Watching TV online, Netflix, Hulu, etc.--Pros and cons

I am 100% behind the future of TV migrating to the internet. I'm more than happy to watch the random ad here or there as long as certain "legacy" and current TV shows are available to me at anytime. I think the internet is truly the future of television. However, many companies seem about as reluctant to do online TV justice as the auto industry was when building the electric car. Two of the worst offenses that need to be addressed before online TV is banished by the corporate elite as an unsuccessful venture:

Quality streaming! I get Netflix and would be head over heals in love with the Watch Instantly feature had I anything above the minimum DSL bandwidth. Netflix offers absolutely no buffering when streaming movies. You are forced to take what they recommend is your best video quality, which for me is always so poor that I can barely make out what is on screen. Netflix seems to be a primary leader in pushing online TV, so why in the world is their service so exclusive?

Permanent commitments! There is nothing worse than watching epsiodes of TV online only to have certain episodes yanked before you get to them. Or worse yet, appear and disappear, seemingly at random, until you simply give up in frustration. There should be an unwritten law that once posted, do not remove!

It seems to me that the movie industry is terrified of having anything available online and are only making the minimum effort and providing terrible service, perhaps in the hopes that people will demand it less. Hulu.com is a site that has really impressed me--they just added a buffering system that allows me to watch in 420P even with my slow as molasses DSL line, and the buffer time is incredibly small! The range of quality between network video players is all over the map, and the leader of the movement, Netflix, has customers actually paying for shoddy service. I hope that some of the suits can pull their heads out of their butts and start to understand the latest tech. I'm getting tired of waiting around for the future to get here.

So, what are your thoughts on online TV?

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My thoughts are that the only reason that it isn't done already is the extreme cost of necessary storage space and internet bandwidth. That is why some shows get yanked - they have to make room for other shows. I believe an hour-long DVR-MS (the format Media Center records in) of standard def TV is well over a gigabyte in size. Then you have the higher-def, DVD quality versions which are far larger. A DVD movie, minus the menu and bonus features, is about 6 gigabytes in size.

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There is nothing worse than watching episodes of TV online only to have certain episodes yanked before you get to them.

By the time I saw the first promo on TV for Heroes season 3 it was already well into the season. I went online and found they had already deleted the first two episodes! So I had to settle for watching the 2 minute recaps for those and then watch the full episode 3. On the bright side without online viewing I would have missed much more than that. One thing that really bugs me with the online viewing is that eventhough they show less ads than broadcast/cable TV they will only show one ad repeatedly for an entire episode causing ad fatigue.

My thoughts are that the only reason that it isn't done already is the extreme cost of necessary storage space and internet bandwidth.

Keeping older episodes around does require addition storage (which is getting cheaper every year) but only requires addition bandwidth if it leads to more viewing but that results in greater ad revenue. I think they pull the older episodes of popular shows so that you will be forced to view it in a re-run on broadcast/cable TV where they make more ad revenue or buy the season when it is released on DVD.

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For what it is worth, as long as they keep blocking viewing from people outside of ConUS, by IP checking then I'll keep downloading shows without any commercials. It is meaningless to sign up for an account and jump through all the hoops then they cut you off because your "international". I get really, really sick of content companies or media vendors telling me what market I'm in. I decide that not them.

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THere are others you can download, i mean online tv viewing programs. One is call PPLive, the other is call PPStream. Google around and you guys should find it. They keep popular stuff on their servers for awhile, so hopefully what you guys are looking for will still be there. Keep in mind that it has stuff from Asia too, since it is mostly serves the Asian sector of the North American market.

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I'm cool. I get every show I want in HD in minutes and I dont have to install any other programs. What is sad about the whole thing is I want to pay for the show and tried several times but they wont let me - so free it is... The entire concept of region based marketing needs to be done away with pure and simple. Content should be based on language only. To me it is the best and ONLY form of market segregation. For example I cannot read, write or speak the local language in the geopolitical area I live in so I will never, ever be part of the market here for any content beyond purely artistic imagery - which does not require any language skills.

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The entire concept of region based marketing needs to be done away with pure and simple. Content should be based on language only.

Region based marketing will be around as long as proximity to your customers is important. Joe's Pizza in Fredericksburg, VA only wants to market to potential customers within a short drive. Thus regional ads cost a large premium over national ads. This past summer AOL Radio outsourced its streaming to CBS Radio. AOL Radio was losing money and with the new royalties the record companies were demanding to make up for lost CD sales, there was no hope of turning a profit with national ads. Under the deal AOL Radio programs and promotes the streams, CBS Radio hosts the streams, pays the royalties, and sales local ads. with its nationwide salesforce which provide greater revenue. Both companies share the ad revenue. Yahoo's LAUNCHcast recently announced a similar deal with CBS Radio.

Before AOL could start placing episodes of old shows like Babylon 5, Kung Fu, Wonder Woman, etc. back in 2005, it needed to get approval from all those with rights to the content for each episode which was not just production companies but often also directors, writers, stars, etc. This also meant restricting the content to those in the USA because some shows are still shown on broadcast/cable in other countries, for example, Babylon 5 is still popular in Germany.

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Defining market demographics based on reasonable reach with regards to product expectations is fine. However I doubt Joe's Pizza will tell a visitor at a local hotel or even one staying at a friend's house that they won't sell them a pizza since they are not local residents proper. Also refining ones business model to accommodate local market dynamics is fine and it is not inherently exclusive to ONLY local residents. Moreover your last paragraph makes my point. It is ridiculous for companies and by extension people to have to jump through such hoops to get product and services or to market such things.

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