Opinion: Low rent

Unless you are a total sports junkie, the only real reason to get pay TV is to watch the movies, but for around $60 per month you’re paying a lot for convenience – you can rent a lot of DVDs for that much outlay.

You could of course choose the cheaper SelectTV crowd for just $30 per month but then you only get half the movie channels. Downloading the latest movies for $6 per view via iTunes seems like a much better deal.

The only gotcha is that the movies are around 1GB in size so you’ll eat up your download quota at a pretty alarming rate – unless you’re ISP is iiNet. Those folks don’t count iTunes downloads towards your quota.

And they also let you download ABC TVs iView content without affecting your quota. It can’t be long before other ISPs start offering similar deals. BigPond already lets you get its own content without quota damage but their content is…well…let’s just say “not as appealing”.

You can also get high definition movies via iTunes – but you need an “Apple TV”. That’s Apple’s video and music streaming gadget and without it you can’t get HD content from the iTunes store. Bummer.

However, about the only other way to get HD content is via BluRay disk and one of those will cost you lots more than an Apple TV, and you’ll also have less choice of content unless your local video store is at the bleeding edge of technology. This only tends to happen when lots of the nearby residents are a bit geeky, so you might get lucky.

So, open up the spreadsheet and do the math. Is pay TV worth the money or would you be better off with a quota-friendly ISP and an account at the iTunes store?