TVSquad

FOX recently signed on with Xbox Live Video Marketplace, and the first series available for the digital download-to-own service is Family Guy. FOX joins other television networks and movie studios on the service, including CBS, NBC Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros., MTV Networks and Lionsgate.

Family Guy was chosen to kick off the new content deal because of its attraction to the younger male demographic responsible for most of the downloads on the Xbox 360's Video Marketplace service. Starting next week, the series' first two seasons will become available, along with the Family Guy DVD movie/three-part episode, Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story. Newer seasons will follow, with fresh episodes hitting Video Martketplace the day after they debut on television.

Later this month, TVComedyClassics.com will officially launch as a download service in which folks can purchase, or rent, various comedies from the UK.

Don't expect well-known shows like Black Adder or Monty Python, however. In fact, there isn't a single show listed on the site I've ever heard of. Perhaps they'll be familiar to some of our readers from across the pond: Labours of Erica, Up the Elephant and Round the Castle, Mann's Best Friend, Robert's Robots and Two in Clover, just to name a few. Other series from the '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s will be added when the site officially launches, with over one thousand titles in all eventually added to the service.

Every so often I'll stumble upon something on the Web I think is totally the bees' knees, but then my excitement is met with total indifference by the folks who read this blog.

So who knows what y'all will think of it, but Way Out Junk is the coolest blog I've seen in some time. It's a collection of albums, many based on television, that are out of print. The blog allows you to download free MP3s, almost all of them transferred from the original vinyl albums.

Starting today, the long-running soap opera Days of Our Lives will be available on iTunes for the usual $1.99 per episode. Fans can also get episodes a bit cheaper by purchasing twenty episodes for $9.99.

According to Variety, placing Days on iTunes is most likely a move to get more people to watch the series, which has lost some viewers over the last year or so. Frankly, I don't see why more soap operas aren't made available this way, or, even better, made available for free online. Soaps more or less require a person to be tuned in day in and day out, and fans, one assumes, would love to be able to go back and catch up on whatever they might have missed.

This, however, leads to another question, which is "how old are the people watching Days, and how many of those people are going to use iTunes for anything?" Something tells me an iTunes promotional push isn't going to be much help.

On the heels of news of Stephen Colbert's "Tek Jansen" cartoons being made available on Xbox Live Marketplace comes even gooder* news: both The Colbert Report and The Daily Show will have full episodes made available on the download service just a few hours after they air on television. The cost is 160 points (I don't have Xbox, but if you do, then I assume you know what that means), or two bucks per episode.

1. Click the download button for your video.
   
2. A thumbnail page with a drop down box pops up asking you to choose the device to send the movie to.
3. Next, a confirm page pops up.
4. Close the confirm page without clicking anything.
5. Now go ahead and choose another location from the drop down menu on the previous page.
6. Repeat as necessary.

Computer users running Windows Vista with Windows Media Center will soon be able to download and purchase original content from Showtime, including full episodes, cast information, and various video highlights. Unfortunately, this is only available to people running Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate and not to folks like myself still running Windows Media Center on Windows XP. I've been meaning to upgrade, but I'm an extremely lazy man.

I've already said it about a million times, but I'm always happy to see evidence of this sometimes atavistic industry's realization that "television" no longer refers to just the "TV set." As more and more people turn to the Web to see their favorite programs, partnerships like this make a lot of sense. More ways to watch means more people watching, and that's never a bad thing.

If you have little kids in your home, either because they're your children or you just left a window open and some random kids crawled into your home and now refuse to leave, you might like to know that there are six free videos from the Learn Along with Sesame series available on iTunes. The segments include: