That was some interesting piece of information. I am working on an article about the varying trends across decades in the entertainment industry and I believe that your page could support my work. So, I would want to refer to your page. I hope that is okay with you. Appreciate your help.

Respectfully,
Parimar Kohen

But here, you hit is on the head and where everyone is missing the boat is TV Shows? If it is clear that the majority of consumers don’t want to own really awesome movies, then why does everyone think that we want to always own all those episodes of Ugly Betty? Really? If I only want to watch a move once or twice, how many times am I going to go back and watch that same episode of The Daily Show? And why would I want to deal with having to house and backup all that crap too?

TV is 1000x’s more disposable then movies. Lets get real APPLE! Give me $0.25 or $0.50 rentals of TV shows and I will tell Charter to bite it and go to 100% digital download programming and never watch another commercial.

Don’t know about you, but if I have an option to BUY an episode of Ugly Betty for $1.99 or just simply watch it and lose that 30 minutes of my life never to be repeated for $0.25, 99.999% of the time I will drop that quarter again and again for more TV to WATCH then I will EVER BUY.

22 minutes of content carries about 8 minutes of ad time (ignoring any product placement, local ad time, etc.). So 8 minutes of ads is about 16 30 second spots. So, how much is each spot?

Well that depends on the show, the network, negotiations, etc etc… for the sake of argument and easy math let’s assume it’s a fairly small but decent show that brings in 4 million viewers weekly for a new episode. Let’s also assume that each spot goes for $25k. (again this is all to make the math clean). Well the show is “worth” $400k in revenues for delivering 4 million viewers. Run that math all the way down and it’s a $10 CPM.

In this scenario the network could replace its revenue per capita with a rental fee of $0.16. El Jobso needs some new mock turtlenecks, there’s delivery cost, etc. so let’s up it to $0.25.. even $0.50.

Of course this is a “top down” pricing model that assumes the value of this content (and our attention) is the same in this new medium. I’d generally disagree – just looking at the supply/demand equation. More viewing outlets, more shows, more content available for our attention – while by definition our attention is a fixed good: you’ve got 24 hours of it to spend every day – even if you are extremely ADD.

okay, back to work.

Another scheme would entail a bulk subscription to a number of shows for the season. This is similar to a choice version of shows on cable packages.

I think what would make more sense is to have free downloads with ad support. Essentially these would be the exact same as what the networks are offering as online streams (like ABC-HD, NBC / Hulu, Fox / MySpace, etc). This would allow the consumer to take the content on portable devices like their iPhone or iPod. If ads are embedded, going DRM-less would actually help in the number of eyeballs, because you’d be increasing the number of device screens (whether or not those screens are on Apple devices really shouldn’t matter).

These could essentially be podcasts of msm with advertising.

When / if that happens, it will be the true competitor to linear cable/satellite/broadcast TV, because consumers will be able to access any content, essentially on-demand.

One other thing: has anyone talked about how much the studios will be raking it in with Apple’s download model? I may be wrong on this, but generally, with DVD rentals, the studios only get paid when Blockbuster or NetFlix buys a physical disc, and (unless there’s exclusive deals) none of the brick-and-mortar’s $4/rental to consumers. Here, the studios are getting a portion of $3-6 every time a video is downloaded by a consumer. That’s a huge change in the rental business model, and I’d imagine if successful, a big boost in the studios bottom line.