I don’t understand why TV stations don’t put all of their content online, free to be viewed whenever. Yeah, concievably people could tune out during commercials or something, but we can do that anyway. Fast forward could be disabled. I guess I can see how this would really seperate the wheat from the chaff (those shows you watch just because they’re on), but I’m sure people would still veg out in front of the living room TV when they were in that mood. I can only think of two reasons why the stations would not want to do this: one, having to be there at the right time makes a program more of an event. But still you’d have to watch the real TV to see it premiere. Also, I can see how they’d be worried about people editing the programs to not contain commercials and redistribute them, but I’d think the overall increased viewership would offset that. So what’s the deal?
I put this in GQ rather than Cafe Society because I’m more interested in fact-based reasons than people’s opinions, but feel free to move it, mods.
Bandwidth would be one issue. Multicasting video signals, even relatively low resolution, would be a huge bandwidth drain. Not a big problem for a TV station that can probably afford some fat pipe to serve the content without significant lag.
The other problem is regionality. Networks broadcast different shows at different times in different zones. Additionally, advertising is all served by the local branch of the network to ensure that each region gets its own ads as purchased by vendors and/or chains in the region. Ditto for local news. This is problematic if you’re trying to centralize your broadcast.
That being said however, IIRC MSNBC is currently in the process of considering this very thing, offering live feeds of NBC content. I don’t know where they are in the decision or plans to do this, but I leanred of it a couple of months back.
I think one big problem would be gettinga license allowing you to broadcast your program. It wouldn’t be an issue for the station’s own productions, such as news or magazines. But the owners of copyright to popular movies wouldn’t allow this, or only at more expensive rates. Sure, things such as hard disc video recorders or DVD burners would allow you to archive movies from TV anyway, but it’s still a different thing (from the copyright holder’s point of view) to have those things on the web, downloadable for free.
Broadcast and most cable television is funded by commercial dollars.
Why do the companies and their advertisers pay to provide us with free televison? Because, until recently, they had a fairly good feeling that our eyeballs would be gazing at the screen as they flashed their commercial messages at you, thereby infusing their brand into your subconscious, and potentially increasing sales. The more eyeballs are potentially on the screen, the more the advertising time is worth.
Ten years of internet and other technologyhave shown that when given a greater degree of freedom, viewers skip ads (witness TiVo, and the fact that you never click on banner ads). Therefore, the advertising time on an internet presentation is worth far less to the advertisers than it is on TV. So they won’t pay as much, and it’snot worth the television company’s time to create the files.
You could disable the ability to skip ads, but then people will not tune in as much, and the advertising time will be worth even less.
Another problem is that it’s only in the past few years that monitors have gotten powerful enough to display a full television signal, and the percentage of people who could use this service is still fairly small.
I watch foreign TV sometimes, to see the Premiership footie. The channels are mostly from asia but sometimes the games are shown in places like Egypt as well. You can also watch ESPN online but it has an asian voiceover for the commentary. I’m not sure if all the channels broadcast 24/7 or if they just broadcast to show the football that you either can’t see or have to pay for in the UK. I’m not 100% sure how legal this is as it relies on peer-to-peer connections to keep a steady stream, still it beats paying £40 a month for Sky
This is almost the exception that proves the rule. Sports broadcasting is so popular that the pay-per-view model actually works in a lot of cases. Even with the disadvantages I noted above, there are still so many eyeballs that the advertisers can’t resist. It happens because someone is willing to pay for it. Period.
