I'm not rich by any sense of the word but I'm old and married and have enough income that I'm more than willing to pay for VODs. (Live is just too late for me to be staying up.)
What's most frustrating to me is the lack of information on what you're exactly getting, so in some parts I feel we may be jumping the gun a bit here.
Firstly I don't know how long the season is, if it's as long as the avartec-intel gom.tv stuff they did for bw, I'd be pretty content shipping over my $30 for a season that's that long. If it's a month long season $30 feels too stiff by quite a margin.
Secondly, I need to know what my VOD's include, I need to know what kind of resolution they're going to be in and how they're going to be served to me. Do I get a file I get to keep and hold forever on my hard drive? (Likely not.) And will I have some way of getting it up on the TV and if I do will it be in a watchable quality? And if I want to watch them on my ipad why does this appear to be another set of payments I need to make?
$30 for VODs seems like a scary price, and I really feel for the people in high school, university or at another stage in their lives where the disposable income just isn't there and honestly I'd pirate it or watch a re-stream of it too in your spots.
I think there is an extremely fine line between asking people to support e-sports when perhaps the sponsors aren't there to otherwise show it and outright taking advantage of people. Right now for me though it's the lack of information that's the most frustrating part, I'm willing to do my part but I need to know exactly what I'm getting for my $30.
Anyone else noticed the amount of threads being closed today dealing with restreaming of this event?
I don't like the way TL is moving, by being the lapdogs of greedy organisations such as GOMTV. It seems quite ambigous to provide VODs and restreams of BW, but stomp down on any mentioning of the same measure for SC2.
On September 02 2010 01:38 Go0g3n wrote: Let's see, 64 players, bo3/bo5 matches, - at least 50 hours of live HQ television(if you can call 500k HQ) and access to at least 130 VODs, realistically 60+ hours and ~200 vods for 50$, - not a bad deal.
No. i like to watch replayes from tournaments but im not interested in buying it like Pay Per View TV. I rather just wait untill someone have made an illegal copy of it.
And yes i am against pirates :p
EDIT: also if i WOULD pay i would not want to see one single add in what i am paying for.
Why don't they add some adds at the start that you can't jump ?
I'm not going that high of a price for watching a few video when we can get the same thing for free elsewhere. They need to change their business model, or this will fail badly.
I'd by willing to pay for the whole pack of VOD, but max 5-10$. Else i'll look somewhere else to get the Vod's...
I don't understand why they are trying to change their original model for advertising, shouldn't sponsors and advertisements cover the costs without these ridiculous prices? I feel like as soon as this gets implemented and no one pays to watch (except the few who can afford to), it's going to send the wrong message to the world and Blizzard--that e-sports isn't as profitable as they had hoped. This will unfortunately hurt the movement severely. This is a bad move on Gom's part, if anything they should keep things free with just advertisements at least until the game has a full fledged following and we can be assured of their quality of stream/vods (who remembers constant disconnects/black screens/broken VoDs?).
I loved GomTV for what they did for foreigners trying to get into the e-sports scene in korea. I loved the averatec Intel classic seasons. But this just seems too far.
this just shows how out of touch Blizz is with reality. they expect us to pay $20 to $30 USD to watch a tourney that doesnt even have a proven track record (like OSL/MSL). that is just stupid.
It seems like a lot of people here don't understand that things have largely been a free ride up to this point. I understand those of you who want a cheaper package for live + VODs, and those of you who want a higher quality stream for the price, but those who feel entitled to having it for free...
The only reason BW has been free to watch forever is because it is illegally pirate-streamed. I don't think it's unreasonable for a provider to explore a pay-per-view model for an esport that doesn't have the viewer numbers to support itself by advertising. This isn't football (either one) we're talking about; the market for live-streamed Korean e-sports commentated in english is not sufficient enough at this point to survive on the whims of advertiser generosity.
On September 01 2010 23:27 GogoKodo wrote: I can sort of see where some business guy came up with the pricing. MLG priced $10USD for a single weekend. So someone that deals with money and doesn't deal with Starcraft sees that and figures $20 for a whole season of GSL is a great price. However that $10 for MLG included streams for Halo, Tekken, Smash Bros., SC2 and WoW. It also added a feature for rewinding the live stream which some people enjoyed.
That $20 price would be OK with me if they had a free alternative so I could at least check out the stream first like MLG had. I could see if the amount of content and the stability of the stream could justify the price.
I have no idea how they came up with the VOD pricing though, seems like a number someone just thought up out of nowhere.
For whatever reason, I feel way more likely to buy an HQ stream if there is a free LQ stream. It feels moreso like an upgrade and in a sense a donation to support something you like.
Having to straight up pay for a stream is a sure way to make sure I (and evidently about 600 other people right now) won't pay.
Yeah this is how i feel about it, i just think paying for the stream is actually detrimental to esports but uprgadeing to an HD stream is supporting it.
As someone who'll watch anything BW related, but doesn't really care about SC2, have a wild guess as to how much I'll pay to the company trying to kill off BW to watch their tournament.
I'd probably buy the vods (though not for $30) if you could access them past the end of the season or if someone can provide a simple-to-use method of ripping them to my hard drive; iirc gom's vods were a pain in the ass to rip, and I just can't justify paying for temporary access to video game vods.
On September 02 2010 02:00 Lambast wrote: It seems like a lot of people here don't understand that things have largely been a free ride up to this point. I understand those of you who want a cheaper package for live + VODs, and those of you who want a higher quality stream for the price, but those who feel entitled to having it for free...
The only reason BW has been free to watch forever is because it is illegally pirate-streamed. I don't think it's unreasonable for a provider to explore a pay-per-view model for an esport that doesn't have the viewer numbers to support itself by advertising. This isn't football (either one) we're talking about; the market for live-streamed Korean e-sports commentated in english is not sufficient enough at this point to survive on the whims of advertiser generosity.
first of all, streaming a match you or someone else played/playing is not illegal.
and second, blizz/gretech is being stupid because the business model they are toying with is "stolen" from kespa, yet they cant do the job half as good. kespa's success didnt happen overnight, blizz need to learn that.
On September 02 2010 02:14 dybydx wrote: first of all, streaming a match you or someone else played/playing is not illegal.
and second, blizz/gretech is being stupid because the business model they are toying with is "stolen" from kespa, yet they cant do the job half as good. kespa's success didnt happen overnight, blizz need to learn that.
I'm talking about all of the live streaming of Korean pro events that goes on, bootlegged off of television channels.
I can see Blizzard's hand in this. Gom never did this kind of thing before. I guess it's in their contract with Blizz. Blizz MADE them do it.
Yes, because something bad has happened related to Starcraft, is MUST be Blizzard's fault. We have no evidence or rationale for thinking this, but that doesn't matter, because its Blizzard so EVERYTHING is their fault!
Please. If you're going to make accusations like that, you're gonna have to provide some more evidence than "Blizzard is teh Satan!!1!"
On the subject of the thread...
No, no I will definitely NOT be paying that. And it strikes me as a poor business decision--why not offer up a lower quality stream, probably with ads, for free or at a significantly cheaper price point, then offer premium service with hd and no ads for those who are willing to pay?
Well if they can sell some shity ponny for 25 or some stupid mappack for 15$. Why shouldnt they try to charge 20$ for a stream ? . I dont like this at all and I will never pay money for this lol. So this is the shit why theyre killing PL and BW off ? rofl. Haven fun trying.
Except the money goes to GOM, not Blizzard. Unless Blizzard is getting a significant cut of that $20, Blizzard's best interest would be for these streams to be free, because it provides more advertising for SC2. And I'm sure they'd rather have people buying $60 copies of SC2 rather than get a $5 or $10 cut (if they'd even get that much) from each stream buyer.
This pricing also really does remind me of Setanta sports a year or so ago, here in the UK.
Who went bankrupt and were unable to pay off loans and television rights because they were offering a pay per view type subscription along with a season pass (similar to this payment model offered by GomTv) for Football games (Premier League and England games etc). The service failed because people weren't willing to pay ridiculous prices when they were already most likely paying a monthly sub for there Cable or satellite TV....... which included a sports package. That also showed games from the Premier league etc
Im not saying that GomTv is going to go bankrupt but i don't see how there going to attract enough customers to make enough money though his payment model. Especially when tournaments like MLG and ESL offer a similar service for free and with no guarantee that your even getting a quality stream
EPT
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