Netflix and iTunes For The Win

I killed my cable several years ago now and I don't miss it. Netflix and iTunes have filled the void quite well.

There was a time, many years ago (before my wife and I had children), when paying more than $60 a month in cable fees seemed like nothing. I know of some who pay over $100. One day it occured to she and I to ask ourselves whether we thought that the product we were paying for was worth it. We thought about it and came to the not-too-shocking conclusion that we felt we were getting ripped off. After all, together we watched SCIFI channel and Turner Classic Movies, I watched Wings on Discovery and she watched cable news.

So we canceled our cable, not down to the basic package (because those wouldn't have left us with the channels we watched anyway), but all the way. Simultaneously, we started a Netflix subscription.

Many people are unaware that Netflix offers TV series on DVD. We began to get shows that we enjoyed, like Stargate, and movies of all sorts. What news we wanted we could get from the Internet.

But there was a slight hitch that has now been fixed by iTunes. If a show came out that we wanted to see, we'd have to wait for a really long time until its release on DVD. A perfect example of this is Battlestar Galactica. Friends had suggested it to us, but there was no way we would get a babysitter to watch the children while we went to a friends house to watch episodes.

iTunes offers Battlestar and hundreds of other shows 24 hours after they air on network television (cable). We can satisfy our fix for the one or two shows we want to watch that we can't get on regular broadcast by buying them on iTunes. Later, if we'd like to see the show again or watch back episodes, there's Netflix to fill that gap.

I have a feeling that this formula will work especially well for many who are like my wife and I. I'd say that most people only really even have time for a limited amount of media consumption, so hundreds of channels with thousands of programs just doesn't make sense. A la carte media consumption is the wave of the future, but it's already here in the form of a Netflix/iTunes hybrid.