Just the other day my Macbook died; "green light of death", i.e. it's not charging and not turning on anymore (presumably the battery is dead).
On the harddrive of said Macbook I have ~$300 worth of purchased iTunes movies that I cannot access anymore. I had never bothered to back them up because I was under the naive assumption I could just re-download them when needed. A service that I took for granted not only because I do it with their apps and music all the time, but also because most of their movies were more expensive than the equivalent DVD.
Well, needless to say, apple does not allow to re-download purchased movies.
I may still be able to recover that harddrive. But I'm most certainly not buying movies from apple anymore.
This happened to me recently. I had nearly 2 TB of movies and TV shows on an external hard drive that decided to die on me when I moved it. After some messing around, I was able to coax the drive to boot up again and list files, but it takes hours for me to move the files off of that drive and onto another. Luckily, I buy my TV from iTunes, which lets me re-download everything onto another device, but those movies are lost forever.
I've been looking into other digital download options, but Amazon's not compatible on a Mac, and I enjoy watching movies in HD quality. I don't blame Apple for the restrictions that Hollywood puts on them, but I'm also not going to spend more effort than I need to to watch my movies. Downloading them is the most convenient way to watch, there are no ads, and the quality is amazing. I don't understand why this is so hard for the studios to get right.
This is news to me. When looking at an iPad recently the guy in the Apple store told me that anything I bought on iTunes could be moved to a new device should I ever upgrade. So long as I have the same AppleId (email?)
What else is non-transferable? Books? Music? Apps? (Can iDevices do other things?)
It's transferable, but not necessarily by downloading again from Apple. You just back up your downloads and then you can transfer them from device to device.
Not that it makes any sense not to allow people to download stuff multiple times, especially when said stuff is DRM'd, but try reasoning with the movie studios.
It might get better in the future though. Music is now mostly DRM free and you can re-download directly from iTunes. That changed not that long ago. If the music industry can change there's hope for the movie industry as well.
You can redownload: music, apps, books, TV shows. Movies aren't in that list. Also, you might not be able to redownload something if it's been taken off the store.
is that really a problem with itunes? if your house burned down, you'd lose all of the movies you had on DVD. at least with itunes movies, you can legally make backups of the files.
Well, I'll flat out admit that I'm an idiot. I should have read the fine-print, they surely did tell me somewhere that I'm not allowed to re-download m̶y̶ their movies.
But then again. It's 2012. Is it really such an outrageous assumption that I'd be able to re-download digital content that I paid dearly for?
Steam lets me re-download my games as often as I want. Amazon and all ebook vendors let me re-download my books. Google let's me re-download my android apps. Apple let's me re-download my apps and mp3s.
It just honestly never occurred to me that iTunes movies would be different. When I paid $16.99 for an iTunes movie while the same DVD would have costed $9.99 I was actually mentally justifying the markup with the convenience of not having to care about backups...
For a reasonable but not specifically informed consumer, I think it's likely they expect to be able to re-download movies from iTunes, particularly since music, apps, etc. can be re-downloaded.
In the US, tends to err on the side of consumer protection, even in the face of a click-through license to the contrary. While Apple will let you re-download if you call (apparently), if I'd lost >$100 in iTunes movies and they wouldn't, I'd call AmEx and charge back the purchase. Or go to small claims, just for the novelty of winning against Apple.
However, I just pirate music, tv, and movies shamelessly (and buy Blu-Ray physical media, since I like 1080p, and rip). MPAA and RIAA declared war on everyone else about 15 years ago, so fuck them. The only reason I pay is for convenience.
Sure , but houses rarely burn down. Computers crash a lot. In fact, I'd venture to say that most (or maybe close to most?) computers end up in some state where their owners either can't or think they can't retrieve data from them. Based on the likelihood of this happening to their customers, it'd be decent to let users re-download media you know they've already paid for and been given access to...
In addition to this is the commonly stated idea that you don't own a copy of a movie, you only have a license to watch it. If that's the case, I should be able to acquire the movie data assuming I have already paid for a license to watch said movie. Right now, consumers get the worst of both worlds.
Just the other day my Macbook died; "green light of death", i.e. it's not charging and not turning on anymore (presumably the battery is dead).
On the harddrive of said Macbook I have ~$300 worth of purchased iTunes movies that I cannot access anymore. I had never bothered to back them up because I was under the naive assumption I could just re-download them when needed. A service that I took for granted not only because I do it with their apps and music all the time, but also because most of their movies were more expensive than the equivalent DVD.
Well, needless to say, apple does not allow to re-download purchased movies.
I may still be able to recover that harddrive. But I'm most certainly not buying movies from apple anymore.