Media Distribution Done Right: ABC

So a few weeks ago, Lost premiered its third season. While I was dying to watch the premier, I, as usual, was stuck at work pulling a late night. The next day, I went to work again and stayed another late night. Wanting desperately to watch the show, I thought about my options. Lost is one of those shows you can’t just miss an episode and then jump in the next one and still feel satisfaction.

Now normally, someone from my age group would go and “torrent” the episode. Well, that or use iTunes. But I am not comfortable with the notion of DRM. Joe user went to piracy because either nothing was offered to meet the demand that was there or because the solutions offered were too draconian. Recently, an executive from Disney was quoted (famously) for saying that DRM is something to compete with as a business model, rather than view it as a scourge. I recalled this quote and remembered that ABC was offering their shows online.

So I went to ABC.com and looked for Lost. Needless to say: I WAS IMPRESSED. Now this is just my personal opinion, but if all networks did this, I would cancel my cable TV subscription in a heart beat. Here’s the highlights of ABC’s online TV offering:

• Quality: The content is at a quality at or very near to what you would see if you downloaded the show from iTunes or other less “legal” means.
• Speed: Unlike waiting to download something, I was able to immediately begin watching the show and it streamed the rest in as necessary. The delay to begin watching was about 3 seconds.
• Commercials: Regular TV commercial breaks are 3 – 5 minute each. Well on the Internet stream, it is one commercial per break — 30 seconds. And when it finishes, a “resume” button appears so if you really needed to go to the bathroom, you can come back on your own time. As a side note, the advertising was probably one of the more effective ones I’ve witnessed for TV content. Because the sponsor’s logo appears at the top during the episode, I actually remember the advertisers (All State and Century 21).
• TiVo functionality: I can pause or skip around at will.

This was 100% lost revenue for ABC had I downloaded it using BitTorrent. Or worse yet, I could have been “too busy” once or twice more and never seen the show again because I “fell too far behind.” It seems no matter how you slice it, if the show is at an inconvenient time, but I really love the show, in the older days, the network would have had to simply lose me as a viewer.

There’s some real draws in what ABC has done here.

• With this new model, they can focus on quality shows and not really have to worry about competing time slots and placing “filler” stuff.
• Let’s say the network launches a new show. Right now, they have to heavily entice a consumer to view the show to get them hooked. Now, the barrier to entry is much lower because the time slots of other more popular shows matter far less.
• Telling someone “man this show is soooo sweet” is as simple as sending a link.
• Old shows can continue to be popular and pull in ad revenue. In today’s medium, you have to rotate out re-runs because of the opportunity costs.

I have a few ideas on how ABC or other networks could vastly improve this service.

1. Put all past shows up on the service. This will draw in a huge fan base who can then begin looking at other shows and generate new fans that previously did not exist.
2. Don’t add in more commercials. Notice what I liked about this service and why I would choose it over TV. Fill it up with ads and you stand to drive your consumers straight back to piracy. Consumers don’t mind ads so long as they don’t dwarf the content (think “sugar with your coffee”).
3. The quality is excellent, but it is missing a full screen mode. I’ll be honest here, you can toss this in as a feature you get with a subscription service. This subscription service would give you access to additional content that regular free users can’t, such as shortened commercial breaks, commentary, deleted scenes, etc.
4. Integrate the ability to blog about the episode. If you do this, you will create a centralized community that will generate buzz all on its own. Don’t compete with MySpace. Just make each episode have its own trackback link and other forms of social integration such as a Digg link.

I’m really excited to see how things turn out with this. With the GooTube purchase, it seems more and more likely this will be just the beginning of things to come. I hope other networks follow this awesome example (and improve it). If you’re competing with free, the only way to win is to offer better service and ease of use, which is exactly what ABC did here.