Brilliant new idea!! Every television fan should read this.

Yes, because TiVo exists and you CAN skip through commercials with it. *heh*

And there is hardware and software that already allows you to watch t.v. off your computer....plus....you can get almost any program you want these days from usenet groups or by going into any of a myriad of channels in IRC. That's where I go when I miss a program. Why pay or watch ads when you don't have to?

It was a good attempt though.

tivo costs a ton of money. and even then, you can only watch the shows that you already set to prerecord.

we're not talking about being able to watch tv with your computer. Unless you have a huge hard drive and figure out someway to record all tv shows at the same time as they are being aired so you can pick from any show aired in the past few weeks to watch whenever you feel like it. But no hdd is that big, no computer that powerful, and were it, it would still lock it up from letting you use your computer to do anything else at the same time.

we're talking about being able to pick from and watch pretty much any and every program that has been broadcast in the past month whenever you feel like it.

with tv, you are forced to watch tv at certain times or even if you have tivo, you must have already preset the tv to record the show.

what if at 2 pm, you feel like watching a sitcom, even if you have tivo, odds are, you didn't have the foresight to record every or even any sitcom aired over the past week. with this, you can watch whatever you feel like watching without having had to record it ahead of time and pay exorbinate fees for tivos.

The usenet groups you're talking about are an illegal means to watch tv. TV networks lose money when people use those ways since they have no idea how many do and have no way to collect ad revenue.

But even worse, the usenet groups are very complicated. You have to be very computer savvy to be able to find the right ones. Even if you do, odds are, most shows haven't been recorded and made available on them, only the most popular ones.

And worse yet, they're a pain in the ass to download. They take a god half hour or so to get one show even if you have broadband and find a good link. And even then, half the time, the video ends up being corrupt or some mislabeled porn video or something.

All your suggestions are subpar. And they cost networks money by them not recieving ad revenue for their work. It would be in both your interest and in theres for my idea to be implemented.

It would be simpler and far more open for you, letting you choose from virtually any program aired over the past several weeks anytime you feel like it.

And it would dramatically increase how many people watch tv for the networks. I bet only about half the people that want to watch any particular show actually remember to. And I bet there are a bunch of programs out there that people would give a shot and watch were it possible for them to try these shows whenever they feel like it. It would also reduce video piraacy via IRC.

From a corporate angle, everybody wins.

It'll also go farther in turning everyone into tv/internet zombies. And that's always a good thing.

I am never usually this unanimously pro something, but that's a fantastic idea. Make that your intellectual property, and try to sell it to NBC.

There are but three problems that appear to me:

1) People's Internet and PC maintenance bills will be through the roof, though they could get unlimited plans.
2) The sentimental attachment with the box (although people could spend the money they would on a TV/VCR on a big LCD computer screen)
3) Eye-strain.

Otherwise, it's an excellent plan.

This has been in dicsussion for a long time and is already partly in use - it's called "Video on Demand". (Comcast calls it "On Demand")

But the ads in the original shows only cover the cost of the original airing. Take a show like "Friends". NBC put it on the air and sold ad time. After showing it and then showing re-runs NBC sells the show in syndication. Those people pay big bucks to NBC for the rights to air the show and they recoup their cost by selling ads.

If NBC just took the show and put it on their WWW site they'd loose all of their syndication revenue. The major networks don't have the system in place to countine maintaining ad revenue on syndicated shows.

To get your concept to work we'd have to see a major shift Television broadcasting where the major networks and the syndicate networks merge into one. The networks would also have to figure out an entirely new system for charging for ads too. They currently base their charges on the time slot, length of ad and projected viewer-ship levels. They'd have to take the time slots out of that and find a more precise way to calculate the others.

But the biggest drawback is that bandwidth to deliver Video on Demand just isn't there. You and 10,000 of your neighbors can get cable Internet because all of the actual cable TV signals are being broadcast by the cable provider as a single stream. Once everyone started choosing what to watch when they want it you'd have 10,000 different streams and no one would end up watching anything. The bandwidth doesn't exist at the networks to feed videe streams to 4 or 5 million viewers at once.

Video on demand costs an insane amount of money. Something like 70 or 80 bucks a month. That's because no one watches the ads. This is something everyone with broadband access gets free of charge.

Then they can first try this out first with shows that won't go up for syndication.

Reality shows can only be aired once since the surprise is that noone knows how it's going to turn out. but those that missed last weeks episode of survivor or whatever would be eager to try it out.

If it proves popular, they could find ways around the syndication issue.

Perhaps those networks that bought the syndication rights themselves could make them available online as well. I am guessing the syndication contracts give them full rights to the shows they bought. So I see no reason why fox which bought syndication rights to all the old episodes of friends, can't simply make the shows available online as well.

The networks don't have to use the same ads. They could sell seperate ad slots to interested companies that will only air on the shows being broadcast online. Ad slots that pay based on how many people watch these broadcasts online. It should be very easy to determine how many do so.

As for the bandwidth. I'm not sure how it works but I have broadband internet (not through my cable company). I frequently send several gigabites of data to my friends over aol instant messenger. I frequently download several gigabites of video or games online from sites that charge no fees for doing so. If I can do that, I don't think it should be any more difficult for me to download a few hundred megabite video from say fox.com And if so many sites can let me download gigabites worth of information for free from them and make the money back on the couple of cents that me visiting their site gives them, then I am sure bandwidth itself isn't that expensive.

Considering that the many ads that I will watch on the friends episode will probably generate for nbc a dollar or so, I am sure they can afford the couple of cents the bandwidth to stream it to me costs.

How would I go about making this my intellectual property? Is there like some online version of the patent office that I can quickly and easily submit this idea to?

Thanks for your help.

Video On Demand doesn't cost anyone anything. It's a concept not a product. It is exactly the concept you've laid out in this thread.
(btw, "On Demand", which is Comcast's implementation fo Video on Demand, doesn't cost me anything. Comes free with my Comcast Cable TV service. )



Downloading a file and watching streanming video are two VERY different things. If your file transfer stops for a few seconds every minute you don't care. The system automatically picks up and resumes the download until it's finished. Go and stream a few high quality movies and watch them on your broadband connection. After a few minutes of the movie stopping and starting you'll get disgusted enough that you'll stop watching.

Your also misjuding the bandwidth requirements to stream video. I have a box that allows me to stream low quality video (MPEG2) from my PC to my TV and it needs at least 20 MB/s to play without pauses and video drop-outs. That's a closed network with no one on it but myself. Your Cable or DSL connection is a 2Mb (or so) connection that you share with all of your neighbors. (a cable connection terminates at the street. A DSL connection terminates at the phone company central office. Either way once to hit the access point it becomes a shared medium.) You may have 2MB/s to the street but from there on out it's split between you and any of your neighbors that might be on-line. The more that are on-line the slower it gets.



I coul dput a 30 Terabyte file on a server and you could be able to download it. That has nothing to do with how much bandwidth I have available. More bandwidth just means it can be downlaoded faster(provided that bandwidth is available the entire path between the server and you).

It isn't that expensive to them. Hosting facilities have bandwidth they can buy wholesale as they need it. It's expensive for YOU. Call your local phone company and ask them what it would cost to have a dedicated 45 MB/s line run into your house. I'd be surprised if they could get it to you for under $12K a month. Then you'd have the option of finding an ISP that would be willing to terminate that line for you at another $10K a month or so.

I don't know what service you're talking about. I have time warner and subscribing to thier tv on demand costs a ton of money.

Fine so streaming video is difficult while letting you download files is easy, how about this then...

forget about streaming the video.

Like I already stated, they develop a proprietary media format that can only be run on a specific media player, one that doesn't let you rewind or fast forward.

You download the files from nbc.com and then watch them. Due to the format they are in, you are forced to use that specific media player, which doesn't let you fast forward throught the commericals. NBC keeps track of how many peole downloaded each file and uses that to estimate how many watched it. It usually takes me a minute or so to download a hundred megabytes. That's the case with most broadband users.

Would that work?

It would work from a technical perspective.

Figure your average DVD movie is about 2 to 2.5 hours in length and fills 8GB of Disc so a 1/2 hour TV program would be about 1.5GB in size. For a decent broadband connection that probably what - 15 or 20 minutes to download before you could watch it? That's probably do-able for most people.

I'm confused. If you aren't watching it on your computer and you're not watching it on your t.v. where ARE you watching it? Or are you talking about something akin to pay-per-view that the cable companies offer?

As for usenet/IRC...I've never had a porn substitution and there are some less than popular programs that I've seen on usenet.

Regarding computer savvy to get to programs on usenet/IRC, well I spent less than a weekend figuring it out by visiting various websites. So it was fairly easy.

I still watch 99.99% of t.v. shows on t.v. When the commercials come on, I leave the room or channel surf. Better yet, they're on tape so I just fast forward!

fishin' has some good points too.

Like fishin' said, streaming video technology isn't up to snuff yet. It's really irritating to watch something and then have a "hiccup" as your video playback program "buffers". Another problem is the fact that many internet users are restricted to the amount of bandwidth they use in a month. And downloading a file that has a decent amount of video quality to watch on your computer would be over 1 GB easy for an hour show.

Maybe once some other form of technology or improvements in current technologies have been made they could then do something like that. But there are other logistics too, as fishin' pointed out, so your idea may not be practical at this time.

As for patents...my brother and a friend attempted to get something patented once....it sounded like a huge pain in the @$$ to do. Good luck!

most divx half hour videos are under a 100 mbs. and the quality looks very high even on my 19 inch monitor.

if the proprietary format was compressed like the divx format is, i don't see where the problem lies.

you could download it in a min or so and it uses very little bandwidth.

bump

I actually interviewed with a company that was trying this--didn't get the job though:(

Alas, when the .com economy became a .bomb--you know the rest of the story.

why is anyone even discussing this
there is no/will be no such thing as "intellectual property"
it's only roget's and webster's words... i can download anything i can think of for FREE... i don't even watch tv anymore... who makes money from making and airing tv shows, or in the case of music, making and airing videos and releasing albums?... the answer is: NOBODY IMPORTANT... the real money makers are 3rd parties...

the funny thing about this debate is that everyone assumes that someones should either A) pay for commercial free shows, etc, or B) download for free, commercialed media...

why are commercials even a part of the debate... there's already product placement within those shows/movies/records...

commercials don't make those things exist, and those things don't spawn on there own because of commercials. we're entering a new age here people, we MUST throw the advertisers and networks out of the equation...

and in terms of music ARTISTS... who cares if someone gets your album for free... they're LISTENING to your ART right? the more people listening to your ART the better, right? No? oh, okay, then you must be confusing product with art... i didn't realize anyone could steal art; but they can steal products...

ARTISTS SHOULD TOUR... tv shows and records only make people money; people that have products to sell you.



listen, the broadcasting companies (cable, dish, etc) SELL you their services (for lots of money)... Meanwhile, YOU, the CUSTOMER, have to sit through 22 of commercials for every hour of actual entertainment... on the un-seen end though, those advertisers are paying BIG-bucks to have their ads aired... so why are WE paying. the broadcast companies (cable, dish, etc.) are charging us to be advetised to!!!

if you don't feel raped (for a $40 bill or more) then you never will.

PS
ps...
i've downloaded divx files over a gig in less than an hour... and the content played for more than an hour...

this is all in response to the whole half hour divx, etc post... and the qua.l is bad post

if you want it, it is out there, and it ALWAYS will be...
whether it's high-def videos or pre-release records... we will have what we want electronically.

oh...

and there is no LEGAL file sharing service because there is NO ILLEGAL service (sharing is just something that people do) ... no court in the entire CONTINENT has made any ruling about file sharing except canada... and they ruled that it was completely legal.