Media in New Zealand

Media’s a funny thing.

I recently started looking into a very swish little application called Boxee. Boxee is based of XBMC with a very significant social component to it. Boxee is very popular, especially in the USA because it provides access to legal media streaming services from both content providers (e.g. The Daily Show) and 3rd parties that license content (Hulu, Joost etc…).

Having an idle Media PC I’ve been trying to set it up to interact with TV3’s live streaming and TVNZ On Demand with varying levels of success. After a while I got to asking myself why this is so damned difficult. After all, I’m willing to watch ad-supported content at lo-fidelity, I just don’t want to watch it on my computer.

Part of the problem is that, as usual, the old-time media companies are change adverse. I came across this article, written last year, about how popular TV shows are being screened a lot sooner in NZ due to illegal downloading. It certainly seems like they’re starting to see the bright side of less restricted content distribution, but they’re still tying it to the “you’ll watch what we want, when we want” mentality that TV and radio have imbued.

The question: Would they have improved their service if their customers hadn’t hit them in the wallet? Would they have listened to feedback from their customers telling them they didn’t like waiting for shows that are 2-3 seasons behind? This is a market, and it’s working.

However, this is the part that makes me laugh: after all the conditioning of the consumer by the advertisers that cheap is good, convenience is king and the I WANT IT NOW generation it’s spawned, they’re now grumbling that people can find what they provide faster, cheaper and easier.

It must be more cost effective, too. People only watch what they want, ads can be more accurately targeted. An example: Sky costs $80/month, between all our flatmates we only watch sport, a few shows on Discovery and a very occasional movie. If we could get a decent sports line-up (cricket, rugby and league) anywhere else we’d drop Sky in a heartbeat. The amount of advertising we’re subjected to compared to the amount we’re paying and the amount we utilise is simply staggering. Not to mention, due to their proprietary encryption system means I can’t shift the content where I want it i.e. my iPod or my PC for later. I have to use their platform.

But of course there are also technical barriers to my content freedom utopia.

Broadband quality in New Zealand is, as we all know, poor. Things are improving though, but caps and expensive overseas bandwidth still pose a problem to internet media in NZ.

Lack of support for IP Multicast means that bandwidth costs for the provider may be prohibitively expensive, also. You can think of internet connections as a phone call, one entity communicating with another. This means that to serve content your bandwidth costs would be (Size of Content) x (Number of viewers). Multicast works more like Radio, or terrestrial television. One broadcast and many people “tuning” in.

Of course, if these technical hurdles were overcome, one would wonder if you would even need a broadcaster. Clipping the ticket between advertising and content providers. That’s a question for another day, or another person