Becoming a network executive

I get so many offers for this kind of work that, frankly, I'm going to snap at any moment.

Seriously though, when are the cable companies/networks going to realize that we want every show to be On Demand and find a way to make it happen?

Granted, finding a way to pay for talent, production, editing, etc is a challenge, especially since one of the major virtues of On Demand is the lack of commercial interruptions.

((I read somewhere a while back that Tivo was thinking about making it so that its users had to watch a commercial before they could delete a recording. This seems annoying to me (though understandable as a way to make up for lost viewers of the advertising that pays for the shows), especially because it would be unfair to punish consumers who hadn't actually fast-forwarded through the commercials with another commercial.))

But what's wrong with the online video model that NBC.com uses, where you're forced to watch a commercial at the beginning of the show? Or what about using some kind of pay-per-view system, or a payment plan where you buy the right to watch a certain number of shows per month or a certain number of hours per month? Or what about doing like iTunes and selling subscriptions to specific shows?

It's becoming increasingly hard for me to believe that bandwidth is an issue there; the size of my OnDemand library with Comcast (for the record, Comcast is just fucking awful) is pretty extensive, and the downloads are quick.

I personally prefer the idea of payment plans, but it seems to me that there would be a couple of objections to such a system: 1) customers don't want to go to the trouble of determining how much TV they watch in a month; 2) this would price television out of the range on many consumers.

*BUT* what about... (here it comes Comcast, something you'll definitely fail to understand) ... giving consumers the OPTION? So it makes TV more expensive. Let the rich try it out and see what they think; if enough people adopt it, the investment in cost reducing technologies (e.g. distributed file sharing networks to increase bandwidth/download speed) will begin to make sense, costs will fall, and everyone will be happy. If not, the old model will still be available.

Shit, I'll even give you a couple ideas for the marketing campaign: 1) It's the ultimate vChip for parents who want to restrict what their children watch; 2) It can help promote an active lifestyle by making it easy for users to restrict the amount of time they spend watching TV. Somehow I doubt that the second claim is actually true, as it seems to me that more choice typically leads to more consumption (supply creates its own demand), so it's not something that the distributors would need to worry about. And it sells.

I'll conclude with another musing and a question:

1) Wouldn't it be nice if movies were released through cable distributors in pay-per-view format at the same time that they're released in theaters? I bet more people would watch movies this way. I'd certainly see a bunch of movies at home that I wouldn't bother to go to the theater for. I think that HDNet does this already to some extent.

2) Readers (more likely, reader): How would television shows change in response to a new distribution format like I've mentioned above? Example: What would happen to pre-commercial cliffhangers?