Apple: 200m TV episodes sold, 1m in HD

I don't understand how they sell one.

So let me get this straight...I can buy "The Office" season pass from Apple for $60 in HD. And I can watch it in 5.1 only if I have an AppleTV. ($229).

Or I can run a MythTV and legally obtain it from an HDTV card and $20 over-the-air HD antenna in 720p quality with 5.1 audio intact, and no digital rights management headache. The OTA version does of course come with commercials, but those can be automatically skipped.

Or I can buy the season on DVD. In the case of "The Office", season 4 is currently $31 on Amazon, vs. $42 on iTunes. The DVDs can easily be ripped out with HandBrake as well.

And of course torrent sites have it all for free as usual, which means that the producers of the iTunes-marketed TV shows have absolutely nothing to gain from embedding them within a DRM layer other than to annoy their customers.

The only business case I can see for wanting to use iTunes to buy a TV show is if you missed a particular episode and want to watch it right now.

someone should tell those 200m people that most of those shows are available to watch for free on nbc.com and abc.com, heck even sci-fi.com for your BSG fix....cbs.com is a bit behind the times, but they are getting there slowly....and let's not forget hulu...I used to have season passes to quite a few shows on itunes, but now I don't pay for any, and I got rid of cable as well...all hail the 21st century :)

Oh wow! In how many countries is it available??? Over here in Austria (i.e. EU) we don't even have films. Rentals, TV shows and stuff would also be nice but there you go. But who would imagine a country with only 8 Mio. inhabitants worth the money of starting discussing with the appropriate studios etc. See not much money to be gained here and we don't speak English as our mother tongue which makes the matter even more difficult (which lets me assume that if films etc will be available her in 2021 I guess I won't be able to watch them in English which I prefer because the rights to that would be somewhere else...namely the US and the UK bla bla bla). Damn it why can't there be some sort of world wide regulation or at least a EU wide. I just want to give you money!

And, uh, how many HD downloads from the free-spending XBox crowd?

Netflix or your local rental is a much better option for HDTV (1080p) because an entire season of a show fits onto one Blu-Ray.

Paying to view episodes piecemeal is crazy.

useless for Canadians ... xbox 360 doesn't have any tv shows available in Canada and the tv shows that apple has available for Canada I wouldn't watch even if I was paid!

Any idea how many HD TV shows Xbox360 has sold since 2006?

What really frustrates me about HD TV shows on iTunes is that you can't access the 5.1 audio stream unless you output using an Apple TV.

You can see the stream in QuickTime and VLC but it is locked down in someway that prevents it from being played back. The file is limited to 2.0 stereo on a Mac and has use of 2.0 or 5.1 surround on an Apple TV.

I wrote a nice letter of complaint and while Apple was kind enough to refund my money that does not solve the underlying problem of me not wanting to buy an Apple TV.

Does that count the freebies they gave out the first few days?