It must be clearance time over at Apple. Price slashing everywhere.

But wait, I just bought that TV show for 1.99. Can I get a 99 cent rebate to the Apple store now?

if i can get new release movies at mcdonalds for $1 , im sure not gonna pay more for a tv show i could watch for free. yay redbox

So slap some ads in the show and give it for free, just like on tv... duh

Like Fos said, I can rent a new movie to watch for a day for $1. I'm probably not going to watch a show more than once, twice MAYBE. If I have cable or what not I'll just DVR things. If I don't, I may pay 99 cents instead of spending 30 seconds on BitTorrent to download a show. Any more than that and it's just...goofy. I mean, they play the show for free on television right? Put ads in the download, badda-bing badda-boom! (go go fast-forward)

Amazon Unbox has $.99 movie rental specials every friday. I've rented 3 so far and have really been happy.

And apparently they've changed the policy on rentals to where you have 30 days to watch instead of 48 (still only 24 hours once started though.) At least the rentals I made last weekend had that policy.

I've bought 1 itunes tv show in that time. Not sure I'd buy at $.99 though. Mostly because they still have DRM. I'd like to burn a DVD full of DIVX versions to play in my portable dvd player.
I'll stick with downloads from TiVo, even though the encoding is pretty slow on a PPC Mac.

$1.99 for one episode (like iTunes has now) is too much. If I watch 2 shows per night, that would be like $120.00 per month! Too much!

I don't have cable right now because there's nothing good to watch at the times I'm able to watch TV. But I'd be willing to pay the equivalent of a cable bill to watch whatever shows I want on demand. $0.99 per show would totally work for me. Go Apple!

Why pay for something when most networks stream a lot of their shows for free.

@Cheve: as long as there's not Ricoh ads. I like my TV in color.

@BloggyMcBlogBlog: because you would have to be online to watch. I download to then transfer to my phone, psp, etc..

@BloggyMcBlogBlog: Because theres a difference between being able to download and watch an episode on different devices and having to watch through the browser at a streamed show. Usually a downloaded episode will have better performance and resolution than a streamed show, and a streaming show is not usually an option for people on slower networks.

I understand Apple's proposal, now that their entire iPod line, minus the shuffle, can play video it will drive sales of video downloads. The networks would be stupid not to jump onboard. Like everyone has observed the stuff is delivered for free anyway.

The part we are missing here is that the primary revenue stream for the networks is advertisement revenue. The money coming in from iTunes is chump change, and does not fit with the revenue / employee model in place at the networks today. While we can sit around and say 'even 99 cents seems expensive for a TV show' (and it does), there are good financial reasons for the networks to not play that game.

If they price shows accordingly it is possible their ratings on their network will go down (slightly) as a result. A slight drop in ratings could translate to a dramatic drop in advertisement revenue, which is how those shows are paid for.

It makes sense to all of us that they need to change their model, but it is difficult to argue with the concern that they can not show their ratings reducing. The iTunes play was merely to give regular viewers a back-up if they miss an episode, it was never meant to replace watching the network.

The lesser concern, but certainly still on everyone's mind, is the power the Apple yields on their iTunes product. The very fact that they can consider changing the pricing structure sends shock-waves. As you might guess, big companies have big egos (including Apple), and no one wants anything dictated to them. Any surprise that NBC has exited stage left?

So...if I watch network TV on the TV where I don't have to pay anything, but there are commercials: how much money does the network make?

Networks made money via commercials (and, I guess, selling re-run rights and such) long before they started selling series' on VHS/DVD/iTunes.

So, really, does anybody know the profit associated with having 1 more person watch the show "live"? Or, how much NBC makes in commercials for, say, Heroes, and what the typical audience size is?

What I don't get is how they are justifying their music downloads for 99 cents if they wanna make video downloads the same price. I mean, if I can download a tv show that's 28 mins for a buck, why the hell am I paying a dollar for a 3 min song? TV shows should be a dollar tops. I mean, if a new 22-episode dvd costs $30, then maybe just divide the $30 by 22 and sell the episodes for that or less (Note: they will probably be of less quality and lack the extras of the dvd) Anyways, until the quality is better I'm not downloading anymore shows. I got The State and Man Bites Dog and they look like crap running through my friends AppleTV.

@EQC:

That's a question I have, too. They already made their money supposedly, so why do they need so much more. Of course they should make profit off the sales of the episodes, but it doesn't have to be insane. And when I pay for a dvd set, it has a nice box, usually a lot of extras, and can play wherever a dvd will play. So I don't know where this .99-1.99 price fits in exactly.

@MJDeviant:
The cost is more in line with content delivery and storage costs.

Sounds about right to me. After all, I can rent a 2-4 hour film at the video store for about $4. I can rent one disc of a season's DVD, with usually 3-5 episodes on one disc, for $4. That averages to around $1 an hour.

So when you think about it, half-hour shows should only be 50 cents.

While its fair to note that $0.99 for a song and $0.99 for a TV show are pretty disproportionate according to production costs, I'd suggest that the greater issue is that music is wildly overpriced than this would be underpricing the TV show. I mean, $0.99 per episode is roughly what sitcoms sell for DVD. Apple isn't reinventing the wheel, here. They are just introducing an industry established price point. Given the major drop in product quality with iTunes compared to DVD, the idea of spending $1.99 per episode never made sense to me.

What I'd really like to see is someone get creative and pre-sell DVD season sets a year in advance and include with it iTunes downloads for each episode. It could really revolutionize the production model for television if shows were pre-financed by fans like this, and it would be a much better product for consumers. Might not work for a first season show, obviously, but for popular shows I think there would definitely be sign-ups.

It seems that capturing customers for your brand and your artistic properties and maximizing the revenue gained should be more important than it appears to be to networks. Why maintain a high price for downloadable content, apple is right when you differentiate content based on price people do not buy as much. Customers that know what to expect will by one thing just as easily as the other and will end up buying more, that is the reason for the success of iTunes. At a 1.99 people are doing the math and its just not working. Especially due to the lack of HD. I bought Lost on iTunes for the same price as a DVD set, or more, and then I bought the dvd set because the files from iTunes are inferior to even DVD's. If I were apple I would sell nothing less than DVD quality video at 99c to $1.50 and $1.99 to $2.50 for HD (720 or 1080). If video is mobile only. I would go for $50c, though I would like all lesser versions included in the top price. Regardless of the pricing structure if networks want any sales they should go for the unified pricing so that people will differentiate what they buy only by content and not by price. Its proven to work. The one other thing that Apple needs to do, thought it might be hard to convince publishers, is to redesign their service to be like Steam. So that once you purchase a song or video on your account you can redownload that song or all your music to an authorized computer as many times as you want. I have reconfigured or switched computers 3 times since I bought Half-Life 2 and each time I install steam and redownload gigabytes worth of programs a no cost to me so now every time I but a game for my pc I consider steam. Even a few games that I have bought from third parties have registered themselves with steam and I can download them again without ever looking for my disks. The question should not be, how can I get the most money out of one show or song, but how can I get people comfortable so they keep buying and buying without reservation and keep them happily building their libraries by building backups into the system. I would probably even include a resellers market as well, a person pays 99 cents for a song and you let them sell that song to someone else at whatever price but take 25censt of the sale value, then people know they can get value out of their digital library and if they sell it 4 times you make the same money as one sale with a reduced cost. Give the people an account and they turn around and spend the money that the buyer just gave them on more music. Injecting energy and more total money into the system. You can still maintain the link to the publisher so that they get a cut of resale. It all runs on the same counterintuitive principal that taxes do.. if you cut taxes you have more spending and therefore more tax revenue. If you cut prices and give people the ability to resell you increase spending and increase revenue. People like ownership but eventually subscription models like rhapsody will beat out purchasing models if there isn't true ownership (the ability to resell) because why should people pay 20 dollars for 20 songs when that same 20 can get them 1 million to listen to.

 
 
The problem right now is that networks are not used to considering viewers customers. To them, the advertisers are the customers and the viewers are the product. This type of shift is too radical for, let's face it, old fogey business men in suits to ever understand.

test. sorry. kthxbye.

People don't pay for content - they pay for the convenience of delivery. That's why broadcast TV is free. All the network execs are doing is to try to milk a market that has never existed and will never exist.

@Cheve:

That is an awesome idea. I hate adds as much as the next guy, but for $1 per episode, count me in. I dont buy shows right now just because its hard to justify that kind of money. A dollar makes it a done deal.

Are the networks listening?

@Monty:
I understand what you are saying, but I totally disagree. I see no reason why media houses can not make money through cheap downloads without advertising. HBO makes money without comercials, why cant other media houses do the same with download services?

Let's see, $20 per TV show season x 12 shows = $240 per year. So why am I paying $50-70 per month for satellite?

Like Homer Simpson said at the beginning of The Simpsons movie. Why are we paying to watch something you could watch at home on the TV for free? You people are all stupid!!!!

I've said it a thousand times: content drives sales. Apple sells content to drive iPod/iPhone sales (which "halos" into Mac sales). They don't need to make any money off content because they make it up in hardware. If they gets costs down to a dollar, they win, we win, and networks, if they're paying attention, will win because a 50% price cut will draw in far more than double the buyers.

sorry @SUMOCAT

i doubt anything will double the buyers. i'm the most tech person in my family and i have no desire at all to download shows through itunes. it has to be one of the worst video viewers, so why bother?

Apple has a good point. With digital media distribution, you can go for volume over unit price. Heck, every entertainment type should be sold at low-low prices these days, shooting for volume in sales rather than high per-unit costs.

Music is much too pricey on iTunes too, especially considering the regurgitated garbage that constitutes the vast majority of new music. Lower those prices considerably too, I say.

Personally I wouldn't buy TV shows at all, but I certainly would at least consider it if prices came down to a reasonable level. The current prices aren't reasonable.

Is it possible to download dvrd stuff from a satellite receiver (dishnetwork) since they allow the archos do it anyway? Any Insight on this?
Also is it possible to watch any flash video on iphone/touch?
Thx

I love lamp.

As for the commenter who asked how Apple could justify 99¢ for a 3 minute song if charging the same for a 24 minute TV show ... Consider that you'll likely get much more than 24 minutes of enjoyment from that song; as people tend to be able to listen to the same good tune thousands of times (while doing other things) but people seldom watch TV episodes more than once (while giving complete attention to the show).