Bittorrent + Television = BTV: a liberating television viewing experience.
With this interesting mix of technologies, technologically-inclined people are seeing a decoupling of time and television that goes even further than what is possible with a TiVo. With a TiVo, you can time-shift new shows. With BTV you can watch virtually anything that is worth watching that has been on ever.
You can find old series that are no longer (or are infrequently) on the air such as:
- Brisco County Jr.
- Monty Python’s Flying Circus
- Farscape
- MacGyver
- etc…
With the current setup, if you forget to record a show and you miss it, you have maybe one or two chances to see it again before it disappears until syndication sets in. You are at the mercy of the broadcasters. For extremely linear plotlines, missing a single show can mean a great loss to the viewers.
What I think a lot of these BTV proponents (file sharers) really want is a way to watch any show that has ever aired whenever they want. I think that if the television networks created a service that allowed you to buy a box (like a cable box today) and pay per download or per month to watch any show ever made.
Think of it like a TiVo with a direct connection a very large storage house of video. Of course, there are engineering problems to overcome first. First you have to probably digitize everything and get them into reasonably-sized files of decent quality; typical file types used internally for the TiVo would probably do rather well. The next issue is the bandwidth.
This one is the hard bullet to dodge. No one doubts that video files are larger than music, photos, or even text. That’s probably why standard BTV consumes such a large fraction of the Internet’s traffic already. If you’re going to provide every file at the fingertips of everybody, you need a massive data pipe and an infrastructure that Google would approve of.
Or do you?
If the service were priced well enough, then they might be able to leverage a modified bittorrent to their advantage. Whatever price you set on this service, you’d have to realize that the free alternative of BTV will always exist no matter how hard you try to crush it. That’s why you need a price that is reasonable, but not eye-gougingly high.
All of the client boxes would have local caches of recently-viewed materials and a connection to the Internet. The network servers would provide a browsable index and the interface would bear a striking resemblance to TiVo’s browsing features. Browse by genre, year, keywords, producers, actors, episode guides, titles. Incorporate data from TV Tome and IMDB and use them to your advantage. Heck, this would probably be better than even the UK’s attempt at something similar regarding licencing their old BBC materials for British citizens to download.
As for bandwidth, each box could talk to the main server which could be running as a specialized bittorrent tracker. Each client would be “sharing” local copies of anything recently watched and then the entire distributed system could just manage itself: shifting copies of more popular files around the network to turn the entire viewing audience into a distributed caching system.
If something like this existed I would pay for it just to be able to watch things like VR5 and Centurions again. I think that many of the people out there would crave the nostalgia hidden in the backlog of shows of the past. This would have the potential to become very popular.
If a few files leak out into the bittorrent community, would it really be that big of a deal? The thing you’d be selling is ease of use and utility. A service. A user interface experience; Apple did it by wrapping BSD with a nice interface and selling it in a nice little hardware box…why should television viewing be any different?
I would definitely be behind that. The issue in modern society is that we are too busy to watch things when they are set to air. Time shifting it the key to a whole new audience.
The problem is that commercials are what fund the current TV shows. What happens when such a service has to have commercials just like regular TV. I guess this is where the subscription fee comes in. Even if it were per series such a system would be reasonable.
But you have a point the market for old TV shows is not big enough for DVD sets to come out, and sometimes you really only want to watch it once through. Such a subscription service would not require a big investment in production for old shows with small markets, but would still net a small profit on such enterprises.
I would so watch M.A.N.T.I.S. and Strange World.
I definitely agree with what you’re saying. Completely decoupling time and tv would open up that buzz-world of ‘the long tail’ untapped market of people who want to watch one or two really random shows.
People all have their own interests and there can never possibly be television stations that cater to every single taste.
Providing everything for the end user might net a larger income off of the quasi-infinite number of minority consumer groups.
And you know what… someone’s going to “realize” this idea and patent it. Unless it’s you.
I don’t really care if someone takes the idea. I’m certainly not the kind of person who would want to navigate the contract and licensing hell it would take to get this thing implemented.
I would love to have something like this. There are a lot of shows out there building up dust, making no profit for anyone and hidden from those who want to watch it that even a limited library of old shows would be a great idea. I could see all those episodes of Invisible Man that I missed.
I actually saw copies of MacGyver in Target the other day… the world never ceases to amaze me :)