The addition of TV shows to iTunes is a welcome one, but I wonder about the pricing. Steve Jobs believes that people want to own and not rent their music, but does the same hold true for TV? I'd pay a couple bucks to catch a missed episode of a current show, but would I buy one episode of Seinfeld? Probably not—I'd be more likely to buy an entire season. TV episodes do not stand alone as well as movies. But then you are talking about a serious investment of cash and time. And while you're at it, can you buy one season of an older show, or do you need to buy the whole series? I can't think of many multi-season shows I'd want to shell out that kind of money for. And after watching all those shows it would probably be a very long time before I'd want to watch them again, so is it even worth the purchase? That's what rentals are for.
I enjoy using my Netflix subscription to rent an entire season of a show for basically no cost, and watch them all in a marathon weekend. To make buying more worthwhile than renting you'd have to want to watch it over and over. The time requirement alone makes movies a different equation than songs. I do listen to songs over and over, and can do so passively. My guess is that at some point down the road, Apple will recognize the need to switch over to a rental format. At that point, they would be in direct competition with Netflix.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has said that Netflix has never been tied to a specific delivery mechanism, implying they could switch to internet delivery when needed. But unless they've been secretly developing and refining it, Apple most likely has a superior distribution experience in the iTunes store. But do they have the movie rental customer base that Netflix does? It's hard to say how much overlap there is between their music customers and potential movie/tv customers. It could benefit Netflix to partner with Apple, to use Apple's store as a distribution method, but how much does this benefit Apple? Access to digital delivery rights? If Netflix even has these yet, it might be useful, but I'm guessing Jobs has his own deals lined up.
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