Back when Napster was king, and the only legal online music stores either had an eclectic selection (emusic) or hopelessly restrictive DRM, I was convinced that if someone could just come up with a comprehensive, easy, and non-cumbersome way to buy music that it would be a hit. Then Apple came a long and did it, and legal online music finally took off.<\/p>\n
Over the past couple of years the online piracy battle has turned to movies and TV episodes. I’d been thinking again along the same lines I was thinking about music 5 years ago that if someone could just come up with a way to get current TV episodes available for sale at a modest price, that legal online TV episodes would take off. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it turns out that Apple has done it again.<\/p>\n
Apple has now made current TV episodes available in iTunes Music Store. The selection is a bit dismal, but it’s a good start. Current hits Lost and Desperate Housewives are two of the series on offer. The other three series are ones I’d never heard of: Night Stalker, The Suite Life and That’s So Raven. OK, so it’s a bit slim pickings for now, but hopefully it’ll get better. Individual episodes are priced at $1.99, though they have the same price for both hour long and half hour shows which is a bit weird.<\/p>\n
Now for the downside: Unlike their audio offerings, currently Apple does not allow you to burn video episodes to DVD. This is unfortunate as watching video on a computer often isn’t as nice as watching on a TV. I’m hoping for them to lift this restriction in the future. I haven’t actually downloaded a video yet, so I’m not sure about the video quality either.<\/p>\n
Some suggestions for Apple:<\/p>\n
1) Lift the burning restriction!<\/p>\n
2) Offer a “season pass” subscription where one can subscribe to the entire current season and have new episodes downloaded as soon as they are released.<\/p>\n
3) Beef up the catalog. Here’s some suggestions I think would really get noticed: 24 and Battlestar Galactica. Personally I’d also like to see the Law & Order series, and West Wing.<\/p>\n
4) Along the lines of the free songs promotion, make deals with new series to feature a free episode per week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back when Napster was king, and the only legal online music stores either had an eclectic selection (emusic) or hopelessly restrictive DRM, I was convinced that if someone could just come up with a comprehensive, easy, and non-cumbersome way to buy music that it would be a hit. Then Apple came a long and did … Continue reading “Apple Really Gets It”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}