Live TV, DVR???
Seriously, there are already 100 f'ing ways to do Live TV, DVR and, more obscurely, access "Premium Internet Content" from one place (look up Tversity Pro - http://tversity.com/support/premium-websites/). They might be a pain in the ass compared to whatever sure-to-be-slick approach Apple is cooking up, but compared to paying $2/show for shit that was already broadcast for free off the public systems or on your already-subscribed-for cable... I'll go the cheap route any day.
What someone (maybe Google, you listening big brother?) needs to do is to compete head-on with the cable companies and let you subscribe to a channel with access to their scheduled lineups as, more or less, a playlist and everything on-demand post-original-broadcast in the very likely event that you miss a show at its original airtime. *
The only reason for live-anything these days is really sports (maybe business news if you're a day trader, or regular news if you just have too much time and joi de vivre). Nobody wants to plan their lives around when Desperate Housewives (or whatever you're into) comes on.
When you purchase cable, in the states at least, everything comes in these great big bundles. My last cable bill was, I think, in the neighborhood of $70/month for probably 300-400 channels and equipment (HD DVR, extra box or two) - probably $55 or so before equipment. Of those 300-400 channels, we *might* have watched 30 (if even that) on a somewhat regular basis, which would put us in the neighborhood of, at most, paying around $2/channel for what we really used... or $0.13 a channel if you average it out across everything ($0.17 if you include equipment).
Anyone who thinks this business model will survive a charge the same (or an 1,100% premium depending on how you want to look at the numbers) for a single episode vs. access to the entire channel through cable is daft. Unless you only watch a handful of shows (which, with two kids in the house quite fond of their Disney channels, definitely doesn't apply to me) this makes no economic sense for the customers... which is usually a pretty decent indicator for the viability of a business model.
iTunes has been doing decent charging reasonable prices (about the same as a real cd) for mp3s. In the movie rental business Netflix and Redbox are slapping the crap out of everyone because they somehow managed to provide content for *really* cheap compared to on-demand through cable providers who charge the same, more or less, as brick and mortar rental stores. Digital content can be successful but the problem here is that they're going in the other direction - charging more for their service where you provide the bandwidth and you purchase the hardware, than if you went the traditional route.
It reminds me of the article here (I think) recently about an online source for renting some obscure TV series that was charging more for the online rentals than it costs to buy the DVDs. Why would anyone sign up for that???
* I claim patent pending, copyright and for good measure a trademark on all ideas presented in this post and any derivative works thereof :D