As pretty much all of you know, I love Battlestar Galactica. While I have a cable, not everyone does. Why? Many reasons, ranging from cost to the fact that they watch very little TV. And in today’s time, you really don’t need a television to catch your favorite show.

Apparently, if you have a mac, this is not true. It wasn’t always so.

Once upon a time, iTunes and NBC got along fantastically. Then iTunes pricing scheme started rankling at NBC. Negotiations were had. Negotiations were unsuccessful. There was a nasty breakup worthy of a song by an emo band. Soon, NBC had taken up with the skanky ho that is Amazon Unbox. Okay, Unbox might not be a skanky ho. However, Unbox uses only Windows Media DRM, something Macs (unless they dual boot with XP or Vista) can’t decode.

Unbox also works with Tivo, but not all Mac users will have Tivos (just like not all mac users will dual boot). Many cable companies make it a true pain in the ass to use a Tivo instead of the DVR you can get from the company (my own cable provider included). Now, those Mac folks who dislike using Torrents and prefer the legal route, used to have Hulu as their answer. Hulu is pretty cool, it’s streamed TV shows with some limited advertisements (basically like commercials) in the streamed video. It used to be that BSG would be available about a day after it aired.

This is no longer so.

Unfortunately, (and fortunately), BSG is a show that compels its fans to watch as soon as a new episode airs. Or, in the case of cable non-subscribers, as soon as its available online (legally). BSG’s start and part of the reason it was able to continue in its early days was because of its availability online (albeit via Torrent at the time). BSG, I would gather, has a higher number of technologically savvy viewers. Viewers would would be using ‘alternative’ viewing options.

With Hulu delaying the airing by a week, with Unbox being incompatible with Macs, and with iTunes not carrying NBC shows (oh yeah, BSG is ‘owned’ by NBC and not SciFi or something like that), Mac users are left with the twitches and shakes of not having their BSG fix until a week after the fact.

Meanwhile, the friends of the now-twitchy fans have to keep their mouths shut for an extra week so they don’t spoil their friends. And we all know what happens if you spoil BSG for a friend.

Things worse than death itself.

What options are the mac-using fans left with?

• Purchase Parallels (PPC macs)
• Purchase BootCamp (Intel macs)
• Purchase XP/Vista (after bootcamp or parallels)
• Purchase a Tivo
• Purchase cable

or

• Aquire it via not-so-legal-means

I mean, for mac-using fans sans cable, getting their weekly BSG fix is like a heroin addict having the drug and desperately trying to find a clean needle.

C’mon SciFi and NBC. You should know better. Play nice with mac users. Don’t alienate any part of your fan base. Use a clean needle program.*

*I’m actually an advocate for real clean needle programs. But that’s another entry entirely.

Categories: bsg