Sunday Newspapers, Now With CDs

VirtualUK writes "The BBC news site has a story today about The Times news paper now distributing a CD along with the tree mass that comes with its Sunday edition. They cite that one of the main reasons is that Internet connection speeds have still yet to catch up on the whole in order to benefit from the rich multimedia content of the CD."

CD Contents?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it have the full text of the paper? That would be excellent...

Pure advertising

[Mwongozi]

Everything on the CD is an advert for something else. You can't even get to the main menu without watching a video of a car advert.

Already Done

[someguy456]

I've seen something like this done in a neighboring city, Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico (I live in El Paso, TX). The subscription rate is really low; the paper is almost completely distributed in stores and newstands. Every once in a while, the paper has a special edition contating a cd. I think it's only music for now, but it may change. The special edition costs around US$0.50 more, which is about the normal cost of the paper (Sunday doesn't cost any more). I have never heard anyone else actually mention it, so I don't think it is fairing well.

What the really mean is..

[SolubleFrank]

benefit from the rich multimedia content

"suffer from the bland multimedia advertising"

Good luck

[Safety Cap]

This will last a few months, then they'll figure out that the required tech support ("No, ma'am, you need Quicktime!") and the cost of burning and stuffing will not result in additional sales.

The Marketing Drone that thought of this baby will be canned and sent back to Publix [publixdirect.com] or wherever he came from.

good news!!

[0x12d3]

That's good news for the trees, I hope the CD's are recycleable. This reminds me, I get really annoyed when I see a big stack of phone books lying around, that no one really wants. How long do you guys think it'll be 'til phone books go CD for standard (/common)distribution method? I'd much prefer grepping for pizza than flipping through hundreds of pages.

No more CD's please!

[Kegetys]

I prefer to have things available online these days rather than having them on a CD. I have hundreds and hundreds of CD's stacked up everywhere, and its becoming slower to find something small from those cd's than find and download it from the net. Especially the CD's that came with a magazine get useless quite fast as the things there get old, and the process of finding the cd and listening to the loud cd drive reading it is far less comfortable than just finding and using the same content from the internet.

I find it more interesting to have access to magazine articles from the net after subscribing. That way the content is always available from almost anywhere in addition to the paper magazine.

Enviromentally friendly ?

[EpsCylonB]

The BBC news site has a story today about The Times news paper now distributing a CD along with the tree mass that comes with it's Sunday edition.

are cds more enviromentally friendly ?, aren't plastics created from oil ?. At least trees can grow back.

Audio CD?

[NanoGator]

A few months ago I read about how a San Fran newspaper was providing an audio CD so you can listen in the car. I like that idea.

Taking that idea a step further, I wish Avant-Go would do something like that. I'd like to synch my PocketPC in the morning, then plug it into my car's audio so I can listen to fresh news on the way in.

Re:Pure advertising

[Ignis Flatus]

So? Someone else will just come up with a utility to block all the ads on the CD.

Great idea until universal broadband

[ctwxman]

Right now, CDs are as clsoe as we get to universal broadband.

About a year ago, I built a PC which was optimized for video capture, learned Lingo and bought a licensed copy of Macromedia Director (I believe on this site, buying a licensed copy gets more attention than nearly anything) and started a part time business as a multimedia author.

There are lots of decisions that need to be made... formats, codecs, bitrates. What is the 'universal donor' codec for Windows (I chose mpeg1)? What resolution video is acceptable? How fast will the processor be on the slowest machine you care about? How fast its CD drive? Must the end user install anything at all?

If you're careful and diligent, what people see on the CD can be nothing short of amazing.

I would be asked, all the time, why not DVD? The simple answer is, DVD just doesn't have the installed base, yet. You have to strive for maximum compatibility.

Encoding video is an art form, and I quickly found out few people in the business really understood what you do and why you do it.

With excellent full time employment, I have only done a few CDs. But, I am just as excited about the opportunities as I was the first time I saw they were there.

How about just selling CDs

[Hao Wu]

Why not have ONLY CDs and stop killing 75,000 trees for every Sunday edition? Even better, put it all on-line and don't print a damn thing.

Why not just, um, watch TV?

[Ewann]

Don't most people just flip on the TV (or 'telly' in the UK I guess) when they are seeking "rich multimedia content" that neither broadband nor a newspaper can deliver?

Oh well.

Why not just, um, watch TV?-Intercast and TeleText

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't most people just flip on the TV (or 'telly' in the UK I guess) when they are seeking "rich multimedia content" that neither broadband nor a newspaper can deliver?"

Wasn't Intercast [webopedia.com] and TeleText suppose to be the "rich multimedia content"?

Ah the joys of multimedia development.

[ahfoo]

Reading through the comments, I saw the reaffirmation of my ongoing belief that you've got to have a serious masochistic streak to do multimedia development these days. People are never satisfied because the desireable media experience is such a personal preference.
I've little doubt the product sucks and the criticisms are justified, but I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be on the, most likely, small staff cranking out a multimedia CD every week and I thought --you know, it's probably not such a happening position.
And for the people complaining that it doesn't work on their Gnu-Linux systems I have to ask --did they even try running it under Wine? From the article it sounds like a Macromedia based product and I've yet to see a Director or Authorware packaged piece that doesn't work under Wine. In fact, these types of products often work better under Wine than on Mac or MS systems because when Wine encounters an error that would freeze the program on the proprietary
OS's, Wine simply pops up a dialogue and asks you if you'd like to ignore the error. This makes life difficult for multi-media people trying to create DIY DRM techniques that work by intentionally crashing the program under a given condition on Mac or Windows platforms.

Re:Environmental concerns?

[WoTG]

Yeah, without oxygen, stuff doesn't decompose very well. Landfills will be treasure troves for archeolgists in a couple of centuries.

You're right, at least paper can be recycled. It isn't done with CD's, that I know of...

hmmm

[ColaMan]

I have no idea how much an average printing run costs for your average paper, but surely it'd be a packet.

So, how hard would it be for a newspaper co to go moderately into 'offline' e-news?

What if you could buy a decent reader for 10 bucks (subsidised) and just zap the content in every day for 50 cents a pop? A 100-page pdf / zipped html of the daily paper'd have to fit in 32MB, even with pics. Perhaps you could keep yesterday's news as well , until you run out of storage space.

For those with slow net connections, you could wander into your nearest newsagent, give them yesterday's card and get another card with todays news. The advantage there being that it could be updated throughout the day, rather than the "print it at 3am - good till tommorrow" approach. Your old card simply gets flashed again , ready for someone else tomorrow.

After the initial outlay (subsidised readers, cards etc) , would it balance out in the end?

CD-RW newspapers

[cowbutt]

I wonder if it would be economic to "print" the weekly (possibly even daily) newspaper onto cheap re-usable media such as CD-RW? The readers could keep or return previous editions for re-use (for a small refund) at their option.

This idea inspired by the "Universe Today" [vnunet.com] personalised newspaper in Babylon 5. Alternatively, the linked article suggests printing on a re-usable (as opposed to re-cyclable) paper substitute, such as Tyvek.

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