Fifth Gear to buy
Well finally the TV companies are taking some interest in the fact that some of us would pay to download TV: Slashdot article
Having visited the download site, I have some comments:
– The files are only segments of a program
This may seem like being pedantic, but I don’t watch sections of a program, I like to enjoy 30 minutes of saturated humour etc that can temporarily make me forget work etc. The TV companies need to learn to supply what there is demand for.
– The quality is rubbish (please use DivX!)
WMV. Yuck. Not only was the quality dire, but the codecs are non-standard. A large part of the world wants the freedom to use a file in whatever way they want when they’ve purchased it. That means on Linux, Max OSX, PDA etc. I would never in a billion years buy a .WMV file. Ever. Not if it was my favourite show. AVI file encoded with DivX, yes.
– The site was really slow to download from (probably the slashdot effect)
Speed is not actually essential. Providing a good download mechanism (think multi-platform before creating some Windows DRM rubbish) exists then I don’t mind if the file takes a day to download. You might want to embrace something like bittorrent though. Provided the tracker is protected as your purchase mechanism, then put the files out there in a way that users help you distribute the videos.
Congrats for giving it ago though.