BIG asS tV SHOws

17Sep/062

(capitalization of the title courtesy of my daughter)

So I decided to download a few of the new 640×480 TV shows from iTunes. They had an episode of Lost and Grey’s Anatomy. Can’t beat that price, even with DRM. So I click on it and they que up for download. Then I notice the file size. It’s close to 1GB for EACH SHOW.

I’ve got a standard DSL package at home, it’s fast enough for email, games, etc… So to download the two episodes (about 3 hours of video) iTunes estimated it would take 24 hours. I don’t live in the boondocks, I’m in the Seattle metro area. I could boost the speed of my DSL service, at a greater cost. And the resolution of these shows and movies isn’t even the HD that the nerd herd is clamoring for. I can’t imagine how big the true HD movies and shows would be. So a standard season, lets say 20 episodes, would take up about 10GB of space (give or take). Even on the cusp of the terrabyte era, that’s a lot of space.

I think it’ll be a long time before this kind of a’la carte programming takes off. I think at some point the networks will decide to cut out the middle-man (cable companies) and sell the season passes direct, while also selling through the major players like iTunes. My bet is that the major pro-sports leagues (NFL, NBA, MLB, maybe even the BCS or the NCAA) will be the first to offer a’la carte streaming though. They have the leverage with the networks and the money to pull it off. I know I’d pay 10$ each week to watch a Chiefs or K-State football game when my only other option is to fly back to Kansas or pay umpteen dollars for the ESPN passes that give me a bunch of teams I don’t care about. Heck, let me pay $100 just for all the Chiefs games each season. I’d pay that.

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http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/ Jeff Atwood

You don’t have a video size problem, you have a DSL problem. This is the achilles heel of DSL: terrible download speeds, combined with (typically) anemic upload speeds. On my garden variety cable modem, I can get 600kb/sec and sometimes up to 900kb/sec on downloads. This is in California, but it was also true in North Carolina on a completely different cable provider.
http://www.evanhoff.com/ Evan

Go Chiefs!

Sorry, I had to throw that in–being from KC originally.

And in general, I’d agree with Jeff. My old DSL line acted exactly like you are describing. The switch to a cable modem was a definite upgrade in speed. This has been true for me both in Tennesse (where I currently live) and in Missouri (back in the day).