Legal downloadable TV - Google TVAds perhaps?

Saw on Slashdot Channel 5 in the UK is trialling a downloadable episode of its 5th Gear series. Good to see TV stations slowly waking up to the need. In the UK we suffer from slow lag times on almost all TV series, which is driving many to piracy. When you can bittorrent a new episode of an American series months (or possibly years) before you see it on UK TV, the TV companies are missing a trick in the US not selling directly to their customers.

I suspect that lots of downloading is also going on in the US, especially amoung tech savvy users. Poor Nieson ratings for Enterprise that led to its cancellation, and then the fans shock horror at the news, leads me to the following conclusions:

• There are many stealth viewers of Sci Fi that do not watch by conventional means
• The current systems for tracking them are inadequate for the purpose.
• Lots of shows over the next few years will probably see surprising declines in ratings - especially long storyarc series like 24.
• A new paradigm needs to be invented to enable these shows to be profitably created.

The series 24 really drove home to me the importance of seeing the show in order. Conventional TV with its rigid listing structure is incompatible with a series that is spoiled if you see an episode out of sequence.

I think that Farscape was probably the first victim to this user behaviour. It was hailed as a breakthru, had a huge fan base, and yet no viewers. It was also the first of this type of show to be shown post easily available broadband - Babylon 5 probably would have suffered the same fate had it been a few years later.

What is interesting about the Farscape story is the DVD sales were huge, making the networks reconsider and finish the story with "The Peacekeeper Wars" mini series. That coupled with the iTunes/iPod link up says to me the TV companies are missing a trick.

First a primer for those that don't know what the pirates do. Pirates take shows directly from air, strip out the ads and post them up to warez sites. Often the quality is grainy or blocky or just plain broken. They are, however, available. Mostly they are quickly done to beat the other groups to the punch.

Most people would prefere a more reliable (and of course legal) way of enjoying the shows when they are released. They would like to be able to watch on demand at their own pace.

I have a proposed solution, which I think is possibly a bit better than Channel 5's outrageous $3 price tag.

Its quite simple. Use the Google ads method, but embed them directly into the shows. Most TV rips still have channel logos on them, and though there are tools to remove them, most pirates don't bother. Add the ads for only 1/3 of the show - a continuous advert becomes annoying to the viewer and is likely to make the pirates go on the offensive again - and ensure they are overlayed onto the image to make them hard to remove, but do not invade the image in an obtrusive fashion.

Now think of future benefits of this solution. A little known fact is that MPEG4 has the facility for other streams in it. Until recently they have been all but forgotten, but when it was originally drafted thats all the man from the consortium could tell me about. Read the spec for it. I think all the super compression stuff was achieved when people realized how much a few minor words in the spec about area blocking could be used to produce huge gains - one of the reasons why many implementations are incompatible with each other.

So what are these other streams for? Hyperlinks. Now bring Google back into it with its new video search facility. Scan the stream and supply context sensitive ads into our 20 minute in the hour period. Ensure that the viewer is ad aware. Interested in buying the coat/hat/shoes the star is wearing? Fit that information into the advert stream. Allow the user to select it and pause the video whilst he goes to Amazon to buy it.

Finally sell the DVD version without the adverts a bit later - with all the boxset trimmings fans desire.

Sell directly to the customer - remove the need for franchising of shows out to other distributers. Looking at the money Google make from Adwords, and how targetted it is becoming, it seems like a no brainer. If they don't blow it by trying to force it upon people it should give a much needed jolt in the arm to the entertainment industry, and stop most pirates in their tracks.