Overused Words Are Sometimes Relevant

And, despite my distaste for the words "paradigm shift", I think it might even be useful now. With Apple Computer's latest announcement. No, not the video iPod thing, this:

For as little as $1.99 a show, television junkies will be able to download new and old episodes of some of the more popular shows on ABC and the Disney Channel. In a bold move, the latest installments will be made available to iTunes users the very next day. That may find TiVo(Nasdaq: TIVO) and bellyaching advertisers together at the same short end of the stick for the first time. Meanwhile, televised content purveyors may be on to a new revenue stream worth paddling if this takes off.

I wonder: would my television bill actually be lower if I downloaded the shows I watched? Cable TV costs me about $40 a month, or about $480 a year. But of course, I only get about 22 episodes of new television a year - so each series would be worth about $44. Given that I can get all my news over the Internet as well, and I only try to watch about a half-dozen television series anyway, this could be a major savings.

The other interesting thing to note is that this puts Apple in competition with DVD vendors. Indeed, $44 is much less than a new box set costs. However, the new iTunes won't ship with the ability to back up your downloaded movies, so you won't be able to burn a DVD and put it on your shelf. That said, I'm sure it will be hacked soon. As Cory Doctorow has noted, iTunes-only music tracks usually appear on the pirate P2P networks within minutes of being released.

I think the video iPod is actually more underwhelming - it's a neat added feature, but frankly I can't see a lot of people using the video function very frequently. Maybe for long car rides, but overall I think the iPod will continue to be a music player, not a video player.

Why use the words pardigm shift? Mainly because this is the first real move by the major networks (who still, despite their decline, control 50% of the audience) to embrace the potential of the Internet as a new distribution channel. It will be very interesting to see how subscriptions change the nature of network programming. Taken to the extreme, we could see the major networks become more like HBO, whose dependence on subscriptions has actually liberated them to be more creative and less fearful of the omnipresent Nielsen ratings.

Update: Whoops, spoke to soon. The video function of the iPod depletes the battery in 2 hours. So not even a long car trip. This is a major technical hurdle for portable video players of all kinds - the battery size needed to operate a video screen is much larger than for simple sound. Anything significantly smaller than a laptop is bound to have a pretty short lifespan.