I Just Want To Watch A Movie!

Friends know my issues with Apple have been not so much epic, more just bloody frustrating. For me, their best work is well in the past, and I still maintain a white Macbook from 2008 (albeit running Ubuntu so I can at least keep a moderately modern OS on it).

But once again, Apple’s iTunes monstrosity has defied all reason to become even more annoying than it was already.

I purchased Bladerunner 2049 on the platform last week and Every Single Time I Try To Play it, I get this stupid warning:

I’ve turned the parental settings off in preferences like the website tells me, and yet it still comes up. Doesn’t matter how often I click CONTINUE, the damn thing keeps coming up.

I want to download things. I want to pay for them too. But everyone insists on making it hard. If it’s not Apple’s iTunes store which is the run down cousin of its US counterpart, it’s streaming services which seem pathologically unable to show currently airing shows (The Expanse season 3 for one).

This reminds me of a former employer who had a so-called “Google Killer”. And I imagine if Google had a penny for every time someone’s called their app a killer, they’d have billions. Well they do anyway. I digress.

The business owner’s idea was to get businesses to register with the service, which is fine. The problem was he insisted on doing deals with postal services to process hand written registration forms, and visually confirm the businesses were “legitimate”.

You see where this is going wrong, yes?

And it’s the same for media. If you make it hard to obtain the product, you are actually encouraging people to seek alternate ways to obtain it. Trouble is, content distributors — where the problem really lies — are hanging on, white knuckled, to their old distribution models. Zones for DVDs so you can’t use them in different countries was an innovation which is so easy to circumvent, it’s bizarre they still jam the code onto the discs. Can’t watch your show because it’s been purchased for local distribution by Foxtel (another roadblock to progress), of course people are going to download.

You wouldn’t sell soap by telling people to submit to a doctor’s examination would you? How about restricting the sale of cars ONLY to people who have a garage to put it, because off-street parking is bad? Perhaps you’ll only sell your dinner tables to those who can explicitly state they have four or more people in their household (because the table includes four chairs). What about the artist who’ll only sell their work to someone who guarantees it’ll be hung from a picture rail in a room 12.4 metres wide by 2 metres tall? And it has to be dead centre of course otherwise you’re in breach of contract and the picture will be taken away with no refund and you might very well be sued into the bargain.

Preposterous, yes?

So why do it with music and video?