How to unlock the goggle box

Regular columnist Bill Thompson considers the changes the net is making to how and when we watch our favourite TV shows.

More than three million people have watched episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias and Commander-in-Chief on their computers since US television network ABC launched the service at the start of May.

The shows are free, but come with a sponsor's message at the start and three commercial breaks that can't be skipped over.

But this does not seem to have deterred US viewers who grow up watching many more ads than we get over here.

The downloads are part of an experiment by Disney, which owns the network, and complement the paid-for and ad-free versions of the same shows available from Apple's iTunes Music Store.

Just as you can choose to watch a movie with ads on ITV or without on FilmFour, so you can choose how you want to watch shows on your PC.

Watching brief

ABC is not the only ones dipping its toes into online distribution. Warner Brothers has attracted a lot of attention with its announcement that it will begin to use the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network to distribute DVD-quality movies.

This is a radical step, only spoiled by the fact that it plans to charge the same price to download as it does for a DVD even though there is no physical disc and no packaging (and, I suspect, no extras).


Bill Thompson
Perhaps ABC, Warner and the other mainstream entertainment companies can be encouraged to experiment a little with more open and flexible distribution, so that we can see what will really happen if content is freely available
In addition Warner is so worried by unauthorised copying that the movie will only be playable on the PC to which it is downloaded. So no burning it to DVD to watch on your flat-screen TV or even taking a copy to your mate's house to watch together.

Both initiatives, however flawed, show that the relationship between content - whether a movie or a TV show - and the screen is starting to change, on big and small displays.

And although take-up of TV on mobile phones has been slow it may well take off as the two great sporting contests of the modern age get under way.

With little overlap between audiences, the football World Cup and Big Brother between them could quickly establish the mobile TV habit in large numbers of people, so that by the autumn it will be commonplace to see people catching up on soaps and scorelines at bus stops.

The tension between the desire on the part of TV and film studios to find new ways to reach audiences, and their fear that their content will be copied and distributed outside their control is a serious matter, and serious people are involved in the struggle.