Google Looking to Offer Paid Streaming TV Shows?

[javalizard]

Or just watch TV on you TV for free, on a bigger screen, in real time, how about that? Anyone?

I'd like to live in "you" land, where free consists of:
-Monthly fee for cable + any other channels you do or don't watch
-Cost of the TV
-Cost of time to set it up
-Cost of time dealing with customer service when it all breaks
-Cost of DVR if you have one
-Cost of cable box if you have one (either monthly rental fee, or out right purchase)
-Cost of brain washing your kids into being highly suggestible consumers
-Cost of dealing with your own suggestibility (you know you want to try that new razor with 10 blades)
-Opportunity cost of actually doing something productive with your life. If you make $15/hr at your job and you watch 4 hours of TV a day, that's at least $60 each day in opportunity cost. Will you remember how funny that episode of "(whatever)" is in ten years?

One person's free is seen as a $1,500 per year addiction plus immeasurable negative intangibles to someone else. Shrug.

To each their own.

PS. Why are you paying for channels you don't watch? Why aren't you just paying for the channels you do watch? Answer: That system would break their cable business model! They extract more money from you. No. This is not cool with me.

 

[str1f3]

per episode is a stupid idea, itunes tv and movies may be riddled with DRM but at least it is yours to keep, online or not. if it were "per month" like it was discussed before, that's something very different..

It is not their choice. Networks and companies decide the price. It doesn't matter anyway because this idea by Google is laughable. Apple is busy trying to make an all you can plan with the networks. Google is skating to where the puck has been and not where it's going to be.

 

[kzin]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16)

What an awful idea. Streaming=free, legal downloading=paid, end of story. I'll watch 30 second Hulu ads over this any day.

That's really who this is aimed at: Hulu. Not iTunes.

Though, I disagree with your first assertion. I'd gladly pay for a streamed, ad-less, version of Hulu ... but:

1) I want something Android compatible (watch it on my commute to work). Hopefully it'll work with the Android Youtube viewer. Ubuntu and Mac OS X compatible are good too. I know people here probably want iPhone/iPod-Touch compatible as well, but I don't care about that one.

2) I want a monthly subscription option, not just $2/episode. As long as it costs me less than what I currently pay for DirecTV, I'll probably be interested.

3) I need to be sure that it'll cover ALL of the shows I want. It'd be nice if it did movies, as well.

4) It needs to have a good solid cache strategy... having the video pause mid-suspense-climax moment of a show or movie ... absolutely not acceptable. It needs to let me pre-fetch the entire episode/movie to my viewing device and THEN watch it without stutters. This is an area where I'd be just fine with them using aggressive DRM to prevent users from using that cache as a back-door to pirating the content. (but, just to be clear, I'm not fine with DRM on copies of media that I have _purchased_). This would also help with watching it on a mobile device (pre-fetch the episode into my cache when I'm at my home wifi, pause it, sleep my device, get on the train/bus, watch it while I'm on the commute, where the connectivity is spotty and often slow).

Give me all of that, and a set-top box as well (so I can use it on my SD or HD TV), and I'll gladly give them my money, instead of DirecTV. And if it does movies, with a library comparable to Netflix's total library (not just Netflix's instant streaming library), I might give them the money I spent on Netflix, too.

On-Demand ("next day" is fine with me, I usually wait a day or two watch it on my Tivo anyway), the shows I want, on my TV, Computer, or Mobile device. Why wouldn't I be interested in that?

And if I can get it to work with the Entourage eDGe, that would be absolutely perfect.