Apple Offers Per Show Subscription for
The Daily Show & The Colbert Report
at Only 63 Cents an Episode
Once you remove the monopolistic cable companies from the economics of television, there’s a whole lot of money left on the table. Apple is on track to take quite a bit of it by offering consumers what they’ve wanted all along: a la carte pricing not by channel, but by show.
Starting today you can subscribe to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for only 63 cents an episode.
Where Apple’s $2 Pricing Fails
So, what if iTunes offered The Daily Show? Just do the simple back of the envelope math and you’ll find that suddenly iTunes pricing makes your local cable company look cheap.
There are four Daily Show episodes a week. So, doing the simple math we get:
- 4 x $1.99 = $7.96 (For 1 week of The Daily Show)
- 16 x $1.99 = $31.84 (For 4 weeks of The Daily Show)
Apple Offers Per Show Subscriptions
$31.84 for one show for roughly a month just isn’t acceptible. Fortunately, the folks at Apple had their head screwed on firmly and today unveiled the Multi-Pass. For $10.00 you get the next 16 episodes. Starting today you can subscribe to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for only 63 cents an episode.
This is why the mac doesn’t need a tv tuner. Apple has a habit of eschewing old technologies a bit ahead of the curve, whether it’s the floppy drive or the modem, and they’re happy to do the same with the traditional tv market in the hopes of getting the first mover advantage of the rising one.
As for me, I will more than likely end up a subscriber to both shows.
Permanent Link
I assume that the video quality will be better than what the Daily Show already posts for free on the comedy central website? Or maybe .wmv looks great on windows computers, it seems to always come across as shoddy on my mac.
It’s the same 320×240 video in H.264, which looks good, but is small. Hopefully apple will unveil higher resolutions soon.
Does anyone else have a problem with the wording “Gift This TV Show”? It makes my skin crawl. Why can’t we just use the word “Give”? [shudder]
On resolution: In the US, regular broadcast TV uses the NTSC standard, which sucks. It only has 525 lines, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to go much above 640×480.
Hi from Seattle.