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Automatic download of Season Pass TV shows is not working

Bought a season pass for Doctor Who, set the appropriate flags in iTunes on my Mac [11.0.2], but episodes do not automatically download.


The episode shows up in my iTunes interface, but I have to manually download it.


What is the point of having a 'download pre-orders when available' flag if it is not going to work?


thanks


R

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Apr 21, 2013 5:24 PM

Reply
19 replies

Apr 23, 2013 12:07 PM in response to randyfromlincoln

This problem seems to come and go with each succesive iTunes "upgrade"

I comes under the general heading of why iTunes ***** for TV viewing.

They are still so focused on music and seem to put no emphasis on TV.

And by the way if you search this forum you'll see that this has been a problem for years

I found at lest one from 2007! Get it together Apple


I would also ask, why you should even have to go to iTunes and hit "Check for available downloads"

That should be completely automatic, but that doesn't even work now.


And not to go off on a rant here, but WHY cnat I set a default resolution instead of always having it

default to HD - SD is fine for my purposes, takes less time and less storage.


And please please please list TV seasons with the most recent episode FIRST

May 3, 2013 11:28 PM in response to randyfromlincoln

Here is the scary non-answer I got from iTunes support:


"I have investigated into this and consulted with a senior advisor, and learned that due to some forth coming changes in the system, the latest TV season episodes will no longer automatically download, and will need to be downloaded through the "Purchased" pane from iTunes in the Cloud. I know this may not be the answer that you were looking for, and I apologize for any inconveniences that this may cause.

To do so, check out the steps in this article on how to download previously purchased items:

Downloading past purchases from the App Store, iBookstore, and iTunes Store

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2519

I trust you find this information helpful, Nils. Please let me know how everything works out with downloading the episodes for your purchased seasons, and if you have any other questions or concerns, I will be more than happy to assist you further. Thank you for being an important part of the Apple family, and have a great evening!

Sincerely,


..."


They have basically broken iTunes for TV shows - but then again they never really cared about it.

May 4, 2013 2:14 AM in response to Nils57

I'm going to have to side with Nils57, I also was told pretty much the same from a senior adisor a couple days ago. I thought it was just a rumour to be honest, but it looks like they were in fact correct. Looks like Apple made a change and didn't quite make it obvious to anyone, leaving the rest of the world, including many of its own advisors to suspect it was just another glitch like before.

May 9, 2013 7:24 AM in response to Nils57

I have the same problem so I went to the iTunes store home page and selected the Purchased option then slected the TV shows and Not on this Computer. For a while it would show me the TV shows that I had purchased so that I could manually download them.


Well now some of the Seasons that I have purchased do not show up anymore. Body of Proof was the example today. Other Seasons Pass TV shows have not shown up in previous days.


I get the emails that state that the TV shows are ready to download but I can't find a way to download them since they do not show up as available.


This is NOT the Apple way of doing business. iTunes store software is really buggy.


Reminds me of the Performa computer fiascos and other issues when Steve was not with Apple. Now that he is gone who is going to get Apple back to a quality company?

May 9, 2013 11:49 AM in response to JohnCrane

Most of the time the new episodes show up on the iTunes "latest TV episodes" page (the one reached from the TV tab itself, not the day by day one reached from the TV menu, which I find utterly useless), although some shows consistenly get left out here.

If you know the show (from the email) you can go to the show page in iTunes Store (search by title if you have to), select HD/SD, and then scroll allllll the way down to the most current episode, which (as of this writing) still show up as "Download" rather than "Purchase". Hardly acceptable, I know, but at least you can get there. Except of course for some show episodes, where they must have screwed up some part of the metadata, so they still show up as "Purchase", Case in point: Episode 14 of "Nashville". This episode shows up as "purchase" in iTunes, and WORSE doesn't show at all on AppleTV.

May 9, 2013 4:42 PM in response to corbey

Well, season passes used to work fine - something must have changed in the background to break the automatic downloads. I hope it starts working again - it's very annoying and time consuming to manually have to look for new episodes to download especially when you have a lot of season passes. This problem has seriously made me reconsider my choice of iTunes as my media store.

Automatic download of Season Pass TV shows is not working

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