Lost<\/em>. I wonder if they’ll tend to move toward having them all available, or just the latest one? If it were me, my model would be to have the latest episode available for free streaming for a week, and then charge a fee to watch earlier ones…perhaps $0.99 to stream an episode and $1.99 to download it (without commercials of course). That would keep with the current iTunes\/GoogleVideo price point, but also have a cheaper option for one-time viewing.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
They do have commercials, but they’re much shorter…the video loads in sections, and you can seek back and forth within a section as much as you want. To move to the next section, there’s a commercial. The episode I watched had a 30-second Ford commercial between the sections. That’s it. One commercial. And it was interactive, with a video, or a photo gallery…in other words, a more interesting commercial experience than TV. Once you get through the commercial, you can then seek anywhere in the video up through that point (i.e., the first section AND the second section). You can also pause the video, and choose from two screen sizes, neither of which is complete full-screen, disappointingly, but since my wireless cable connection couldn’t handle the larger size smoothly as it was, perhaps that’s not all bad–the screen around the video is very dark, so it’s not distracting at all to watch.<\/p>\n
Three cheers for ABC for moving in the right direction with internet dispersal of TV. This sort of thing is what’s going to counter downloading, not GoogleVideo’s $1.99 for a one-day stream, or iTunes’ $1.99 for video only worth watching on iPods. TV is free on TV, it should be free on the internet. And honestly, the commercials they have here are appropriate (assuming they’re all like the one I saw). They’re short, they’re interactive, they have a timer so you know how long they last. I have no problem with this.<\/p>\n
Currently, it’s only available in the U.S. That’s gonna be the next hurdle the studios have to figure out. The internet doesn’t have geopolitical borders, and content providers have to start recognizing that and modifying how they distibute things accordingly. But yeah. Good on ABC for pushing the envelope further than it’s yet been pushed. Who’ll be next?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Heck, yeah. Finally some TV studios are getting the point. ABC launches free online streaming TV shows. [via Gizmodo] Here’s ABC’s entry page for streaming episodes. Right now they’ve got Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias, and Commander in Chief available. I flipped through a little…looks like they’ve got all the S5 Alias episodes, the last three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1472,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/desperate-housewives-confusion\/","url_meta":{"origin":21,"position":0},"title":"Desperate Housewives Confusion","author":"Jandy","date":"October 4, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Okay, so I didn't watch any of the Desperate Housewives episodes after the writer's strike last year. I did read some overarching recaps, but I'm still a little confused after watching the premiere last week. Could someone who did watch the end of last season help me out a little?\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Television"","block_context":{"text":"Television","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/television\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":633,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/fall-tv-planning\/","url_meta":{"origin":21,"position":1},"title":"Fall TV Planning","author":"Jandy","date":"September 15, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"The fall TV season is nearly upon us again, and I can't wait! On the other hand, there are so many things I want to watch that I'm going to be overwhelmed within a few weeks. Thank goodness for DVRs, but there are still some timeslots that have three or\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Television"","block_context":{"text":"Television","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/television\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":97,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/early-tv-outlook\/","url_meta":{"origin":21,"position":2},"title":"Early TV outlook","author":"Jandy","date":"September 8, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Not all my shows have premiered yet, but a few have, and I think it's about time I start obsessing, so here we go. Premiered shows Prison Break (Fox, Mondays at 7pm CST) - Prison Break started off a little slow for me this year, but by the third episode,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Television"","block_context":{"text":"Television","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/television\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":702,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/fall-tv-two-weeks-in\/","url_meta":{"origin":21,"position":3},"title":"Fall TV – Two Weeks In","author":"Jandy","date":"October 10, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Now that nearly all the shows I was interested in have premiered, and most of them have gotten a couple of episodes out, here's what I'm liking so far. Pretty much in order of how much I like them. There's going to spoilers for all of them, just fyi. The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Television"","block_context":{"text":"Television","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/television\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":191,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/netflix-rules\/","url_meta":{"origin":21,"position":4},"title":"Netflix Rules","author":"Jandy","date":"January 16, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"So Netflix doesn't have a set-top box yet for downloading rented movies and playing them on your TV screen, but this is the next best thing. They've started rolling out a WatchNow feature, where subscribers can watch movies on their computers. That is, the movies stream, you have full fast-forward\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Film"","block_context":{"text":"Film","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/film\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":31072,"url":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/the-queue-needs-to-die\/","url_meta":{"origin":21,"position":5},"title":"The Queue Needs to Die","author":"Jandy","date":"April 7, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Back when Netflix was a fledgling DVD-by-mail rental company, still only hoping to take the world by storm but not yet having done so, they popularized the concept of a rental queue, a list of DVDs you could set up and organize so Netflix would (depending on availability) send you\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Film"","block_context":{"text":"Film","link":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/category\/film\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Netflix-3.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Netflix-3.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Netflix-3.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/Netflix-3.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.the-frame.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}