And the worst is yet to come…

sounds an awful lot like 2000, when KMart offered “free” dialup service via Bluelight.com…which wasn’t really free beacause every time a dialup was initiated, consumers were confronted with a twangy commerical from The Judds.

They figured all K-mart shoppers were into the Judds. They were wrong.

Rather than hacking, we just got around it the old fashioned way–walked away, turned the sound off, or just stopped using Bluellight.com

When there’s TiVo, where you can get around the commericals, why bother with online viewing where you’re totally stuck with commericals?

It will, though, be interesting to watch this unwind–esp. now that AOL’s turning itself into a network of sorts.

Hear what you’re saying, but a few questions come immediately to mind:

- did Gervais and Co. charge for these podcasts?
- was it original content, never exposed before, anywhere?
- were they video or audio?
- was does “most downloaded podcast on the web” really mean? A thousand? A million?

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that it costs a great deal of money to produce a studio quality TV series. Like it or not, producers won’t be able to fund these series without some guarantee of income. The biggest problem that I see for original video content on the web is the roadblock of cost. Would REPO MAN or TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD have ever gotten made on spec, which is what this model essentially is? Or was it necessary to have a distributor/backer willing to share the financial risk for a share of the potential reward?

Recently the Guardian ran a series of podcasts featuring Ricky Gervais and the devine Karl Pilkington. There was little fanfare and less advertising, yet these quickly became the most downloaded podcasts on the web (or at least that’s what they told us). The reason they won through is because they are genuinely very funny. Admittedly RG is not a no-name but still, without corporate bluster and fuss, word got out and these went huge overnight (if you haven’t heard them, btw, do seek them out – hilarious). Anyway, my point is, the interwebs does a fantastic job of filtering wheat from chaff and this is a process that will improve over coming months and years as users get more sophisticated and better at finding their counterparts on the web. The endless tease of “Lost” or “Invasion” will soon be forgotten, to be replaced by the delights of tomorrow’s “Repo Man” or the next day’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”. It is all just beginning. The dark side is predicted in Houllebecq’s “Atomised”, but the light from a billion creative personalities will drown it out.

So, no “middlemen” at all? So what’s going to happen, Jeff? Content producers will simply make original series video content available on the Web for a fee, just like that? Studio quality content, not just some schmuck with a video camera?

How are they going to get the word out on all this new product and convince customers to pay for it? Are they going to spend their own money promoting this new product? Before they’ve even made a dime from it?

Are they going to stream it for free? Where are they going to find advertisers willing to do that without some guarantee of exposure to their advertising? Who’s going to finance it without some guaranteed income?

Content producers need middlemen, Jeff. They help absorb the risk. Jay’s comment uses a program like SEINFELD, which has already been exposed to millions via these “middlemen”. Without them, it’s unlikely Jay would even have known SEINFELD existed.

I wonder how long until some hacker comes up with a way to convert their content into some other, standard, format that you *can* skip.

You can plug a firewire cable from your HD cable box into a PC, dowload whatever you tivoed, convert it to MPEG 4, cut out the ads and release a high quality version online with BitTorrent were you so inclined.

Yeah right. I wonder how long until some hacker comes up with a way to convert their content into some other, standard, format that you *can* skip. Personally I’m betting on the crack being released within 48 hours of the product.