Free TV Shows, Online!!

Yes, from this May, ABC will be offering episodes of four of its prime time shows Desperate Housewives, Commander in Chief, Alias & Lost, online for free a day after they’ve been broadcasted on television. The shows will have advertising & if some of you are getting any ideas then forget it since the player that will be show them won’t allow you to skip or fast forward the ads!! :wink:

But those who prefer watching them offline will be able to download them for free as well, but they’ll be good enough only for two months & I believe they’ll have advertising in them as well. And to boot, I seriously doubt that the downloadable shows will be Windows only, protected by Microsoft’s DRM technology.

Currently ad-free episodes of some of these shows are available on the iTunes store for $1.99 each, but they are scaled down quite a bit, not appealing to watch in my opinion. The offering by ABC will be of bigger screen size that’ll make watching them a bit more appealing.

But what I wonder is what if this experiment of ABC succeeds. What will be Apple’s take on this, as it’ll be really a blow to it & more so if other channels also start offering their shows similarly, thus impacting on the video sales of iTunes from TV shows!! :wink:

POSTED BY Amit on 11 April 2006
in Internet Lurker

 

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3 Comments so far

  1. Abhinav said on April 11, 2006 at 9:29:59 am

    I think it’s a good idea. If free-to-air TV works so well, why not free-to-air internet TV!

  2. Amit said on April 11, 2006 at 12:38:59 pm

    another thing in favour of “free-to-air internet TV” is that it’ll reach a more wider audience than the “free-to-air TV” since the latter is more often restricted by satellite access often resulting in having geographically restricted audience, while the former will be free of any geographical boundaries, so anyone in the world with a broadband connection will be able to view the shows, unless ABC restricts the viewership.

  3. Abhinav said on April 11, 2006 at 7:53:51 pm

    Hope they don’t, but then again, what are proxies for? ;-)

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