Latest Apple iPod/iTunes announcements. Watch the video. iTunes 7 feature walkthrough.

Personal favorite new iPod/iTunes feature: gapless playback.

I used to wonder about the iTunes Music Store pricing model for TV shows. $2 per episode is OK for single episodes I may have missed, but at that rate, some shows cost $40 a season. Most of the shows I watch are one-viewing shows: I don't need to see it again once I've seen it once. If a TV show is so culturally or personally significant to be worth re-watching, I'll buy the DVD. (And I'll only be interested in doing that as long as the media format is reasonably rippable, and DVD is dubiosly so thanks to anti-DRM-circumvention laws.)

It only now occurs to me, as Apple makes its next big move toward living room dominance with better-than-TV-quality video and a pre-announcement of a new AirPort Express-like device for streaming video, that iTMS TV pricing makes plenty of sense for me personally, on the condition that it completely replaces cable. As a TiVo user, I live the on-demand lifestyle: I only watch shows I like, I like the shows I watch, and I watch them whenever (and thanks to DVD burning, wherever) I like. iTMS has every show I watch on Comcast digital cable today, and, DRM aside, it provides a better viewing experience given a Mac in the living room. For what I'm paying for digital cable, I could get 20 TV show seasons from iTMS, and I haven't actually watched more than 10 in the last year.

iTMS is hardly a slam-dunk cable TV replacement at the moment, for lots of reasons. But it's interesting (to me) that my limited and dwindling interest in TV is largely met by the current iTMS selection and features. As IPTV takes over the world, iTMS is poised to replace cable TV as the conduit for high production values content.

(Noted for the link: If I ever did replace the cable box and TiVo with a Mac Mini, I'd still probably want a broadcast TV receiver device for the living room Mac.)