When I gave up my cable TV, the only thing I really missed was The Daily Show.
So I was very happy indeed when I found it available
on iTunes. I bought a pass, $9.99 for 16 episodes, and successfully downloaded
the two episodes which were already there. Since then, there have been two further
episodes, which are meant to have automatically downloaded, but I haven’t got
them on my computer. When I sign into my account at iTunes, however, it says
that I have received 4 episodes. What am I to do?
UPDATE: Problem solved! You go to the Advanced menu in iTunes, and select “Check for Purchases”.
I’m surprised you haven’t written about the cost. I’ve been saying for a while that I wish I could subscribe to individual cable channels, just so I could get the Daily Show. But the iBorg arrangement pissed me off enough to note that they are charging almost the cost of HBO for a single show (I assume 16 covers a full month). Are they available the day of? Because the motherload (IE only) archives in less than a week it seems, and it’s free. I’d definitely pay $10 a month of the Daily Show on-demand broadband, but I can’t justify sustaining a format monopoly. I’m surprised you do.
It’s an experiment; I’m certainly not saying I’ll do it again. But since I’m crippled with a Mac, I can’t access the motherload.
The real obstacle for me is that I don’t like watching TV on my computer, and I don’t have a video iPod. I don’t think you can burn these downloads onto DVD, either.
So, at the moment, I’m not very happy, and I don’t think I’m getting my ten dollars’ worth. But at the very least I want the 16 episodes I paid for, rather than just two!
Here’s what I do:
I go to mininova.org and search for daily show torrents. Then, I load it up in azureus, my bit torrent client (http://azureus.sourceforge.net/), and download the show. Finally, I use VLC, an open-source media player (http://www.videolan.org/), to watch the shows. I have never bought anything from iTunes and would never buy their DRM-ridden shows, especially since the resolutions aren’t that great. I can download HD rips of network TV shows off of mininova. This is all done on my Mac (Powerbook G4).