While it's fine to watch dramas and sitcoms like "Lost" and "The Office" on the Video iPod, IMHO I think the real market is in shows like "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, or shows like Letterman, Conan, or Leno. Since these programs come on too late for early risers and not everyone has cable, these are the perfect shows to time shift and take with you. And since you watch "The Daily Show" for audio and not video, the small iPod screen makes little difference. If Apple gets these type of "talk shows" for the right price point, like $.50 - but no more than $.99 an episode, it could be a huge hit.

I completely agree. Right now HBO gets not a penny from me because I refuse to spend the money they ask for the few shows they air that I'm interested in. For any customers like Philip Michaels that they might lose a subscription to, they will gain people like me buying their shows a la carte. I would gladly buy episodes of shows like Six Feet Under and a couple of others that I'd like to see. In the end they might even stand to make more money.

All this leads to another issue though. As TV moves more in this direction of downloadable shows, Apple really needs to work out some way for us to burn these episodes to a DVD or some other media to view on our TVs, or else they need to come out with a cool new product that allows us to easily stream shows from our Macs to our TV sets (here's hoping!). I don't always want to watch shows on my iMac screen. For shows that only I want to watch, it's fine. But if my wife and I want to watch something together, it's a tad inconvenient for us to gather around my iMac.

People keep missing the boat in understanding the real value to the media companies in having their programs available a la carte via the iTunes Music Store... sales of shows there represent incremental revenue without adversely impacting existing channels (broadcast TV, DVD, etc.).

For consumers it's a new way of enjoying favorite programs, or partaking in new ones, outside of the traditional places for watching those programs (on the sofa in front of a TV). A reporter for the New York Times got it right when she wrote about how a 5G iPod and TV shows downloaded from iTunes Music Store changed her daily commute by enabling her to watch programs she didn't have time to watch at home on Cable TV.

HBO won't lose subscribers... what could change is that they'd be able to watch more HBO programs while on the go (on an iPod or laptop).

I think your math is way off on a lot of angles... and you can get 25 episodes of Lost for just $34.99. That's $1.39 per 1 hour episode. Not sure why you think a 12 episode season would still cost $1.99 per episode. Maybe it's the Dashboard Calculator widget

If HBO did make programming available on iTunes there would be some people, such as myself and a poster above, who would buy those programs from iTunes but wouldn't pay the Cable company the exhorbitant amount required to get HBO (it would cost me an additional $40 per month to get HBO added to my Cable line-up in Boston). But we aren't currently buying HBO content anyway, so we'd represent incremental revenue to HBO.

When pundits stop playing with their calculators and start thinking about these programs on iTunes being incremental purchases then they'll start seeing why TV shows on iTunes is really going to take off. As it is, I think the pundits are defaulting to the same outlook they had when the iPod mini first debuted 2 years ago... they said no one would buy it because the per gig price was too high. Wrong

I agree with ya' Philip ... but EASE the F' UP on Deadwood!

So why is Cablevision in favor of a la carte pricing being made available?

And a telecom analyst said this:

"Customers would likely pay more per channel than they do now, said Jeff Kagan, a telecom analyst based near Atlanta. Most would spend less overall, though, and get what they want."