are staggering. In just its first month alone, 11 million people viewed ABC shows with commercials and all. And just to see if the sponsors made an impression, ABC exit polled the free-bee viewers. 87 percent could remember which brands where being pushed on the viewers of the low-resolution content without a single hitch. Mmm. On the other side of the Hollywood pond, Apple has only sold 8 million episodes of ABC content in eight months total. Does this mean that people would rather suffer through advertisement than pay money for a show? Looks to be the case.
Some have questioned the $2 price Apple has been charging its customers for TV shows. The compliant is that for a low-resolution program that airs on television, it should carry the same price tag as the music that resides on iTMS. At worst. But would 99 cents even do it? Maybe. Maybe not.
Knowing this, the rumored price that Steve Jobs is pushing for movies, $9.99, may not go over too well either. In fact, many comments around the Internet are already in on the price and it seems that it will bomb at this point. If Hollywood gets some bright ideas (don’t they always?) then maybe it’ll start streaming some of its flops movies to us with an ad here and there. For free, you know. And don’t under estimate Hollywood’s greed.
How this new data from ABC will effect future shows on iTunes is hard to say. Its doubtful that Apple will be able to get the shows any cheaper and most likely we’ll see more “free” shows on the networks web site. While this most likely won’t effect sales greatly on iTunes, it will certainly give Hollywood the idea that it now has an option and will use that against Apple in future dealings with computer-gone-multimedia company. Let the gloves come off.
June 20th, 2006 at 10:07
Actually, my complaint about TV shows is the transitory nature of how I view TV shows.
I’m a fan of 24 and I record it on my DVR to watch the episodes. But I don’t keep them around after watching them. Of course, there was one week this season that I missed. Since I’d watched the entire season, I could intuit what had happened during that missed hour but I figured I’d download that episode that I missed and watch it.
The downloading went off without a hitch and within a few minutes, I was watching the missed episode (so that’s what happened to McGill!). Of course, after watching it, why would I want to watch it again and again and again? I wouldn’t. So I have this TV show sitting there amongst my music videos.
Now if they’d had 24 available for free with commercials, I’d've watched it that way instead of spending $1.99. The whole show is great, but individual episodes? Nah.