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Apple to Offer Monthly iTunes TV Subscriptions

Posted by samzenpus on Wed Mar 08, 2006 11:39 PM
from the download-your-shows dept.
Businesses Media Television The Internet Apple
sg3000 writes "Fans of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, rejoice! Reuters is reporting that Apple will provide monthly subscriptions to two of Comedy Central's most popular shows. One question, as TV shows become available for sale on the Internet, will this make it harder to share clips online, such as through Google Video? In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true."
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[+] Technology: YouTube Removes Comedy Central Clips Due to DMCA 203 comments
Jeff writes "In March, an earlier Slashdot post asked if iTunes sales of the Daily Show would make it harder to share clips online. Well, apparently with the $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition by Google, the answer is now yes. Today, YouTube removed all of its Comedy Central content. Google knew this was coming but you have to wonder if YouTube will be worth that $1.65 billion on Monday. The take down request comes a year after a Wired interview where Daily Show Executive Ben Karlin encouraged viewers to download: 'If people want to take the show in various forms, I'd say go.' Maybe the New York Times Company would have been a better acquisition for Google after all."
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  • -1 Redundant (Score:5, Funny)

    by perlionex (703104) * <joseph AT ganfamily DOT com> on Wednesday March 08 2006, @11:42PM (#14880532) Homepage
    In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true.
    We /.ers already do that all the time, no need to remind us. /me ducks
  • "In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true".

    That's Slashdot. Summed up in a single sentance. That's so beautiful.

    I think I'm changing my sig.

    *sigh*

    And, in an attempt to be on topic:

    No, why would it make it harder to share. Uh, google video? WTF?

    Oh right. That's how people share videos... *snickers*

    Oh Rihgt.

  • Brilliant (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Scareduck (177470) on Wednesday March 08 2006, @11:44PM (#14880547) Homepage Journal
    In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true.

    Thus the scientific basis for chiropractic, homeopathy, and items found in the Slashdot submission queue.

      • Re:Brilliant (Score:5, Funny)

        by Eightyford (893696) on Thursday March 09 2006, @12:21AM (#14880732) Homepage
        Hey without my chiropractor, I wouldn't be able to turn my head side to side. Regular western medicine would rather fuse my spine so that I can't move my upper back/neck at all. Now, which method is progress, and which is pointless?

        There's really nothing wrong with a chiropractor treating back pains. The problem comes when a chiropractor tries to treat migrains, the common cold, ulcers, and even irritable bowel syndrome. Scientifically, you might as well drink chinese tiger penis soup to get a stiffy.

  • Win-win situation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FlyByPC (841016) on Wednesday March 08 2006, @11:45PM (#14880551) Homepage
    If prices weren't artificially high, I think a lot of people wouldn't bother pirating clips -- and the whole IP discussion wouldn't be as important. If, for example, you could download songs you liked at $0.10US each, why bother pirating them? Same for video -- let people freely trade small clips (say, 2 minutes or less) legally -- and add a link to the traded file to make it easy to purchase the whole episode for not too much money. Trading small video clips would become *good* for the companies that produce them, as it would get more people interested in the programs.

  • Sign me up! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Radiohead (86586) on Wednesday March 08 2006, @11:45PM (#14880554)
    I just subscribed to the Daily Show. I don't have cable and the video quality is better than the files I've found on YouTube or other places online. The "subscription" title is a bit misleading - this is more like subscribing to a podcats - iTunes automatically downloads new episodes as they are made available. You can opt-in to an email notifying you that a new episode is available. It's more like a magazine subscription than a music service subscription since you get to keep the video files you've downloaded even if you don't renew the subscription. Kind of like buying an album on iTunes where they send you a song a week automatically. The DRM is the same as for any other song or video you buy on iTunes. Not a bad model for my needs.

  • Rejoice, consumers! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Urusai (865560) on Wednesday March 08 2006, @11:47PM (#14880560)
    Another opportunity to make easy monthly payments!

  • I already have cable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geekee (591277) on Wednesday March 08 2006, @11:51PM (#14880586)
    and for $40 a month, I get a hell of a lot more content than 4 shows.

        • Re:I already have cable (Score:5, Interesting)

          by RalphBNumbers (655475) on Thursday March 09 2006, @12:59AM (#14880884)
          And you are so blinded by the crap on TV that you don't realize that less than 1% of it is worth my time to watch.

          And much of that $70 a month to get the channels that offer those shows back via digital cable.

          And that's not even mentioning the fact that I can see them whenever I want instead of having to remember to watch or record them on the TV's schedule.

          If Apple were to extend this deal (~16 shows for $10, paid in advance) to some of their other shows, like Battlestar Galactica, I could actually see myself making my first iTMS purchase.

          But of course, they probably won't offer that low a rate on longer and more collectible shows like BSG. And I really can't see paying much more than that for a movie that just isn't all that comparable to a DVD (320x240 vs 720x480, watchable on ubiquitous $40 players vs needs a computer or an iPod, comes on a nicely packaged DVD vs can't even be burned as a DVD, etc).

          Really, it seems to me the iTMS got a lot of things right with music, and then turned around and got those same things irritatingly wrong on video.

          They made the music decent quality, as good or better than most of the stuff being traded on the net at the time (using similar bitrates and a superior codec). But they made the video disappointingly low res, equivalent to stuff that was traded online in the late '90s, not the mid '00s (the h264 codec is great, and the ~768k bit rate they use is, if anything, overkill for their resolution, but the 320x240 resolution is just not competitive with what you can find on bittorrent these days [and as Jobs has said before in relation to music, the pirates are their real competition]).

          And they made the music burnable to a standard redbook CD so it could be easily backed up and used with your old equipment, but they made the video unable to be burned to a DVD... (I wonder if the studios demanded the burned DVDs be DRMed and were bitten in the ass by their earlier mandating that consumer DVD burners cannot burn CSS encrypted DVDs?)

          I wonder what balance of the causes of this was? Were the studios setting apple up to fail, or at least not succeed to fast for the competition to copy, after being frightened by apple's rapid success in selling music online? Or, was it largely a technical issue? Would letting the iPod decode 640x480 h264 have required more time/money/power than Apple felt they could spend to release the iPod /w video?

            • Re:I already have cable (Score:5, Funny)

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09 2006, @01:08AM (#14880918)
              Apple hater verification check
              rev 2.3
               
              [ ] Called Apple users "fags"
              [ ] Used "OS/X," "OSX," or "OS-X" instead of OS X
              [ ] Used the word "overpriced" while ignoring previously published price comparisons
              [ ] Described a Mac as "cheap PC parts"
              [ ] Vaguely accused iPod users of falling for marketing
              [ ] Confused install base with market share
              [ ] Referenced Xerox Sparc
              [ ] Referenced "Pirates of Silicon Valley"
              [X] Posted list of fictional cliches in a Slashdot discussion to avoid discussing a point
              [ ] Used the words "evil" and "DRM" in one sentence
              [ ] Gave someone else credit for an Apple innovation
              [ ] Made fun of a Switch commercial
              [X] Ignored a valid point in favor of bashing Apple users
              [ ] Made a one-button mouse joke
              [ ] Made reference to "white plastic"
              [ ] Called 99 cents "too expensive"
              [ ] Victoriously made reference to Microsoft's monopoly market share to avoid addressing a point
              [ ] Referenced a "lack of games" for Mac despite all big-name titles having Mac ports
              [ ] Pretended that normal computer users actually want to have to build an entire computer by themselves piece by piece, have knowledge about every transistor in the machine, and hand-tune C code for any piece of software the user might have an issue with
              [ ] Ignored when someone mentions that you're not a mechanic and didn't build your own car either
              [ ] Used the word "cult"
              [ ] Ignored that Apple was the first consumer GUI with built-in audio and graphics while PC users were staring at C:\> for the next 15 years.
               
              BONUS
              [ ] Claimed to hate Apple yet drooled over running OS X on generic PCs

  • Harder to share? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zakezuke (229119) on Wednesday March 08 2006, @11:55PM (#14880607)
    One question, as TV shows become available for sale on the Internet, will this make it harder to share clips online, such as through Google Video? In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true -TFA

    Totally easier to share, but that's hardly the point. The point is I pay for cable, and there is no way I'd pay for both cable service and downloads... so if what I watch is available for download at $10/season... I'd ditch the cable. I'm not offended by the idea of paying for media. I pay for cable, I chuck money tward PBS from time to time. I'm not that hip paying for DVDs as in contrast to downloads they take up a hell of alot less space.

    Parents would also be interested as I'm starting to notice more switching to video rentals rather cable subscriptions.

  • Legal starting to get more convenient than illegal (Score:5, Insightful)

    by brxndxn (461473) on Thursday March 09 2006, @12:03AM (#14880661)
    The whole point of piracy, imo, is to make all media (entertainment not limited by the economics of scarcity) more convienient than actually purchasing the media..

    But, even with piracy, there's annoying costs involved.. It takes a user's time to find the shit. The user has to be skilled enough to extract it, run it, store it, convert it, etc.. Also, users have to rely on each other to package pirated media in convenient forms.

    However, if one can pay a small fee to get ready access to their shows from anywhere, then piracy will die down. Once the actual media is more convenient than pirated media, piracy will be less of a problem. IMO, even most tenacious of pirates would rather have Google or Itunes store all their media so they could access it from their set-top boxes, Ipods, PSPs, cell-phones - all without having to take the time to convert it or store it on their own hard drives.

    But then, since the media companies are so determined to prove piracy as a bigger problem than it is - as a display of greed not necessarily good for the media industry - they DRM the hell out of everything. So, most people that are used to controlling their own media just ignore everything with DRM.

    Piracy, for consumers, IS A GOOD THING. The more consumers pirate, the more media companies will be FORCED to innovate and adapt. If the media companies were entirely in control, we'd probby be forced to listen to only the 10 most-popular songs on Clearchannel, watch reality tv with 1/2 the time being commercials, and call an 800 number to ask permission for every time we use the media.

    IMO, what Apple is doing is a GOOD thing. It's just hilariously funny how Apple is doing it while becomming an unecessary middleman since the media companies have their heads so far up their own asses they can't realize that they are NOT in control of what the consumer wants - or even their own media once the consumer consumes it.

    I support the principles of piracy.. I think it's morally acceptable to pirate when the pirated media is more convenient (with more features) than the regular media. The marketplace is about the consumer - not the producer. If I decide to put my Chiquita banana on a stripper's tit covered in chocolate and take pictures of it, Chiquita can't cry when I'm not consuming it like a normal monkey. I feel the same way about media companies..

    If media companies had their way, they'd have control of our memories and erase everything they could re-sell us. So, we'd even forget we watched a movie or bought the DVD and blindly pay for it again. /end rant.. gonna eat a banana now.

  • Actually, (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AWhiteFlame (928642) on Thursday March 09 2006, @12:10AM (#14880689) Homepage
    This is pretty cool. The iTunes model .. could be worse. With my Mac that runs iTunes and my iPod, I hardly even notice the DRM. iTunes prices are very reasonable, legit :P, and go straight into my library. AAC provides decent enough music for my 2.1 speaker system (or my headphones). iTMS MPEG-4 provides decent enough quality video for 2 bucks an episode. There is definitely tons of room for improvement, but seeing as they're the dominant force in the online legit music business, they could make the predicament much, much worse.

  • There is a word for this... (Score:5, Funny)

    by SetupWeasel (54062) on Thursday March 09 2006, @12:33AM (#14880788) Homepage
    "In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true."

    I believe the proper expression is:

    Answer with truthiness.
  • I hope everyone's watching closely as fair use is lying on its deathbed.

    Lots of Slashdotters are hailing this development as a move away from traditional TV-based distribution to online video sales. It sounds nifty on paper, but let's look to the future. If these online video stores end up becoming popular enough to supplant TV distribution, fair use is screwed. These videos are DRM encumbered, and breaking that protection is against the law. TV shows like the Daily Show and Colbert Report depend on their being a large pool of accessible content to discuss and parody. Once it's all online and DRM encumbered, they won't be able to use that content without breaking the law. Want to add background music to your home videos? I hope you didn't buy your music online. Even though this type of use isn't specifically protected under copyright law, it is still felt to be perfectly acceptable by the masses, and courts would probably back it based on the same logic that stopped Hollywood from taking time-shifting away from us.

    The future looks bleak for creative works online. These developments call for an overhaul of our copyright laws, but it really doesn't look like that's going to happen. Should a work that is only available in a DRM encumbered form still be protected by copyright? If so, why? Copyright was granted to copyright creators for a limited term, but with DRM, not only do they take away fair use, but they also gain the ability to close up their work forever. Hopefully someone gets elected soon that sees and is willing to fix the many problems with our copyright laws.

    • Re:While good - why not unlimited I-Tunes pass (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Yahweh Doesn't Exist (906833) on Wednesday March 08 2006, @11:50PM (#14880577)
      >Am I the only one thinking this is the first step to subscription music on the IPod

      no, but you seem to be one of the people who are falsely under the impression that "subscription" means rental, which it does not in either the general case or the case of iTunes video passes.

      here "subscription" has its tru meaning, as applied for example to magazines, in that you pay for something in advance (at discount) and receive the product periodically when it is actually published.

      this is not to be confused with BS "subscription" services which take away what you already have when you stop paying.
      • I listen to the same audio track tens, if not hundreds of times. I watch the same video a maximum of two, maybe three times (except in exceptional cases). For the first, a purchase model makes sense. I buy a track, and then I can listen to it as many times as I like. For the second, a rental model makes more sense - I pay a monthly fee and I get to watch whatever I want.

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