While many music download services have either started or plan to start offering DRM-free downloads from the major music labels, so far, pretty much all TV show download services still cripple their streams and downloads with some form of DRM. Television New Zealand, the state-owned broadcaster has now realised just how reluctant consumers are to purchase DRM infected TV broadcasts that they are planning to drop DRM from its downloads, according to a New Zealand Herald article.
According to the broadcaster's head of emerging business, Jason Paris, ad-supported streams outnumber purchased downloads by many thousands to one. Going by the Herald article, the TV broadcaster wants to make it easier to get the broadcast than to steal it. Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM did little to prevent some viewers using freely available software to strip the DRM out of the content anyway, thus rendering DRM ineffective anyway.
Despite how many consumers chose to watch the ad-supported stream versions, the cost of delivering the content and paying the ad agency left the broadcaster with just 2c left over per stream from the revenue collected from the advertisers, which then had to be shared with the content suppliers. At present, their OnDemand service streams around 200,000 videos per month and has attracted around 150,000 visitors per month
Hopefully over time, other video download services will soon follow, particularly with growth in unlicensed TV shows being distributed over file sharing networks. For example, like with legal music downloads, many consumers will not be willing to fork out on TV shows knowing that they will face all these usage restrictions and playback compatibility issues that generally do not apply to most TV shows distributed illegally via file sharing networks.
Further info can be read in this O'Reilly radar source.
