Ever since iTunes began selling TV shows, I've been fairly solid in my opinion that I'd never use it. The reasons are many: cost, availability, size, backup, etc. etc.

We have for a long time now decided we're quite happy waiting for DVDs to be released before we watch the shows we like. In recent years when shows are on free-to-air, we've been happy to record or watch on internet catch-up if we miss something.

However, in the last week I finally gave in and bought a TV series (Walking Dead Season 3) on iTunes.

I realised, on reflection, that enough technology and rule changes had come about that using iTunes TV finally made sense.

Technology changes:

• I bought a laptop powerful enough (just) to play iTunes HD movies
• ... and the laptop has HDMI output
• ... and the laptop has WiFi
• ... and the house has WiFi.
• I bought a TV that has HDMI input.
• The laptop "just works" when the TV is plugged into the TV (mounts as a HDMI projector, runs at full 1080p).
• I'm on an internet plan that lets me download from iTunes without that download counting toward my limits.

Non-technical / rule changes:

• iTunes Australia doesn't make TV shows available until they've been shown on Australian TV. Luckily pay-TV counts and pay-TV has been putting a lot of effort into showing shows as quickly as possible. So the shows I want are now available on iTunes at a similar time to when they're shown.
• Therefore TV is available on iTunes months and months before it is available on DVD.
• While still DRM'd, iTunes lets you authorise up to five computers to play content. I'm sure this didn't used to be the case. My laptop needed to be online to authorise, but WiFi made that easily possible.
• iTunes lets you download content again if you lose it. I'm sure this didn't use to be the case. Regardless, hard disk space is very cheap now. I have a spare portable drive that I've copied my TV to for backup just in case.
• The price of the TV series we want on iTunes is comparable with DVD (same?).
• It is easy to get iTunes gift-cards for 20% off these days, effectively making all iTunes prices 20% off.
• Recent experience with a brand new unplayable DVD reminded me that physical product isn't infallible. iTunes, assuming it is there forever (big assumption), will mean we won't have this problem in the future.
• I used to think DVD was always the better option because you can resell it. Even if the resale is only for a few $, those are $s you can take off the cost. The reality is though the effort to resell something for a few tens of dollars just isn't worth my time. Resale value of DVD is quite low.

So based on all that, we were happy to pay the "impatience tax" and buy Walking Dead on iTunes, because we can't wait for the DVD. Now that we've proved it works, we'll also subscribe to Season 4 and watch the show as it is shown in the US. Can't wait.

We won't do this for everything we watch, because we aren't as impatient with those shows. The only other show we're tempted to do this with would be Treme Season 3 (which is available right now for $30 less 20%) but I think we can wait for that. Maybe new Venture Brothers! Also, some shows are on free-to-air, happy to watch there, with ads (that we can skip).

Regardless... new option!

There are still negatives, obviously:

• Can't easily lend this TV to friends like we're used to doing.
• Can't resell it.
• The effort to set up the laptop to play on the TV, while very easy, isn't as easy to just putting a DVD in, especially when you count the effort to buy, download, copy the files between computers.
• I don't have a remote for the laptop, so I can't easily pause, skip etc.

Not that big a deal.

We had one fairly big technical problem on our first attempt. iTunes video was intermittently playing very choppy. We never had a problem playing video in any other service (iView, YouTube). Google tells me this is a common iTunes problem, especially with HD video. I few false alarms based on bad advice later and I tracked the problem down to battery life.

The laptop had graphics settings which allow it to gracefully drop the graphics power usage as the laptop batter drops. When the graphics grunt dropped, iTunes quality dropped. The laptop is thankfully clever enough to have two graphics settings, one for plugged in, one for battery power. So we plugged the laptop into the wall, cranked the graphics power to max, and now iTunes HD video plays (almost) fine.

The laptop is right on the edge of what is needed to play HD video, and the graphics card is right on the edge of what is necessary to play that video at full 1080p. A little jump here (background processes doing something most likely) and there are to be expected.

The colour quality isn't perfect (too much conversion going on I think), but I can handle that a bit with TV settings. Technically the quality is better than DVD, and the picture is certainly sharper, but to me "quality" is also (mostly) about clean jitter free images, and my laptop just isn't quite powerful enough to provide that in HD. In theory we could drop the quality of the image (setting TV resolution to lower than 1080p), I haven't experimented with this yet. The last two episodes we watched were "good enough".

The world... changed.