First by the flurry of bit-torrenting, now by iTunes. This innovation in on-demand visual media has ramifications for politicians and how they get their message out to the electorate.

I missed Battlestar Galactica [BSG] last night due to inter-state travel and other circumstances. I bought it, and watched it today through iTunes for $1.99 USD. The download took about five minutes, and it was very watchable on the computer monitor.

The mini-series and series one of Battlestar Galactica was funded by Sky TV in the UK. It wasoriginally shown to British television audiences only. As a consequence, technology proficient Sci-fi fans recorded them and distributed them through through bit-torrents. Sci-fi fans around the world bit-torrented BSG and watched the show independent of television. I was one of them.

The global verdict was largely a thumbs-up for this re-visioning of Battlestar Galactica and the SciFi channel in the US rushed to fund a second series of BSG.

Apple recently expanded their iTunes store to include Videos. Even a well rendered and compressed stream from an hour long is considerable. The BSG episode I downloaded is 200 Mb in total. That is a lot of infrastructure and bandwidth to support that in mass market terms. But they have done it. Far quicker that I thought they be able to.

One dollar ninety-nine later, I am left wondering why I pay seventy dollars a month for satellite television. If I can get series like HBO's Rome or SciFi's BSG on demand I don't see a need to pay a large monthly amount for a television subscription.

This change will have political ramifications. Already the mass media outlets have seen the circulation of newspapers drop precipitously as the internet provides a more convenient and omnipresent distribution form. The nightly news programs have seen their audiences grey to the point that all the advertising on them is for pills, health insurance or intimacy performance enhancers.

Bill Hayden wrote in his autobiography;

We had a market to reach - the electorate - and our medium was then as it is today, the media. What the media was prepared to carry determined, and still does, the manner of our presentation.

Television probably won't disappear entirely, but with on-demand shows, and white goods mingling with computer functionality, the old notion of Channel 2, 7, 9 and 10 holding public opinion to ransom will be long gone. It may be some other form of combative segmented media instead; ie Blair, an Australian dailykos or some other permutation of that form of echo-chamber grapeshot commentary. Or something else superior to that wasted media form.

This poses an issue for politicians. Previously the government could grant favours to the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer in return for their support. But if visual media becomes on demand, then who will pay for 30 second grabs? Not me.

Will I pay for an entire speech? Probably not.

Will I pay for newscasts? If parties, politicians, parliaments and citizen commenteriat are providing RSS feeds, podcasts and quicktime movies, then the answer here is no.

I don't see an absolute need for television in my future. The entrenched interests in Australia will try to make sure the massive comsumption of bandwidth that analogue free-to-air television uses will remain. Even with Packer dead, that will take a long time politically and economically to kill. The market will have to move far beyond it (like 50 years) before a politician will be willing to risk the political fallout from removing that bandwidth from the TV stations.

A politician could go the route of Andrew Bartlett and publish directly to their electorate, and anyone else who wants a read. Or they could try and get more popular blogs and websites to carry their type-copies. Maybe even innovate some other way to interact with their constituents and the Australian people.

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Via Arstechnica, Yahoo has closed down its music service and now the keys to the music as part of that product are lost. People cannot play the music they leased - rather than purchased I guess - from Yahoo. It is a good argument against DRM and subscribing to any DRM service or product.

I do use iTunes and occasionally buy songs from it. They are covered by DRM or digital rights management known as Fairplay. The only real way I have control over the songs is to burn them to a music CD and then re-import. A hopelessly manual and laborious process - and consequently a sufficient deterrent against me doing it.

The iTunes DRM has some really weird restrictions on it too; from the wiki article:

The track may be copied to any number of iPod portable music players.

The track may be played on up to five authorized computers simultaneously. (Apple stores this information on their servers)

A particular playlist within iTunes containing a FairPlay-encrypted track can be copied to a CD only up to seven times (originally ten times) before the playlist must be changed.

The track may be copied to a standard Audio CD any number of times.

For the most part I have few enough songs that I have bought from iTunes that it isn't a big deal if I lose them all. The music that I really like is still purchased on CD or integrated from other people's music collections.

One issue that it did raise was when I got divorced recently. Normally physical music collections are easily and quickly divided up. But with DRM music who gets to keep the authorized computers and accounts? As it turned out I got a new iTunes account because it was not my email that we used. But the songs we had purchased stayed authorized on my ex-wifes Macbook. Not mine.

Fortunately the music collection was small enough that it did not become a property issue, but I suspect if DRM hangs around and someone has a non-trivial iTunes music collection in the thousands of dollars a judge somewhere will be making a judgement on how the DRM'd files are split. It may not be to Apple's liking either.

Update: Yahoo is offering the downloaded mp3s without DRM to its customers caught out by the store closing.

I don't have a TV so I don't watch shows that appear on HBO and people asking me about "Flight of the Concorde" is often lost on me. The Creative Class argues that most people under 30 watch TV via their computer rather than through cable or free to air. Rather they watch video on their schedules, not the broadcasters. Alex Tapscott writes:

Most, however, choose to tailor their TV schedule around their lives, not the other way around. That means using the Internet

Not having a TV has meant I have fallen entirely out of modern mass broadcasting media. I don't know what the 'hot' shows are nor the major movies. Advertising literally does not reach me. Tonight my partner and I were looking for a movie to watch through iTunes; I had no idea what as cool, hot, happening, new or what. In the end we rented Ricky Gervias' Ghost Town. But not having a TV means you probably don't watch TV through NBC or vieo anyway simply because the advertising has no mechanism to visit your eyeballs or ears. You fall off the mass media's plane entirely.

It would be nice if iTunes had a wish-list function. I use Amazon's all the time to put things in that I am not ready to buy or am on the wall about.

We find a tonne of new music through Pandora and while I bookmark it in Pandora, it is a pain to Pandora and click on each link individually and have it come up in iTunes. It would be easier if it went straight to an iTunes wish-list and be bought in bulk instead.

iTunes isn't the greatest software anyway, and is mainly useful because there isn't another service like it that integrates your play-lists, music library and buying new music in the one spot.

We rarely watch movies, and when we do it is normally through either iTunes or Netflix. It is exceptionally difficult to find new movies on their websites or applications as they mix in the movies that are new to their service - which might be from the 1980s and not new at all.

Netflix has a better web interface than iTunes. The latter has tiny thumbnails of the movie when you are searching which is useless. It is like Zappos which gives as much space to a text description of the shoe as they do a picture of the shoe itself. Victoria Secret does that style of web selling much better by having large pictures of the clothes in the search.

Consequently it is very difficult to find a movie to watch quickly when you are browsing in 'what should we watch' mode. It is ok if you know what you want to see, a quick search will most likely find it, but trying to browse like you would in an old brick and mortar Video Rental Store is almost impossible.

When I lived in Australia TV shows and movies would come out in America and then take a year or so to propagate to Australia where you could view them or buy them. Worse, in some situations if you bought a product in America, due to zoning it would not play on an Australian DVD or Play Station. Which sucked.

It is ironic that Britain has produced a hit show in Top Gear which is hugely entertaining around the subject of cars. However, it is available in the UK iTunes store but not available in the US Store. These days a media hit is essentially a global phenomenon. There is a Top Gear USA, as there is a Top Gear Australia, but that was not what made the show popular, it is seeing the dolts from England review cars that made it entertaining.

Top Gear is a global show. I fail to see why I cannot buy it the same time from iTunes as the Brits do. Vice versa on the American popular media. I am certain Australians and Brits would love to buy a globally popular show on iTunes without having to go through the pre-digital era of zones and nationalistically segregated stores.

Isn't that the promise of globalisation anyway?