jlover

cloudmobile said:

cali said:

A bunch of companies piggy backing off Apple’s inventions and hard work. This might hurt Apple in the future as there will be less reason to own an Apple TV or use iTunes. 

This is hilarious. First off, Apple did not invent retail digital media downloads. iTunes was not the first of its sort or anywhere close. They weren't even the first to do the $0.99 cents per song/$.99 per album thing, nor were they the first to do the 30 second preview thing. I suppose next you are going to resort to "Apple did it the best" or "Apple's became the dominant/most popular so others don't count"? Yeah, that is typical. Apple gets to appropriate and repurpose everyone else's ideas - and often has to get sued in order to force them to pay for it - and that is OK, but everyone should be hands off on every product that Apple produces, even when Apple themselves got the idea elsewhere? To put it another way ... even if Apple had the iTunes idea first - and I repeat they did not - other companies would have had as much right to copy it as Apple did.

And another issue ... people don't need another reason to abandon iTunes or Apple TV. There are plenty of reasons already. 
1. Apple TV: the cheapest model costs $149. You can actually buy a name brand 32' HDTV for less. A Roku and a Fire TV stick - which offers 80% of the same features as the Fire TV, and when you consider features that most people will actually use (no, most people don't want to play mobile games on their TV, which by the way requires controllers that cost $40 apiece more increasing the cost to like $229) costs $30. And with a Roku you can access all your content no matter where you bought or rented it, not so with Apple TV.

2. iTunes: it was already outdated when it was originally launched because it is a standalone application. There were ALREADY web-browser based services that allowed you to buy and download media back in the 1990s. Now, everybody has a browser-based service - or at least a browser based companion to the standalone PC or mobile app - but Apple. YouTube/Google Play. Amazon. Disney. Ultraviolet/Vudu. Redbox. Target. And so on. Apple is the only one that requires you to access a massive bloated buggy slow application to search for and rent/buy movies, music, TV shows and books. What is worse, the competition has offered browser-based options for over ten years. I remember being able to download music from Walmart's website - the predecessor to what is now Vudu - way back in like 2005. 

3. Oh yeah, content rented through iTunes can only be downloaded on the device that it was originally rented on. No one else has this restriction. Literally no one! At first, Apple tried to claim that it was a restriction imposed on them by the studios to prevent piracy. Gee, why didn't the big, bad content owners do the same to literally everybody else? Now don't get me wrong, that likely was the original reason why this limitation was imposed. The only reason why it still lingers is because Apple's backend e-commerce server application software is many years behind the competition. Which - again - is the same reason why they also do not have browser-based stores for not only iTunes but the App Store. 

Apple didn't fall behind here because of "thieving" competitors or cheap/ignorant consumers. Apple fell behind because their product was - and still is - inferior. Apple has the best smartphone, the best tablet, the best PC and the best smartwatch. But they do not have the best multimedia solution and haven't in years.