One of the things I was planning on chasing up in the wake of the Apple devastation from overnight was whether or not Australia would be getting the HD versions of TV shows like the US. Turns out Gus over at Lifehacker did all the hard work for me though (thanks Gus!).
HD fans will be disappointed to learn that no, we won’t be getting high-def versions of our favourite TV shows through iTunes. And while there’s a part of me that cries out at the injustice of it all, another part thinks that it’s probably a good thing, simply based upon the standard of internet speeds and data caps in this country.
If you need high-def TV shows, there are plenty of options for downloading from the US iTunes store. Just make sure you’ve got plenty of data included in your internet plan.
Chris
September 10, 2008 at 10:38 AM
no surprise there. maybe they know the state of broadband in australia..
Report PermalinkBobbyBBoy
September 10, 2008 at 11:08 AM
Who cares. If Apple and the media conglomorates dont want to offer sell their products to us in the format we want or in a convienient manner we’ll just continue to steal them using Bitorrent.
I do however disagree with internet speeds\ download caps being an issue here. The fact that thousands of people are downloading this stuff over bitorrent would indicate that our broadband infrastructure is fine.
Report PermalinkAdmin
September 10, 2008 at 11:23 AM
iiNet offer iTunes traffic via freezone, so any purchases from iTunes, whether it’s movies or tv shows are all part of the freezone and do not count against your Monthly Quota!
Get it right Giz!!!!
Report PermalinkNick Broughall
September 10, 2008 at 12:13 PM
@Admin – Well aware of the iiNet exclusions. We’ve covered it before. But no other ISP offers iTunes exclusions, so figured we’d address the masses here, rather than the (lucky) minority.
Report PermalinkKieran
September 10, 2008 at 2:16 PM
Minority?? iiNet has 373,482 DSL subscribers as of June 2008 in Australia. Not exactly a minority Nick. Amend the article and stop looking like a goose.
Report PermalinkNick Broughall
September 10, 2008 at 3:03 PM
@Kieran – Not sure where you got your figure from, but assuming it’s correct, that’s 373,482 subscribers out of (more than) 5.21 million broadband consumers (according to the ABS December 2007), which equates to just over 7% of the Australian broadband market. While that’s not a small number – and not something to ignore – it is most definitely a minority.
And let’s avoid the namecalling, shall we?
Report PermalinkKieran
September 10, 2008 at 5:29 PM
This is where the number is from.
http://www.cnet.com.au/broadband/adsl/0,239035934,339291334,00.htm
It might not be 10% of the market, but it isn’t a minority of people. It is plenty of potential HD-buying customers if iTunes ever wants to supply them to .au. How many people do you think would sign up to iiNet if they new they could buy HD content, and stream it straight through their AppleTV to their sparkly new Sammy Series 6 FullHD LCD in their living room – without copping a cent of download charge for it?
Report PermalinkOk.. a much few number of people again… and maybe iiNet would pull the ‘freezone’ classification of iTunes.
No mention of the resolution of these ‘HD’ downloads. I gather they’re not 1920x1080p!
Tim
September 11, 2008 at 1:08 PM
A minority is any quantity less than half, so 49.9% would still be a minority.
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