First of all, I love ITunes for its podcasting subscription ability. That rocks.
Where it falls apart is in the TV shows and I suspect music, but i don’t really buy music from there.
There are about 6 TV shows that I watch regularly by purchasing the episodes from ITunes – Battlestar Gallactica, Lost, Grey’s Anatomy, Heroes, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Numbers, CSI and CSI: New York. Here is what frustrates me to no end – ITunes pays absolutely NO attention to my attention data. I don’t buy any other TV episodes but those, and I buy them regularly. I have to go about 5 clicks deep for each show just to check and see if there is a new episode available. Before I can do that, I have to find the stinkin show in the huge list of shows that they are always changing around the order they are listed in. It takes me FOREVER to check up on all the shows I want to buy.
This is just plain RUDE!!! ITunes KNOWS what I’ve given it my credit card for, it knows what I buy all the time. It should be polite and let me know whether there are new episodes for me to give them my money for. I’d love to be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for each show, they could pass me the info and link through the feed for every new episode that comes out for the show I’m subscribed to. It would be SO easy for them to do. Barring that, they could just give me a ‘MyStore’ link similar to Amazon.com – that way if I went to ‘MyStore’, it could show me all the UNPURCHASED episodes for the all the shows that I have purchased.
The thing is, not only would this make life a LOT easier for me – it would make them more money faster. If they were pushing me info that let me know that there is something new to buy, I’d jump right on it. On top of that, in the ‘MyStore’, they could recommend other shows that I might be interested in, I would definately try them out.
Basically – I wish Apple would put their ITunes podcasting technology on their ITunes TV Show store.
