For some time, I have been arguing in debates that Media companies should adopt different distribution and pricing mechanisms to keep up with changing times. Essentially, there are two kinds of media. One for which you pro-actively pay - films or Music CDs and others which you implicitly pay (by buying the endorsed products) - TV serials, Radio etc.
My primarily problem is that both these kinds of media should be available in different forms also. For instance, I should be able to download the latest movie and I am willing to pay a reasonable amount of money for that - say Rs. 100 for a doanload. How do I come up with that number. Well, I am taking into account two sections - one is what would the film-maker receive from my buying two tickets at the theatre - possibly around Rs. 50-60. The rest is for covering the cost of setting up the Infrastructure for people to be able to download the movie.
Why am I proposing this alternative? Primarily because I hate going to theaters. They are way too costly for me to afford (I am including the cost of transport and the popcorn-Coke to the ticket cost), and is too much effort in a crowded city like Bangalore. So I want to watch the latest movie and willing to pay for it.
The problem is that no film-maker is willing to even experiment with this method. The fact is, that hardly deters anybody from still watching the movie at home, and that for free. There was a time that people would make significant efforts to download a movie online, but I realized it's so much more easier these days with reliable-fatter bandwidths and ever-improving codecs. A full 3 hour movie is probably 400MB these days and thats not too difficult to download on a 512 Kbps pipe.
Anyhow, going further with our discussion, I also propose that the second kind of media, for which you don't pay directly, should be freely available for people to watch it at alternative times. The media can contain the same ads as shown in the original (with probably better targeting and improving conversion rates). Movin997.com streams live the Movin 99.7 San Fransisco radio station. I loved this station when I visited the Bay Area earlier this weekend and I pick up songs regularly on the Internet while sitting in India.
In fact, most popular Indian TV shows are already available on Youtube, and with a little ingenuity, not only can you download a video from Youtube, you can even convert it and have it in iPod, iPhone, where you can watch it whenever you find time. Most TV serials are just content driven and hence the quality of the screen or the picture hardly makes a difference. And hence I wouldn't mind watching the latest episode of the "Great Indian Laughter Challenge" on my iPod on my way back from office (I use the company shuttle, so no driving :-)
Alas, the media companies have hardly picked up this business model, in spite of this having been suggested enough times on the blogosphere. Having said that, I feel elated that Hulu.com (the legal media streaming site) is picking up traction - close to 9M people visiting the site.
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