Some people seem to think it's a status symbol to pay more for things than they have to. Or at least that's the idea I come away with when thinking about the services that will let you watch TV online for a fee. Still, these services are out there and must serve a real purpose for some people, so I'm going to talk about them a little bit today.
Amazon Unbox has TV shows available for download for $1.99 an episode. They have shows from CBS, NBC, Fox and the CW (but not from ABC) and a host of cable channels. They also have lots of old TV shows that have been released on DVD. These are also available for $1.99 for an individual episode, but some also have special deals if you buy a whole season at once. For instance, you can get the first season of The Mary Tyler Moore show (24 episodes) for $35.99, which is a substantial savings over the per-episode price. However, Amazon sells the first season on DVD for $21.99, so I don't understand why you'd pay a $14 premium to not get a permanent copy of this for your archives.
iTunes also has TV shows at $1.99 an episode. They have shows from ABC, CBS, Fox and the CW (but not NBC) and some cable channels, and some old shows as well. Unless you have the iTunes software installed on your computer, you can't do much more than browse a list of titles available, but if you do have the software, there's a very logical browsing interface.
I'm told by those in the know that the reason to get your video from one of these paid services is so you get better quality video, have a "permanent" copy that you can watch whenever you want to, and can watch on other devices besides the computer (TV, cell phone, PDA, etc.) Neither of those seem like compelling reasons to me, but obviously many people feel differently. So if this makes sense for you, go for it, but I'm going to pass on this method of watching TV online.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment