this is a sad time, friends.

although i didn't use it much, the closure of lokitorrent is a huge deal for any P2P faithful. just days later, tv-swarm decided to shut down operations to avoid any possible legal action against them. this is a huge blow to anyone involved in tv torrents, which in my opinion is _the_ best idea since PVR's first started to launch in the late 90's.

go to any techie message board and you'll see that some people are starting to say that torrented tv programs show you what the future of tv could be. so far tv networks can't figure out that there's a viable business opportunity in providing episodes online. i think it could work.

and thus, i present my vision.

imagine that you follow a tv show every week, let's say 'lost.' with broadband internet, you can get that episode to people through their IP address rather than broadcasted over tv airwaves. by charging for the episode, you don't need useless commercials every 10 minutes. hell, you can still cut corners and make an hour-long show 40 minutes for all i care. let's say you charged $1 for an hour-long episode, 50 cents for a half-hour. sounds expensive, but work with me here.

i'm not saying abc shouldn't show 'lost' every wednesday at 7pm. the entire country doesn't have broadband access, so you'd have to still broadcast it on tv for maybe the next 10 years. obviously, it'll take time to download the episode. okay, so easy solution, put the episode up for download 6 hours before it's broadcast on tv. in 5 years, with next-gen fiber internet, we should be able to move data pretty quick anyway. make it so people don't have to go look for it, instead of broadcasting an hour of television, broadcast an RSS feed that tells everyone when the episode is available. software sitting on home PCs can see the feed, and accordingly automatically download the newly available file.

so abc's webpage shows that a new episode of 'lost' is available. how do you pay for it? abc could keep a database (or rather, abc could be just one vendor in the National Television Users Database that tracks what programs a user follows) that tells them what a user will want. just like ABC has to push out 'lost' in standard definition (480i, stereo sound) and high-def (720p, 5.1 dolby sound) to its affiliates, it could offer the same thing online. with some compression, you could offer the lower quality one (although it could be downrezzed from the HD master, so lower quality here could still mean DVD-quality) for like 350mb. the HD copy could have less compression applied, and would still look and sound good at 2gb.

theoretically, you could decide how to select which programs you'd like to download much like selecting programs to record with tivo. let's say a pilot episode of a new show's just released. offer it for free. whet people's appetite with a great first episode. watch everybody pay a $1 for the next one. avid fan of a certain show? know you'll watch the whole season of 'lost' all the way through? pay for it in advance. see that the season will be 24 episodes long, and pay a discounted amount for signing up for every episode. package deal, the whole season for $20.

and to avoid watching it flesh out to rogue P2P networks and illegally downloaded? put some DRM restrictions on it. allow it to be archived to a total of maybe 3 dvd's (preferably HD-DVDs or blu-ray discs within a few years), but not shared to 4000 downloaders. this way, someone could watch a tv show and have bought its released dvd season at the same time.

it's all about changing the model, really. c'mon, it's easy to see tv's completely behind the times at this point. it has to be, cuz it tries to cater to the entire country as one single demographic. why do i pitch this idea? cuz time-based broadcasting is dead. it actually died in the late 70's, believe it or not. as soon as the betamax vs. VCR debate was decided and the VCR format won out, watching tv when it was originally broadcast died. i think we should tune in live for special events, such as sports. shows and stuff... i should be able to watch it on my own time.

just look at tivo's struggle against the entire television industry. people are showing what they want. they don't feel like they should but up with commercials anymore. and they don't feel like they *have* to be at the tv at 7pm wednesdays. listen to the people!

anyway, i think it's feasible.

--j