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Comment by necro | Hacker News Reader

The point I'm trying to make is....shifting the pain point. In this example itunes has been shifted past a particular persons pain (time/cost) point to be a convenient legal solution. Good point on the non availability in certain regions. At least my experience with itunes is that they are improving the service to lower that pain point in those areas too. You could not get certain content in canada a while ago, so the alternative was to find it on other sources, but as itunes adds more content in more other regions, this pain is reduced and it becomes the convenient service more and more.

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You could not get certain content in canada a while ago

Canadians should be so lucky. You still cannot get most content in most of the world. No Netflix, no Hulu, no Pandora. iTunes has a meagre selection, and that which is eventually released here, comes half-a-year late and overpriced.

I'm Australian, but this experience is shared by most people who live in not-the-US. The content industry still has a world of distribution failings to address before their customer-hostile anti-piracy flailing becomes justified.

I give that arrangement until your friend realizes he can only shift his content onto 5 devices, at which point his content is lost forever. Or when his hard drive crashes and he realizes he can't re-download tv episodes.

Personally, I value my money too much to spent $100 to "rent" tv shows. My pain point is being able to own the things I buy. Until then, it's bittorrent until the bluray comes out, then buying that.

But this is just a threshold issue. What does the difference in cost have to be for you to rent vs buy. Let's say it's $60 to buy a season of a show on hard media that you can watch as many times you want and yes, you own something that will collect dust for a life time. Perhaps you can resell it, but that just means your initial cost was lower and you in a sense rented it for the difference in price for that time period. Now if the cost to rent is say $20 for a season would that be worth hassle free experience of the content? How about $10, $5? At some threshold the value vs cost starts to make sense.

He absolutely can redownload TV episodes if he bought them from iTunes. Same goes for Music, Apps, Books, but not movies.

That's not a fair characterization of iTunes' restrictions. You can use purchased movies and TV shows on up to five computers, and ten 'associated devices', but Apple TVs don't count towards the ten. The content is never 'lost forever', you can always deregister one or (even if you no longer have access to them) all of your devices to register a new one.

[edit: you can also - although this is fairly recent - redownload an unlimited number of times to registered computers, devices or Apple TVs]

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