Apple should start to listen to customer issues with disappearing content.

Question

There are many threads with users experiencing missing downloads of tv shows. There is clearly something going on apples side here and really disappointed that no one has come forward and stated that we are aware of an issue and hope to have it fixed asap. Considering how many people purchase products for apple tv the response should by apple should be better. tech support telling people such as myself to do a complete restore of apple tv is not acceptable which i did just in case. the issue still remains. i advise people to hold off purchasing content for tv shows until an answer is provided. wasted enought time on this matter and still a fan of apple but patience is wearing thin. i realize that this forum is not answered by apple but feel that apple does read these posts and would love to keep the revenue coming in for itunes as it avoids piracy among other things.
Message was edited by: goofy69

Answer 1

Winston Churchill wrote:
I've never had any content disappear,
I had it happen once, around the time we first got itunes store access in UK on AppleTV - everything inexplicably deleted from AppleTv not just some things.
Fortunately the purchase I'd made a few hours before had synced to iTunes.
I really feel there are a couple of weaknesses with the model for media purchase on AppleTV:
1 - Things inexplicably disappear for some users - it MAY be user error in some instances - but if that's the case there is clearly no safety net warning in either iTunes or on the TV that the user is doing something that might cause the problem otherwise they'd remember.
If you've purchased content and it disappears before it's synced back to iTunes or been watched, you're going to take some persuading to part with your cash again in this manner.
2 - 'Reverse syncs' of purchases need to be avilable manually for AppleTV, possibly by a drag and drop within iTunes to override instances when the user has set up the wrong type of library, or the sync library fails to reverse sync content. Without being to move content back from AppleTV the user cannot use on other devices or make backups - a very unsatisfactory user experience, even if it only affects a few.
Movies/video with DRM are protected anyway, so what's the problem?
For iTunes plus material all that would be needed would be for the user perhaps to confirm their iTunes store credentials to allow the reverse transfer to happen to prevent opportunistic copies being made by nefarious individuals or those who have come into possession of stolen or 2nd hand AppleTVs.
I have found to date that iTunes Store invariably are quite helpful with any purchases that develop issues, but it is not guaranteed they'd allow redownloads etc, and it takes so little to put consumers off a service when it doesn't live up to expectations.