I’ve recently been bitten by the urge to jump on the HDTV bandwagon. Cable and FiOS are both very expensive options, in the neighborhood of $60/month with a DVR.
One of my friends dumped cable and went 100% AppleTV. Even if I don’t save money going that route, I’d at least get to keep the shows after watching them. I wrote down a list of the shows I watch and poked around the iTunes store to see what’s available. I was pretty disappointed with what I found:
Many shows don’t have a season pass option, meaning you have to pay full price for each episode – and I think that also means you have to seek them out each week; iTunes won’t grab them for you. Most shows I looked are not available in HD, but I realize this was a recent update so I won’t complain about that too much. “NOVA,” an excellent documentary program that I can watch for free on PBS.org is $4.99 an episode on iTunes – and that isn’t even in HD!
On top of all that, I think the iTunes store interface is fairly convoluted, TV series don’t seem to have their own landing pages, and clicking on some of the breadcrumbs doesn’t result in any navigation.
I don’t know who’s dragging their feet here, Apple or the networks, but it’s bad enough that I’m going to stick with cable!
Living Critic 