AOL's Mystro PVR brewing
Earlier this year, the New York Times carried an article about AOL/Time Warner's plans to enter the PVR market, both with the DVR box for Time Warner customers, and with a new service called MystroTV.
A few months later, details about the Mystro service began to leak out. It may be pay per view video-on-demand plus Television DVR functionality in addition to broadcast TV on demand. That last one's a new feature. Imagine a system with every major network show from the past few days stored on your box and ready to go at the touch of a button. It'd be like having the ability to TiVo everything over a shorter time frame.
Whatever Mystro may turn out to be, it sounds like the wheels are in motion. Time Warner is advertising a few openings on the Mystro marketing and development team as they gear up for test marketing in Green Bay.
It'll be interesting to see what a huge company that owns multiple channels, the largest internet service provider on earth, music labels, and studio assets can do with a magical box sitting in your living room.
Three words: retroactive season passes.
Seriously though, this would be much cooler if it used a peer-to-peer network to download the shows from other TiVos where people hadn't deleted them yet. If how lazy I am with deleting shows is any judge, then you could go back way further than the past few days.
Posted by: Aaron Swartz | October 21, 2003 at 08:13 AM
That's a great idea actually, exploit the power of the network instead of making everyone record everything from the preceding days. Essentially, it'd be napster for TV, but if the networks want more people watching their stuff, why would they oppose it?
Posted by: Matt Haughey | October 21, 2003 at 09:47 AM
Well, one might argue the networks want more people watching their stuff to expose them to their ads, and thus be able to charge higher ad rates. Unless Mystro won't let you skip ads (which frankly wouldn't surprise me), they still lose out on eyeballs for ads.
Maybe there's a business model here? Instead of comparing it to Napster, compare it to iTunes. Pay $50 an episode.
Posted by: Joost Schuur | October 21, 2003 at 04:23 PM
$50?! You can get an entire series on DVD for as little as $30.
If they want to do pay-per-play for TV (instead of just movies), it'd have to be cheaper than the 4-5 dollars first run movies cost. I'd pay $2.50 for an episode of Six Feet Under I missed (or didn't have HBO for). I'd probably only pay a buck, tops for a sitcom though.
Posted by: Matt Haughey | October 21, 2003 at 04:31 PM
I think the inherent danger in charging for TV is that these programs will still, no doubt, include the ads. When I order PPV, I get an ad-less program. But what happens when I order one of Mystro's TV shows? I'm paying $X as well as probably not being able to skip the ads.
Yes, it will be interesting to see what happens which a media giant produces a PVR, but not in the way that you suggest. My inkling is that these will be leaning much more towards the corporations than the consumer in terms of ad-skipping and box modification. I see DMCA and DMR written all over Mystro.
Posted by: John | October 21, 2003 at 07:32 PM
Sorry, clearly a typo. I meant 50 cents an episode of course (half hour, maybe a dollar for a full hour).
I just bought an additional TiVo (backup unit and for conflict resolution in adition to my DirecTiVo and old ReplayTV) and the $12.95 monthly pricetag is a bit of a hard swallow for the service I'm getting (guide data basically). It feels more like a 'support TiVo so they don't go bankrupt' fee than anything else, which I'm still okay with.
Posted by: Joost Schuur | October 21, 2003 at 08:18 PM