I just find it hard to believe that paying for TV shows via iTunes or other can be as economical as getting them all-ish over the cable/satellite pipe for a flat rate/month.
My other issue is that it's not possible to legitimately get auto racing without paying for cable or satellite. Yes, you can see the 3 races that get shown per year on broadcast, but that ain't enough to really understand what's going on with a championship.
I don't disagree. The cost model isn't quite there yet. But it's also highly dependent on what and how many shows you watch.
I know people that pay $50-$60-$80+/month to watch four or five shows a week. Shows where the "Season Pass" via iTunes (or whatever) would be $12-$15 per show. So paying $60, $80, $100 for
every episode of the half dozen shows you watch is actually less than paying $60-$80/month for the 3/4 months each "season" runs.
But of course, if you watch four-dozen different shows, all the time, or just like to channel surf, then an ala-carte model doesn't work so well.
And absolutely, sporting events are a problem. Though I think they'll figure it out. NFL Sunday Ticket works, as do Pay-Per-View events. But no, until you can just click a few buttons and watch that race or game that's occuring
right now, it won't work.
It's getting there, however. I noticed our AppleTV had many of the Olympic events broken down into individual programs. So if you wanted to watch just figure skating, you could buy the Ladies' Short Program, or the Long Program, or Men's practice, or the whole season pass for all of the men's or women's figure skating events, etc. They didn't have it for every event but they had several of them. But it was the
day after the event actually aired, making it less useful. Had those events been live, that would have been quite nice to just "buy a ticket" to those individual events. Rather than having to sit through the 4-hour block of NBC's programming just to get to the 30 minutes of event that I cared about, for example.
