Completely stupid idea IMO. If Sony thinks this is a good idea it’s yet another illustration of how out of touch they are. Just because people watch YouTube clips doesn’t mean they will pay for 6 minute versions of 40-45 minute shows.
Why not sell the entire unedited shows for a reasonable cost (not $1 a show), or the whole season at once?
This will be interesting for about 5 minutes before people go back to YouTube.
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Sony certainly knows what consumers want. I can’t believe you think this would fail!
Are you sure they’re planning to charge for the shows? I don’t see them saying anything about selling these, just that they’ll be showing them.
Unless MySpace is going to pay Sony, it sounds like they’ll be selling the episodes: ““We’ve been looking for a legitimate way to make money from our library,” Mr. Mosko said. “Something that could bring new life to shows that have been on the shelf for awhile.””
Yeah, the article didn’t mention a charge for these at all, thus my YouTube comment.
No one’s going to watch five minute “minisodes” of Charlie’s Angels when they could be watching this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldFCBpTwEGI
Or, ya know, the fulls episodes of current shows that ABC, NBC and CBS offer for free on their websites.
I can see this. Back in the dark ages, the TV station I worked for used to carry a lot of baseball games. They kept on hand several cut-down versions of “The Rookies” to run in case the game would end at an awkward time. There’s nothing like watching a 15 minute version of a show that originally filled an hour.
It’s a market mining technique and Sony will use the data to determine what series to “bring new life to” by DVD release.
I dunno, condensing an episode of “Charlie’s Angels” into three and a half minutes? After they’ve shown the whole plot, what will they do with the remaining tnree minutes?
Now if they added bunnies, they’d be onto something!
A 15 minute version of “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire” would generally be 5 minutes too long.
I’ll go against the grain and admit I think this idea is actually kind of cool. Look, we’re not dealing with Shakespeare here. We’re not really doing a disservice to Ricky Lake or Charlie’s Angels by cutting out 90% of the filler material. Hell, I’ve seen several heavily edited versions of movies (Phantom Edit, anyone?) that were more enjoyable than the full movie itself.
I’m actually really interested to see how these turn out.
This line confused me, but then I realized that Viacom and CBS split into two seperate companies recently, with CBS obtaining the rights to Paramount Television. Presumably, Paramount has to pay CBS to use the old Paramount TV shows.