Is The 2010 TV seasons online yet?

Over the last few weeks, we’ve look at the state of Inter­net stream­ing. In this final data-heavy post, I am revis­it­ing the 2010 TV sea­son to assess if the sit­u­a­tion has got­ten better.

How I did this?

Last year, I did some research that served as the basis for this series. In it, I detailed the avail­abil­ity of  the top 50 shows of 2010 as legal online streams.

This year, I pulled the list up and assessed whether things had changed. For each show, I pulled up the wikipedia entry and checked what show sea­sons ended in 2010. I then checked which of these sea­sons were com­pletely avail­able (as in every episode of that sea­son) on Net­flix, Hulu, Ama­zon and iTunes. In the case of Ama­zon and iTunes, I noted if the sea­son was avail­able for pur­chase or rent, a dis­tinc­tion that some­times has an impact on price.

If only part of the sea­son was avail­able, I did not tally it up as avail­able in the final tally.

The list

So with­out fur­ther ado, here’s the list of top 2010 TV shows avail­able for stream­ing on the internet:

What can be rented?

The Net­flix and Hulu busi­ness mod­els are largely pred­i­cated on a single-fee, all you can eat approach. By com­par­i­son, Ama­zon and iTunes have gen­er­ally been more focused on a pay per view model but some sur­pris­ing things popped up in the research.

First, the entry of Ama­zon Prime in the mar­ket seems to sig­nal to that com­pany prepar­ing for a single-fee all-you-can-eat approach to aug­ment its pay-per-view model. Sec­ondly, one show (The good wife) was avail­able for rent on iTunes at the time of the research (it has since moved to a Pur­chase only offer­ing). Whether this was the prod­uct of error or a test trial can­not be assessed but it was an inter­est­ing development.

So does the rental pic­ture look bet­ter this year for shows that are 2 years old? Let’s look at the data:

Net­flix here is the big win­ner, reflect­ing what has been guessed at but never proven empir­i­cally until now: the company’s focus on get­ting older TV show col­lec­tions seems to appeal to its cus­tomers and the com­pany has been aggres­sively grow­ing its cat­a­log in this area.

Sur­pris­ingly, how­ever, Hulu has lost con­sid­er­able ground here, los­ing about 10% of the con­tent it was offer­ing only a year ago. This appears to reflect a strat­egy whereas Hulu works as a catch-up TV model but once shows get older, they are dropped altogether.

While only a few months old, the Ama­zon Prime offer­ing has been play­ing catch-up in this area, and is appar­ently aggres­sively going after the Net­flix model. I wouldn’t be sur­prised if we were to see a match in the cat­a­logs of those two com­pa­nies next year.

Mean­while, iTunes has mostly got­ten out of the rental mar­ket for those shows, opt­ing instead for a sales-focused model.

Can I buy a show?

For peo­ple who pre­fer pur­chas­ing com­plete sea­sons as online streams (prob­a­bly the same peo­ple that used to pur­chase those as DVDs in the past), the story looks really great. Both Ama­zon and Apple have made strong head­way in mak­ing that con­tent avail­able. How­ever, sur­pris­ingly, there are still a few hold­outs who are mak­ing their shows unavail­able for online stream­ing even over a year after those sea­sons ended.

The dis­tri­b­u­tion of shows actu­ally seems to shrink when you go fur­ther down the cat­a­log. This could be because the stu­dios don’t feel like invest­ing fur­ther into shows that were not at the top of the list. While this is an inter­est­ing con­cept, it com­pletely goes against the idea of long tail avail­abil­ity of con­tent on the inter­net. Even in a word where the mar­ginal cost of putting a show online is very low, the stu­dios are decid­ing that the low cost is not even worth it, leav­ing poten­tial audi­ences with­out a legal way to get to that con­tent. If I were an online stream­ing ser­vice con­tent acquirer, I would offer a rev­enue shar­ing deal on this con­tent in exchange for unlim­ited exclu­siv­ity to it. I might even go as far as tak­ing care of the dig­i­tal con­ver­sion, with the idea that costs would be cov­ered  under the rev­enue shar­ing agree­ment, with the first few dol­lars required for con­ver­sion going back to the party that did the con­ver­sion. This model would allow prop­er­ties that had only a niche appeal to find new life as new peo­ple join­ing that niche could now get access to that content.

Con­clu­sion

The first thing one notices is that older TV shows are still hard to find on all-you-can-watch sub­scrip­tion based types ser­vices. While Hulu seems to be focus­ing on the catch-up TV model and fails dras­ti­cally on keep­ing longer terms archives, Netflix’s offer­ing is still rel­a­tively weak, with less than half of the top TV shows of 2010 being avail­able over a year after they ended. TV stu­dios seem to have opted for sell­ing this con­tent to con­sumers, an option that may end up pro­duc­ing less rev­enue to them in the long run as the cost of such shows is still rel­a­tively high (between $20 and $40 per show season).

While the TV stu­dios may look at stream­ing as equiv­a­lent to DVD own­er­ship, the con­sumers are still con­sid­er­ing streams as a cheaper alter­na­tive to the plas­tic disks and thus will prob­a­bly not go for the same price lev­els on streams as they do on DVDs. This kind of price pres­sure is pretty com­mon in dig­i­tal media and has already been wit­nessed in music and books.

As we’ve seen over the last few weeks, avail­abil­ity of recent con­tent is rel­a­tively lim­ited when it comes to legal stream­ing. What is more wor­ri­some is that while time has some impact on avail­able con­tent, a lot of shows still are not made avail­able as legal stream.

In a world where TV stu­dios com­plain about their shows being made avail­able online by pirates, they should first look at why peo­ple are pirat­ing these shows: by fail­ing to pro­vide a legal alter­na­tive, the TV stu­dios are partly respon­si­ble for the piracy prob­lem and should first focus on pro­vid­ing legal ways to access all old con­tent before com­plain­ing that indi­vid­u­als are mak­ing that con­tent available.

Piracy will always exist but con­sumers may be more inclined to sup­port the peo­ple fight­ing piracy if legal alter­na­tives to piracy are avalaible. It is thus incum­bent on the TV stu­dios to make all their con­tent avail­able online for peo­ple who are will­ing to pay for it.