This is where I'd personally love to see Apple prosper. I despise cable (and to a lesser extent) satellite broadcast companies. We are constantly paying for channels we simply don't watch. I mean, there's nobody even home M-F, 8Am-4PM ... and yet we pay. Then there's all these completely bogus, price gauging fees. The 'packages' suck mule dongle. Yes, I want channel A but in order to get it I must also get channels U, V, W, X, Y and Z. Is this what cable 'on demand' means? I ask for something and they demand I take all this other garbage with it?

Charge me for USE you SOBs! I want the shows that I want and when I want them. Apple can make that a reality ... but it's still a wee bit too pricey and a wee bit too small a selection.

Yes, a subscription to an individual show needs to be a little cheaper. Then I can buy ad-hoc/ala carte anything else that strikes my fancy.

Juicy!

Apple missed an opportunity there when they didn't buy Tivo as many of the rumors sites predicted (an Tivo and Apple users hoped for). Tivo will now offer downloads through Amazon's service (yeah, I know but how cool would that have been if it was Apple's iTunes)

You can have both, but Apple is pushing the iTunes store model. I personally love my Tivo as much as I do my Macs and iPods. Just wish they could play better together.

I do like the new features in Toast that allow me to use Tivo2Go on the Mac.

Maybe with the Apple TV.2 but at the moment its not attractive at all, most of the buyers just want it because its from Apple. It will be big but not just yet, a lot more content can change that.

Go ahead, price out your favorite shows on cable and compare the total price to downloading them from iTS. Cable is still way cheaper and the variety is still greater.

Movies are a wash for me. Cable-On-Demand and Apple will have the same movie-du-jour plus or minus a few months of exclusivity. Apple is competing with the wrong people - DVD media. Apple needs to be competing with MS/XBox and Cable companies - both of which have high bandwidth inputs and lots of storage for content.

The battle for the entertainment center has begun. Apple will always have the more elegant solution. Pricing will decide the winner. I hope that apple will become price competitive soon. This apple fan boy is waiting for AppleTV.2 as well.

Right now MS/Xbox have a device capable of competing but no content. Cable companies have the content and a terrible set top box. Both can change to compete with apples complete system very easily, but they wont until apple shows them the way.

I got rid of cable 22 years ago. Couldn't stand paying for dozens of channels I don't watch that had nothing on. Been using wabbit ears ever since.

However, I have been buying quite a bit of History Channel (and similar) DVDs from Amazon, as well as movies.

I usually buy used which saves quite a bit of money.

I guess this is my version of Ala Carte. If the cable & satellite companies offered Ala Carte I'd likely buy.

It would be nice if the Apple TV developed into a decent option for me.

In order to steal the market from the hardware makers, they have to convince 30% of the CD and DVD player buyers that they're better off buying a device that, on its own, is useless, and use it to play content purchased from iTunes (other sources need not apply). I know there's a lot of people who slurp anything apple delivers, but I can't believe there'll be 2 million of these things sold in the first year.

For the CD side, its ridiculous. The AppleTV has no interface for music except on the TV (um, what if I don't want to turn on my television to switch songs or play an album?) and is only good if you want your music in the same room as your TV set.

For the DVD side, you don't even get a DVD drive in the iTV, so you need to go into the other room to load your DVD, or plan on just buying all your content from Apple.

(BTW, with all the "Its got to be one price, because iTMS buyers are too stupid to understand some items might cost more than other items!" hoopla over music and movies, right now iTMS movies are variable priced, but unfortunately variable high, not low. I guess we can't have $4.99 movies in lo-def, standard-quality audio, but we can get it for $9.99 and $14.99!).

"Go ahead, price out your favorite shows on cable and compare the total price to downloading them from iTS. Cable is still way cheaper and the variety is still greater."

Ok, so setting aside the selection and quality (ie, not HD) issues, let's do some math.

Number of TV series you watch: let's assume 10 Number to new episodes per season: typically 15-18, let's assume 18 (because "24" is skewing things!)

So I'm looking at 180 TV episodes each year. At $2 each that's $360 per year, or an average of just $30/month. The price of my basic cable (no movie channels) is $65/month, a savings of $35 each month that I can use to buy the other miscellaneous content I might occasionally watch on TV.

So what's missing: - local programming/news (HD over the air?) - sporting events (sorry Apple, highlights ain't going to cut it) (also perhaps available HD over the air) - selection (improving) - HD (coming soon???) - subscription model (buying is fine for music which I listen to over and over, but I don't need to own my TV shows)

Interesting, 180 TV shows. One flaw, with cable I get all of them in real HD... iTunes is 640 wide, not even DVD standard.

In point of fact, I moved to HD last spring... and that was about a year ahead of my master plan (forced move, old CRT gave up the ghost). I'm finding that I watch a LOT of non-movie content a LOT more than I did when I was SD. I'm seeing 1-2 HD, DD 5.1 concerts each month, at least one Discovery HD documentary each week.