Living Critic

I’ve recently been bitten by the urge to jump on the HDTV bandwagon.  Cable and FiOS are both very expensive options, in the neighborhood of $60/month with a DVR.

One of my friends dumped cable and went 100% AppleTV.  Even if I don’t save money going that route, I’d at least get to keep the shows after watching them.  I wrote down a list of the shows I watch and poked around the iTunes store to see what’s available.  I was pretty disappointed with what I found:

Many shows don’t have a season pass option, meaning you have to pay full price for each episode – and I think that also means you have to seek them out each week; iTunes won’t grab them for you.  Most shows I looked are not available in HD, but I realize this was a recent update so I won’t complain about that too much.  ”NOVA,” an excellent documentary program that I can watch for free on PBS.org is $4.99 an episode on iTunes – and that isn’t even in HD!

On top of all that, I think the iTunes store interface is fairly convoluted, TV series don’t seem to have their own landing pages, and clicking on some of the breadcrumbs doesn’t result in any navigation.

I don’t know who’s dragging their feet here, Apple or the networks, but it’s bad enough that I’m going to stick with cable!

If you have a problem updating your apps because iTunes refuses to go to the updated on the App store there’s a little fix that may help.

Got to your applications section of iTunes.  

Then right click on any app and select show in finder.  This will pull up your entire apps directory including prior versions.

Select everything in the directory and drag it into iTunes.

iTunes will warn you for many of your apps that your importing an older version or something to that effect, decline to import the older version.  This may take a bit of clicking.

Once all the apps have been added the links back to iTunes should be established and you’ll be able to click on the regular link to update the apps as you’d expect.