Tuesday, June 20, 2006

A Quick One

Occasionally, I (and several hundred others) take the same train home as the cutest woman in the area.

She works for All My Children, which I know partially because she is frequently reviewing scripts for the show.

Last week, she was reviewing a script for show 9,413.

Think about that a moment: 9,413. Even if they were doing a new show every day, that would be over 25 years of shows. As it is, they're in their in their 37th year.

I mention this because I'm trying to find a true advantage to Internet delivery of video. And one of the things about having done 9,000+ shows is that there is virtually no chance that you can sell them in DVD form to enough people to make it worth marketing them. As with the longer-running series that later hit syndication, it's almost too expensive to buy the rights to second-run the series.

But it would work over the Internet. As Mark Cuban, owner, of the apparently-soon-to-be-NBA-champion Dallas Mavericks*** noted, "The first Disney streams should have been their soap operas. In real time."

He just didn't take it far enough. He's absolutely correct when he notes the unique ability of the internet:
[T]he toughest to reach audience for Soaps is at work and the net is the best way to reach them. Affiliates aren't reaching them. Cable and Satellite aren't reaching them. Only the net does.

And once they're watching the current run on the Net, offering them deep-discount old episodes should be the next step. They don't have trouble with the technology. And they are willing to make the effort to access, in the same way as the first two days of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament this year led to CBS having to add servers and discovering new ways to market the product.

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