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You can buy entire seasons of a single show or just a few episodes.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
Downloadable TV shows: Good quality and expanding choices at iTunes Store


June 18, 2006


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, The Post-Standard

   TV used to be something you watched on a TV set. These days, it could just as well be something you watch on your iPod or your home computer.
   The big advantage of this new way of watching your favorite shows is clear the first time you try it out. You don't need a VCR. The shows are already recorded for you, and you can watch them again and again. All you do is download the ones you want to see.
   Where can you get these shows? For now, the best source is the iTunes store, owned and run by Apple. You need a Windows PC or Apple Macintosh and the free iTunes software. iTunes comes with each Macintosh computer and can be downloaded for Windows. (Get the Windows version from www.apple.com/itunes/download.)
   TV shows cost $1.99 each and are easy to browse for. You can buy entire seasons of a single show or just a few episodes, and you have a choice of 100 different series. (More shows are being added by the month.)
   Among the shows on the iTunes store are Desperate Housewives, CSI, Survivor, 24, The Apprentice, Commander in Chief, Alias, The Shield, America's Funniest Home Videos, Saturday Night Live, Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants, South Park, Law & Order, The Office, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Battlestar Galactica, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Dragnet, Knight Rider and much more.
   I bought the entire last season of two Discovery Channel shows, Extreme Engineering and Mythbusters, and a few shows from the Animal Planet channel's Breed All About It series. I also bought an episode of CSI I'd missed on regular TV.
   Buying videos works just like buying music. If you've never bought music from the iTunes store or never used iTunes at all, I'll explain briefly how it works. You set up an account with Apple (a one-time operation), click an icon to go to the store, then preview the item you're considering. Everything you want to buy can be previewed first.
   When you're ready to buy an item, you click a clearly labeled button. That's all you do.
   You don't do a thing to get the music or video into your computer, nor do you have to locate the files or do anything else that's geeky or frustrating. It's literally all done for you. If you have an iPod, you can have iTunes automatically copy new shows to your iPod whenever you connect it to your computer. (iPods work with both Windows PCs and Macs.)
   If you don't have an iPod or want to view the shows on a bigger screen, TV shows you buy can be enjoyed on your computer and on a few others that you authorize. Mac users have a built-in automatic sharing system on any wired or wireless network, and my wife used that function to watch some of my TV shows on her Mac.
   I had expected poor-to-fair video quality. After all, modern iPods play these TV shows on their tiny screens, so Apple didn't have to make the videos look any better than the images on postage stamps. But when I viewed them on my computer so the video was about 3 inches across -- not very big, to be sure, but quite a bit larger than an iPod screen -- the video was sharp and clear. When made the picture full screen, I could clearly see roughness in the picture. The ideal size for good video quality seemed to be about 5 inches across, an acceptable compromise.
   My only caution: Watch out for steadily decreasing disk space on your computer. A typical TV show takes up 100 to 200 megabytes of storage space. If your drive has less than, say, 5 gigabytes of free space, consider adding or upgrading to a larger drive before buying many shows.