I decided to catch up with the “Lost” craze during the Winter break and bought myself the DVD box of the first season which I hadn’t watched when it was aired in France during my summer internship (you know… dubbed version, better things to do with my time in Paris). This kind of stuff is addictive and I am a great audience so I have ended up a junkie, lost in lost (very overdone way of putting it I guess).

But now, there are the 9 first shows of the second season, which have aired in the US and are not available on DVD. How can I get my fix? How can I catch up to be able to see the new episodes?

To put it in eighties lingo style: Today, an Apple saved my life with this (i)tune. I am so glad that popular ABC shows are available on iTunes!

So, I bought a $25 iTunes gift card at a pharmacy store on my way back from class. I could have paid online if I had a US credit card –a requirement to access the US iTunes, the only one where the shows are available. I redeemed my voucher in a new account and started the download of the full season to date, i.e. 9 episodes for a total of $17.91.

The first episode took a few minutes to download and the others were there by the time I was finished watching the first episode.

To put it in Californian lingo style: That’s awesome, Dude.

I don’t think this is the future of television, but that’s for sure part of the future of TV. The TV business model is very different from the music majors’ and I think there is a great opportunity for the video content producers and broadcasters (for lack of a better denomination) who have made the right move to prevent/circumvent privacy and complement their offering while addressing their customers’ needs:

Because, after all, THIS IS “ease of use”! To be honest, I have downloaded TV shows illegally a couple of years ago, when Friends final season was not aired in France. But getting a show on iTunes is so simple, fast, reliable, safe and cheap that I much prefer to pay $2 per episode than go through the hassle of finding it and retrieving it on any p2p tool that is in fashion at the moment.

I wonder though if this will have an impact on international rights (at least in English speaking countries). In fact, TV is focused on big addictive shows more than ever (including Lost), thus generating a lot of demand which is not met timely outside US borders. In the same way that some of my fellow French citizens have been reconnected to their high-school English when any new Harry Potter book is out (roughly 3 months before the French translation), some (like me) don’t want to wait for the new episodes of a show if they are already available. I guess that’s all the more true if English is your mother tongue or one of your country’s official language!

So, in the same way that people in Australia were asking US friends to buy them iTunes vouchers when the iTunes music store was not available there, I guess we will see people asking for US vouchers to access new episodes of their favourite shows online.