digital music/video
03/08/2006, 1:40pm, EST
Wednesday, March 8th
iTunes offers monthly TV show pass
Apple's iTunes Music Store on Wednesday took its first step toward a monthly subscription model with a new service called Multi-Pass that lets users buy TV shows on a monthly basis, according to Reuters. "iTunes is launching the service in partnership with Viacom's Comedy Central Network, which is rolling out 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' and 'The Colbert Report' on the service. Fans will be able to buy the next month's series of 16 new episodes via Multi-Pass for $9.99, or to pay $1.99 per episode. Four episodes air each week and viewers can download each episode after it's been broadcast." While the multi-pass' is not a complete subscription model--users can keep the episodes--Apple until now has only offered videos and TV show episodes for $1.99 per episode. [updated]
The addition of the shows comes shortly after Apple included five short films and three TV shows from Bravo, bolstering the availability of video content from Apple again in late February. The iTunes Music Store already offers numerous shows from Comedy Central, including Comedy Central Stand-Up and the hit cartoon South Park.
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-4 episodes of The Daily Show x $1.99 ea. = $7.96/week -$7.96/week x 3 weeks = $23.88/"month"
That's still almost two and a half times as expensive as the $9.99/month multi-pass for the show. In fact, they only need to broadcast more than five shows in a given month to make the multi-pass cheaper than buying a la carte. That sounds like a pretty decent discount ("extra deal") to me.
Also, since the runtime for the first episode is 21:57, I'd say no commercials.
A little more than 60¢/show, commercial free? I dunno, sounds like a pretty decent deal to me.
If you think about it, this method is actually more like a REAL subscription, like for a magazine. You get the next one when it is ready. If you stop paying, you stop receiving, but can keep all the ones you already paid for. That's more like a "subscription" than the "pay monthly /download all you want / lose it all if you stop paying" schemes from Napster and others.