Archive for May, 2005

iTunes, Battlestar Galactica and money

May 27th, 2005

Hi All,
I’ve been thinking and talking about this idea with my co-workers and now it’s time to spread the idea to the world (what else is a blog good for than to spread stupid ideas/opinions). What is the idea you ask? Well, I could be the only person on earth that doesn’t have cable because I think $55+ a month for crap channels is a joke. I could be wrong in guessing you don’t watch the 3rd CSPAN channel you get either. How can one fix the problem of being forced to pay for something you don’t want? Easy, small payments on a large scale. Here’s my idea, now that iTunes supports video content Apple sells cable TV shows for 99 cents an episode. Now, I have no idea how much the cable companies pay cable content providers but I think 99 cents an episode is probably a pretty good deal. Heck, 50 cents an episode is probably good.

So the idea in practice goes something like this; I, the Battlestar Galactica fan, really wants to watch the series but doesn’t want to waste my life searching for some torrent that actually works and then spend another day downloading a 200+ MB file at .2k/second only to find out the quality is so poor it’s not even worth watching. I instead pay one dollar to download an h.264 file from iTunes music store at almost 1/2 the size that is almost tv quality. Instead of paying $55+ to the cable company, I spend $4 dollars a month and get a show I actually want to watch when I want to watch them. Furthermore, content providers wouldn’t have to cater to advertisers and would be free to explore new and interesting ideas.

Would people buy it? I have no idea, but sign me up! 🙂

cheers, will

# posted at 4:29 am by Will