Apps and Software By Russell Holly Aug. 15, 2014 11:29 am
Streaming video is amazing right now. You can skip the DVR and grab a Hulu Plus subscription, binge watch entire seasons of long-retired television shows with Amazon Prime and Netflix, and if you feel like you love something enough to own it you can purchase digital copies through iTunes and Google Play and just download them. It’s a pretty sweet time to be a streaming video user, and it’s only going to get better from here. Still, things aren’t perfect, but each potential problem presents itself with an opportunity to reshape this industry.
Right now it is next to impossible to use just one service for all of your streaming video. Even if you accept services like YouTube and Vimeo as just temporary video clip services instead of looking at them as the massive user-created content distribution systems they are, there’s not one that offers everything just the way we want it yet. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it means these companies have to compete with one another aggressively in order to earn our business.
On a higher level, it also reduces the number of users willing to sever ties with cable companies and live entirely on streaming content. It all depends on how much you are willing to pay, but with little exception if it is on the TV or in the Box Office you can get it with an Internet connection.
The intial Chromecast interface.
[h=3]Available (almost) everywhere[/h]The biggest reason streaming video services do so well right now is their availability. My iPad mini is the first thing I slide into a gadget bag when traveling, because I know it has everything I could possibly want to watch on it. I can pull it out in the hotel room, or while on an airplane, and just know that as long as I have an Internet connection I have something to watch.
Game consoles and streaming set top boxes are largely just as convenient. Whether it’s the Xbox One, Google’s Chromecast, or an Amazon Fire TV, there’s a good chance I can watch whatever I want on the TV. There’s a few hiccups, like Amazon Instant Video on any Google product or Showtime on anything but the Amazon Fire TV, but for the most part if you have an Internet connection and a screen you have the content you want to watch.
If for no other reason than convenience, never needing to worry about a portable hard drive with all of my HD rips or those terrible binders full of disc sleeves to conveniently store all of your discs, streaming video is just plain easy.
[h=3]Running with original content[/h]The coolest thing to come from the explosive growth in streaming media is original content. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and soon Microsoft are all releasing original content. The best part of this is that, so far, a lot of it has been exceptional. Amazon threw a bunch of darts at a wall to see what would stick, but Hulu and Netflix both have taken great strides in providing content that works for their audience. It is often remarked that Netflix wants to be HBO, and with the near cult-like following shows like HBO’s The Newsroom and Netflix’s House of Cards have gained recently it’s easy to see the parallel. This idea transforms services like Netflix from an accessory service into a major part of your entertainment package, and unlike regular television you can take it with you anywhere.
Hulu and Netflix have also used this format to introduce content that is relatively low-risk but targeted to specific audiences. Netflix picked up Arrested Development after it was cancelled on regular TV, and the response when an entire new season had been made available at the flip of a switch was incredible.
In the same light, Hulu partnered with VizMedia to re-release the classic Japanese anime Sailor Moon entirely in a digital format. Sailor Moon was originally released here in the US in the 90′s, but so much of the original content was deemed inappropriate for children that the US broadcasts of the series were heavily edited. During a recent panel on Sailor Moon Crystal, VizMedia shared their excitement in regard to the response the re-release has seen so far. Despite being subtitled, with a US dubbed version due out soon, each episode of Sailor Moon Crystal is in Hulu’s top 5 viewed videos on release day.
[h=3]Rentals are still broken[/h]Unfortunately, there’s still some strange disconnects when it comes to an all streaming existence. If you are on Android you can’t get Amazon streaming services, and that’s a real shame. Amazon Instant Video with a Prime subscription is one of the best services out there, because it combines the all-you-can-watch smorgasbord mentality with a rental service. This means that a lot of folks rely on iTunes, Google Play, and others to rent and buy videos digitally.
Strangely, we use the exact same format for digital rentals as we did for physical rentals. When you used to rent a physical disc, the person renting you the disc had to buy multiple copies of the same movie and assumed a certain amount of risk. The cost of a rental, which was usually about a quarter of the price of just buying the movie outright, meant that after a couple of rentals the owner of that physical copy could turn a profit. When it was time to shrink the inventory down, the owner of that disc would offer to sell it to the person renting it for significantly less than the retail cost of the movie.
Rental services are still a critical part of the video industry, because it allows people to watch things without paying full price for them. Plus, since a single file only costs bandwidth once it hits a server, the rental format is a huge cash cow for the service providers. For some reason, no one is making any attempt to upsell a user from the rental to ownership. If you rent a movie on Google Play for $3.99, and immediately afterwards decide you want that movie to be a part of your collection, Google still has to charge you $19.99 for the HD version of that movie.
[h=3]The case for unification[/h]What the streaming video industry needs right now is some cooperation. Users should be able to shift seamlessly from watching the back half of Stargate Atlantis Season 1 to renting Captain America: The Winter Soldier. At the end of that movie, there should be a prompt asking if you’d like to own the movie with a price tag that looks something like the full price of the movie with the cost of the rental subtracted, give or take a dollar or two. After that transaction is complete, or after the user has refused the upsell, there should be some guidance to similar content on other services. For example, the episode of How It Should Have Ended that relates directly to that movie.
We can’t have just one service, because there’s just too much content out there being offered in too many ways to please everyone. What would make a lot more sense is some kind of unity between these systems, in some kind of mutually beneficial agreement. Some of this can be handled through hardware, like the Roku boxes. Most of the problems we see today are software, and that can be fixed if the content retailers see value in doing so.
At the end of the day, streaming video has the potential to be so much more than what it is right now. Which is cool, because it’s already awesome.
More...
Right now it is next to impossible to use just one service for all of your streaming video. Even if you accept services like YouTube and Vimeo as just temporary video clip services instead of looking at them as the massive user-created content distribution systems they are, there’s not one that offers everything just the way we want it yet. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it means these companies have to compete with one another aggressively in order to earn our business.
On a higher level, it also reduces the number of users willing to sever ties with cable companies and live entirely on streaming content. It all depends on how much you are willing to pay, but with little exception if it is on the TV or in the Box Office you can get it with an Internet connection.
The intial Chromecast interface.[h=3]Available (almost) everywhere[/h]The biggest reason streaming video services do so well right now is their availability. My iPad mini is the first thing I slide into a gadget bag when traveling, because I know it has everything I could possibly want to watch on it. I can pull it out in the hotel room, or while on an airplane, and just know that as long as I have an Internet connection I have something to watch.
Game consoles and streaming set top boxes are largely just as convenient. Whether it’s the Xbox One, Google’s Chromecast, or an Amazon Fire TV, there’s a good chance I can watch whatever I want on the TV. There’s a few hiccups, like Amazon Instant Video on any Google product or Showtime on anything but the Amazon Fire TV, but for the most part if you have an Internet connection and a screen you have the content you want to watch.
If for no other reason than convenience, never needing to worry about a portable hard drive with all of my HD rips or those terrible binders full of disc sleeves to conveniently store all of your discs, streaming video is just plain easy.
[h=3]Running with original content[/h]The coolest thing to come from the explosive growth in streaming media is original content. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and soon Microsoft are all releasing original content. The best part of this is that, so far, a lot of it has been exceptional. Amazon threw a bunch of darts at a wall to see what would stick, but Hulu and Netflix both have taken great strides in providing content that works for their audience. It is often remarked that Netflix wants to be HBO, and with the near cult-like following shows like HBO’s The Newsroom and Netflix’s House of Cards have gained recently it’s easy to see the parallel. This idea transforms services like Netflix from an accessory service into a major part of your entertainment package, and unlike regular television you can take it with you anywhere.
Hulu and Netflix have also used this format to introduce content that is relatively low-risk but targeted to specific audiences. Netflix picked up Arrested Development after it was cancelled on regular TV, and the response when an entire new season had been made available at the flip of a switch was incredible.
In the same light, Hulu partnered with VizMedia to re-release the classic Japanese anime Sailor Moon entirely in a digital format. Sailor Moon was originally released here in the US in the 90′s, but so much of the original content was deemed inappropriate for children that the US broadcasts of the series were heavily edited. During a recent panel on Sailor Moon Crystal, VizMedia shared their excitement in regard to the response the re-release has seen so far. Despite being subtitled, with a US dubbed version due out soon, each episode of Sailor Moon Crystal is in Hulu’s top 5 viewed videos on release day.
[h=3]Rentals are still broken[/h]Unfortunately, there’s still some strange disconnects when it comes to an all streaming existence. If you are on Android you can’t get Amazon streaming services, and that’s a real shame. Amazon Instant Video with a Prime subscription is one of the best services out there, because it combines the all-you-can-watch smorgasbord mentality with a rental service. This means that a lot of folks rely on iTunes, Google Play, and others to rent and buy videos digitally.
Strangely, we use the exact same format for digital rentals as we did for physical rentals. When you used to rent a physical disc, the person renting you the disc had to buy multiple copies of the same movie and assumed a certain amount of risk. The cost of a rental, which was usually about a quarter of the price of just buying the movie outright, meant that after a couple of rentals the owner of that physical copy could turn a profit. When it was time to shrink the inventory down, the owner of that disc would offer to sell it to the person renting it for significantly less than the retail cost of the movie.
Rental services are still a critical part of the video industry, because it allows people to watch things without paying full price for them. Plus, since a single file only costs bandwidth once it hits a server, the rental format is a huge cash cow for the service providers. For some reason, no one is making any attempt to upsell a user from the rental to ownership. If you rent a movie on Google Play for $3.99, and immediately afterwards decide you want that movie to be a part of your collection, Google still has to charge you $19.99 for the HD version of that movie.
[h=3]The case for unification[/h]What the streaming video industry needs right now is some cooperation. Users should be able to shift seamlessly from watching the back half of Stargate Atlantis Season 1 to renting Captain America: The Winter Soldier. At the end of that movie, there should be a prompt asking if you’d like to own the movie with a price tag that looks something like the full price of the movie with the cost of the rental subtracted, give or take a dollar or two. After that transaction is complete, or after the user has refused the upsell, there should be some guidance to similar content on other services. For example, the episode of How It Should Have Ended that relates directly to that movie.
We can’t have just one service, because there’s just too much content out there being offered in too many ways to please everyone. What would make a lot more sense is some kind of unity between these systems, in some kind of mutually beneficial agreement. Some of this can be handled through hardware, like the Roku boxes. Most of the problems we see today are software, and that can be fixed if the content retailers see value in doing so.
At the end of the day, streaming video has the potential to be so much more than what it is right now. Which is cool, because it’s already awesome.
More...
