Is Renting TV Shows in 2010 Like Selling Bottled Water in 1970? http://bit.ly/cOuese
Jumping right to the conclusions:
From $30 to own a full season outright, to somewhere between $25 – $50 per month to watch and discard as many episodes you can bear to watch. How does $.99 to rent a single episode measure up? At just one episode per day you are already at the similar costs of the alternatives, and that does not include the hidden costs of distribution and storage. So is it then worth it to rent a-la-carte from Apple in convenient individual packages, or is it still much better to just pay for the water hook-up represented by cable and Netflix and drink from the tap whenever you like?
99c for a rental is outrageous for a “half hour” show, where the best the major Networks can get is 25c from advertising revenue. Add Apple’s markup of 14c and the maximum that’s reasonable is 39c for a rental. And that’s for premium, first run content off one of the major networks. Lesser content should be priced *below* that.