The Apple iTunes Music Store has grown over the last few years from a place with just a 100,000 songs to now a full media outlet. There are millions of albums, thousand of TV shows and hundreds of movies. Two weeks ago Apple and the NFL announced new NFL highlights for each and every game of the season. You can purchase them on at a time for $1.99 or pick an entire season for $24.95 ($1.56 a game). They are roughly about 10 minutes long provide a recap of the game.

NFL Expansion

The NFL is very particular about who it licenses its content to to whom so it is a very big deal that they partnered with Apple. The NFL has a five year deal with DirecTV up in 2010 and just last year started their own network. The writing on the wall is pretty clear, the NFL wants to deliver content to as many places as possible while retaining full control. Since Apple has been very successful balancing content protection with fair use for the consumer this made the NFL's choice even easier.

The Highlights

We were a bit delayed in heading into the Jet Kingdom labs as we were waiting our new 80GB iPod Video (no green color choice). After getting our new iPod set up and running we set our sights right on the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). The NFL games are well promoted so it was not hard to find the Jets page (pictured) which had a few reviews and offered the options of purchasing the two games available or buying a season pass for all 16 games as they come available. We went for the one click purchase of the season and after one pop-up that wanted to make sure we knew what we were getting into, the games started downloading. Since the announcement was after the first games of the season, we were happy to see they had included the Jets vs Titans game. The files downloaded pretty quickly over our DSL connection and synced up right to the iPod. Future games will automatically download since we purchased the season pass.

JetsPod

The highlights are about 10 minutes long and pretty bare boned. It is a mix of offensive and defensive plays on both sides of the ball. For the Jets highlights it was of course the Jets announcers and we assume that all teams have their hometown voices to recognize. The announcers set up the position on the field and the time remaining but we would have really enjoyed some graphics to let us know where we were in the game. The plays are played in full from a few different angles which is nice, some of which we didn't see on regular television. This, of course, gives you the ability to go back and replay that play over and over again (unless it was that Jets fumble).

The highlights looked pretty good on our 24" LCD screen stretched to full screen view. There are some artifacts in the quality but not enough to ruin it. If you are used to iTunes television shows this is just the same. On the iPod they look great, very crisp and clean. How else can you get your NFL on while on the subway?

Conclusion

The NFL highlights available on iTunes are a great addition for the NFL nut and super fan. While they could be extended a little more with graphics, downs and scores they are a good start if not a little pricey. Just like green eggs and ham you can enjoy them here, there and everywhere.

• NFL on your iPod
• Quick and easy
• Season subscription

• Needs more graphics
• No scores, stats
• A little pricey
• Too short