I don’t think people want to buy TV shows.
Instead, I think people want to buy access to TV shows.
Now that bandwidth speeds are finally getting to the point that watching video online can be a good experience, content creators and content providers are looking for ways to get video to consumers online.
It used to be that content creators (networks) needed content providers (cable companies) to help package and distribute the content.
But with the Internet, content creators don’t need the content providers to get their programming out to viewers. Content creators can post videos online, and visitors can come to their website and watch the video.
The problem right now is fragmentation. There are too many individual places to get the content from, and nothing that effectively aggregates that content to deliver it to the user at a cost that is palatable for the content creators.
Apple gets half of the equation right. The iTunes platform acts as a point of defragmentation. If I’m a user, I don’t want to go to a dozen different sites to watch my shows. I want to watch them (or at least get access to them) in one place. That’s what the iTunes store does successfully.
But where Apple gets it wrong is by adopting the music model for TV shows. It sells shows one at a time, a la carte, like it is a song.
A la carte works for music. That’s because people want to own songs, so they can listen to them whenever they want and as many times as they want.
But with video, people may want to watch whenever they want, but repetitive viewing is significantly less of an issue.
Yes, there are exceptions. There are people who want to watch their favorite show ad nauseum. But that’s not the overwhelming majority of viewers. Whereas with music, everyone listens to songs multiple times.
A song is easily digestible. It doesn’t requite a big time commitment. You can listen to your favorite song in just a few minutes. Music is passive. You throw it on, and listen to it in the background.
TV isn’t passive. Sure, you can turn the TV on and just listen to it passively while washing dishes. But owning a TV show isn’t really important in that equation, the way it is important for music. For music, you want to own the song because you like a certain style of music and want the freedom to listen to that, even if it’s in the background, whenever you want.
So the next step is easy to identify, but hard to execute. Essentially, it’s about finding a pricing model that will include access to a vast array of content, for a price that is reasonable to consumers and satisfying to content creators. The technology is the easy part. It’s the dealmaking that will be difficult.
