Apple TV owners lost legal movie playback this weekend
DRM server snafu deprives fanboys of films
Unconcerned about the insidious impact of Digital Rights Management? You may want to think again when you hear about the many Apple TV owners who found they couldn't play legitimately acquired movies this weekend.
There you are, you've paid for a film through iTunes. You own it. But you can't play it.
Many Apple TV owners are blaming an outage of Apple's DRM server, seemingly a result of the company's data centre re-jiggery pokery ahead of the imminent roll-out of its iCloud online service.
It may also be related to the roll-out of the Apple TV 2 to Belgium, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland, which is expected to take place this week too.
Apple's support boards are filling up with complaints from punters that their boxes are asking for iTunes passwords all over again. Key in the password, in order to authorise the device for iTunes content playback, and movies still don't play.
The outage appears to have begun hitting users on Friday and was still bothering folk this morning. New posts from punters suggest, however, that the issue might now have been resolved.
But a whole weekend unable to play content you've purchased? Wouldn't have happened in a DRM-free world. Or even with copy-protected optical media.
Apple itself has yet to comment on the matter. ®
COMMENTS
"content you've purchased"?
"content you've purchased?" - content you PRETENDED to purchase more like. And paid full price for the pretence of it.
And that dear friends is why
DRM is a totally impossible technology.
Unless content providers are prepared to pay punitively massive compensation payouts when their technology fails, so that they take their obligations seriously.
They would also need to undertake to provide the unlock key if the service is every withdrawn.
Give up on DRM and just sell your products! You'll make MORE money.
This is indicative of the futility of Digital Rights management. Everytime DRM software gets changed or updated, it breaks the rest of the system, pissing off paying customers.
I just purchased Star Wars Complete Saga on BluRay and my Samsung BD-5300 BluRay player can no longer read the disks so I have an $86 set of disks that cannot be returned since i opened them to play them and a BluRay player that is rendered "unfit for the intended purpose" by DRM.
No firmware upgrade appears to be in the offing yet according to Samsung. Apparently Samsung, LucasFilms and Fox are more concerned about losing profits to "pirates" than the paying customers they already have.
I do not download media, I purchase it. But count me out on purchasing media any longer until this problem gets resolved.
Exactly how much does it cost for hardware manufacturers to repeatedly create or repair firmware? Bocoup buck methinks...How about the cost to create DRM in the first place, even more money wasted!
I'm not even talking about Allshare/DLNA stupidity just DRM. If you spent half the money wasted on DRM on keeping your customers happy, you might sell more product.
In fact, I will now go out of my way to avoid buying any new BluRay media until there is ONE, SINGLE, UNIVERSAL DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT PLATFORM THAT CAN BE ADEQUATELY TESTED BY ALL HARDWARE MANUFACTURERS WELL BEFORE THE MOVIES ARE RELEASED.
So much for MY "Consumer Sentiment". Frikkin MORONS! Nuclear Icon for my opinion of DRM junkies.
@Doug
So what you are saying is: You don't particularly get off on waterboarding, but you will support it's use on yourself and others as it sure beats genital electrocution.
