Comments coming in on the TMTV survey are prompting me to make a few comments about TrainMasters.TV.
- I hope past content isn't going to be going away
Everything we post on TMTV is FOREVER! One of the most important values we want to provide is building the TMTV library ever larger! NOTHING will ever be going away! It will ALL be there, and the titles will just keep increasing.
- I'm feeling double-charged now that DVDs that I bought are showing up on TMTV
All the videos coming to TMTV are value-add - and in the case of the Model Trains Video DVD archive, we're giving you re-mastered 720p HD versions of all the DVD archive videos on TMTV.
When you buy a Hollywood movie on DVD (480i), if you want a 720p HD version, you have to buy it separately. Well on TMTV, you're getting 720p HD quality videos for no extra charge - it's all a benefit of your TMTV subscription.
- What about downloadable versions I can keep, or even DVDs of favorite segments?
Getting a copy to own involves extra infrastructure and also puts the video "in the wild" meaning there could be some unauthorized copies making the rounds. We find model railroaders to be a trustworthy lot, so we are thinking about offering downloadables and DVDs of the TMTV content without any copy protection (because we trust you - and we find copy protection to be rather annoying).
The downloads and DVD would be available to anyone for a price - but TMTV subscribers could get a 50% discount for videos they want to own.
-Why would TMTV subscribers pay a second time for downloadable videos and DVDs?
Streaming video hosting is fairly affordable and it;'s easy to automate, so it can be priced at a few dollars a month to subscribers and we won't lose our shirt.
That DVDs cost extra should be obvious - a hard product costs money and labor to produce, package, and ship, so DVDs can't be free unless we want to end up in the poor house. Hollywood DVDs get produced by the hundreds of thousands (or more) at a very low bulk cost. For a model railroading DVD, a run of a thousand is a large run, and the bulk order unit costs of runs that low are a lot higher. For on-demand DVDs (make it when it's ordered) like these would likely be - the cost is higher still (but still not unreasonable). In short, expect to pay more for model railroading DVDs than you will pay for Hollywood movie DVDs.
As for downloadable videos, there's the extra infrastructure for selling downloadable videos as products. It's a lot less than for DVDs, but it's also not free.
We're thinking of offering the TMTV videos for purchase to anyone, whether they are a TMTV subscriber or not. TMTV subscribers will get the videos for 50% less than non-subscribers.
-Why don't you do ad-supported like YouTube and MRH and make these videos free?
We thought long and hard on that and we've decided it's not practical for video in a niche industry like model railroading. It's one thing for hobby vendors to do paper / static ads - they're used to that and the process to build static magazine ads isn't that involved. However, doing video ads is an entirely different matter.
Video ads take a lot of effort to produce and they're not cheap. Most hobby vendors don't know the first thing about how to run video ads, much less how to get them produced. They also don't have the resources to pay for producing such ads.
Finally, assuming the hobby vendors were all video ad savvy and they could afford to pay for us to produce video ads for them, it would easily take all month to make the ads. As a result, TMTV would be a video ad channel only like QVC, for model trains. Would you really want to watch a web video channel that's just ads?
The other option is to open up TMTV to general ads. Do you really want ads for razors, trips to Hawaii, or laptop PCs interrupting your attempt to watch videos on TMTV?
It's just not practical and we won't stoop to inflicting MRH readers with general non-trains advertising or making them watch an ads-only channel.
We hope this helps answer some of your questions about TMTV.
