DrunkenBlog

The Battlestar Galactica stream

The Sci-Fi channel has put up the first episode of Battlestar Galactica up for viewing online, commercial-free, along with several deleted scenes. If you're curious about the show -- I'd go check it out, although if you had the option I'd find some way to view the mini-series first.

Yes, it's streaming and not for download. Yes, it's in Real Media format and fairly low-resolution (hint: right-click and choose 'view in player' so you can increase the size). It's still cool as hell, and still one hell of a smart move. While the specifics can possibly be improved, this is a pretty noticeable crack in the damn.

Battlestar is getting a lot of a lot of critical acclaim, let alone the great word of mouth, but you'd be surprised at how many people now just flag a show in their heads to possibly look for on DVD later simply because they started too late. You can watch any random episode of the Simpsons and enjoy it on its own, even though you might miss a few in-jokes... but many shows just aren't that episodic.

I hear Fox's 24 is good this season, but I'm not about to start now. Battlestar is another good example -- while you can enjoy each episode on its own, you really do miss something by not having the story built up in your head.

Letting people into the story early means they're even more likely to watch future episodes instead of waiting and not wanting to be 'lost'. Not everyone can relate to this, but I'm just one of those people where if I've missed the first few minutes of a show, I'll forgo watching the whole thing... it just maddens me.

How TV is currently setup just drives me insane, mostly because it's so artificial. Imagine everyone around you raving about, say, the Harry Potter books, and the tenth volume is sitting on the shelves of bookstores everywhere you go, but the first nine volumes are out of print.

It doesn't mean you wouldn't enjoy reading that tenth volume, just that the experience wouldn't be what it would if you had the whole frame of reference built up in your head.

I know all the talk right now is about movies instead of TiVo and big blockbusters instead of no-names, but my money is on TV surprising everyone with how lucrative it'll be online once things shake out.

So many problems in distribution go away, so many middle-men go away, that the opportunities for making bundles, especially for the independent studios, are going to lead to the new resurgence of TV.

This isn't original thought -- even though I rant about it often -- it's basically the idea of micro-programming, and it's what's shaking up music from so many different angles like the iTMS and satellite radio.

The idea is that while towards the end of its run it cost $1.5 million USD to produce an episode of Farscape, and the Sci-Fi channel could make money by airing it, they only have so many time slots and could make more money by airing something cheaper, even if it got lesser ratings.

With micro-programming, the opportunity-cost problem doesn't rear it's ugly head, which means the 'network' doesn't lose anything by carrying one show instead of the other as long as it's profitable. The only limit is how much you can watch.

Battlestar is still a fairly niche show, in the sense that it's on a high-number channel on cable. The numbers I saw were ratings in the 3.1 million viewer-range (as a comparison, something like Friends would do 20-40 million), which of course are hard to quantify because the ratings system is so screwed up, but it's all we have.

My understanding of how this works right now is a typical network like the Sci-Fi channel charges the cable company somewhere between $0.03 and $0.30 cents per viewer to carry the channel. The whole channel. Channels with higher ratings charge more to carry them, but per-subscriber it's not very much (this is opposed to something like HBO, which is theoretically commercial-free).

To supplement that, they sell advertising cutting into the individual shows, so rating do count because that's how they set advertising rates. I don't know how much Sci-Fi is paid per subscriber to carry the channel, but split across its 24 hours of programming it certainly wouldn't go very far. We'd be back to marionette spaceships really quickly if that's all they were able to pull in, and advertising was pulled altogether.

However, I'd be very surprised if they were paying over $1 million USD per episode of Battlestar Galatica. If 3.1 million are watching something that cost $1 million to create straight from the studio, to break even they need each person to pay $0.32 cents per episode to watch commercial free.

Of course it wouldn't have to be commercial-free, but as it stands right now a channel like Sci-Fi can't say "Pay an extra X and you can watch a version with no commercials...", the distribution setup just doesn't make that realistic, but online it basically costs them nothing, which goes back to the whole distribution deal... this would decimate costs.

Bandwidth costs, but generally in tiers. It's fairly expensive to move between tiers, but once you are willing to pay X to cross a threshold, it's practically free until you hit the next tier. Services like Akamai mean you basically don't really have to worry about building out your own network. And right now, there are a lot of distribution problems with TV, even more so than movies, because there's so much more TV content created.

That 3.1 million figure is for the Sci-Fi channel alone -- it's also distributed through channels in the UK, Australia, all over the world. They can still distribute through those literal channels globally, but by using the infrastructure of the web they're already catering to a global audience, all at the same time, not segmented around the world through different channels and schedules.

That last part is more important than you might think -- as the people are generally going to get the content they want anyways. Battlestar is an aberration, in that those in the UK saw the series before we here in the USA, in the majority of cases it works the other way. It's sad to mention a show to a friend in Australia and find it's just coming on there while it's starting its third season here.

Networks overseas generally don't want to start shelling out for syndication rights before they know a show has a good chance of being a hit, and often times don't want to pay first-dibs syndication rights... better just to wait, which means people get what they want online anyways. This is already a huge phenomenon, but of course for those with the will and desire to figure out how to get what they want.

Made simple and easy and cheap, a fledgling show like Battlestar would have no problems pulling in gobs of cash, even through the screams of the middle men as technology cut them off at the knees. Once everything is really up and running, I just really don't think a show like Battlestar would have any problems pulling in 5+ million global viewers like that, but it does beg the question of what the cable companies are then going to carry.

They aren't going to be happy about being relegated to just the bandwidth provider as consumers go direct-to-the-studio, that's too much cash to be cut out of, and I'm sure we're in for a lot of bleating.

Movies are coming in this form. I'm convinced we'll see something come from Apple on it this year, and I'm sure getting the music labels on board will seem 'easy' compared to what they're having to deal with now. What do you do in a case like Sony, who not only owns the rights to things like Spider-man but also has a division that competes with the iPod?

Still, while movies are cool it's just not where my heart is -- it's in TV, because it has the most ability to grow. You can make an entire season of a show for the production costs of a cheap movie, and so much of what we watch on TV has been retarded by the system.

Sweeps are an example, with artificial and contrived cliff-hangers being thrown in just to try to suck in some extra points, and it's hard not to go back to how greatly shows are affected by the artificial constraints the medium is shackled by.

A show like Battlestar, or one of my brand-new favorites -- 'Tilt' on ESPN -- after a few shows practically has to devote 5 minutes to "previously, on..." just so you aren't completely lost.

All these types of stupid constraints -- and at this point they are stupid because they're unnecessary -- go out the window. The actual numbers and math I used shouldn't be taken as gospel, as the real equation would be a very fuzzy thing, but probably even more in favor of what I want than not.

Best yet, the shows we like have a higher likelihood of staying on 'the air', because it's actually pretty hard to make a TV show, or a movie now (with the advent of DVD, etc.) that doesn't make money... it's just hard to make one that makes more than what could otherwise be generated in the same time slot.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    February 26, 2005, at 08:37 PM