The media I want to buy

So I’ve dropped cable almost 2 years ago and have never regretted it since.  I am a 20 something, fairly successful person and I could certainly afford to pay for Cable however it doesn’t really fit the way I want to consume media.  The Tivo was perhaps the first glimmer of how I wanted to consume media.  I was an early adopter into Tivo’s and had several Tivo’s since then all the way up to the Tivo HD which I sold after dropping cable.

My current media setup is:

TV in the living room, connected to a Windows 7 computer with an OTA TV tuner using Windows Media Center

TV in the bedroom, connected to a Mac Mini

I have a computer hooked into my TV’s and NOTHING else.  I’ve been watching streaming video, and downloaded content onto my TV’s for YEARS.  And as more and more people find Netflix and Hulu I think others will not be far behind my sort of media setup.  I have no doubt that I am costing someone somewhere because I don’t think Hulu, ABC, NBC, or other streaming content providers have been able to recoup their bandwidth costs with their piddly advertising.  I for one am willing to say I am more than willing to pay for the service.

I think Hulu plus is the right idea, however it doesn’t have enough content to back it up.  I’d be more than willing to pay $20-30 a month for an equivalent to basic cable 100% streaming on demand, with the commercials and everything.  As well as I understand content providers don’t want to give away their entire content library forever since it will cut into DVD sales.  However, as far as I’m concerned I don’t want to own physical media. It’s much easier to call up a show and stream or play it on the computer vs. trying to find a disc.  That being said I would be perfectly okay with a 2-3 week period to which I can watch the latest episode of something, and perhaps ‘buy’ it and stream it forever whenever I feel like it for a fee.

When you consider how much normal service providers like AT&T or Comcast have to spend on the lines, overhead etc an online revenue model could very well net more money to the content developers.  Sure the cable companies are negotiating rates for each channel they carry.  But who is to say and online provider can’t do the very same thing, it is already happening in some cases.  And an online aggregator has many advantages to this because they can easily…

1. Tailor commercials to the individual demographic, interests heck even what they make public on their Facebook profile.  This could mean a targeted advertising which they could charge a premium for.

2. Offer tiered levels of service that traditional media cannot do, they could offer a commercial free version for a higher cost.

3. Offer up sales to buy rights to stream content in perpetuity.  Or even revenue sharing deals where customers can call order the show or movie on Amazon shipped to their door.

As we’ve seen with Roku and Netflix if a decent service shows up hardware will be made so perhaps the less technically savvy can join in on the fun.  I think there is a lot of attempts out there trying really hard such as Apple TV, Google TV, Hulu, and Netflix but not really any one of them offers what I want to buy.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 14th, 2011 at 9:41 am and is filed under biz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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