December 2006 Archives

Earlier this year some survey's showed that Australia was the second biggest offender for illegal downloads of television programs, now a survey conducted by Adam Zuchetti, an honours student at the University of Sydney, has revealed that 53% of respondants download programs. THE AUSTRALIAN published an article on this last week and sounded a warning bell for the local television industry.

"AUSTRALIA'S $3.5 billion free-to-air commercial television industry is being threatened by the internet more quickly than expected, with a new online study showing 53 per cent of respondents regularly download TV shows from the internet, most of them illegally."

At first this sounds quite alarming, however a closer look at the details reveals a little less cause for alarm. The study was conducted through online TV sites, so the respondents were fairly web-savy individuals - early adopters of new technology. The latest ABS numbers on broadband usuage in Australia gage it 6 million internet accounts both business and household and 3.1 million of these are non-dial up accounts. Australia has a population of over 20 million and televisions are pretty much in 99.9% of homes. The uptake of PAY-TV in on a palteau of around 20% of homes. With that knowledge in hand, re-reading the Australian's article it sounds slightly less alarming. The article also notes that when Australian television stations have played the latest US programs like 'The O.C.' or 'Jerico', the viewing numbers have has no substantial increase to other programs like 'Desperate Housewives' or 'Lost' that Australian audiences often get to see 6 to 10 months after they are on in the U.S. (If you reading from oversea's to give you an idea the show 'Weeds' just premiered here.) The big difference in this though is not viwing levels it's viewer satisfaction, we still watch the shows even though we often know that Monica and Chandler are getting married, or that the President reveals he has M.S. or whatever the plotline. We just feel much happier when qwe get the surprises that the rest of the world enjoys. What do you thinkl of this article? Will downloading kill the local TV industry? Fell free to add you comments below.

The Sundance Film Festival has announced that it will be creating a virtual screening room with the online world of SecondLife. One of the films slated to be screened to an online audience is the indie documentary 'Four Eyed Monsters', which was recently featured in FAST COMPANY.

Often film festivals have restrictions on entering films that have been already been screened at other festivals or have been presented online. While the Sundance Film Festival is one of the premiere film events in the world - and no-one is likely to turn them down, it might be more challenging for smaller festivals to bring in an opportunity like this. Cross posted at graemewatson

I haven't seen many references to this so far, but I think it's quite signicant. YouTube the online video sharing website has just introduced a new feature that allows you to record staight to their site from your web-cam signifcantly removing one step out of the online video production process. Gradually we are seeing a trend of the web - moving from text based formats to more visual based formats. Imagine what a discussion forum will be like when they are completely visually based, or a blog.

WIRED reports on how popular, but cancelled, television show 'Firefly' may find a new life as an online game.

Often when we look at Cross Media opertunities we think of delivering a product across multiple channels simultaneously, however the real value may be in Long Tail opportunities for established brands andarchival content.

The opportunity to legally download programs this year has been growing. Australia has one of the highest rates of illegal downloads and to couteract this television networks have employed a few good strategies. Channel 7's program 'Jericho' is played in Australia on the same day as it debut's in the USA, deleting the 1-2 years waiting time Australians normally have for new television shows out of the US and UK. All channels have experiments with legal downloads and Channel 10 had had success offering free downlaods of hit series 'Thank God Your Here' and fee based downloads of the short series 'Tripping Over'. As we head into 2007 things are certainly stepping up a notch. Channel 10 has announced that next year it will lauch up to fifity web sites to create an online presence for it's shows and will offer a far greater range of downloadable content, allowing viewers to watch programs where they want, when they want. This was immediately surpassed by Channel 7 announcing that through a collaboration with ReelTime would allow them to run a huge range of programs for download, including content marked for broadcast on the rival stations. This will be really interesting, we know that programs can be devalued if a great enough of it's key audience sees the show through other distribution channels if they are able to access them. The ABC has to plugh through 3 seasons of 'The West Wing' before they got to the eppisodes that the loyal audience hadn't already seen on DVD release; Channel 10's 'Battlestar Gallatica' had been seen by almost anyone with a opssing interest in Sci Fi through download and DVD releases before it made it to the TV. It could be quite a lively tussle for viewers as stations gain their online rights for their rivals programs and beat them to the finishing line.

Comedy Central will make a new show specifically for mobile telephones. It is noteable that this is a traditional media channel developing content specifically for a newer platform, not repurposed content or additional content, but something totally new, and that's significant.

It appears however that the show will broadcast to mobiles at a specific time slot, which seems to be a type of thinking from the heritage media world. People want to be able to watch thing when they want on whatever platform they want. Giving it a specific time slot seems to be old school thinking.