Ok, waded through all the complaining. Let's get a few facts straight.
-These deals are ground breaking. It's content in a new way. By no means do I want to buy low res videos to view on my iPod (but many do). This is merely a first step. Apple needs to accept what they can get and prove it a viable money maker for content owners. Then Jobs can get higher resolution downloads.
-If this model proves successful (and it looks like it is), Apple will have to release a larger product to view higher resolution, larger videos.
- For all you wishing for other shows, only those shows owned by ONE company are part of these deals. Many of the shows being requested are owned by 2 or more companies and distributed by a network. It will be quite some time until these are available for d/l.
-Rumors of an Apple DVR? I say no way, this deal shows that they are behind iTMS as a distributor of video content.
Just a comment. I'd like to see Frontrow 2.0 support DVR (Hey, and what about choosing internet Radio too?) and I think it likely. I'm hoping that Frontrow is extensible so that companies like Miglia and El Gato can simply plug into Front Row. I have an Alchemy TV DVR card in my Mac and I enjoy watching TV while working. I almost never use the DVR feature except on very rare occassions. The reason, is that the current product does not allow you to watch one channel while recording another and two, when recording a 2 hour movie the resulting file (at 640 x 480) is larger than a ripped DVD using MactheRipper! So, I usually rip the show at 320 x 240 which is about the size of the iPod videos. The difference though, and the reason why I like the option (which is what this should be all about) of downloading TV shows off of iTunes is that the quality of the download, even at 320 x 240ish looks a whole lot better than the DVR at 640 X 480 and it's been edited for commercials. I'm not about to sit there, import the movie into Quicktime (or some other program), edit the commercials, save the file again, etc. etc. The other thing I'm more likely to do is to rip a DVD (say of Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek TV series) using Handbrake, save each episode as a single Quicktime movie file (which means I need to make decisions about resolution again-so far I'll change the video settings to 480 x 282ish resulting in a Quicktime file of about 256MB for a 45 minute episode) This is a time consuming process at best, often taking between 1-2 hours per episode on my G4 Powermac. Again, downloading the episode I want to watch from iTMS take only minutes on broadband saving a lot of time.
I do expect Apple (or someone) to begin offering not just TV content to download but movie content to download as well. I'm a big fan of NetFlix but I can see the day when even they go all digital with some sort of DRM for movies you download as rentals and movies you download to own.
Finally, wouldn't it be great if Cable Television went away and it all became just internetTV? I'd love to have an entire planet full of content to choose from. I've always thought that a menu system of programming in which the subscriber gets to pick and choose the content they want to pay for rather than the "Basic, Standard, Premium" cable all or nothing option currently offered would be a much better system. iTMS may be the beginning of this type of system. 5 years from now, there may be alot more of us that don't have land lines for telephone service and don't subscibe to cable TV for television content. Podcasts have killed on-air radio for me and I'm happy to see that body buried! A lot has happened in the last year and I think the developments we see now and those to come in 2006 is the beginning of a new paradigm shift in multi-media content delivery.
