By Anthony Fordham
Forget rushing home to catch your favourite show. TV has changed and now comes to you.
If you still think TV means sitting on the couch to watch whatever the networks want you to watch, when they want you to watch it, think again.
TV is changing in many, astounding ways. You can watch what you want, whenever you want to? even on a mobile phone.
Services like BigPond TV are an example of the big changes to the world of TV, which is rapidly becoming a medium you dip into whenever the mood takes you, instead of being entertainment that requires committing time to your couch.
That new consumption pattern means mobile TV is often watched in five-minute grabs. BigPond TV offers comedy shows like South Park and The Chaser, which are easy to chop up into chapters. Dramas like The Shield and Rescue Me are also available in the chopped-up format, while a new format called ?Minisodes? takes classic TV like Charlie?s Angels and Starsky & Hutch (which were pretty light on plot to begin with)?and shrinks them into five-minute episodes, just right for watching on the bus.
BigPond TV is charged per-view, with 50 cents about average for five minutes or $5 for a full episode. Like renting a video, subscribers will have a seven-day window in which to watch the program.
The subscription cost also covers the bandwidth usage to download the content, so once you pay for mobile TV there will be no other charges to download the shows you have subscribed to.
Source: Australian GO magazine
