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Apple Seeking Price Cuts on iTunes Television Episodes?

I'm presuming that they will come to a compromise price of $1.49 here. That will be roughly in line with the DVD price in the states, taking into consideration that the quality is lower with iTunes, and there are no extras.

Personally I think that in the month following a show's premiere, the price can be much higher due to consumer demand (if they missed the show), and because it is new. $1.99 or even $2.99 makes sense for a one-off episode.

Older content should be cheaper. Content purchased as a season should be cheaper (and take into consideration single episodes purchased before, so the overall price is not affected). Basically the cost of buying a season on iTunes should be slightly lower than the cost to buy the DVD box set at the same time.

Now in the UK, when a new season DVD comes out, it's far more expensive. Battlestar Galactica Season 3 - RRP £50, available for £35. $70. $3.50 per episode (albeit including 17.5% tax). So I think that people should quit moaning so much.
 
thecritix said:
so its fair that because we're able to afford higher prices we should pay them for exactly the same product??? because we're british?!
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Basically yeah. Same reason you pay £5 for a ****ing BLT at Heathrow and it would cost $5 at Dulles.



Anyway, I think 99¢ shows will work only if they make available premium versions in HD for $1.99 or maybe even $2.99
 
This would be nice, yes...due to the less quality and lack of bonus features...of course, this could pave the way for the damn HD downloads at a decent price.
 
Apple's right

This is the way the studios should be going. Sales volume would more than double. The resolution is only 640 x 480, after all, not the 720 x 480 of a standard DVD. (In the U.S., of course -- I'm not sure what it is in PAL-land. 720 x 576?) It looks small, but it's significant, especially when you know that you're also dealing with a lower bitrate mpeg 4 compression. Plus, the copy protection, which you don't have if you record the program on a TiVo, and you can't burn it to DVD.

So how about this? Release the whole season in HD-DVD or Blu-Ray -- oops, can't get the volume yet, because the players are still too expensive for mere mortals, and no one want to buy the player that loses. First of all, studios, settle on a favorite instead of acting like idiots. But until then, release the full season on DVD the night of the finale. Put a little button on the show's page, selling it for the usual price, but discounted by the amount that you've spent on the series on iTunes! So, you watch the last breathtaking, hysterically funny episode, and then watch as people click the "order the DVD" button. Better still: release it in Hi-Def, and charge more.

Or, you can take the NBC route: go to the Undead at Unbox and charge what you want.
 
This would quickly transform the AppleTV from a hobbyist item to a killer piece of hardware. I love mine already, but 99-cent shows would give a lot of people incentive to get an AppleTV.
 
Also regarding the US//UK price comparisons; you cant base it on the exchange rate because it fluctuates and is volatile.

A better way to work it out is to see what % a $1.99 show makes up of the average US income, and what % a £1.89 show makes of the average UK income. Its about relative expense, not absolute expense based on currency rates.
 
Prices for TV shows and movies are silly. Ideally, a song would be $.50, a TV show $1, and a movie $2. Not that any of the content producers would ever go for that, because they're short-sighted fools who prefer to bitch about piracy and prosecute the symptoms rather cure the root cause. They need to break the 50-100% markup exerted on the consumer by retailers, which doesn't help them anyway, and transition to a more efficient means of distribution. There's nothing but good that would come from this.
 
$.99 is a great idea. Most of the programming on network TV isn't worth anything, so any price reduction is a good concept. The networks should take it and run.
 
I wonder if they will change the UK TV shows to 50p? I doubt it very much. Aren't they like £1.89 now or something sick? (over $3)
 
They are correct that everyone would make more money at $0.99. When they first started selling TV shows a $1.99, I bought one just for the novelty of it. I have not bought any since and won't buy any more because there just aren't any that are worth $1.99 per episode to me. At $0.99 I would definitely buy a few. At $0.50 I would buy a lot.
The choice is theirs; they can have some of my money or none of my money, but there is no way they are going to get $1.99 / episode worth of my money.
 
Not gonna work....

Even at 99¢ I won't buy any more TV shows that I have which is only two episodes of My Name is Earl (because my DVR screwed up) and a season of anime TV show. Rest of the TV shows were stuff I recorded using EyeTV or free stuff on iTunes (and that was only to test the download speeds to my Apple TV).
 
Per episode fees = useless

$1.99, .99, .50, whatever. It's all so useless and unneeded. As so talked about by myself and others, when i want to watch TV, i don't want to sit there and keep a running total of my shows. The ability of cable TV --> to browse channels and tons of shows along with Tivo, makes iTunes TV shows completely useless and expensive.

For those few that will chime in and say they only watch 2 shows, that's fine. Apple can and should keep the per-episode fee for people like that. But for people that watch lots of cable, or even just a few series every week (Plus local news, etc), an iTunes TV subscription service would be the only solution. I'd gladly drop my cable subscription and join Apple's if they were to do this.

Cable is already moving rather quickly (for the cable industry) into on-demand tv services for single shows and so on. Apple could still get their foot in the door and be first and rule the industry with a subscription service; of course that is reasonably priced - even if that means equal to current cable tv rates.

But until I can browse through channels and not just buy a single show here or there and keep a calculator next to the remote, it won't do. If they wait too long, the cable co's will leave no room within a few years.
 
Brilliant move - volume would definitely increase and i'd buy more shows... can't justify $2 for one watch at this point but would watch more at $1 a pop.
 
Macrumors said:
One concern raised is that potential impact these prices would have on DVD sales which have traditionally been an important source of revenue for the studios.
Case in point: NBC Universal just released "Heroes" on DVD, with most retail outlets charging about $40 for the set of 23 episodes. If Apple had its way, the same set of episodes would cost less than $23, potentially making the DVD -- despite its myriad bonus features -- less appealing to consumers.
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Well, the DVD is higher resolution and has bonus features, packaging with artwork, and is easier for the average Joe to watch on his TV (remember, the device that was designed to view TV shows?). So the iTunes episodes should be cheaper than the DVD. The current situation where the downloads cost substantially more than the DVD is probably significantly discouraging sales on iTunes, and it's possible that the increased volume of downloads would make up for any loss of DVD sales.

The author of the article speculates that Apple and NBC's recent split may have been in part related to some of these issues.
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Well, that's the first thing I thought when I saw the headline, too.
 
OhEsTen said:
If you're really into a show - people will want the DVD for exactly that point - the extras that you don't get through iTunes. Why do most of the studios seem so hesitant with stuff like this? I don't see cheaper iTunes shows cannibalizing DVD sales...
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And at that point DVD sales are cannibalized. Look at the looky-loos who aren't sure what to do. Before, the cost of the DVD was so close, that it was worth it to just by the stupid box. Drop to 99, and a lot of casual users will just buy the show off of iTunes. DVD sales drop, and profits are lost...

BigFatDuck said:
i think a price drop is necessary. sure, you would be paying less for a season- which is exactly the way it should be considering you're not purchasing a physical product which involves shipping, stocking, manufacturing, etc. as well as having content at lower quality and DRM restrictions without any bonus features. as it stands right now at $1.99 / episode you're paying MORE for the digital version than the DVD set. how exactly does that make sense?
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...but you are getting the episode soon after airing rather than waiting until 9/4 for The Office Season 3 and I'm-still-not-sure for BSG Season 3. That's a big thing for a lot of people. My wife is going to miss the season premiere of the Office and until the NBC thing shook out, was planning on buying it off of iTunes (would have done so even if they had split the hour into two episodes).

p0intblank said:
If this happens, I'll be in awe... Not to mention, this is yet another slap in the face for NBC.
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Why? :confused:
 
Project said:
Also regarding the US//UK price comparisons; you cant base it on the exchange rate because it fluctuates and is volatile.

A better way to work it out is to see what % a $1.99 show makes up of the average US income, and what % a £1.89 show makes of the average UK income. Its about relative expense, not absolute expense based on currency rates.
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Your analogy doesn't quite hold up it the real world. I understand exchange rates fluctuate and are volatile but if you compare average income percentages then in Thailand a TV show would cost .04
 
I would definitely buy more TV shows at that price! 1.99 adds up really fast. More than anything though, I want some HD content. I'm in college so we have a lil 20 TV in our dorm, but I have this beautiful 20" imac that HD would look amazing on!!

I have tried ABC's stream, but right now they have a grand total of four shows on there with only 1 episode per show. Maybe it will get better this fall.

Well there is my 2 cents, off to class...
 
I would love it if they would offer the option to "rent" the show at a lower price. All I need the show for is for maybe about 2 days to watch it with my family. I don't watch TV shows again. It's all too familiar the second time around.
 
Yeah, I'd start buying a lot more TV shows too.

Consider House. I'm just discovering this great show. To buy season 3 on DVD costs about $50. To buy all 24 episodes on the iTune store at $1.99 currently costs $48. Hmm. Decisions, decisions - do I want the higher-resolution version on physical media with bonus features, for the same price? Of course I do.

But at $0.99, I'd probably buy them now, watch just to get caught up on the soap opera bits in time for Season 4 to start in a few weeks, and then worry about buying the DVD later.

I suspect I'd start thinking that way for a lot of shows.

But right now, I don't buy TV shows, because I keep thinking, "Well, if I end up really liking it, I should just buy the DVD set at about the same price".
 
armhol said:
Here here! You beat me to it, this was my thought exactly. Think about this, if the price does drop to $.99 thats about 50p, so we would have to pay nearly 3.8 times as much as in the US! RIP OFF!
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I'm sure they'd drop your price substantially at the same time, probably to 89 or 99p. Still not ideal but.... You know, it's not Apple's fault that the US dollar is worthless and the pound is strong. If you lot had switched to the Euro like everyone else you wouldn't be having this "problem". :D
 
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