What is Digg?38 Comments
- wired4u, on 10/12/2007, -3/+41If they just release a torrent none of this would of happened
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+28Now they will just realize that people are actually interested in quality content for free on the web.
- tsunamisteve, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Hello, reality. What they need is an alternative download in iTunes. Pay for ad-free, free for ad-supported. That way you don't have people using two or three times the bandwidth when they want to watch the episode more than once. Put a 30 second commercial at the beginning and end, as well as the usual spots in the middle. Most people won't bother going through and removing them and might even sit through one.
- Trjn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Then wouldn't making things like this available via torrents help change that perspective?
Of course, if we were able to torrent the files, we would have more control over them, and there wouldn't be an opportunity to force us to watch ads (which is the only way to make some revenue from "free" distribution), especially if some people remove the ads and redistribute the files (illegally). - ratzfatz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Well... ABC might be another candidate for an arrangement with Akamai?
- TenebrousX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8at least they don't have to spend $1,000,000 on bandwidth per month!
- whizzbang, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Who said IPTV wouldn't be popular? ;)
- Lumiras, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Hopefully things like this will lead to more legitamization of BitTorrent. People need to realize that BitTorrent is not just a method to steal stuff. It's also a great way to share large files between users
- JustinLeung, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5First off even if they do use $1million dollars worth of bandwidth each month then they would make it back and more off ad-revenue. and also people would just fastforward the ads if they made it downloadable with ads, that is exactly what they are trying to prevent, by forcing you to wait 30seconds between each segment of the show.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4pplive is a peer to peer tv streaming program kinda like bittorent in tha everyone shares bandwidth.. i am surrprised with the high cost of bandwidth it hasnt taken off faster...
but pplive is ok.. like having back up cable even hbo.. all with asian subtitles though.
http://www.pplive.com/en/index.shtml - RyeBrye, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8BitTorrent is built into Opera 9... Why does opera get no love these days? It's hella fast, and has built in mouse gestures and tabbed browsing... (Yeah. it's not open source... at least it's not IE)
- mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4i'm sure they are excited that this is taking off.
i think they are initially giving the streams limited resources in order to see how popular it became. now that they see that they don't have enough to satisfy demand, i think they'll go all out with hardware and bandwidth to make sure this doesn't happen again.. - svidrod, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9torrents won't work with mainstream public until torrent apps are built into firefox/IE/safari. plus ISP's and the public at large view torrents as illegal use only.
- wolfzero, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Okay, So I've been catching up on Alias (all of Season 5 is up there). During my lunch break yesterday (11am) , my video stream paused, and refused to play anything for over an hour (except the lame, brought to you by intros). We'll see how they do tomorrow when everyone who missed Lost is on there. It's better quality than iTunes downloads, but not portable at ALL, no fullscreen just a button that LOOKS like it'd do that, but instead increases the resolution slightly. I'm sick of all the accusations that we're zombiefied idiots because we like to watch television, especially quality shows that are on here (okay, not Desperate Housewives). In an era where filmgoers are becoming increasingly ripped off and led down, big budget TV shows like 24 and Lost are stepping up and providing engrossing, intelligent content for us film geeks. With technology like DVRs, streaming video, and filesharing, we've unchained ourselves to the network timeslots and advertisments that make TV such a pain in the ass. I hope to see the other networks follow ABC into the fray online.
- marksy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5LOL! "The data was based on attempts to access the ABC site from 31 cities worldwide." Good shot... Some of you yanks still think the whole world is the US huh?
- carpespasm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3the cool thing is, torrents do the opposite of the traditional distribution in that the download you'll get will accelerate the more poeple who are downloading it. torrents only problem is that it will so quickly saturate your bandwidth
i'd like to see a torrenting extension built into firefox which by default uses 1/2 your bandwidth max and allows you to change the setting. it could also be a boon to viral video sites like youtube, who is also being eaten up by bandwidth costs - polygon01, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3*Cough*
Use a US proxy server (international users)
*Cough* - newezra, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6I can say with certainty that all this is running through Akamai.
- timdorr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2No, it's running through Limelight Networks: http://www.limelightnetworks.com/ You'll notice ll.static.abc.com is where this stuff loads from. Flash video streaming is their specialty.
- airborne99, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Newsgroups!
- tidejwe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Exactly! I remember back when half the torrents had commercials. I didn't care. I think that's how most of "The 4400" shows came. How is that any different?
I actually watched a session of "Alias" on the ABC website. Downside: Quality sucks, and can't go full screen. Upside: the commercials I saw were only 30 seconds long and they were internet ads, not video ads. So if you were interested, you could click links, etc to learn more but you didn't have to. Once the 30 seconds was up you could click a button to get right back to the show if you weren't interested. I was impressed! SMART MOVE! Just give us better quality!!! I hate watching it when it's only a fraction of the size of the screen. Oh well...it's a good step. I've been telling lots of people about it and they're excited cuz now they won't miss a show. - Boilerblues, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Gotta say it was sweet watching Lost this morning from the site (since my VCR didn't record it last night).
- gerkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1on demand streaming is not the proper solution for this. ITMS is a much better approach (although the video quality is not great). There's NOTHING worse than being at the most important part of a show and it dies, or the buffer overruns, or their site crashes.
I bet ABC is much more apprciative of what ITMS provides for them after this experiment ;)
As for ad content, I think it's about time that some smart people (are there many left in the industry?) start moving towards a newer business model. I hate ads. I don't watch TV because of this. If they stream with ads, then they've lost me again. Al the mind numbing ads are too high of a price to watch mediocre content on bad soap opera'ish stories. YMMV of course, but that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it. - nessup, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Considering that Ana-Lucia and Libby are now dead, yes, it does make sense that it crashed.
- deadlock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There are two reasons that foreign subscribers weren't allowed access to the streams (or the shows in iTMS), in my reckoning. Firstly, it makes sense to limit the trial to ABCs home market for support reasons amongst others. Secondly, syndication to foreign networks is a huge revenue generator. If I've already seen Lost streamed from ABC (or purchased through iTunes) then why would I watch it on RTE (the Irish network that carries that show)?
I'm pretty sure that the same distribution problems that plagued the iTMS at the start come to bear here as well. To cite an example, Universal Ireland are a seperate entity from Universal in the US. If I purchase songs from the US iTMS, none of my cash goes to Universal Ireland, who obviously aren't happy about that. - jo42, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Lost:
How do you keep someone guessing?
Tell you next week.
Next week on Lost:
How do you keep someone guessing?
Tell you next week.
Repeat for a whole season. - Wireddd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1yeah that was a bit of a bombshell
- Anoobis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i was trying to figure that one out. is it mean to be countries or cities nationwide?
- mapkinase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Ad-percentage was quite decent actually compared to the amount of junk on conventional TV. There are much much much less ads in the stream compared to TV.
And if you have slow feed, most of the time they even won't start playing in the allotted amount of time (30 sec). So you do not even have to turn off the sound of your computer. :-)
It shows how much more quality TV would have gained if they would provide less ads. - cleverboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Ah, but they'd have to make it so that you couldn't skip the ads. Perhaps in the next iTunes update. I'm sure somewhere out there Jobs is already demonstrating this feature to some boardroom (bored room?)
- jimages, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0There's all this flak over why international user can't get the feeds from ABC or through iTunes of American shows. What I can't understand is why I can't get shows that originate in my country from my country's version of Tunes. Is it that iTunes reps have not approched international content producers or are international networks sitting back and whatching what happens in the States first?
- aridiradio, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0From what I know of Limelight Networks they are mostly a bandwidth provider and streaming provider. It is entirely possible that the website crash had nothing to do with underlying badnwidth for actual streaming, as often websites and stream providers are done not only in different places but but different people. So you might be giving bad rep where it's not due. (and yes for the sake of being open I've used LL bandwidth before for my business for a year and it's been pretty flawless).
- polygon01, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I thought you tech savvy international diggers would know how to use a US proxy server. I just watched some of the latest lost episode quite easily all the way from New Zealand, quality is OK but not as good as the torrented version, so I think I'll stick with them for now.
- jmadrigal, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Yup, I think that's not the smartest thing to do, since this thing would be attractive to people outside the U.S. who have no access to the latest episodes on TV. If all the advertisers on the show are international then why can't we watch it outside the U.S.? I can still buy a Ford in Taiwan (but then again, why would I? american cars suck). Anyway, guess I'll have to keep downloading commercial-free torrents (notice the lack of tears).
- newevilmind, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1Has anyone noticed how all over the ABD website it says "Watch tv shows FREE"???
this means that they plan to charge people to do it in the future - _skin_, on 10/12/2007, -16/+2I bet the idiots decide not to do it anymore because of this too.
- Saintlink, on 10/12/2007, -23/+4This is great news. Perhaps these viewers will accidentally come across some decent reading. Zombie TV America can't do without its fix. Tragic.
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