ITV joins iTunes

As I reported on the BBC and Channel 4 joining the iTunes library, I figured I should probably report on ITV doing muhc the same thing.

So lets get on with it. How do I turn what is really a one line post at most, basically a simple tweet, into a full blog post of four paragraphs or more?

ITV Worldwide, the international arm of ITV will also be featuring in a blog post I’m working on called ‘The British Cultural Expansion’ that looks at the rapidly expanding international arms of the various British media organisations - but that’s one for another time.

But anyway - how do I write about the fact that ITV are now putting a number of shows, albeit older shows, on the Apple media platform and stretch it when the story can be summed up as “ITV put old shows on iTunes”?

Well I could talk about the fact that they ARE only putting older shows on iTunes unlike the BBC and Channel 4 who seem to be putting shows up eight days after their first television broadcast.

I could also show you a screen grab of their iTunes store and mention that it looks incredibly childish and very cheaply done - but that would be petty.

I could mention the list of shows available through iTunes from ITV. That you can now download Lewis, Goodnight Mr Tom, Cold Feet, Brideshead Revisited, Captain Scarlet and The Saint.

It’s also possible that, if I were to be writing a long post that I could talk about the fact that I have to pay £1.89 for these old shows - despite the fact that I also pay £1.89 for newer shows on the BBC and Channel 4 channels.

I could rant for ages about the injustice of the price difference between the UK and US Television stores. That if I buy a show from the UK store it costs me £1.89 ($3.77) but a similar show from the US store would cost me 99p ($1.99) and that, even counting for VAT (17.5%) this is still a 60p difference on every video downloaded - but I wouldn’t want to rant about that as it’s off topic.

What I think I will do is move on from ITV and post my response to Adam Bowie - who wrote a post about concerns for the future of ITV video - suggesting that Kangaroo might have something to do with the fact that it’s all old shows.

I’m personally certain that Kangaroo is the main reason only archive programming is available at the moment and why only a limited number of BBC and Channel 4 shows are available.

But that doesn’t mean more recent ITV shows will never appear on iTunes - it just means it might take a while and I see two reasons for this.

The first IS Kangaroo. Mainly that one of the jobs of Kangaroo will be to act as a distribution house for ITV, Channel 4 and BBC online video content making it available for other platforms (like iTunes and Joost).

The second is that ITV may not have the same sort of online retail rights in place with other rights holders the BBC does - also that ITV have been, until very recently, incredibly slow at releasing DVDs of their TV programmes - if they released them at all.

Well that’s what I might and might not write if I were to write about the fact that ITV is now on iTunes - but as I’m not going to write about it you’ve just wasted your time reading this.

Story through a link on BBC Internet Blog to Adam Bowie.

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