Here's what the iTunes music store gets right: they make it faster and easier to get what you want, and they do it at a price point that doesn't make you feel like you're being gouged.
That was clear to me last night, when I realized that I wanted to watch the first few episodes of Battlestar Galactica while flying from Seattle to Philly (en route to Durham, for an NSF PI meeting). I had the episodes on NetFlix, but didn't want to (a) bring the DVDs with me because it's too easy for them to get broken or lost, or (b) use up precious working battery power on my laptop when I could watch the episodes on my video iPod. So I started to rip the episodes onto my hard drive (and yes, fair use zealots, I had every intention of deleting them after I'd watched them, since they were rentals). An hour later, with only one episode onto my hard drive, with mediocre video quality, I realized this was not time well spent. A quick look at iTMS showed me that I could buy all of season 2 (20 episodes) for about $25--and that I could start the downloading before I went to bed and have all the episodes not just on my computer but automatically transferred to my iPod before I had to leave. It was worth every penny to not have to laboriously go through disc after disc identifying, ripping, and transferring individual episodes.
I watch very little TV these days (with WoW to play, who has time?), and what little I do watch is typically on the video iPod while at the gym. Other than Lost, however, I haven't had many shows I've even wanted to watch there. BSG has changed that. For those of you who haven't watched the series, it's spectacular. And it's nice to find a show that I really like that hasn't already been cancelled (like Firefly, for instance). The writing, editing, and acting are all superb. Highly recommended.
(Fellow WoW addicts will probably recognize the game reference in the title of this post...it really needs to be said with the right goblin accent for full effect, though.)
Currently playing in iTunes: Tocceilidh from the album "Re: Bach" by Lara St. John
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