iTunes Video Store
My ReplayTV crashed last night while recording
Lost, so I decided to use it as an opportunity to test the new video download
service from the iTunes Music
Store.
First off, I think $1.99 is a
bit high to get a single episode of TV. $0.99 would be more my
speed.
If I was to download this on
BitTorrent, it would probably take several hours. Actually, I've never tried to
download a brand-new episode -- it's possible that with so many folks
downloading it at once, performance might be better. But the iTMS downloaded it
in 8 minutes on my cable modem.
Fast!
The resolution seems to be only
320x240, but it looks pretty good, except on the credits, which look kind of
pixelly. And the video seemed awfully dark -- but hey, that show tends to be
hard to see. And there was no closed-captioning. Overall, though, pretty
pleasant experience.
A TV show gets
maybe 2 cents per minute of commercials per viewer. So revenue is around $0.25
for a show with 12 minutes of commercials, per viewer. Ten million viewers,
$2.5 million dollars. So $2 seems like an awful lot more than they're used to
getting -- though, to be fair, you might watch it with four friends, twice,
which makes it more even.
By the way,
at two cents per minute, a human life is worth about $400,000. I think the
networks are selling us cheap.
Filed Thu - October 13, 2005, 05:48 PM in
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