The Future of Television

Back in the dark ages — circa 2005 — I discovered that I could obtain shows from BitTorrent that I otherwise would have been unable to see. If I missed an episode of Lost, I could BitTorrent it. When the new Doctor Who premiered in the in the U.K., I could BitTorrent it. I wasn’t interested in pirating anything — my goal was to watch the stuff that the distribution channels were preventing us from seeing. And it worked. I was able to keep up with Lost and Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, and Extras long before they touched down on American soil.

Last fall I took a serious look at the television offerings available through the iTunes Music Store. This, my friends, is the future of television, at least in our household. A “season pass” for The Office, for example, costs $35 for 22 half-hour episodes (which are, in reality, 23-minutes long). That’s $3.18/hour, which is exactly the same as what we’re paying for our cable right now.

But that’s not the end of the story. For that $3.18/hour, we get to keep the episodes and watch them at our convenience. (Yes, they’re crippled with DRM, but I’m okay with that for now. I think that’s an issue that will sort itself out — in the consumer’s favor — during the next few years.) Also, minute-for-minute, the cost for hour-long programs is roughly half the cost for 30-minute programs.

There are drawbacks, of course:

•Selection at the iTunes Music Store is limited. Want to download The Wire? I do. But I'm out of luck. HBO doesn’t have any shows in the iTunes Music Store yet. I'm forced to choose between BitTorrent or waiting who-knows-how-long for the show to be released on DVD at Netflix.
•The files are crippled with DRM, which may cause problems for me in the future.
•I don’t have physical copies of these shows as I would on DVD. (This is both an disadvantage and a advantage.)
I currently watch two shows via the iTunes Music Store: The Office and Battlestar Galactica. I also subscribe to Heroes because:

1.it’s about comic book-y stuff, and
2.it’s supposed to be good