I purchased a DVD that advertised a free iTunes copy. This struck me as odd since I bought the DVD specifically because it was not on the iTunes store.1 I had planned on applying the delicate art of Handbrake to make it available through my AppleTV.
I thought "Hey, I might as well give it a shot." So I followed the short set of instructions. I was required to insert the DVD and run a small application.
There's a real problem with iTunes TV show pricing.
The media studios have become very transparent in the their approach towards digital media: Make it too expensive to be viable and push everyone to the old media.
Here’s a good example. Looking at the Kids in the Hall series on iTunes[1], I can get all five seasons for a total of $165 (that’s $33 x 5 seasons). That seems expensive. Maybe it’s just lack of demand for a niche show.
Option-Return. Great tip.
iTunes Match is nice but it has not altered my enjoyment of iTunes. However, one thing has been a bit of a surprise. All music really means all music on my iPhone.
Because I use my iPhone as a music device, I'm a smart list maniac. I have far more music than space (even on a 64GB iPhone 4S). I keep these lists on my phone:
Best Songs smartlist (four or more stars) New 2 months smartlist (added within the last 2 months) Push to iPhone (manually curated list of songs/albums I want to always have available) Coding (manually curated list of music without lyrics.
Several podcasts and news feeds I partake of have been talking about perceived problems with iTunes Match. My experience has been pleasant. My first attempt to enable iTunes Match told me it was not available. I waited 5 minutes and tried again and was successfully activated. The “upload” took a couple hours. I have a moderate sized library of less than 40K tracks. I have some odd-ball stuff like Henry Rollins spoken word performances as well as video game and movie soundtracks.
Now that Apple has data on a great number of music tracks uploaded or linked with their iTunes Match system, I would love to see some anonymous data about the tracks. There are a number of things Apple should be able to discern from the files.
What percentage of tracks are pirated What is the time distribution of pirated tracks (I bet the majority of pirated music was downloaded in the Napster boon) What is the average bit rate of tracks What percentage of tracks are from Amazon What percentage of tracks are ripped from CD’s What does the genre distribution of music look like What are the top most pirated tracks/artists/albums Do I think Apple has access to this data?
Weird week in iTunes for me. This is a testament to what iTunes gave the music industry. I would have never gone to a music store or browsed on Amazon to purchase any of these except for the Decemberists. All of these were spontaneous purchases due to some incidental advertising by Apple in their iTunes store. I'm happy with my purchases but I would not have made much more effort to buy any of these.
I consistently get a crash report when I manually force a wifi sync to any of our iOS 5 devices. I'm not sure why, but it feels buggy and that worries me.
I’m surprised there has not been more buzz about this. There has been a lot of speculation that Apple will stream iTunes media some time in the future. The future is now on the AppleTV 2.
Apple is already streaming podcasts for the AppleTV 2. If you setup some favorite pdocasts on your little black brick, Apple registers those favorites with your iTunes ID. Now any other AppleTV 2’s that are using the same iTunes ID have the same favorites available for browsing and streaming.
I'd like to posit a thesis that I have rarely heard about Apple. Apple understands that their market potential lies in their consumer advocacy.
Apple is often criticized by media producers for their self serving decisions that often hurt pre-established business models. It started with the music industry crying foul over Apple's insistence on $0.99 per track. Later, Apple was criticized about the lock down of the iOS platform and advertising system.
