Subject: Why is the iTunes Store so little optimized to sell? and so little for not downloading?
Hi Steve,
I’ll keep the intro short: PowerBook G4, White MacBook, MacBook Pro, iPhone 3, 3GS, iPods… iPad: for sure!
I actually buy quite some music and TV shows in the iTunes Store. And I wonder: Why is it so, well, 1999? The only thing it seems to remember is my name. Certainly not my previous purchases. If it did, it would tell me at login that there is a new episode of House ready to download. It should do that whether I have a season pass or buy every single episode.
You know which music I buy – why don’t you automatically show me new releases? Why does the Genius feature not work on your end and present me with “you might like to listen to this too.” It doesn’t have to be on my machine, could be in the cloud and thus much faster. I would probably purchase even more…
Do you know what the worst part of buying TV shows at the Store is? The ever-returning Downloads which I can’t delete.
Example: I bought season 1 of West Wing and later got the DVD box set. Obviously, I didn’t need to download all episodes. But that is what the Store intends me to do every time I purchase something. A year later still, because it won’t start downloads in reverse chronological order as it should, but chronologically. To make matter worse, I got How I met your mother Season 4 which had Standard D and HD for one price. I only downloaded one definition yet, but iTunes Store wants me to download the rest.
Which means that every time I buy a new TV show the Store automatically starts downloading old West Wing episodes. To-be-downloaded-items that I can’t permanently delete. Do you really want me to download 20 GBs just to get rid of this?
Still, looking forward to the iPad…
sebastian
iTunes 9 Killer-Feature: Comments on podcasts
In yet another revolution, Apple grabs “podcasts” forever with integrated comments.
Whether you call it ‘podcast’, ‘vidcast’, ‘vlog’ or video show, Apple one-upped competing podcathers with one new feature in iTunes 10. Publishers can now connect their blogs with the iTunes Store and let the audience comment from iTunes, without them ever having to visit the publishers site.
Research has shown that a lot of podcast viewers still do so at their computers. Now they won’t even have to leave the iTunes application to interact with the content providers. They can input their comments with email-address, name and text in iTunes and the information is automatically transferred to podcasts publishing site. It works the other way round, too, with iTunes being able to pull in the already present comments to a certain podcast episode, thus enabling a dialogue often lost.
//Well this is made up, iTunes 9 probably will not feature this feature. It is, however, a statement I gave in an interview at the Techcrunch Berlin MeetUp last year which unfortunately was never published. I still think it would be a killer feature, being huge for Apple directly of course, but also able to kick podcast interaction into new spheres.
