Ad-funded TV is dead, they just don't know it yet.

Sarah and I have recently been enjoying The Killing; Danish crime-noir with some very compelling knitwear! We started when we saw BBC4 was showing season three a few months ago so we set the PVR to record them. We thought we should probably start at season one and so we watched them on LoveFilm. They didn't have season two, but iTunes did (for around a tenner). My point is that here is a show that contains brilliant story-telling and we watch it when and where we want - on the TV, the iPad (in bed) etc, without commercials. It is what television was made for. I don't need to be loyal to whoever delivered it to me; LoveFilm is part of my ISP's package, iTunes charged me a bit and the BBC is paid for by my TV license.

House of cards on Netflix is unique in that it hasn't (and won't) be available on any over-the-air television platforms. It is big-budget TV drama with the following differences;

• They aren't tied to 26 or 48 minute episode lengths to cope with the requirements of the network and the advertisers; the writer and director get to decide if this is a 35 minute or 1 hour and 15 min story,
• All episodes are available at launch time and forever; how's that for giving users the choice of how they want to watch?!
• The story needn't be cut with cliffhangers or with ad-breaks in mind.

I think in years to come this will be considered the seminal moment when all the old-media platforms who merely exist to provide a conduit to consumers were disinter-mediated.  If you think about a commercial broadcaster, what is their business model? Advert sales - and in that you have to realise that the programmes really are the loss-leader on the adverts. They don't really care if you watch Downton Abbey, well, only in that it drives you to watch the advert breaks. The BBC is of course different in that they have no commercial interest in anything other than retaining their charter which means they have to make good programmes. 

Until the last few years you had to be a big media organisation to deliver adverts into people's homes before you could afford to deliver programmes, but now that's not the case. Have you ever wondered why ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five's on demand services are so hopeless next to the BBC iPlayer? It's because the new model scares them silly. 

I think that increasingly LoveFilm, Netflix, iPlayer etc etc will be the method people choose to consume tele with only a bit of live watching for sports and news. The few pounds a month all of those on-demand services cost is tiny next to what Sky charge you directly and what ITV charge you indirectly (remember, the average family pays around £600 per anum on top of the goods they buy to pay for commercially funded television - and you have no choice over it; it's more of a tax than the TV license).

FrameRate on the TWiT network had a good discussion on the matter;

My home AV rig

I'm often asked what I use at home for music/TV/movies - nothing fancy (haven't got a 5.1 rig yet!) because money has been tight for the last few years and I try and follow the ex-work/cheap-on-eBay way of getting things done. As a family we all listen to podcasts and music on 'phones/iPods/USB-stick-in-car and since we don't have any consistent manufacturer for anything we keep everything as MP3s and DivX AVIs or MPEG2 (for off air recordings of TV shows).

• Music - I started encoding my music in 1999 when I got my first MP3 player (the mighty Diamond Rio 500 in case you remember!) and so experimented with different encoders and data rates. At the time I concluded that the Fraunhofer MP3 encoder at 128kBits/sec was adequate if I was using ear-buds or in the car. I quickly changed my mind and have been encoding all my music at 192kBits/sec using variable bit-rate. I have blind-tested myself on good speakers and conclude that for my middle-aged hearing I can't spot the difference between uncompressed and that data rate. MP3 is the way to go as I have a mix of playback devices (iPhone for personal listening, Dell Digital Audio receiver for the living room along with various PCs & other-brand 'phones & MP3 players for the rest of the family). Consequently I always set iTunes to encode to MP3;
  
  
  I often hear people banging on about FLAC and Apple Lossless but I'm not that bothered. I tend to listen to music for the lyrics and chord progressions, not that last 0.01% of perceived fidelity. I spend my life listening to proper speakers (i.e. thousands of pounds a pair) either from behind a mixing desk or in a dubbing suite so don't try impress me with what you bought in the high-street! I know what good audio sounds like.


• TV recording and video playback - I'm using Windows 7 on a ten year-old workstation to make recordings off air; two £15 no-name Maplin-special USB DVB-T sticks allow multiple recordings via Windows Media Centre. I keep thinking I'll buy a DVB-T2 stick so I can make FreeviewHD recordings but I haven't yet, partly because iPlayerHD is so good. The machine that feeds the living room TV is the same machine machine that is the kitchen iTunes/radio machine - it has two soundcards and dual-display. In there kitchen there is a mini keyboard and mouse and in the living room a hand-held RF mouse. You wouldn't know it was the same computer save for when you want to fast-forward the video playback whilst someone in the kitchen is trying to find a song in iTunes and the mouse pointer jumps off your screen!


• Commercial removal/editing - I used to be a big fan of ComSkip as it is an excellent automated ad-break remover for Transport Stream video. However, I watch so little commercial television that I've found my regular MPEG editor Video Redo to be just as good;
  
• DVD / BluRay - I grabbed a Sony S370 on eBay for £70 and it is an excellent machine; actually better than the S380 that replaced it (Sony lost the right to several codecs). It supports several online video services.
• iPlayer - we used to use the Wii as an iPlayer machine and it is really good, but standard definition only. In fact I picked up a Wii with a faulty DVD drive for my Mum and loaded the iPlayer client onto it and she uses it as her BBC on demand machine. We now use the Sony BluRay player as it supports HD iPlayer and the pictures at 5mBits/sec are indistinguishable from off-air HD playback. Even the SD content looks better than the Wii's output.
  

So that's it - I'm not in a position to spend thousands of pounds but I am pleased the way I've got it all working for virtually no money.

Subtitling software and my new Bluray player

Occasionally my PVR makes an incomplete recording of a film that Sarah and I wanted to watch. It was the case last week with the Italian film Couscous and so I didn't feel too bad snagging a copy from a torrent site. However, when we sat down to watch it I realised there were no subtitles (either burned into the video or as a separate text file). "Not a problem" I thought - straight to one of the many sites that carry subtitles for every film ever released and I grabbed a likely looking .sit file for the movie. After discovering that Microsoft have pretty much removed all subtitle support from Windows 7 (my PVR is MediaCentre) I tried watching it with that old faithful backup VLC player (an order of magnitude better than WMP12 in every respect!) - a good example of where open-source software makes the closed-source equivalent look very silly - but I discovered the subtitles in the file were a consistent twelve seconds late. I suppose the subtitler was working off a different version of the film, maybe he started his frame count with all the film and distribution company bumpers?

Again, no worries, I fired up my previous standby for manipulating subtitle files DivXLand Media Subtitler only to discover it can't slip ever sub in a file by a defined amount. In every other respect it s an excellent utility handling twenty-odd file formats and having auto-timing functionality as well as individual sub-sync features, but couldn't handle this problem easily.

So, bit of Googling revealed another free and excellent utility Subtitle Edit which offers pretty much the same toolset but with the ability to slip the sync on groups of subs. Just what I needed; it has a better preview facility as well so you can drop into various places of the video file to check the captions are consistently running to time and it will automatically pull captions a few frames either way when the audio waveform doesn't quite match with the start frame-code of the subtitle.

After this VLC played the .avi & .sit combo perfectly but not WMP12 or MediaCentre. At that point my thoughts turned to my new (2nd hand!) Bluray player; a Sony BDP-S370 which we've had for a week (£70 on the eBay) and have been mightily impressed with it's network video functionality. It's the best iPlayer machine I've found so far bar none (much better than the Wii, Virgin Media & Tivo) and it will happily play the file and display the subtitles either off a thumb-drive or via the network using DNLA.

BBC iPlayer on the Wii

The Wii has been able to access iPlayer for ages via the rubbish browser it has but the launch of an iPlayer app (or channel in Nintendo speak!) means you have a proper interface and the Wii playback of MPEG4 video has been improved with the most recent system update.
I spent a while monkeying around with it this morning and it is excellent - the interface is really usable and the playback quality is excellent. This is the best iPlayer machine we have at home.

Couple of BBC iPlayer stories

BBC and ISPs clash over iPlayer

ISPs say the on-demand TV service is putting strain on their networks, which need to be upgraded to cope.

This is so rich - ISPs moaning about the fact that they have sold themselves short. Now the Beeb pay Akamai (and other peering partners, I'm sure) for every gigabit of iPlayer data that leaves White City and then I pay my ISP for my 4meg uncapped connection - currently £25 per month which I don't resent. The ISPs have peering arrangements with backbone providers so that they don't actually pay for aggregate bandwidth between those higher echelons of the internet. What it comes down to is that they have sold people on faster-than-they-are-willing-to-provide connectivity and now they have to stand by those promises.

BBC announces Nintendo Wii deal

The video download and streaming service that lets people catch up with BBC programmes will soon be a channel on the hugely popular game console.

Wow - what a fantastic coming-together of technology. You could have yourself an iPlayer set-top box for £180 (aside from the huge fun you get from the Wii) - that is the kind of things that will mean that video-on-demand will really penetrate and I'm thankful that it's the Beeb. After all they made DVB-T a reality in this country (ITV couldn't/wouldn't sustain OnDigital) and if this keeps Murdoch out of the space then so much the better.