Value I Can’t Refuse
I’ve said before that I’m not sold on buying TV from Apple. Mostly because the DRM sucks, partly because of inconsistently offered season packs and generally being rather pricey.
But there’s two bright sparks on that not terribly enticing horizon now, and that’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, both now available in Australia for the first time digitally. I’ve been addicted to them ever since discovering them on free-to-air Canadian television, but suddenly I can actually get them legally without subscribing to Foxtel.
And the deal isn’t too shabby. $9.99 for 16 episodes (four weeks’ worth), which you pay up front and have downloaded for you automatically as they arrive. The DRM of course is still about and annoying (I mean, you can’t even burn them for god’s sake), but for more disposable shows like these, that’s not nearly as irritating to me.
And, I can watch them on my TV, because while I don’t have an Apple TV, I do have a MacBook Pro. Ahem.
Jackson Kearney
June 24th, 2009 at 7:30 am
First!
What an achievement.
In any case, I would like to complain about the massive amounts of gratuitous geek porn at the end of your post. What filth.
The Daily Show is nicely timed since we can’t watch the episodes from the website anymore. I’m not sure when that stopped, actually. Could we ever?
Personally I’m excited at the whole multi-pass thing. Especially for throw-away shows such as this. The $2.99 per episode model is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of cost vs DVD. Some shows seem to have their box set prices arbitrarily inflated in stores, so buying the season on iTunes is actually cheaper. Not often though, so it’s nice to have a option that is not a rip-off.
I agree DRM sucks – but there isn’t any alternative at the moment is there? Hopefully television networks will come around, since I’m sure Apple doesn’t care. It isn’t really in their interests.
Do you mean you can’t burn them as a data cd/dvd? Burning them to a DVD to watch in your television – besides the fact that no television studio has ever let people do that so I’m not sure why people would have the expectation – would easily remove their DRM. I’m not saying I like it, just it makes sense that they don’t allow it.
Tom Charman
June 24th, 2009 at 10:38 am
The DRM on music was such that you could burn them to listen on your CD player, presumably because no one thought people buying music would go for it if they weren’t able to play it on their established music devices.
Clearly they think it’s easier to steamroll the video watching public.
The Daily Show and Colbert Report sites started blocking international visitors about 2 months ago, maybe 3.
Jackson
June 25th, 2009 at 12:18 am
I’m sure one day television and movies will be DRM free. Anti-DRM activism does appear to actually be working if you look at the music industry.
Unfortunately “they” are actually different groups of companies. The people who gave up on music DRM are by and large not the same who control television and movie studios. Otherwise we’d probably have region coded cd’s :) Distributors like Apple have to create a DRM that satisfies the networks. You know this of course, so I’ll stop.
I mainly wanted to say you should not complain. I have a DRM protected eBook which does not even let you copy passages of text. Some don’t even let you print. Adobe let’s the publisher decide what restrictions they will have so it’s a mixed bag. Fairplay is actually pretty reasonable in comparison. It could easily be worse.
Anyway let’s hope Apple add it as a feature in Itunes. Converting video files to Dvd isn’t quite as trivia as burning music. A bit wishful and stupid of me to hope though