Tangentially related: you know one excuse I’m tired of hearing? “We can’t bring you this because of international licensing issues.”
You know what, content companies? Fuck you up the ass. I don’t care that you have international licensing issues, you’re going to have bigger issues when you realize that maybe one of the reasons your revenue is decreasing is because you’re only selling shit to one country.
It didn’t even occur to me to think of this during the SOPA protests, but perhaps the solution to piracy websites outside the US isn’t shutting them down (because you will never manage to stop piracy anyway), but actually giving people outside the US parity when it comes to buying your content.
Here is how you get a TV show on your Apple TV in the US:
- Go to your Apple TV.
- Go to TV Shows.
- Choose a show.
- Select an episode.
- Press buy, and it’ll be playing within 30 seconds.
Now here’s the process in Canada:
- Go to your Mac or PC running iTunes.
- Find a TV show on the iTunes Store.
- Press Buy Episode.
- Wait for the entire episode to finish downloading.
- Go to your Apple TV.
- Go to the Computers tab.
- Choose your computer.
- Choose TV shows.
- Go to Unwatched.
- Select the episode you “just” bought.
The main reason for this: different entities control the rights to the television shows in Canada, and surprise, surprise, they don’t want the iCloud TV show locker to exist here because that could undermine their television business. Because of that, there is no way to get a TV show on your Apple TV without downloading the entire episode on a Mac, PC, or iOS device ahead of time outside of the United States.
Now you might think that’s an issue limited to iTunes’ implementation of selling TV shows, and yes, that’s true, but I dare you to find a single other service selling television shows in Canada. There are none.
