Kirk McElhearn, on his blog Kirkville, made a blog post this morning, Where Have All the iTunes Store Movies Gone?. He has a list of 9 movies that he was saving – I wasn’t aware of the dragging to Finder creating a .webloc link – which when he went back to investigate were no longer available in the iTunes Store.
No comments on the original post, but Macworld picked it up – here, without adding anything. My first reaction was, ‘oh, that’s sloppy journalism.’ Particularly when you see the commenters doing the research, which I’ll summarize in a moment below. However, it made me realize two things: 1) they gave the issue a lot more eyeballs, and 2) Even ‘professional’ blogging is, well, just sloppy, compared to older school journalism. By this I mean no research, no checking sources, nothing much more than what’s off the top of your head. This is hardly the nightmare of ‘What I had for lunch today’ which was regularly lampooned back when blogging was first making it into the major media 5 years ago, but I wish the Macworld poster would have done just a little research before pushing the ‘Publish’ button. Oh well.
Anyway, if we want to look at things positively, we can see the Macworld post as a postive example of crowdsourcing, something which overall I have problems with, but I will save that for another post. In short: the commenters did the work here. Commenter DougAdams pulls out a relevant quote from AppleTVJunkie.com:
Why do movies seem to disappear from Apple TV?
No one knows for certain but we believe that it is a combination of the studios pulling titles at their discretion and the newer movie release title rights reverting over to premium cable channels such as HBO, Showtime and Starz. So once it’s time for the movies to premiere on those channels they become purchase only titles or disappear altogether.
Subsequently, commenter fletc3her notes that Netflix streaming lists the dates when some content will no longer be available. This is an important piece of information, and belies the complexity of the licensing issues surrounding Kirk’s original question, and also points out that Netflix is a little bit more forthcoming than Apple when it comes to explanatory dialog boxes.
Finally, commenter encampbe did the logical thing and looked up Kirk’s list on Amazon.com streaming, finding that
While the movies are all found, they are all listed as “currently not available.” Clicking on them brings up the regular video screen, but in the middle, instead of the preview, the following message appears: “Due to our licensing agreements, this video is currently not available for purchase or rental.
So, in sum, it appears to be a question of fluid content licensing, rather than the possibility of some negative video content migration off of the iTunes Store. Props to the nice job done by Macworld’s commenters!
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[...] (2008). This was picked up by Macworld later that day. Still later in the day, I made a blog post (link) which summarized the conclusions made by the commenters on the Macworld site and noted that there [...]