Will Amazon expand TV Play option to facilitate ala carte video on demand?

Just noticed that Amazon is now offering a "TV Play" option for future episodes of selected television series like popular series produced by AMC.  This is like video-on-demand for each episode you may have missed of a TV series you may be following.

I noticed this option when I received a postcard from DISH network mentioning a special offer available for DISH customers that were watching some of the original series produced by AMC but now no longer available through DISH (because of a pricing dispute) like Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead and Hell on Wheels.  Since the postcard mentioned Amazon Video as their recommended viewing alternative, I went up on Amazon and noticed the new TV Play option for Hell On Wheels (about the construction of the transcontinental railroad) that we were following on AMC.  So I called the phone number DISH provided on the postcard to see if they had some kind of coupon code and they actually gave me a credit on my DISH account equivalent to the cost of streaming this coming season's episodes of Hell On Wheels using Amazon Video.

Is this one of the first cracks to appear in the armor of the tier-based cable and satellite pricing structures?  If so, I applaud Amazon Video for taking a bold step to offer this service and DISH Network for being concerned enough about their customers to offer the equivalent of a credit for a loss in viewing opportunity created by a contract dispute.

However, I would urge Amazon (and their studio partners) to be a little more reasonable in their pricing if this service is expanded to other channels.  $2.84 per HD episode ($1.89 per SD episode) seems a bit steep for only one episode of one series on one channel. HBO charges even more - $3 per HD, $2.23 per SD episode (at least for Game of Thrones) if you order a full season.  I think they should recalibrate and look more toward the 99 cents per episode price point.

However, if I could order per series for some offerings and per episode for other channels (like a particular program on Nat Geo), I would definitely consider relinquishing most of my cable tiers and go back to basic channels only.  As it is I pay more than $100 per month for America's Top 250 so I can get access to History Channel International but end up watching Netflix most nights  anyway.

I actually prefer to watch episodic dramas on Netflix so I can watch back-to-back episodes, allowing me to follow continuing story lines more closely and identify more deeply with the main characters.  I also don't have to worry about the network skipping weeks and preempting regular programming for things like sports playoffs or political conventions.  If that happens I often lose track of when the series I am watching will resume and miss several episodes all together making it difficult to pick back up where I left off.  This happened to me with "Heroes" and with "Flash Forward", two excellent series but both interrupted repeatedly by network "special" broadcasts of other programming that caused me to become confused about what was happening and lose interest.

What we may really need is to go back to basic broadcast networks that focus on news and talk shows and use ala carte streaming for original dramatic series and educational or edutainment programs.  Sometimes I marvel at technology advancements that end up going full circle and resurrecting older business models.  Years ago when PC networks were first being developed and individual workstations had relatively limited hard drive space, we used to encourage our users to store all of their data on the network server.  Then PCs began to have much larger hard drives and people began saving large multimedia files and our network servers became overwhelmed so we took a step backward and asked people to store only files being shared with others on the central network server and use their local hard drive for their own personal data.  Then cloud services came along and network infrastructure improved so much in transmission speed that now we again urge network users to store their data in the cloud and not on their hard drives any more.  So we are once again almost back to where we started!

Obviously, methods of delivery for video entertainment are in a dramatic state of flux right now and it will be interesting to see how everything shakes out. 

Related articles

• The half-cut cord: What's bugging me about cable
• AMC Is Thriving By Breaking the Rules of Legacy TV
• Don't put down that buffet plate! Why a la carte TV isn't here yet

Firefox now compatible with Netflix Streaming! Yeah!!

My older PC workstation in my home office seems to revolt if I try to use Internet Explorer on it and for quite a while that meant downloading movies from my Netflix instant queue was dicey at best.  If I just ignored the "Internet Explorer has encountered an unknown problem and must close" error and left it minimized on my desktop I could go ahead and play the movie and it would USUALLY play but my system would later hang at some point.  If I tried to use Firefox - my regular default browser - I would get an error message telling me that the streaming service required Internet Explorer.  Well today I tried it again and behold - Firefox worked like a charm!  I did receive a notice that the content I had chosen to download (Spartacus: Blood and Sand) was protected by Microsoft Digital Rights Management software and asked if I wanted Silverlight to automatically install the proper software to play my selected choice.  Of course you have to agree or you can't watch the movie so I granted permission.  I had previously installed Silverlight for some multimedia work I was doing a while back so I'm not sure if someone who has never installed Silverlight would have to install it first or not.

Of course the other thing I was excited about was the availability of "Spartacus: Blood and Sand"  in streaming format before the last two episodes of the series on STARZ has even finished airing.  Go STARZ!!

I also noticed that the Wii has added the ability to stream movies from Netflix.  I already have a Roku player with that capability in the living room (I bought it about a year before I bought the Wii) but it looks like I will need to move my Wii to my office if I ever want to use it much as my retired husband spends a lot of his time watching TV in the living room and I can't get much screen time for the Wii.

I've been thinking about buying a 40" Proscan LCD HD TV for my office (It's price is less than $500 - not bad for 40" and I'm used to playing the Wii on a 60" screen so I can't downsize too much!) and it would be nice to watch instant movies on it as well without having to add any more equipment. My husband is balking at this point, though, because he's afraid I'll spend even more time in my office than I do now.  But, come on, now - how much "Ax Men" can a girl take!!

Big Brother Tactics Give Amazon A Black Eye

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. - More: NY Times

I find the above incident hardly surprising. Recently I was notified by Roku that my new player now had the ability to obtain video-on-demand movies from Amazon. I went up to Amazon to activate my player for this service only to discover (by reading the service agreement's fine print) that Amazon, even though they were charging $14.99 to buy a downloadable movie - a price almost as high as a new release DVD - they advised that you download the movie and watch it as soon as possible because they did not guarantee that the film you purchase would be available for future viewing if the studio that released the film should decide to no longer offer it in downloadable format. The only thing surprising about the Kindle incident was that Amazon actually refunded the purchase price. I assumed that Amazon, by making such a disclaimer in their VOD agreement, was negating any liability for such an act and was not obligated to issue any refunds.

Anyway, needless to say, although I activated my Roku player for Amazon VOD services, I have never purchased a movie in that format. As for renting a movie from Amazon, I think Netflix is far more economical, even if you have to wait a bit for a disc and I can choose from hundreds of instantly available titles on my Roku device for free in the meantime.

Boxee may break the grip of tier-based broadcast services

Boxee may be just what we've all been waiting for to eliminate the gatekeeping of broadcast content by traditional cable and satellite providers. For years I have been frustrated by the "tier" system of purchasing broadcast content from first cable then later satellite television providers. Right now I have to pay for the maximum tier from Dish Network just to get History Channel International and the National Geographic Channel. They tout the tier as 250 America's best channels but we only watch about 15. I have no interest in using my television to play music. I have no interest in sports channels (and my husband doesn't either). I have no interest in religious channels or shopping channels or channels that blare the latest stock market reports (I can check the trading on particular stocks faster on the web). I don't have kids at home anymore so I don't need the cartoon channels, Nickelodian or the Disney channels. I'm not into racy programming so I don't need the adult channels. Netflix is far more cost effective than any of the Pay-per-view channels.

At least I have the ability to set up "Mary's favorites" so I don't have to scroll past all of the noise to select the few channels I want to watch. Even then, if I could watch programs on demand, I don't really need to constantly subscribe to even my preferred channels. The History Channel and the Military Channel rely far too heavily on old WWII newsreel footage to fill hours of programming time. Although the History Channel has been doing a little better lately, at one point in time people were calling it the "Hitler Channel". The Military Channel has also aired a few ancient warfare programs that were interesting too like "Warriors" and "The Battle for Rome" but spend most of their time acting as a running advertisement for US arms dealers and the Defense Department. Anyway, services like Boxee, in combination with websites offering on demand video, could finally put an end to this ridiculous business model that makes consumers spend so much money on product they don't even want. Of course I would have to wait for a PC version of the program and finally get around to giving up my Mitsubishi big screen TV and invest in some HD model.

"Boxee bills its software as a simple way to access multiple Internet video and music sites, and to bring them to a large monitor or television that one might be watching from a sofa across the room.

Some of Boxee’s fans also think it is much more: a way to euthanize that costly $100-a-month cable or satellite connection.

“Boxee has allowed me to replace cable with no remorse,” said Jef Holbrook, a 27-year-old actor in Columbus, Ga., who recently downloaded the Boxee software to the $600 Mac Mini he has connected to his television. “Most people my age would like to just pay for the channels they want, but cable refuses to give us that option. Services like Boxee, that allow users choice, are the future of television.”

The software, which is free and available for download at www.boxee.tv, works on Mac and Linux computers, and on Apple’s set-top box, Apple TV. A version of Boxee for Windows PCs is being tested among a limited group of users.

Boxee gives users a single interface to access all the photos, video and music on their hard drives, along with a wide range of television shows, movies and songs from sites like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, CNN.com and CBS.com.

Unlike the increasingly long and convoluted channel directories on most cable and satellite systems, Boxee offers a well-organized directory, which can be navigated using the remote controls that now ship with most computers."