The facts about those 99cent TV shows on the web – it’s gonna be expensive

As broadband get faster and more people are switching their viewing habits to the web television networks are beginning to seriously look at moving their television shows to services like iTunes. A lot of noise has been made recently due to the announcement of the iPad from Apple about a 99 cent pricing scheme for television series episodes.

On the surface this sounds like a great deal right?

Sure for the occasional viewer of television it is a great deal but if you are an avid television watcher and have your favorite shows that you just can’t miss this is gonna be another case of being nickeled and dimed to death.

To give you an idea of how quickly all these 99 cent deals can add up let’s use my television viewing preferences (and I really don’t watch all that much) and see just how much this will really cost. Here’s my current list of favorite shows and the number of episodes per season:

• CSI – 24 EP
• CSI: New York – 25 EP
• Criminal Minds – 19 EP
• Bones – 26 EP
• NCIS – 25 EP
• NCIS: Los Angeles – 18 EP
• Fringe – 20 EP
• Castle – 17 EP
• Lie To Me  - 16 EP
• Numb3rs – 23 EP
• Flashpoint – 13 EP
• The Mentalist – 17 EP
• Sanctuary – 13 EP

This isn’t even taking into account the television shows that my wife watches; which is a lot more than I do, but as it stands this totals out to 256 episodes.

So what would this cost me if I was able to buy them from iTunes works out to $253 but when you take into account my wife’s viewing habits I could safely double this to $506 for one season of television shows.

Now add onto this all the movies that we’re suddenly suppose to want to download and watch and we can safely add on another hundred bucks over the year – or more.

The other cost that isn’t being taken into account here is our ISP costs which given that they want to start instituting bandwidth and or download caps based on tiers we will see those costs go up as well.

Sure the idea of getting all our entertainment via the Internet might seem like a great idea but you can be sure that it isn’t gonna be a cheap one.