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I won't buy TV episodes until they cost only $0.10.

$1 is still too expensive in my mind.

It's all relative. Different people will have different pricing ranges.

But, thinking logical, something like HOUSE MD costs $3/ep. online. So a whole season (lets just round up) of 25 eps costs $75. You then buy the DVD later with extras for $40.

Twice the price, in essence, for now. Sans extras. Sans freedom to copy or burn as you wish.

But, $25 for the same season NOW, sans portability, sans burning, sans extras, is a good trade in my mind.

These companies had the same problem in early VHS/VCR days. I remember seeing ALIEN under glass for $80. Movies were sold for insane pricing because the companies were stuck in an archaic level of market perception. Once they brought it down to $15, everyone was buying fave movies instead of no one buying anything, and the market boomed.

Come on, people. $1 a program is fair. Now, if they want to charge the larger price, give some kind of accountability so you get all the extras at season end by having a subscription or something. Or the extras cost a lump fee later on and integrate into the programs ordered. The movie/tv companies aren't considering their audience yet, they are still caught up in bean counting greed.
 
Considering nearly 100% of the show I do watch, are available, to watch, for free, from the networks own web sites, I'm not quite sure why the networks would have any issue with this.

Ah well, another great mystery of life I don't understand, LOL.
 
So, I can watch them free live (or with a DVR). I can watch them free streaming on hulu or ABC.com with a few ads. I can have them stream instantly on Netflix or get DVDs for the ones that don't. And they think $.99 is going to be worth it at per episode pricing? :rolleyes:

Charging to television content at all is where the problem is.

you end up paying for television one way or another. i like the itunes model because it eliminates commercials and i can choose what i want to pay for instead of subsidizing a bunch of crap i don't like. it ends up being a lot cheaper than a cable bill and i don't come home and throw on the television watching hours upon hours of content. the signal-to-noise ratio of my television watching is very high; no game shows, no reality shows, no bad shows sandwiched in between two good shows.

i'd actually like to see all television go this way, instead of the ineffectual nielsen rating system, a system based on purchased episodes would probably lead to fewer good shows being cancelled.
 
It's been said here before, but most people only watch a show once and that's it. Why don't they come up with some sort of a rental model similar to movies? I'm not interested in buying TV shows so they can take up space on my hard drive. With all the shows also being taken online, I don't see how lowering the purchase price will help this much.
 
Well Hulu is now reported to be looking into charging for "popular" shows, so...

I expect the penetration rate for people buying an episode to watch once and delete would be very low unless it really was just pennies.

So I expect Apple is trying to make the per episode pricing more competitive with DVD box sets for people buying episodes for archival purposes, saving users the inconvenience of having to rip and convert their DVDs to MV4's to watch on their :apple:tv's.
 
Wrong method

Why don't they just have all the TV shows available for free paid for by advertising?

Like the way commercial television has been funded for the last 40 odd years?

Who's going to pay for shows when you can just do a google video search and watch them for free? :rolleyes:

There would be a lot more cash to make from advertising like this than revenue from people purchasing the shows, surely?
 
Exactly. There are way to many streaming options to consider buying video media on iTunes. If you think a show has rewatchability then I'd sooner buy it on BD. This certainly wont kill cable because most people still subscribe for the sports, on demand and as ISPs. The same model that works for music certainly wont work for TV/movies

Although if they can work out a monthly subscription model that includes 90% of what you would watch, then supplement it with .99 pricing on extra shows that fall outside the subscription (odd channels, specialty shows), that would be worth avoiding the hassle of finding them through 'other sources' (for me at least).
 
I think the networks would be smart to allow this. What shows I miss I download via torrent because we don't have Hulu in Canada and $2 a show adds up on iTunes. If they were to make these .99¢ I would absolutely start downloading my missed shows legit, just like Apple got me to pay for my music.
 
I think it'll be brilliant if they can get pricing down or give me a package deal of TV content. There comes a time when you sick of the alternatives to getting a copy of TV shows you missed and I think that time is starting to get pretty close.

A low, but reasonable price for consistent easy to find and keep (no DRM thanks) TV content seems OK to me.
 
I won't pay a cent for TV shows in iTunes until they are closed captioned. I'm hearing impaired and video is worthless to me unless subtitled.

The capability to display captions is built into Quicktime now. There is NO excuse for not providing captioning.

Apple really needs to pressure the networks into do this. I might actually buy a show if they do.
 
It's a good move - I've bought a handful of TV series, usually when they're on offer to bring them in line to what a DVD boxset costs. Which is how they should be priced at the very least... Season Boxset Cost = Season Pass on iTunes (DVD Cost = iTunes SD Costs, Blu-ray Cost = iTunes HD Cost etc).

If this was the case there are definitely a few TV Series that I would buy... as it stands I'm not forking out nearly £40 for Season 2 of Chuck in HD.
 
I hope Apple can pull this off, one dollar is the magic iTunes figure. It worked for music and it's worked wonders for apps and games on the iPhone. I think it would really work and boost sales of TV episodes as well.
 
This was talked about before in the thread about Apple acquiring the ad company:

Apple knows exactly what content, hardware, and music each and every one of us has ever bought from them. They know our occupations, ages, and other things too. Using their enormous genius database, they are in an unprecedented position to target each of us with specific ads that could be inserted into TV shows. Advertisers would get the most bang for their buck through the iTunes store. So the question is, if all of these other sites can provide the content with ads, why not the iTunes store?

Personally, I would rather pay a little and not have to watch the ads. However, if the TV people are only willing to sign a deal if ads are involved, it seems to me that the iTunes store would be the best place to do it.
 
So 0.99 SD shows and 1.99 HD shows? Sounds insanely awesome. If broadcast companies want to sell full seasons, their prices need to be lowered to equal 10% - 20% less than what it would cost to buy all episodes individually. What incentive do we have to buy the entire season if it costs just as much to buy each episode?

What about music? It should also be lowered, perhaps to 0.50 per song. Music companies are too greedy, but they have to adapt if they want to survive. It's much easier to illegally download music than buy it...

Lastly, why are movies more expensive than their DVD counterparts? Doesn't make sense why movie companies are restricting their content from iTunes, when they can obviously make a bundle from it. When will these movie companies release MORE films to iTunes? They should realize that iTunes is a much better alternative to Netflix, with regards to making money. The future of media is virtual...
 
What about the externalised costs passed on to consumers?

If you are all so keen to pay the same for digital content with no physical media have you thought about the extra costs that you will be paying to create physical backups of this content?

This has all been passed on to consumers with no change in pricing structure to reflect that you are to be paying the bills for physical media.

When they can find a way for consuming content that is quicker and easier than an internet search maybe there is a viable business model.
 
It's been said here before, but most people only watch a show once and that's it. Why don't they come up with some sort of a rental model similar to movies? I'm not interested in buying TV shows so they can take up space on my hard drive. With all the shows also being taken online, I don't see how lowering the purchase price will help this much.

Renting a movie "on demand" is $4 for a 2-hour movie. So the established price for rental is $2 per hour of content. If iTunes priced TV at $2 per 1 hour drama and $1 per 30 min sitcom, that would be comparable (OK, TV shows are not really 30 and 60 min, but they are in the ballpark). If you don't like to clutter up your drive, then watch once, and either burn to disk or delete.
 
sports

this won't replace my cable until I can watch live sports in HD. I can watch live sports now on the net but the quality is only about standard at best.
 
Personally, I would rather pay a little and not have to watch the ads. However, if the TV people are only willing to sign a deal if ads are involved, it seems to me that the iTunes store would be the best place to do it.

It would only work if it's streamed. The $1.00 is to download the TV shows; we can easily skip past the ads. Maybe subscriptions; similar to broadcasting? Then we get limited advertisement without having to download the video.
 
Free, over-the-air? No such thing where I live.
Hulu.com? No, it's limited to the USA.

99 cents for one TV episode would be much better, but if it would be even lower with a season pass it would be even better.

What TV networks need to understand is that a TV show isn't like a music album. I might only like/want two or three tracks from an album, but if I like a TV show I won't want to miss a single episode. It's two completely different things.

Let's say that none of the shows I'm currently watching gets cancelled. It means I currently watch 16 shows. At one episode per show per week it currently means 128$ each month via iTunes for something I have to download and not having "on demand" TV (news, etc). At that price nobody's going to want that, cable or satellite gives you more for a lower cost.

Even at 64$ it's quite expensive, though. Most people only watch a TV show once and then never watch it again. Not to mention storage space, not everyone has terabytes of storage for all those TV shows and movies...

TV networks should wake up and offer affordable prices. It's better to sell 1M episodes at 99 cents or even 3M episodes at 49 cents than to sell 100K episodes at 1.99$.
 
Agree I must with Apple. There is just too much competition with Netflix and from the networks themselves who are offering whole episodes of their shows on their websites. While I buy music from iTunes (on occasion), I always get movies and tv DVDs from Netflix (as well as stream Free content from there, too)! Sorry, but a 23 minutes episode of the office just not worth $!.99 and certainly not $3 for a hi-def version. Not doing it.
 
But, thinking logical, something like HOUSE MD costs $3/ep. online. So a whole season (lets just round up) of 25 eps costs $75. You then buy the DVD later with extras for $40.

Twice the price, in essence, for now. Sans extras. Sans freedom to copy or burn as you wish.

...and sans DVD/BD quality.
 
Umm, have you watched a show on nbc.com or abc.com lately? That's exactly what they do.

donbadman, macrumors regular
Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: London

I guess that, like me, he can't watch any shows on NBC.com, ABC.com or Hulu.com. Americans keep forgetting that they block non-American viewers. Sometimes, the only options are iTunes, wait for the DVD and... er, that third option. You know what I'm talking about. :p
 
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