The family only watches 60 Minutes, Weather, TCM, Football and a large movie library on Apple TV. We are looking for a way to ditch the cable connection. Unfortunately they also supply the internet high speed connection. What is the work around?

@starwarrior - unless you're bound to it under a bundle deal, there's no reason why you couldn't cancel the cable tv service and keep the cable internet service. They might charge more for just the one service, but that's still going to cost you less in the end than paying for a service you don't use.

iTunes Apple TV could be interesting if it run worldwide and not only in USA or UK. If subtitles are a problem, just put an option for English subtitles, I believe lots of non English native speakers doesn't mind to watch a English movie with a help of English subtitles. Just an idea of a citizen of a non English Language Country. :-)

Except you won't be watching football, watching weather (as fascinating as that is) and I don't know if 60 minutes is available on the interweb...

And good luck finding those TCM movies out there anywhere. Most places don't seem to think anything from the 60s and before is worth digitizing/renting (and when they do, they want premium prices!).

It isn't subtitles. It's copyright and the studios. While some stupid show (say 30 Rock) might be airing now in the US, it might not be sold to run in Europe or Asia until next year. As such, they don't want to lose their distribution money by having people be able to download them in those areas (same reason why DVDs are sold with regions on them).

Networks are believed to be worried, however, that they could suffer the fate of the music industry, which agreed to 99 cent iTunes songs in 2003 only to find that people bought singles instead of albums.

And how is this worrying them? You can already buy shows separately. I would think they'd be more concerned about letting Apple dictate pricing and control to them, rather than the other way around.

Companies are also alleged to be resisting the idea of an iTunes TV subscription, which might cost $30 a month and offer an assortment of shows from different channels. Disney, CBS, News Corp., Time Warner and Viacom are all claimed to have been approached, but hesitant because iTunes could draw people away from conventional pay services, which have held out in spite of a recession.

Actually, the bigger question is "$30 a month???". Netflix costs a third of that, and offers on-demand streaming of episodes and movies.

There is no doubt in my mind (not that the going-ons of my mind really matter) that a shift to legal digital music would not have happened without Apple negotiating a price point of 99¢ per song. The price point was important to make the market attractive enough for people to break the norm of buying a CD (and in some cases, stealing it), the concept of actually paying for something purely digital with no physical product was a mental shift. Some people still believe 99¢ per song is too much, but clearly it's acceptable to a large mass of people. The other key piece of Apple's success in digital music is their understanding of the average consumer and the seamless buying experience from content to player. Perhaps at an exponential rate, this is less true if at all today, but in 2003, the internet was wide open and a scary place for most average people. What the iTMS also offered was a safe secure (real or perceived) and well designed place to buy one's music.

If course this is not 2003 and it seems like everyone's mom is on facebook these days. The environment that existed to transition people digital music cannot really be compared to today's environment where the content to sell is digital video media. We are comfortable with the web (bad or good, we whip out the credit card for online purchases as a matter of habit now days). But today we also have OnDemand content that is both free and paid for, other sources of media such as Amazon, and there is Hulu and YouTube and on and on. Not only that, but the music industry was the first, they had no idea what was coming, no one really did. But the Networks and movie industry see what happened to the music biz and have planted their heels to the extent possible. So while you might actually be getting more from entertainment out of say a TV show, than a song, why would you pay $1.99 for the show when you can get it for free, or you'll probably never watch that show again, where as a song you'll listen to again and again? You'd pay for it for convenience, but you'd only pay so much for convenience. There's something about 99¢ that seems like a bargain in the human mind, you think of it differently than you do for about $1.00. You need to get people comfortable with paying for something that they could otherwise get free, and the magic price point plays a big role in that.

collect low-cost content to drive hardware sales. I hope Apple can manage to do it, because it's going to need a lot of leverage to sell tablets in the millions of units to the average consumer.