17th
The Cost of Lost
Notes:
Blu-Ray is the only format offering full 1080p HD, but only Seasons 3 and 4 are currently available. It seems reasonable to assume that season 1 and 2 will eventually appear, but there’s certainly no guarantee, so this is a bit of a gamble for anyone wanting to start a collection today.
I deliberately omitted “Torrents / Other” as a potential source due to them being illegal. Other reasons to avoid include difficulty finding older episodes, inconsistent quality, and “codec hell”. However, this is likely to remain the only way to get platform-agnostic, full-HD shows for the foreseeable future.
iTunes HD TV shows are only 720p, but every HD purchase includes an SD version encoded correctly for Apple portable devices, saving you tons of re-encoding time if you want to hop on a plane or go to the gym.
It is unlikely that iTunes purchases will ever play outside of Apple hardware/software, so you stand to lose your entire investment should Apple drop support for the Fairplay DRM system. (“Apple reserves the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Service (or any part or content thereof) at any time with or without notice to you, and Apple will not be liable to you or to any third party should it exercise such rights.”)
iTunes has, so far, not offered an SD to HD upgrade path as they have for iTunes Plus music. (For example, I have Season 1 of The Office in SD, but would have to fully re-purchase the season to upgrade to HD.)
Another option: All seasons of Lost are available on DVD or Blu-Ray (Seasons 3 & 4) from Netflix (subscription, about $8-12 a month), but are not yet available for “instant” streaming.
Pretty bleak, all in all. I wonder how long it will take to get this to the relatively suck-free state we now enjoy with music in iTunes Plus.
I increasingly believe that the future of digital TV/movie distribution for home viewing will be subscription-based streaming, a la the Netflix Instant Queue, particularly since this obviates the need for the user to store (and back up) massive amounts of infrequently-accessed data.
