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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Because everyone is actually willing to pay for content, if the price is right, and it is sufficiently easier than the free alternative.

Case in point: TV shows. You can either click a single button and download the TV show from really fast servers, be notified of new episodes (and even auto-download) automatically...

or you can go to a shady torrent site with porn popups all over the place, install a torrent client (and set it up, which behind a NAT is non-trivial for most laymen), find a good torrent search engine, download your torrent, and curse your machine because public trackers are full of leechers who don't upload.

Yeah, I'd pay for the former too.

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Exactly. Where are my $2 episodes that I can download legally?

A decently popular cable show probably has around 2 million weekly viewers. Make it super easy to get the episodes in 720p for $2, and that is $4 million a week in revenue, or $80 million for a 20 episode season (plus merch and dvd collections afterwards). I'm not sure what a season of a given cable show costs to make, but I'd be surprised if it was $80 million.

From the consumer's perspective, we are used to paying $60-100/mo for cable. If episodes cost $2 and we watched four a month, that is $8 per show per month. Our normal $60-100 would buy us 7-12 shows, which I imagine is more than most people follow anyway.

Same could be true for sporting events. I'd gladly pay $4-5 to watch streaming high def games. The company would make a killing off me in March, but I'd still pay it because it's worth it to me to not have to buy a whole cable package just to watch one month of basketball.

Internet distribution is also a good way for studios to try out riskier ideas. The problem with the broadcast TV structure right now is that nobody dares put an aggressively creative show in a prime time slot - it's money on the table basically. So great new shows that may have attracted a solid fan base get thrown into suicide time slots, and inevitably fail.

With TV-on-demand (in all of its forms, not just the pay-per-episode format) you can do two things:

- Make risky shows just as accessible as the top blockbusters, giving them a real shot at success.

- Play with your price point. People may be willing to pay $2 an episode for Lost, but maybe they'll pay less for a more obscure show? Who knows, maybe you can charge more.

Up here in Canada Apple doesn't offer most of the shows that I follow, or I would be a regular customer... Neither does Hulu or Amazon... a bit of an untapped market I think, especially given how high cable rates are around here...

Where are my $2 episodes that I can download legally?

Amazon On Demand, I think they call it these days.

It has, quite literally, every American TV show I have watched in the last 2 years.

The player is terrible, and throws up 3 prompts to escalate every time I open or close it on Vista. The download speeds are slow. The quality is unexceptional. But darn it, TV for $2 an episode -- I'm there.

(I'm not the world's best spokesman because I live in Japan, all of their stuff is licensed for the US only, and I get it by using a proxy on my server in St. Louis to defeat their geocoding. If the rights holders really want my yen instead of my dollars dupe this in Japan and you've got them.)

I don't want to watch it on some crappy player in my browser (although I love Hulu and am willing to do browser + commercials for free content), I want to download a DRM-free 720p video file. Basically I want the same quality I can find on TPB, and I'm willing to pay a couple dollars an episode for it.

Make it easy to get (rss feed of torrents so I can just set it to automatically download) and I'd gladly pay to support a show I liked.

(And really it doesn't have to be a torrent if that word scares the networks. I was just suggesting that because it'd save the provider A LOT of bandwidth.)

Ouch. $2 an episode would be harsh for me.

Our cable bill is like, $80 and that includes internet. So maybe $40 of that is for TV.

And I watch a bunch of different shows. CSI x 3, Law and Order, Bones, House, NCIS, Fringe, The Mentalist, Psych, Criminal Minds, Numbers, Law and Order, Lie to Me.

At $2 a show, per week, that'd set me back.. about $110 a month!

Far more than I pay for cable right now.

I'm not saying that a la carte has to be the only option... I'd just like if it was an option.

Where are my $2 episodes that I can download legally?

I can't tell if this is a rhetorical question. Most shows I want to watch cost $1.99 at the iTunes store...

They are $2.99 for HD, and they are DRM'd.

> Purchases you make from the iTunes Store can be played on up to five computers that you authorize using your iTunes Store account name and password.

Although, yeah, they are close!

But does the DRM really get in the way of how most people watch shows (ie: once)?

The thing with $2 per episode is that once I watch an episode, I don't really want to watch it again (at least for a month or so). $2 per show is too much for 1 watch. Subscriptions are a better route IMO. I could watch whatever I want (new and old) whenever I wanted without commercials and on demand. ATT Uverse has something like this: We pay for the monthly access, and I can watch VOD (Video On Demand) - both movies AND tv shows, and I'm mostly happy with it. Hulu is my favorite option right now, but I can't go back and watch older shows.

Where are my $2 episodes that I can download legally?

You can get a large number of shows for free (and legally) at hulu.com No HBO/Showtime stuff, but most of the rest is there.

Only if you live in US, or are willing to mess with US proxy.

Sadly, most of the world does not live in US and therefore, hulu.com is not an option for them. Torrent is.

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