Where Have All the iTunes Store Movies Gone?
I’m a big fan of the iTunes Store for renting movies: it’s quick, cheap and easy to use, and the selection is much better than the non-selection where I live. I’ve rented a number of movies, and have saved up a list of others that I want to see. What I’ve done each time I spotted a movie I’d like to rent is to drag its URL to my Desktop; Mac OS X saves a .webloc file which, when double-clicked, opens the appropriate page in the iTunes Store.
But it doesn’t work quite like that. I had a folder of 15 weblocs for movies I wanted to see, and just went to look and see what my wishlist contained. (Note to Apple: make a movie rental wishlist/playlist in iTunes.) I tried double-clicking each webloc file to see the movies, and quickly found that out of the 15 movies I wanted to see, most of them were no longer available for rental, or even for purchase. Here’s a list of the nine movies that have disappeared:
- American Gangster (Unrated Extended Edition)
- Atonement
- Charlie Wilson’s War
- Eastern Promises
- Michael Clayton
- Mr. Brooks
- Rendition
- The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
- The Brave One
So where have these movies gone? Was it planned that they would have such a short shelf-life on the iTunes Store? Why, if they are digital, have they been removed? Was it because of licensing agreements, or lack of interest? (The latter wouldn’t make sense, since it doesn’t cost anything to keep digital files on a server; or not much.) Most of these were relatively popular movies, so I’m perplexed by their disappearance. I don’t have any answers here, only questions.
Follow-up:
A timeline of how this story spread.
Posted: 12/5/2008 by kirk | Filed under: iPod & iTunes | No Comments »
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