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Entertainment: Acquisition costs for media
Wed, 04 Mar 2009

I'm sure I've ranted recently about the cost of media in pure dollars (as opposed to in terms of entertainment guilt when you don't have time to consume all that you'd like.)

DVDs are the prime offender really; it used to be that Star Trek: The Next Generation seasonal sets were some $100 or more (Canadian), which was truly offensive. Now, I know that some series come in seasons of 10 while big ticket American shows are often in batches of 20 or 25 a year, so theres a cost increase there. And for geek material like ST:TNG the consumers are _perhaps_ more affluent or will grumble and pay up anyway.

Either way, it annoys me to find some very fine shows at $50ish per season, with others being far too high at $80ish, and some even more. It also annoys me that BBC labeled items are always in the $80ish area due to some supposed importing fee rubbish.

Anyway, when The Wire box set recently was on sale at Amazon.ca I put my money where my mouth is - the entire show (5 seasons, each comprised of 10 or so full hour long (not 40 min!) episodes) for some $100 dollars, that seems pretty fair, so I figure I can sort out some numbers for myself.

5 seasons * 10 episodes * 1 hour per episode (ignoring DVD extras which are nice too) .. so a good 50 hours for $100, or $2/hour of entertainment. OKay, that seems to be my number. The aforementioned ST:TNG season would be 26 episodes (guessing) * 40mins per episode (guessing) or 17 hours of entertainment for $100 (now about $60) .. or in excess of $5/hour, so thats way off my charts. Nowadays ST:TNG is $60 so thats about $3 and change per hour. Being ST:TNG it's near to my young heart, so I'd probably go for it.

I guess I'm willing to spend $2-$3 per hour on good solid entertainment, and will simply steer clear of high cost items outright .. I'm just not going to look $200 in the eye. (Consider Dr. Who .. how many decades of that is there? I just can't imagine buying much of it.. but if they made it cheap enough, they would get some money out of me. Theres a lesson there for the industry..)

Last night while browsing some ebooks and reviewing their usual rape-style DRM rules, I had a brainfart:

Base line: $2-$3 / hour of entertainment against video products (DVD)

250 page average novel, at say 90 seconds per page is approximately 6 hours, at $9.99 per book. That'd be a little over $1.50 per hour of entertainment, but pretty near the base line ballpark.

A video game used to be rated in the 50-60 hour range, but just as often nowadays a game is expected/designed to be sequal generating and so are broken up into smaller chunks of higher impact entertainment. Consider $60 for 30 hours as an average.. again, the magic $2 per hour spot.

Lastly, lets examine music; a typical CD might be say $16.99 for an hours entertainment. Ouch, thats why off the normal scale, but you do listen to music over and over and over more than re-reading a book. So maybe. I imagine if music was half that price it'd sell a lot more.. so ask Apple about that. (Note that if Apple is selling an album for $10US, they're pretty much establishing a cost to print and distribute and store physical media.. I wonder how well it stacks up against reality eh?) Is this $2/hour number a well known quanity, or vary wildly per individual? I'm in a rush now or I could throw some more values into the functions and figure it out.. but pass.

So there you go, now we have some concrete proof I'm a two dollar kind of whore.

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