A few weeks ago I was reading about some of the problems Neilson (the TV rating company) is having. So many people are Tivo-ing, bittorrenting, iTunes downloading, etc. their TV shows these days, that Neilson’s job of reporting who is watching what when is becoming difficult. TV watching has become asynchronous. I myself download Lost each week on Thursday from iTunes and watch it on my computer.
So I was thinking, that because Neilson’s main purpose was to provide info for advertisers, there needs to be a new way for advertisers to target this asynchronous watching market. I though that someone should offer free downloadable or streaming shows with embedded advertisements. I’d sit through a couple of minutes of commercials in Lost to save $1.99 each week.
Looks like AOL had the same thought. Today they opened up shop with In2TV, an ad-based streaming web TV service. You can find a ton of vintage shows there. Stuff like Kung Fu and Welcome Back Kotter, along with a commercial or two.
What would be really cool is if they included the commercials that originally aired with the shows. I’d pay for that!
Wow, what a god awful implementation of a great concept. Can anyone get the videos to play? After guessing Firefox was probably the problem I opened the site in IE, updated WMP like it told me to (including restart) and I still can’t see any video.
My former company was actually asked to bid on this project, including doing a fairly extensive demo build-out. Our design was light years better than what is there, but I think the biggest mistake was going with Windows Media. Admittedly, we did not personally have the capacity to encode thousands of hours of video, but our demo used Flash Communication Server to stream the video clips which also allowed us to pop-up little trivia questions and mini-games within the show. Maybe they are still doing that, I don’t know since I can’t watch the video. Anyhow, they are already using Flash (badly) in other sections of the site so my guess is that the video choice was likely driven by MS donating all the video servers and technology, something they often do on high profile projects. In my opinion the user experience would be significantly better had they gone with Flash video.
Also, we actually suggested including the original commercials with the shows but I guess that got axed as well.
The streaming and the quality sucks. Would have been so much better in Flash. I don’t say that out of bias for Flash, it just would have been, particularly if they had gone with Flash 8 On2 video encoding. They would have had 10 times the quality of what they have, and a smoother stream.
Oh well, at least I can watch the first show I ever remember seeing on TV: F-Troop!
AOL really screwed the pooch on this one. The ads that preceed the episodes play perfectly, but the actual episodes don’t work at all. The player just goes dead once the ads finish playing. AOL sucks!
The battle has begun…
I remember “dreaming” about this type of thing almost 4 years ago, thinking “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could use an internet-styled approach to watch any program any time simply by finding the episode and clicking the play button?”
Honestly, I would rather pay a monthly subscription for a well-executed “internet tv” than for ANY of the cable or satelite services currently available.
I am a little surprised that AOL is the first out of the gate, but I’m happy nonetheless.
Now if the other big players would get in on the idea, I’d be set!
The Nielson comment struck me. I think the media industry has been looking to kick Nielson for a long time. The inaccuracy of the system has long been in question. By providing content online, particularly to ‘logged’ in users, a provider can not only gauge demographics better, but also have precise numbers on views/downloads. Watch for concepts like “web exclusive premieres” and much tighter movie trailer to download marketing.
mikes right the adds play perfect but once there finnised we are privallaged to waste our bandwidth on black screen
oh yes i was excited when i heard this was gonna be availble
tv free on the internet wow oh yeahh
but the upshot of it is ive downloaded and ajusted and tweaked till my media player now wont play a mpeg stream thanks for the downgrade
I didnt have any problems with in2tv untill I started getting the stupid (AOL® Hi-Q™ Message: “Your Hard Disk Is Full) and thats on a not even half full hard drive either some buggy software they have there who’s suprised its aol after al.