standard versus HD season pass problem
There's a problem (or perhaps "penalty" might be a better word) with opting to buy standard resolution TVs shows. This issue is pretty much true of any season pass that I have bought over the last several years, although I'm going to use the season 1 pass of Better Call Saul as an example.
First off, this is how I have all our AppleTVs at home configured. We use nothing but HD TVs but I really don't see any significant difference in standard versus HD resolution, and standard is cheaper, so it's a no-brainer for me.
Again, this is strictly for example -- the problem happens with all season passes -- but from what limited HD TV series I have purchased, I think the problem is restricted to when I buy a season pass in standard definition. It's Tuesday morning, and Better Call Saul airs on Monday night. So I go into TV Shows -> Purchased -> Recent and find my show there. As you can see in this shot, the latest episode available for viewing is "8. Rico".
But watch what happens when I go into "More on iTunes Store" and look there:
Yep, episode 9 is available (in fact, as you can see, I watched half of it before I decided to take some pictures to detail this problem).
This is a fairly minor glitch, although it shows up similarly on the iPhone as well. If I were to open the Videos app there and look in the Better Call Saul item, I would not see episode 9. But if I go into the iTunes Store app on the iPhone, find the TV series there, scroll all the way to the bottom and click on "Also Available in SD", I can then download or stream episode 9.
This is always a "short-term" glitch because the problem eventually corrects itself -- right at the time when I get an email alert from Apple that the latest episode is available for download. The problem is that this sometimes happens 1-2 days after the show airs, so it's kind of annoying when I should be able to pick the episode right from the "top" of the stack just like the people who bought the show in HD.
Since this happens all the time on multiple AppleTVs, I think this is less a problem with my hardware or account than a bug in Apple's system. I'm hoping though that posting this here with screen shots will work its way back to the iTunes Store as a "request for fix".