They're turning famed WBEZ Chicago public radio show This American Life into a TV show. It's coming to Showtime March 22nd. Showtime!? Blarg... I hope it's on the torrents so I can steal it. I wish they'd just dump that B.S. cable stuff and video podcast it so the people who want to see it can. They could reach a LOT more people and make a lot more money if they simply video podcast it and put ads in it. It would be so much more profitable in fact they could put FAR less ads in it... but then heh, I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said a million bizzilian times. Just shut up and watch the trailer.Watch movie
Original post on February 23, 2007 from del.icio.us/popular/system:media:video: (RSS feed)
(Via Mefeedia)
Whoa, this is really, really, really good news. Except I don't get cable. Like you, lookin' for the v-cast online, yo.
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of the show. But we are already doing this. You can go to hundreds of different vlogs and find people telling their stories. You don't need showtime to pump advertisements down your throat to see real people.
ReplyDeleteEven though I don't frequent youtube, I know you can find thousands of people telling their story their way on youtube.
Still, it is nice that the TV folks will get to see something like what I watch every day.
Howdy Lan, thanks for leaving a comment!
ReplyDeleteI would say we ABSOLUTELY need more This American Life on TV. Real authentic american voices are definitely lacking on television. That said I don't think I'm ever going to get showtime... ever. It's not showtime, it's Comcast, and the way cable works... it's comepletely anti-thetical to everything I stand for.
I do wish it would have come to PBS instead. It's not like it requires an extremely large budget.
Now here's the big news. We already KNOW people at Showtime. THey're in our midst. I can't mention their names but you know them. I didn't realize it myself but they IM'd me today because they saw my post and I got a little sneak preview of one of their episodes. Just a single story segment. I'm excited.
They also wanted to ensure me they ARE working on the issue of how to function outside of the cable model.
While I don't have a lot of hope in the short term for cable shows distributing their content over the web without drm I think *maybe* there could be a sliver of hope.
The one episode I caught was the PERFECT format for a video blog.
The whole economics are all worked out as far as I'm concerned. All they need to do is pop it online in a lower quality format such as 320x480 or maybe something a little highter as a video podcast with mp4 and get a few sponsors of which they do a mention on the intro... and put a 30 second or so add on the outro... it's BRILLIANT... and why? Because when you're not going through Comcast or some other *ss-hat cable giant all the advertising revenue goes to YOU the producer... whereas 90-95% of all revenue goes to the network owner not the show producer in the old model.
This essentially means you can put less ads on the material and make MORE money.... cutting out the middle men.
I've already seen a tremendous amount of like companies experimenting with this model including National Geographic and a few others.
I just keep pointing people to the following presentation.
http://www.mininova.org/search/future%20bittorrent/
Anyway, the ONLY problem is that it's a dangerous game for the producer. Often networks demand exclusivity making it an all or nothing game.
Sooner or later though the major networks strangle-hold will be broken.
More likely I think we will see people like showtime atleast experiment with video podcasting using it as primarily a marketing tool. Shorter clips, lower quality, with post roll ads. I'd expect showtime to start there.
It's going to be a long time before we see whole shows come to the web. To many layers of beuracracy need to change.