Not necessarily a SciFi entry but…
Today, Apple had a big announcement involving new power books and the new video iPod. This is all fine and well and as the self-appointed Mac Zealot for SFSignal, I did a little happy dance. The key portion of the announcment today was that you will be able to buy TV shows via iTunes. ABC is starting the shindig with a selection of 5 shows including Lost, Desperate Housewives, Night Stalker and 2 unnamed shows. These will be available the day after they are shown for 1.99 a pop. They are commercial free. Now I don’t know about quality or what resolution they are being distributed in, but this is a huge step forward compared to the no availablity of broadcast TV. I dare say its about time in that I no longer need to have my PVR setup to catch a show and if I want to catch back issues – I can simply download those too. Let us hope its a first step in the right direction for media distribution.
Link via Gizmodo…
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I don’t know about that downloading TV content thing…why wouldn’t you just look to mininova or torrentspy? (seeing as how the stupid tivo keeps erasing my episodes of BSG before I can watch them….grrr..) The downloading of video is cool and conceptually this is pretty hip, I just wonder if it’s not more flash than substance…just my two bits
:O
If I can reliably get the content for such a low price from the networks, I’ll do it. The problem with torrents is the lack of reliability.
Hmmm…$1.99 a download? So for the thirteen episodes of BS:G Season One that would be $25.87. Say they throw in the pilot movie (as in the boxed set) for another $1.99…$27.86. Let’s see: Amazon has the boxed set listed for…$41.99!
Assume a full season (like season two) box set goes for $60.00 (actually, Amazon is over the map on your SF boxed set prices…high for Trek, low for SG, etc.). So a iPod set of 22 episodes would be $43.78.
Hmmmm…might be worth it. We’ll have to see what movies go for and how the content swells (in other words, who else jumps on board the bandwagon). Also, color me skeptical about watching something on a screen that small. Dick Tracy had better eyes than me!
The real question is – can I download Lost via iTunes and watch it on my PC, without having to own an iPod (which I personally have no use for.)
To answer your question Scott, yes you can. Its all built into the new versions of iTunes and Quicktime. The downside from what I have I have been reading is that the video is designed to look good on the new iPods, and does not scale well. This makes me pretty sad in that they really have the opportunity here to open a new venue for distribution and by doing it halfway – they really can ensure it fails. Torrenting TV shows is a hit or miss matter for me in that quality and other things come into play. I have just had some real bad experiences via the torrent stuff and some good ones. I want consistency and decent quality and thats worth paying for.