I was amused to hear folks on PRI's Marketplace radio program say that 99 cents for a rerun on the video iPod was a good price. Turns out that 99 cents includes commercials in that rerun, because people polled said they would rather pay 99 cents with commercials intead of $1.50 without them.

As I have written before, the public sure is misjuding this. TV CPMs are about $10, or 1 cent per ad shown to a viewer. So in a half hour program, with about 15 ads, the network and everybody below them would have made about 15 cents to show it to you. 30 cents for an hour long show. At full resolution too, and the ability to record it without DRM to watch later. Yes, Apple gets a cut, is it that huge?

So 99 cents is no deal, though they are actually sacrificing more to cut the price 50 cents and include ads, unless they can target the ads better and thus get more revenue from them. Will you be able to fast forward on the downloaded shows?

My main lament has been about what a bad deal TV advertising is. You get $1.20 worth of programming to watch a full hour of pure advertising. Way below minimum wage.

I want to see TV available for download, but I think instead of this system should give us shows at a similar cost to the advertising based one (plus a retail markup) at better resolution to boot.