For the love of mercy, just get a Tivo (or other DVR), and you'll never miss an episode of a favorite show ever again.

Once you do, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Also, aren't people who download TV shows mainly watching them on either an Ipod (which I don't understand why anyone would bother) or on their computers?

"If you sell me your TV shows for 99 cents -- $23 a season -- I'd either cancel or cut back on my Comcast subscription and give you that money instead."

That's why Comcast is one of the ISP's that is lobbying very hard to kill the idea of Net Neutrality. They want to make it as difficult as possible for their internet customers to get entertainment from sources other than Comcast. Alternatively, they'll settle for being able to charge online video stores a fee to allow Comcast internet customers to access the stores.

Farhad,

Sorry to be a pain, but how does your proposal add up?

"If you sell me your TV shows for 99 cents -- $23 a season -- I'd either cancel or cut back on my Comcast subscription and give you that money instead."

Does that mean you are willing to reduce your Comcast subscription for a season of episodes of one, single TV series? Let's say you spend $115 on cable for a year. Five networks times $23 dollars gives you exactly five TV series in place of your complete cable package.

How does that work?

Do you pay $115 a year for cable? How?

Comcast's cheapest service in my area is $18 a month, about $20 with taxes and other fees -- $240 per year. Their next cheapest service -- "Standard Cable," the one that most people get -- is $52 per month, $624 per year.

For $240 a year, I can get 10 full series on iTunes at $23 per. For $624 a year, I can get 27 series -- or, fewer series and an Apple TV.

I'd be happy with $115 per year for cable. My cable bill is $54 per month, with no premium channels (i.e no HBO, Golf Channel etc.). Left up to me I'd punt cable in a second, however my wife would have a cow.

She has an iPod and loves iTunes. If she knew she could get every episode of every show for $1 we'd be done with cable.

This would be a great distribution model, as low run shows with a devoted fan following could charge a little more and remain "on the air".

I don't know were you get your cable but $115 a year is way off. It's more like $480 ($40/month) for basic and $600 ($50/month) for digital.

jmenon is getting hammered. LOL.

Basic economics: lower the price and make it up in volume.

Corporate America's great idea?

Jack the price. Jack it again. Include a user fee. Tack on a monthly subscription fee. Add advertising. Add an additional user fee if you want to watch the TV show in color. Want sound with that download? Oh! Now it's a "premium" episode if you want sound! Jack the price again.

Thank God Apple is out there standing up to these guys!

If it wasn't for companies like Apple and others (who are barely keeping the corporate machines at bay) we'd all be watching 20mins of commercials per 30min sitcom -- paying $190 a month for 10 cable channels. Paying another $90 a month to get "local" channels. Paying another $199 a month to get internet access. Paying another $50 a month to watch "Monday Night Football" (that's a "premium" feature, ya know!) And on and on.

Just watch. The above scenario is coming. They know the cash cow is breaking up everything and then re-selling it to you individually.

Soon you'll be paying a fee per website.

Visit Salon.com seven times in one day? Soon Comcast will be charging you $90 just for internet access -- and THEN .25 cents per site visit! But don't worry. If you don't want to be charged per site, you can "upgrade" to the "Super User" package which costs a mere $375 a month for unlimited surfing. Seems like a resonable alternative to .25 per site

That's the money for nothing paradigm. Take everything you currently have and then break in down into a hundred individual components and attach a fee to it.

Money for nothing.

Isn't there a quality difference here? When you get the DVD of a show you usually get 3 or 4 episodes per disc. I recently bought Season 3 of Lost and all of it fit on my iPod at the cost of 5GB of space (maybe less?). The video quality can't be the same. If I tried to stream them to a 32" TV I imagine it would look like crap.

Creepo is right, the resolution of an iPod episode isn't nearly as good as the standard DVD resolution, not to mention HD. 320x240 is yucky. It's fine for catching up on a missed episode, but it's only a quarter of the resolution of a DVD. It isn't the pricing of online content that keeps me away, it's the awful quality, frankly. I'll wait for my DVDs, thank you very much.

How much would I pay? Zero. I can't for the life of imagine a time when I would pay more than zero for anything TV related on my portable device. Not because I'm a Birkenstock wearing hippy anarchist who claims not to own a TV, because I'm not, but because TV is so awful, so piss poor there's nothing on worthwile. Honestly, reruns of bad series? Game shows? The Surreal Life? You have to be on some kind of jones to need this.

Tell you what - you tell Time Warner to throw it in for FREE and I'll consider it. They get enough of my money as it is, and since they kickback 15% of revenue back to the city for exclusive access, I mean, an access fee, I figure there's more than enough to go around w/o coming to me and shaking me down.

I am not paying *anything* to watch something on a 2" by 2" screen.

As for NBC, I can see "Heroes" for free over the internet. All I have to do is put up with a brief ad for a blue car.