This is an old review I wrote and never posted, but it’s still relevant today. My conclusion is up to date for 2011.
Having just purchased and watched seasons 1 and 2 of The Tudors from iTunes (I missed them on Showtime), I was searching the net for other peoples thoughts on the quality of these TV shows. One review I came across was from AllForces.com, concering iTunes quality vs Bit Torrent. Since their blog post in 2005, Apple seems to have upped the standard of their TV show offerings.
I’m be the first to admit that I’m an Apple fan, with my Mac laptop the primary downloader of these TV Shows, syncing to my iPhone and also viewing the shows via front row on my Mac Mini. It’s the viewing of these on the Mac Mini I will review.
Read the rest of this entry »
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 USD$1.99 per episode (with Some more expensive) The Australian Store offers the episodes 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.
