Time vs. money vs. attention vs. TV.

In a post Big Cable world,* I think the Apple TV is going to be the best solution for watching TV on your TV. Apple is doing a wonderful thing for consumers (and a terrible thing for content providers) that I haven’t really seen discussed anywhere. They are sticking with their iTunes pay model, you pay to watch every episode of TV or every movie, but they are working to make prices lower. They want TV shows to only be 99 cents to watch, and some networks have signed on.** As long as I have a job, that’s not a lot of money for what I’m getting*** and I would be more than happy to pay that much per episode for the shows that I want to watch.

*That is a safe assumption at this point. In 5-10 years we won’t watch TV like most people do now. Channel surfing will be a thing of the past. You will watch TV on your schedule, if you don’t already. Also, Big Cable is a funny concept. Add ‘Big’ as a prefix to any type of corporation and it becomes evil.
**When Apple originally opened the iTunes store, it took some time before all of the record labels agreed to Apple’s terms. If AppleTV catches on, it’s only a matter of time before all the major networks buy in.
***The elephant in the room that I’m choosing to ignore for now is that if studios make less money, they will pay less money to produce content. It’s not always very expensive to produce good TV, but a lot of the single camera shows that I’ve loved most in my life are/were quite expensive. Battlestar Galactica, LOST, etc.

Google TV sounds good in theory. As of now, it doesn’t appear that you will be paying per episode, and that seems safer initially. But you are going to be bombarded with advertisements. Your television is suddenly a huge canvas for Google to fill up with advertisements. Whatever you watch on your Apple TV will never have ads. Whatever you watch on Google TV will almost always have ads, and if it doesn’t, the Google TV interface will almost certainly be ad heavy, as are many of Google’s other platforms.

I don’t mean to be an Apple shill, but I believe Apple is taking the right path here. It’s no secret that Apple is not beating down content providers’ asking prices out of the goodness of their heart. They want to sell more iTunes content and more AppleTVs. But the bottom line for me, and I believe there are many like minded people out there, is that I am hyper aware of the value of my time vs. my money vs. my attention. I’ll allow some time and attention for ads, but for 99 cents, I would rather keep that time and attention. And Apple lets me do that.?