Digital Home Thoughts: Jeremy Toeman Explores the Concept of Buyshifting

"Over the past few years, another trend has emerged, where viewers are buying TV shows on-demand and á la carte from digital resellers like iTunes, or on plain old DVDs. And these consumers are buying a lot of them. At the time of writing, seven of the top 25 DVDs on Amazon are TV shows, and one in five DVDs rented on Netflix is a TV show. Furthermore, many cable and satellite companies have teamed up with the networks to provide on-demand episodes available as early as the day following the original live broadcast -- that is, if their customers aren't among those who've bought over 50 million TV shows through iTunes. And with recent moves by major players such as CBS and NBC, as well as technology startups like Brightcove and Joost, it's clear that buying television episodes á la carte is no mere novelty -- nor is it going away. So perhaps it's time we gave this phenomena a name: buyshifting. We'll use that to refer to broadcast TV programming that you don't just watch -- you buy or rent. But where does buyshifting stand today? And is it really the future of television?"



I hadn't really thought about what name to give the process of consumers buying content instead of viewing/recording it off cable, but buyshifting seems as good of a name as any. Although I have to admit, it seems unrealistic to think that at this point there are more than a handful of uber-geeks that have given up on cable TV completely and are only buying TV shows a-la-carte. In part two of his article, Toeman does the math, and it's pretty interesting to see how it all shakes out - and how bad cable does.

For me at least, cable still offers one important advantage over buying TV shows individually: there's no DRM (except for the broadcast flag, which is thankfully still fairly rare). I really like the fact that I can record a TV show and put it on my laptop, burn a DVD, put it on a PMP. The TV shows and movies that I'd buy from my cable company are locked to my cable box. Plus, it has a limited hard drive so there's a barrier there if you want to keep the TV shows - which I'd certainly want to do if I was paying for everyone. There are a few other advantages cable has: because it's an "all you can eat" model, I can watch all sorts of new shows come new season time, and skip watching the new series that I don't like. I'd be more reluctant to watch ten premieres if I had to pay $2 for each one. Lastly, if you're a cable modem customer like I am, there are bundled savings: my bill is about $90 USD per month, but that's for digital cable and a 10 mbps Internet connection. So I think Toeman's math will vary depending on where you live.

What do you think about this "buyshifting" issue - are you a buyshifter, having ditched old-school cable? Or does the math not work out for you?