Black Friday event, AppleTV $99 40GB or $149 for the 160? Include along with that a one day expansion of the Under $5 movies sale to include many of the $9.99 movies and reduce the $14.99 to $9.99.

Apple needs more people to fall in love with this device and a special deal might be just enough to push some of them over the top and clear inventory so they can update early next year.

Agree that it does not need to do DVR (but I haven’t seen many people suggest that).

However, I think from a marketing standpoint, putting in a Blue Ray drive might move boxes. Blue Ray is a feature that people can understand and do not already have.

Something hit me after I did the math on purchasing content. Today, we all pay twice for our TV shows. We pay once to the cable company for distribution and then a second time with the ad’s that we have to watch. Someone is making some serious cash on me here! Maybe the advertisers should pay the cable company so I don’t have to? Maybe the studios should offer a better distribution method that doesn’t cost so much money? But I sure should not be paying someone for the pleasure of being advertised to.

The really crazy thing is why don’t the studios back iTunes better? By my math it appears that studios are charging $.50 to $1.00 per viewer per hour for ads. Even at my reduced figures iTunes gets them about the same money and at current prices it could be better than double. I just can’t figure out why they care who pays them?

Once I cut the cable, if it starts to cost too much or I run out of content and just can’t figure out anything better to do, I’ll look into boxie.

That’s right… if I paid a la carte at iTunes for every show I watch, it would still be cheaper than cable.

Then I discovered streaming.

For things I plan on watching only once (and plan on sitting on the sofa while watching it) streaming video can save me $2 to $6 per day over iTunes purchases. It only costs me about 90 seconds of my time per show, a fraction of the 8 minutes per show on broadcast.

Now I’m saving even MORE money on shows I would have deleted after watching anyway.

doug, while Hulu and other content sites supported by advertising may not be necessary for everyone, it would be a great addition/alternative option to the current “pay to view/own” model of the itunes store.

i just added boxee to my appletv, and i find the internet sources like Hulu to be a fantastic compliment to both the itunes content and live television. it’s great to be able to watch shows on demand for free with limited advertising on Hulu, and it’s also nice to be able to purchase episodes on itunes that i can watch anywhere with my ipod or laptop.

Even without Hulu, AppleTV could work for many people, and if more people would take the plunge, it would work for even more people. Apple does not need Hulu if they increase TV show sales by 3 or 4 fold. They will be able to get networks to sell TV shows cheaper. I can see SD shows drop to $1.49 and HD at $1.99 for 1 hour shows and down to $.99 and $1.49 for half hour shows. Give a little bit deeper discount for Season passes and presto, I can buy TV cheaper than I can subscribe to TV.

Depending on your current viewing, you can even do it at current prices. You should do the math. For me $70/month is what I pay. That’s $840/year and I watch about 24 new season shows per year. At 22 episodes for a full season, that’s about 500 shows or $1000. With season passes saving between 10-20% and pre-paid cards available at 5% discounts we are talking about the same or less money.

There is still the problem of sports and older shows, but I’ll back fill my library over time. The big win for me, is all my media available to all my computers, iPods/iPhones and AppleTV’s totally comercial free!

My contract with DirecTV ends in January. I plan to switch then and I’ll let you all know how it goes.