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They've definitely been baking advertisements into movies and television shows for years now. My ideal pragmatic solution would be a platform (or two, or five)

by JonLim 12y ago

They've definitely been baking advertisements into movies and television shows for years now. My ideal pragmatic solution would be a platform (or two, or five) that acts like a dumb pipe for content providers to license their content to, and receive some form of compensation every time it is watched, prorated into the amount of the episode/movie is actually watched. However, given the difficult licensing issues found for every country, that's probably not going to happen any time soon.

sbarre 12y ago
Also the content production ecosystem is currently reliant on big successes making up for failures and/or niche content. That's why cable companies bundle channels together instead of letting you pick and choose the ones you want. If it wasn't for this, the industry would become even more risk-averse, and we would see a lot less diversity of content, or risky unproven ventures. In the end I believe this would be a net loss to everyone.
exelius 12y ago
This solution is what the content creators want too: the problem is how to pay for it. Micropayments are the obvious choice, but they're currently impractical for a number of reasons (Bitcoin is promising but has yet to clear adoption hurdles necessary to hit the mainstream). I don't know that this will ever come to pass though. Micropayment tech is just too far off, and workable online distribution models are already in development. Obviously, the cable/satellite/telco video companies of the world don't want to get disintermediated here; so most of them have been building IP video platforms for the last few years. It will still likely require a cable video subscription (though maybe with a slight discount as you won't need to rent a cable box.)
- gnopgnip 12y ago
  A distributed network is not well suited to micropayments. With every user it exponentially increases the resources used. Bitcoin can handle about 7 transactions a second maximum. Much less currently.
  - exelius 12y ago
    Yeah; there are technical limitations with Bitcoin that are well-known. I was referring more to virtual currencies in general; Bitcoin is unlikely to be the final evolution of virtual currency. My comment was more about how Bitcoin raises the promise, but I do know it's unlikely to be able to fulfill it.

by JonLim 12y ago

sbarre 12y ago

Also the content production ecosystem is currently reliant on big successes making up for failures and/or niche content. That's why cable companies bundle channels together instead of letting you pick and choose the ones you want. If it wasn't for this, the industry would become even more risk-averse, and we would see a lot less diversity of content, or risky unproven ventures. In the end I believe this would be a net loss to everyone.

exelius 12y ago

This solution is what the content creators want too: the problem is how to pay for it. Micropayments are the obvious choice, but they're currently impractical for a number of reasons (Bitcoin is promising but has yet to clear adoption hurdles necessary to hit the mainstream). I don't know that this will ever come to pass though. Micropayment tech is just too far off, and workable online distribution models are already in development. Obviously, the cable/satellite/telco video companies of the world don't want to get disintermediated here; so most of them have been building IP video platforms for the last few years. It will still likely require a cable video subscription (though maybe with a slight discount as you won't need to rent a cable box.)

gnopgnip 12y ago
A distributed network is not well suited to micropayments. With every user it exponentially increases the resources used. Bitcoin can handle about 7 transactions a second maximum. Much less currently.
- exelius 12y ago
  Yeah; there are technical limitations with Bitcoin that are well-known. I was referring more to virtual currencies in general; Bitcoin is unlikely to be the final evolution of virtual currency. My comment was more about how Bitcoin raises the promise, but I do know it's unlikely to be able to fulfill it.