For years I’ve been rather frustrated every time I think about iTunes. I’ve got 40GB free on my 1,000GB drive. Yes, I’ve got a *dedicated* iTunes hard disk in my main Mac Pro.
It’s flipping ridiculous.
Buy a 2GB movie for £9 and unfortunately it’s now your problem to manage the file. I want to buy the license and not have to mess about managing my own data infrastructure.
If you have a disk crash and you lose all your movies, hard luck.
I reckon you *might* be able to appeal to Apple for the right to download some/all of your purchases in that instance. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple declined to assist. Every time you download something they’re pretty good at pointing out that you should keep a backup.
A backup of my 960GB of iTunes content?
No thank you.
I just don’t want that problem.
You know and I know that Apple has a record of my purchase and that it’s stupid-simple for them to enable download on demand. I’m sure the company has wanted to look at offering this for sometime but licensing issues may have prevented it. Or perhaps the sheer data volume implications.
So I’ve been flying fast and loose. I don’t bother to back up all those TV shows, movies or music.
That’s a problem.
But perhaps a bigger problem — or massive frustration — is not being able to access the data because it’s stuck on my primary iTunes library. If I want to watch Top Gun when I’m in Houston next week, I need to plan ahead. I need to put that file on the devices I want now. It’s unrealistic to sit in a Houston hotel room and transfer a 2GB file at 15k/sec from my home machine.
The chances are the Houston hotel will have a pretty good connection to the iTunes server though. So I’d like to be able to pull down that content as I wish.
It looks like we will certainly have this feature enabled next week — although I saw no mention of movies yet. Did you? I might have missed that. Still, the ability to stop having to worry about the location of my data (and the fact that it’s backed-up — or that I have a license to access it as I need) is rather reassuring.
I particularly like the concept of iTunes Match as well: All the other music I have in my library now becomes accessible on any (Apple) device.
What are you thinking about iTunes in the iCloud?
