The value of timely content
I love The Daily Show. It’s one of a very few shows that I missed when I went from having cable TV to not having it (when Kirsten and I got married we decided that we didn’t need it). So I was thrilled when iTunes started offering it on a subscription basis. The $10 a month was well worth it, and significantly cheaper than paying $40 a month for a bunch of channels I don’t care about. At first things were great – I could sometimes even download episodes before they aired here on the west coast.
However, things quickly fell apart. Sometimes new episodes wouldn’t show up until around noon the next day, sometimes it was several days later. Complaints to Apple didn’t really change anything. I’m not sure if it was their problem or if they just weren’t being delivered the content in a timely fashion. Either way, it was annoying, but still the best option for our cable tv free household.
8 months ago, they started showing episodes on their site, but the experience was pretty bad. The episodes were broken up into clips that had to be watched individually, and the full show wasn’t even available (the toss to Colbert at the end of the show, for example). I was willing to deal with ads, but I was not interested in hunt and peck piecemeal gathering of pieces of a logical unit.
Recently The Daily Show was added to Hulu. It’s ad supported, but the ads are short, the video quality is great, whole episodes are available (in one piece), and most importantly, the previous night’s shows are always available when I wake up in the morning. Game over. iTunes loses. After trying Hulu for a few days (to make sure the timelyness of the content going up wasn’t a fluke), I canceled my iTunes multi-pass.
(and yes, I understanding the irony of writing about timely content after a 2 month absence of what was meant to be a weekly blog)