I've decided that in the past, I was spending way too much on TV service for how little I actually watched it. The PVR helped, but it also revealed to me how focused my TV watching is. I don't miss channel surfing, and I rarely watched live TV, so why am I still chained to 250 some channels for too much a month?

So for the month of October, I am going to attempt to still watch what I want, in a legal way, and see how it goes. I have a Mac Mini hooked to the HDTV, and now have a multipass subscription to The Daily Show. I bought The Office DVDs yesterday, and will look at buying the shows I want to watch in October off the iTunes store.

My first impressions are going to be of The Daily Show files off iTunes. One episode ended up being 250 megs, and is now 640x480. Quality wise, it looked better then my old method of recording it on the ReplayTV. The nice thing with the iTunes file is that it has no commercials in it, so much like the ReplayTV, I'm not touching the remote at all during playback. With the multipass subscription, the next 15 episodes will auto download to the machine when they are released, so all I have to do is grab the remote to activate Front Row, and select the show. From what I remember of The Daily Show release cycle, 16 shows ends up being about how many they do in a month, so this is going to cost me $10 a month to see.

Thus far one downside appears to be that not all the shows I want to watch are available on the iTunes store immediately. For example, the episodes of Mythbusters appear to be quite old, probably mirroring the first season DVD releases instead of having the newer shows. I've written the Discovery Channel to see if they have plans to change this anytime soon.