All the readers from the U.S.A. can tune out now. They won’t understand this posting since you’ve created a reasonably well-populated iTunes Store. But in Canada? I can hear the wind blowing through the Canadian iTunes Store.
No doubt you’d like to offer a wider variety of content but there are some stupid, Canadian protectionist regulations on top of the ridiculous licensing restrictions of the content providers. That leaves us with negligible content and TV shows that don’t appeal to me.
Perhaps it would be more appealing if the pricing was reasonable. At $2.00 for a 22-minute TV show, this is totally a non-sale.
I’m paying $91.40, after tax, for more bleepin’ cable channels than I can watch, including HD channels. Let’s say my family members watch 6 hours of cable a day, every day of the month. That works out to about $3 for those 6 hours. To get the same amount of content in the iTunes store, you’d have to price shows at 50 cents an hour.
Until the pricing is more in line with reality, and my budget, and the content is worth watching, I have no choice but to stick with cable.
Your video rental prices are not bad compared to the bricks and mortar stores like Rogers Video or Blockbuster, but pale in comparison to Zip (a.k.a. Rogers Video Direct).
Since I don’t have urges to watch shows immediately, I can wait for Zip to deliver. Their pricing is $2.50 per DVD, postage paid both ways. That’s more like it.
Since you don’t need to keep numerous copies of each DVD, and have warehouses and people to handle shipping and receiving, I won’t even pay you a premium price for the convenience of watching a movie right this instant. With a DVD, I get some extra content too, should I choose to watch it.
Zip allows me to keep a DVD longer than two days too, although if I keep it too long the effective price goes up because I will not be able to rent as many movies for the fixed subscription price.
No, I’ll give you $1.50 for a regular DVD-quality video and $2.00 for an HD rental. Throw in another buck to let me keep it for a month so my daughter can watch it when she’s home from university on the weekends.
Zip has over 72,000 titles available. And you have how many? A few thousand? Since I need to subscribe to Zip to get choice anyway, why pay more to the iTunes store?
But, if you did have any more movies than you have now, the Apple TV would be useless as it has no decent way to search through content, create favourites or wish lists, or keep track of our history so we don’t rent something we’ve already rented.
I’m sorry to say that the iTunes store is like a few day old infant in its maturity. When the store becomes an adult, then I’ll be interested.
