The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.
Exploding TV: Fat Actress meets fat pipe
: Yahoo will air the first episode of Fat Actress before it airs on Showtime. Damned smart. Showtime will reach a larger audience. Time will tell what the best distribution mechanism is for such programming — or whether that choice is left us us instead of to the industry moguls.
This is like a publisher distributing a book to libraries before releasing it to stores; an unusual promotion for the book — and helps the libraries build traffic I guess, but the unorthodox distribution is still in the hands of the “industry moguls”, not the readers.
You’re right, time will tell about the best distribution mechanizism, but will “on demand” commoditize programming? Does distribution drive programming or programming drive distribution? Any thoughts?
I believe Yahoo! will actually air the debut of Fat Actress at the same time as its debut on premium cable. A small difference, I know. But the best part? Yahoo! will keep the show online for 5 days after, so you don’t have to actually, you know, wrap your personal schedule around Showtime’s.
Yahoo: another small bite taken out of TiVo’s pie!
why do you want to kill Tivo? Why is Yahoo a better overlord than Tivo? And what makes you think Showtime isn’t showing the show about 10 times a week?
Oh, and Jeffo — I trust the industry people more than you.
Anybody knows somobody at Yahoo or Showtime whom I can contact and have the clip put on DV Guide (dv.open4all.info) as a torrent?
Ed, I’m a TiVo fan but in the long run it will be replaced, possibly by the TiVo company, with a box that will go retrieve items from the net to show us.
Microsoft is already working on this with Comcast, as is Tivo. Old news, really; these IP-based systems will actually be more efficient because they won’t require every channel to be broadcast all the time (as cable is now); you’ll merely open a new stream to the server.
This sort of plan require a lot of things falling in place, such as widespread implementation of Metro Ethernet. In the end, Yahoo is the least important piece of the puzzle.
bittorrent = piracy. Nice try, me hearty, but there’s no frickin’ way Yahoo is going to give you somnething like a Showtime show so you can distribute it free of charge.