I just bought a season pass to season 3 of Battlestar Galactica. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get it before, but I went ahead and bought the 90-minute (with no commercials) first episode for $2 (which, btw, was totally mind-blowing, heart-wrenching, intense, and awesome).
As I was buying the season pass, I was thinking “man, it sure would be nice if Apple detected that I already purchased the first episode, and refunded my money.” But it wasn’t a big deal, I knew mine was a rare case and probably not worth their time to develop that feature.
But as soon as I put the season in my cart, this message pops up:
It detected my redundant purchase, nice! However, I soon realized that this was merely a warning message, and not an offer to get a refund.
Come on Apple. The season-pass customers are the best thing that could ever happen to you. Why not give us first-class service and make us feel great about buying several season passes? I am thankful for the ability to catch up on a current season, and watch with no commercials, both of which are very valuable to me, but it is still something I would only do for a show I absolutely loved. Why not make my experience truly amazing, improve customer service and encoding quality (there have been a lot of complaints about the BSG season 3 video quality– but of course, there is NO way to give feedback, and we have NO hope that the episodes will be re-encoded), and hell, maybe tweak the price a little bit. If Netflix can physically mail me ~15 hours of content for $18 a month, you can certainly transfer ~15 hours of content to me over wires for the same price. How about half that? Come on, make me cancel Netflix, pleeeeeease?
John…I think it’s time that Apple rename and re-envision iTunes. It’s off-title…and while it’s got some great functionality…it’s lacking in purposed functionality for a true media center (fuck MSFT). I feel your pain, but it’s still better than most things out there.
- G
For convenience-loving commercial-haters like me, Netflix and ITMS are the only games in town.
You’re right, they need a re-branding and and some refinement of the experience.
But now that I think about it, I’ll tell you what: if there is one absolute pattern that I’ve noticed with Apple ever since Jobs came on board, they are extremely careful with what they introduce and how they position themselves. All of their innovations are in absolutely in the right direction, and are very, perhaps even brilliantly incremental.
The new products and features merge themselves into our lives and we barely even notice. Look at how the ipod has progressed over its lifetime… each iteration seems like it barely ads a new feature… people always say “that’s it?”. But in just a few years we’ve gone from a clunky black and white 5 gig with mechanical wheel, to a super thin color 60 gig that plays video and photo slide shows. (and of course the mini/nano/shuffle flavors). If someone showed me the ipod i have right now (60 gig video) in 2001 i may have not believed that it would arrive in 2005.
And a lot of what we take for granted in the iPhone was iteratively merged into our lives via the iPod and OS X.
The Apple TV looks like a mini, works with itunes (and doesn’t really add any “features” per se, just convenience), and is relatively affordable. People will get them and think nothing of it. Then, in a 18 months, BAM, the Apple monthly media plan, $50 for all you can watch.
They iteratively introduce the infrastructure and then have set the groundwork for the revolution.