More Sketch Comedy on iTunes
Apple is definitely on to something with selling Saturday Night Live sketches on iTunes. They should quickly expand to selling sketches of other beloved and short lived sketch comedy, such as The Ben Stiller Show, Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show, and, of course, The State. iTunes and the iPod could be the best thing to happen to sketch comedy since Lorne Michales.
The iTunes Store is as a perfect venue for selling sketch comedy, as the iPod is for watching the sketches. Sketch comedy is incredibly viral; it creates dedicated fans who love to collect, quote and introduce others to their favorite sketches. iTunes would allow fans to easily find and download their favorite sketches and transfer them to their iPod where they would be easy to show to friends. And whoever they show a sketch to will probably end up buying it themselves (especially if the price was right).
I can’t imagine a sketch comedy fan that wouldn’t love to be able to carry their favorite sketches on their iPod to show to friends at any time. Especially after years of buying bootleg VHS tapes at questionably quality on eBay, iTunes would be a welcome convenience and well worth the cost.
The two main benefits of selling individual sketches are lower cost (hopefully about $1) and easy searching. If sketches were sold individually this would allow also customers to easily search for the sketch they want and only buy only the ones they want. Most people who are just getting into a new show may not want to purchase an entire episode, let alone a whole season on DVD. Also given that within any complete episode are always a few sketches that don't quite work (cough, jeepers creepers), which could be easily avoided. Also, individual sketches would enable user to create a video playlists of only their favorites, essentially this would let you design your own episode of only your favorite sketches.
UPDATE: Currently recent Saturday Night Live sketches are sold individually, however the price is $1.99 per sketch. This is way to high, and people are really letting them have it with the Customer Reviews.