The Gantry Launchpad

Battlestar Galactica, the new download frontier...

Dean reminds us that the first episode of the second season will be shown in less than 24 hours...

Just lemme know where the torrents are. :)

You know, this show could be the Itunes of television. Me, I'm not going to fork out $40/month to see that one show -there's not that much on cable I want to see-, but I'd still love to watch Battlestar Galactica.

I certainly wouldn't mind forking over a couple bucks to pick up a digital capture of a given episode.

So why not graduated downloads? Say $2 or $3 for a good quality digital TV recording, $5 for same with Dolby Digital, and maybe $8-$10 for HDTV w/5.1 sound?

The trick would be limiting this to paid-for downloads, but that's addressable.

Let's look at costs. I pay $7.50/month for 7000MB bandwidth. (Verve Hosting. Excellent service. HIGHLY recommended!!) At that cost I could afford to allow 10 downloads of a 700Mb episode, and that's very high quality. I've seen some (approx.) 350Mb episodes which are still good quality. In other words, a very high quality download (700Mb video file, AKA a single VCD disc) would be $0.75 cents a download, using my current, individual user plan.

So let's call it 20 downloads/month for $7.50, for the bandwidth. "Production" cost in this case is 20 downloads divided by $7.50/month, which gives 37.5 cents per episode downloaded. And that's using an el cheapo "bargain" plan.

Verve Hosting (my ISP) offers 35GB/month for $45/month. That means (roughly) 140 downloads for $45 server cost. In other words, $0.33 cents per download.

These are all end-user prices. I don't doubt that an industrial-strength server contract would allow greater economies to scale.

Now I'll be the first to admit that these are "back of the envelope" numbers. In this case, I think they're solid enough to conclude that $1/download (given 350Mb/episode) is a reasonable cost estimate.

And, yes, I'm ignoring start-up costs for the hypothetical BSG episode server. :)

But when you get right down to it, how many existing fans would be happy to buy legal copies of the episodes for $2-$3 for a 350Mb vid, or $5-$6 for an HQ copy (~ 700Mb)?

Me, I'd certainly go for the 350Mb stuff, and I'd look very favorably at a $5 cost for the HQ stuff, especially if it meant continued existance for the show.

In other words: forget the letter-writing campaigns, here's how real fans show their support. With money.

Even if the studio doesn't have a direct-to-DV machine on-hand, all you need is an HQ digital feed, and a digital video recorder. And how inexpensive is that? After that all they need is to distribute the copy to paying customers.

One way to discourage piracy would be distributing (via BitTorrent) encrypted ARJ or ZIP files. The password could be created for that account, then encrypted on the fly. Anyone in the world could distribute that encrypted ARJ or ZIP file, but you'd need the password to open it.

No, this wouldn't eliminate piracy, but it would discourage it; especially when you consider that most black markets historically exist when "offical" market prices do not match actual market prices. In other words, when the asking price is in excess of the selling price.

But -you ask me- where are the actual data to support this claim? Aren't all music/video dowloaders a guild of thieves?

Good question! Good answer? Look at success of Itunes. Before Apple started that company, no one believed you could sell songs for $1 a pop, and still make money off of the transaction. Itunes is now one of Apple's strongest revenue sources.

Itunes is why I believe most people are willing to spend money on TV shows. I repeat: Ituens is now one of Apple's strongest revenue sources. In other words, people all over the world are willing to pay for legal copies of songs, even though they could get those same songs for free, given current pirating & distribution.

Given that, I'm betting that people will be willing to pay for legal copies of TV shows, even though they could get those same shows for free, given current pirating & distribution.

I can't tell you how much it costs to produce a single episode of Battlestar Galactica, but I'll bet it's in the range of millions of dollars, minimum.

So how much more would it cost for the company to set up a nearly guaranteed source of future revenue (i.e. website dedicated to downloading episodes)? Not much, I'll bet.

Let's let BSG be the new century's Itunes....

Posted by Casey at July 15, 2005 1:28 AM | TrackBack