Practically un-announced, Apple have made available a limited number of TV shows on the Australian iTunes Music Store.

While I commend the move, I have to question their pricing. The US store offers TV shows @{.tweet-username} USD$1.99 per episode (with Some more expensive) The Australian Store offers the episodes @{.tweet-username} AUD$2.99, which equates to approximately USD$2.85.

Why the difference? You can’t tell me Apple has set-up different infrastructure and have different hosting for Media in Australia. They are not paying to send the data over international links. So why the over 40% increase in pricing from the US?

I think the local media companies and licensers got greedy. It is as simple as that.

It’s not just the price that gets me down. The content is different. The continually stupid regionalisation of content has shown to be a road block to people GLOBALLY. For example:

• DVDs (remember region coding at the end of the last decade?);
• TV – why do shows still get screened outside the USA weeks or months later;
• Movies;
• or music.

Yes this is a global economy people. The ease of Torrent sites to circumvent this division of content drives the end user towards increased use of torrents. It is now apparently easier to get a season of your favourite show from the internet than wait for it to appear on TV; or on iTMS. The only people wising up to this are the Movies Studios whom now do simultaneous global releases, because they were losing too much money.

Until the pricing on the Apple store is the same, and Australia gets the same releases as the US at the same time (on TV or on iTMS) – people will continue to use torrent sites as their source of the latest TV shows from the USA. Plain and simple – “Listen up Media conglomerates!!”

Update: It looks like they did release a press release yesterday.