Friday, August 20, 2010

Why Does Video Cost so Much?

After reading this article about YouTube starting to charge around $5 for certain independent films, I started wondering why it's so expensive to purchase video content instead of music. Don't get me wrong, I think most music is overpriced (most songs went to $1.29 as soon as iTunes allowed them to raise the price from $.99), but from a value proposition, I don't see why video is worth 5 times as much as a song. Sure, bandwidth costs and file sizes are larger due to the inclusion of video and it costs more to produce a video in the first place, but on the other hand, I and most consumers will watch a video once in my lifetime whereas I'll listen to a song multiple times and continue to listen to it throughout my life (assuming it's a good song of course). Is a half-hour show I'll watch once really worth $3.99 (especially when it was originally broadcast over-the-air for free)?

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