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Apple Adds New TV Shows To iTunes
Phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Apple has added eleven new and classic television shows from NBC, the Sci-Fi network, and USA. The new shows include Alfred Hitchcock, Battlestar Galactica, Monk, Surface, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, Dragnet, Law & Order, The Office and most importantly: Knight Rider!" From the article: "Steve Jobs took the opportunity to toot Apple's horn, stating that since the inception of video downloads on the iTMS, they'd sold nearly three million individual items. In addition to the sales figures, the PR from Apple stated that their current offering of video stands at approximately 300 episodes. All in all this looks like a slam dunk for Apple as they're rounding up their distribution deals and diversifying their suppliers. If the rumored deals with FOX and CBS are true then Apple will have a dominating lead in this market, much like their current domination in the digital music distribution arena."
Are those shows downloadable in decent quality, or only in poststamp ipod format?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
... when they lock up some kind of deal with rhino to distribute mystery science theater 3000.
yeah... now *that* would be a dream come true? need a quick manos fix? go to itms... and watch on your ipod.
*thinks about productivity*
perhaps that isn't such a great idea.
but yeah... wonder if mister jobs is a misty?
sad robot making broken music
Which brings up an interesting problem: If this were available in the UK, how would the television license come into play? Would it be rolled up into the cost if you wanted to buy an episode of the UK Office? Since you don't need a tele to play it, just a computer or ipod.
Everybody is talking about possible future Apple products - the iphone, icamera etc. I think there is a more logical and much more interesting product apple could make - an Apple TV.
Think about it - Sony and Microsoft are currently battling it out with gaming machines assuming that it's going to become the "media hub" for the home. What if they're completely wrong?
Apple have got many of the pieces of the puzzle already - Frontrow, itunes, a rock solid OS to base things on.
I can imagine my old mum and dad buying an Apple TV, but they would never in a million years buy an XBox or playstation.
I thought it was the old show ...
But no.
Season 1: $25.87
Season 2: $1.99/episode
*drools*
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Sorry, but I have to rebutt this.
h.264 will be the format of choice with the next-gen video cards with hardware support for h.264.
FairPlay does sort of suck, since you can't do anything with it, but at least it works, and doesn't get the movie/music people are bent out of shape.
Mac + Windows represents virtually all the _consumer_ market. Plus, iTunes can run on Linux via CrossOverOffice and others, so this point is not all that strong. The market just isn't there for solid native Linux support.
You can play these videos are FAR many more devices than the 5G iPod, like EVERY PC and Mac with iTunes. Yes, the videos right now are built for the iPod, but if you think the iPod is the only intended device, you've missed the point - the iPod is just a test.
Why do you need to burn a DVD when you can hook up your PC/Mac to your TV/HDTV, or even better yet, watch them on your nice high res monitor? Most people don't have HDTVs, so their computer monitors are as high res as they go. And you can burn the files to a data DVD to take wherever, or network share, or whatever. The DVD isn't tomorrow's technology - it's barely even today's. These videos represent a physical media-free environment, so again, whether this is a good thing or not, I think you're missing the point.
HDTV downloads would take FOREVER. Of course, if reports from Front Row-equipped iMacs streaming in HD trailer without stuttering or loading times is true, Apple is two steps ahead of us on this already.
Point is - this isn't meant to be a be all that ends all offering. This is a test, this is only a test. Why the heck else would they pick such a crazy variety of shows to test many potential demographics?
I'm curious as to what technology underlies the iTunes Music Store. Are they using Apple hardware on the hardware side? WebObjects on the software side? If it's an "all-Apple" solution that's a major success story that they ought to be leveraging to sell their server products.
-JT
If you have a TV licence for your house, then it covers all TVs within that house, as well as any and all TVs that can be powered solely from their own internal power source i.e. batteries at any other location. The iPod would qualify for that, so as long as you had a TV license at home (which you almost certainly would) then you'd be OK. If you didn't, then they might have to re-think things. That being said, it would only affect BBC programmes, as the license fee is only there to support the BBC as other channels are supported by commercials, so it would be entirely up to the BBC whether they even made their programmes available via iTunes.
Here's a Google-HTML-ised-PDF from the BBC website about some of the above.
Also, there has been talk - I think it's even been posted here on /. - of altering the TV licence to cover computers too, given that TV shows can be acquired (legitimately or not) through them, though I think it got smacked down at the time and I've not heard any more about it since.