The linked article, over at Daring Fireball, describes in more detail some of the cool new features of the new products that Steve Jobs unveiled yesterday.
I have two main comments:
1. Yes, I agree that this FrontRow technology should somehow be hooked up to a television. Maybe a Mac Mini that's styled a bit more like a DVD player, with Front Row and a TV-out ports?
2. The whole $1.99-per-episode TV thing is cool, but I think it's way over-priced. For instance, each season of the TV show Friends has 23-25 episodes, and they currently sell in boxed sets for $20-30 (depending on how old the season is). That's only about a dollar an episode, plus it's in DVD format with full-screen resolution (not measly QVGA) and the whole "collector's item" stigma since they're in the boxed set. People will think that this "legal TV download" thing is cool for a while, but eventually they'll realize what a bum deal they're getting price-wise.
Granted, the downloadable shows are available the day after the original broadcast, so the speed in delivery (as opposed to a year or two for full-season DVDs to be produced) might make it worth it for some people. I know that, if ABC had put Commander in Chief up on the iTunes Video Store, I would have downloaded the second episode (which I missed for the actual TV broadcast) right away.
Also, another mitigating factor is that the full-season Friends DVDs were $35-40 when they were first released, about $1.50 per episode. Since the iTunes TV shows are immediately available they might be worth it... *if* they had high enough resolution to play on a proper television and not on a 320x240 video iPod screen. But making high-res video available would increase the download time significantly, and in our current gotta-have-it-now culture that might decrease the attraction quite a bit.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
The Geek Code desperately needs updating, but in any case here's mine (as of 2010-02-28):
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GIT/MU d+(-) s:+>: a C++> ULXB++++$ L+++ M++ w--() !O !V P+ E---
W+++ N o++ K? PS PE++ Y+ PGP t !5 X- R- tv+@ b++ DI++++ D--- e*++
h--- r+++ y+++ G+
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
If you really care about knowing what that all means, you either know the code already, or you can get it decoded for you here.
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