Digital Downloads and Analog Media

Note: The following post is very Apple-centric, re: iTunes, AppleTV, etc. Substitute if you like any similar technology except Windows-specific ones. Oh wait, that only leaves Apple.

I’m not asking too much. I mean, I don’t watch a lot of TV. Any, in fact. I don’t even own a TV. I don’t have a DVD player or TiVo, and I don’t have cable.

If you consider my impact on the television industry, you’ll find it’s not really worth factoring into any equation. And yet, if they want to reach into my pockets and clean out any part of my paycheque that doesn’t go to food, rent, or Starbucks, it’s a pretty simple matter. In fact, I’ll tell them right now what needs doing.

A tweet from the lovely Shannon McKarney got me started down this line of thought, and brought up some old ideas I’d had. Not complicated ideas, nothing I’d consider revolutionary, but pretty straightforward ideas. Her question revolved around how, given the demand indicated by the Wolverine workprint leak and the feeding frenzy of downloading it set off, can movie companies use the internet to make money? There’s a market, how do you tap it?

Simple. Give me what I want the way I want it.

Movies: easy. Release in theatres on a Friday. Next Friday, release on iTunes in HD for rent. Depending on the movie, MAYBE wait two weeks. Two weeks after that, release on Blu-Ray and DVD. Down the road, THEN you come out with extras. BD discs with behind-the-scenes stuff, all the extra fluff, bonus sequences, director’s cuts, and so on.

I want to watch movies, but that’s not what theatres are about to me. Theatres are about pushing your way through a crowd, about getting the worst seats in the house because there are no two adjacent seats together. They’re about overpriced, substandard food, five dollar soft drinks, sticky floors, and people talking to each other behind you and kicking the back of your seat.

Imagine not having to pay for that. Imagine sitting down at home, cooking up some pasta, making a sandwich, grabbing a beer, blending a smoothie, or BBQing some steaks, and then putting a movie up on the big screen. Enjoying a movie even when your baby is sick, or your child is teething. Recovering from the flu, or staying in with your sweetheart on a rainy Sunday evening. It’s a better experience all around.

Some people will prefer the classic, and for groups of any reasonable size, the theatre will just make more sense. It won’t kill the theatres, but it will augment them. More people will watch movies because the barrier to entry will be lowered. The giant screens are irreplaceable, but that just justifies them staying in business and charging more. It’s an experience, but you don’t always want it.

So what about TV shows? Possibly a little more complicated, but I have an idea about that too. First things first: confessions. I download all the TV I watch. I don’t pay for it, I don’t have cable. No one gets anything from me. If I had the following solution, I would pay.

Imagine a scenario: It’s Monday night – Lost night. You’ve got a long day at work, but at the end of it, you drive home. Throw together a dinner or some leftovers, sit down on the couch, turn on your AppleTV, and flip on Heroes. Watch it, in all its HD glory. When your wife gets home from her late-late shift, she can watch it again. The key factor: you don’t have cable. You never had. No DVR, no anything.

You bought a subscription to Heroes. You paid, up-front, for the entire season. Every Monday morning, your AppleTV downloads the next episode of Heroes for you, automatically. When you get home, you don’t have to wait for it to download, you just jump right in. The AppleTV respects airdates by requesting a key from Apple’s servers before it’s allowed to play it. It knows what time it’s supposed to be available, and once that time comes, it will let you play it. It verifies with the servers, and the content is unlocked – for good. It costs a little extra to get it in HD, but it’s worth it.

The end result? High-quality digital versions of the show, each episode sent to your home so that you can watch it on your own terms, without having to subscribe to cable TV, get the HD pack, get the HD PVR. For me, it would be about $78/mo before tax to get the same thing. That’s a lot of money that most people aren’t willing to pay – especially if, like me, you only watch a few hours of TV per week. No wonder people pirate it.

So think about that. I can pay $78 to Shaw, who then turns around and buys access to the channels, who sell access to advertisers to make money for production (or syndication rights). For that, I get hundreds of channels I’ll never watch, and years of content I have no interest in. Or, I can pay $20 (or even $30!) to subscribe to an entire season of Heroes, or any other show (adjust pricing accordingly for different types of shows).

It’s a no-brainer.

So please, accept the digital age. Accept that you can skip the middleman (or at least, a lot of the middle men). Accept that you can lower your overhead. Accept that impulse-buying is a good thing. Accept that having an entire season of Heroes paid off by the fifth episode is a good thing. Accept that you’ll be able to have TV series with long-running plots, because people will be able to easily start at the beginning, rather than wherever the networks happen to be airing them at. Accept that on-demand is better over the internet than through some broken cable box UI.

How do you stop piracy? You don’t. But if the iTunes Music Store can be more popular than free, I think you’ll find that giving people quality will encourage them to part with their hard-earned money.

Accept change, because the world is changing, with or without you. After all, I can already do everything I’ve talked about above, I’m just not paying you for the privilege.