Here’s a cool article about the future of TV.

How Battlestar Galactica killed Broadcast TV (http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html)

Here’s a quote from the article. My comments, for what they’re worth, are below.

Widespread piracy of television programming has short-circuited this process, connecting the producer directly to the audience. As yet there are no viable economic models connecting the television producer directly to the audience. Industry pundits talk about audiovisual downloads through some system like Apple’s iTunes Music Store, and perhaps we’ll see something like this in the near future, but this works against the simple fact that people do not expect to pay for television programs. People will pay for movies, when they choose to pay for movies, but they won’t pay for television programming. Not if they can get it for free. The audience is not at all involved in the economic value chain of television production; that’s been the rule for a half-century. It’s reasonable to presume that any attempt to change the economic behavior of the audience is doomed to failure.

I’m a big fan of Battlestar Galactica (BSG) and I watch it every week. But never on TV. I haven’t seen a single episode via broadcast TV. I began, as the author above mentioned, downloading each episode with eMule - an open source P2P program.

I really can’t stand to watch broadcast TV with all the commercials. It interrupts the flow of the story and is just a plane nuance. But, until recently a necessary one. As the author mentions. The economic model is based on producer, distributor, sponsors, audience.

But the author doesn’t think that there is any way to eliminate the middle man - distributor and sponsors. He doesn’t think that people will pay for a TV show. Of course he wrote that before iTunes began selling episodes of BSG the day after they aired.

I could still download each episode from Bit Torrent or eMule or something similar. But that takes time. Once the episode runs it takes a few hours for someone, usually a few people, to make their copies available. Then they begin to spread, slowly at first but picking up speed exponentially as more and more people have the bits to share. In my experience with a variety of shows that I watched in this manner I would say that on average I could watch the show in question about 36 hours after it aired - give or take. But sometimes I would download a file that was frakked up and have to start over. It didn’t happen often but it was a real nuance when it did.

Now that iTunes and Google are making TV shows available I have a reliable source to download from. And for $2 it’s a bargain. Not only do I get the show that I want to watch, without commercials, but I also get something that I can watch repeatedly if I want. But you know what is best about all this? I get to support the creator of the show. I’m voting with my money and telling them that I love their show. I hope that enough people are downloading to provide a revenue stream that will allow them to keep the show running indefinitely.