OK, let's recap the ongoing saga of This American Life's streaming policy. The world's greatest radio show was an early pioneer in making its episodes available over the Internet. For many years, I have enjoyed the streaming functionality (supporting the show through buying merchandise and the occasional donation (OK, once)). A few months ago, TAL switched from the Real Audio streaming format to streaming mp3 via the .m3u playlist format. This was great, allowing listening with a variety of programs, including iTunes. But apparently a lot of people realized that it was possible to download the mp3 file directly, and this ruffled someone's feathers (something like "contractual obligations" were mentioned), causing a shift to a gimpy, non-downloadable kind of stream which disables all the navigation features except for "play". Now comes a new development, announced in this exerpt from the August 24, 2006, This American Life Update newsletter:

COMING SOON: MP3 STREAMING RELIEF
If you've been frustrated with this summer's less-than-ideal streaming MP3 functionality, relief is in sight. We plan to introduce a new, user-friendly Flash player for our streaming files sometime in September; it'll reinstate all the things you've been missing (fast forward, pause, rewind,etc).

They are also going to drop prices of old shows from 4 bucks to 95 cents!

Here are a few early episodes which are not available as streams, but can be purchased through the iTunes Music Store: Episode 8 - New Year, Episode 11 - Enemies, and the irresistibly titled Episode 17 - Name Change/No Theme.

My advice? Snap up some of those cheap episodes before something even weirder happens!