The success of the BBC iPlayer has inspired a raft of new video streaming services, offering free TV shows for anyone willing to sit through a few adverts.
This is a TV. Kind of.
MSN Video Player is offering classics from BBC Worldwide, such as Big Train and the Young Ones, along with unclassics from like How To Look Good Naked from independent powerhouse All3Media (to be fair, All3Media all supply the sublime Peep Show).
We’ll soon see the UK launch of the popular American streaming service Hulu (which has the backing of three of four of the big networks, and so shows great stuff like Family Guy). And the company that runs the digital terrestrial infrastructure has just announced it will be launching an on-demand video service built from technological leftovers from Kangaroo (which would have united BBC, Channel 4 and ITV content, if the pesky regulators hadn’t got in the way).
All in all it sounds like a golden age for fans of TV: freed from the tyranny of the schedulers, we can watch what we want, when we want – without having to set a video recorder or buy a DVD boxset.
But there’s something about the business model that doesn’t stack up. In fact, it’s that one word again: free. TV production has already been decimated due to the huge number of channels competing for advertising. Ever more targetted channels – and the web is the most targetted of em all – mean ever more targetted advertising. Which sounds very appealing until you realise that ‘targetting’ also means the death of event TV. We’ll watch what we want, not what Auntie tells us. And that means no big-budget dramas or comedies: in their place, a turgid diet of reality shows and re-runs. So who makes the classics of tomorrow?
I really hope the TV and film industry has this web model figured out. Perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic about an industry that’s been quicker to react to the threat of illegal downloading than music was. I just have a feeling that Spotify is a service that’ll only ever make money when it’s bought by Google, or Apple, or someone with a lot of spare cash. So why will ad-funded video streaming services fare any better?
You can see my (rather more optimistic) overview of the free web TV phenomenon in this piece I wrote for the Daily Mail’s Weekend magazine, which also includes some top gadgets for streaming, plus the latest information on the BBC’s Project Canvas – a souped-up Freeview set-top box that could bring on-demand streaming to the mass market. If the regulators let it.
Related posts:
No Auntie, we won’t pay more for iPlayer
Pirates don’t kill people, lawyers do
The business of free: how much is money?
