I always like to look at the iTunes Film Bundles section, to see what they’ve got on offer. They do a lot of franchise bundles - Back to the Future, Harry Potter, etc. - but this past week I noticed they were doing a set of genre collections instead. The brilliance of these bundles is that they are around the £40 mark, for ten films. And not ten rubbishy films, they’re pretty good movies, in HD format.

After causing a bit of a kerfuffle with my harsh criticism of the special effects in The Terminator, I was intrigued to see the iTunes Film homepage feature some CGI Trailblazers. Now, we have already established that I am not an expert on movies, but some of these made me ponder. Terminator 2 - I’m saying nothing! Aliens - I’ve seen this one, although I don’t remember it enormously. I seem to recall the CGI being acceptable though.

As media, and particularly music, becomes more and more digital, it seems as though subscription services are the way of the future. There are many sites out there that offer an all-you-can-eat style buffet service, allowing a monthly fee to provide access to all tracks behind the wall. Of course, once you cancel your subscription you are left with nothing, but as long as you continue to pay, you can continue to consume as much as you desire.

With iTunes now starting to roll out HD versions of some TV shows, alongside the standard def versions, we had to investigate. Given the option, it feels wrong to buy a lesser quality version, even if it is slightly more expensive to do so. LOST returned to our screens recently, and by screens, I mean monitors playing the HD show with the help of an Apple remote. I wasn’t sure that the higher quality made that much difference, but about halfway through the second episode, I suddenly saw it.

You can now buy or rent films on iTunes in the UK, and there’s quite a lot to choose from. Considering how few TV shows there were when that was first introduced on the UK store, I’m quite impressed. There are some questionable decisions on the part of Apple, when you look at the HD side of things. You can’t buy an HD film and you can only rent one if you have an Apple TV.

Been browsing through the iTunes top 100 songs for a while. Not planning on buying, just seeing if I’m missing anything. Having my head so buried in the podcasting cloud, I barely have time to listen to the radio anymore. The answer was not much, by the way, although there were a few surprises along the way. What the hell is Neil Diamond doing in the top 100 downloaded songs in iTunes?

I know, I know, this blog has been about television far too much recently. The problem is that at the moment, it’s the only other non-Sidepodcast thing I’m interested in. ITV hasn’t really featured in my thoughts recently, but now two things have happened that sort of cancel each other out. Let me explain. The Good ITV shows are now available on iTunes. Get your hands on Cold Feet (yay!) or Lewis (uh…) and that’s about it at the moment.

First the iPlayer, and now iTunes. Finally, the BBC have allowed their programmes to be on the iTunes store. It’s only a select few at the moment, and only one that I’m particularly interested in, but this is a revolutionary moment. I understand that there are limitations and conflicts with the BBC’s charter – they can’t charge us for content when we pay our licence fee, can they? But I believe buying from iTunes is no different to buying a DVD and there are hundreds of BBC DVD titles to choose from.

I made an iMix but half the songs aren’t in the music store. I’ve been bitten a million times - AGAIN - and it itches and it hurts and I hate it. I started watching Nip/Tuck, but didn’t think it was very good. I watched the first ten minutes of Ny-Lon but thought that was rubbish too. Where’s all the good TV gone?

Anyway… website update - 101 Words will have its own site very soon. I apologise for the delay but learning PHP and MySql is bound to take more than a day and it happens that I keep getting distracted by iTunes and Prince of Persia! And on the subject of iTunes, please note the new iMix section, I just discovered playlists and will probably be up till the early hours creating them!