I recently had to take a rather long flight for work – Philadelphia to Las Vegas (plus an extra hour on the tarmac because someone was deemed “No Fly” after his/her luggage made it way on to the plane. Par for the course when flying out of PHL.), so I thought it would be the perfect time to purchase the first season of my latest addition, Forever, and download to watch on the plane. I’m a bit of an Amazon addict, and looked there first (rather than thinking things through and realizing that iTunes would have been the better platform for my iPhone and Mac, but I digress…). Score – pay $40 for the full first season, and you can download episodes as they’re released. Sweet.
So I buy the episodes, but can’t find a way to download them for offline viewing. Huh. Start a chat with an Amazon rep, who tells me I need to use Unbox, which is still on the Amazon site, but they’re no longer supporting it for some reason (I’ve since read that it’s very buggy). Methinks Amazon wants you to purchase shows/movies and just stream them. Not thrilled with that, since I just gave them my money but can’t do what I want with them. So I downloaded Unbox, and finally got my new shows (10 episodes at the time) downloading.
As they’re downloading, I suddenly realize something and make the infamous “not impressed” face – what file format am I downloading these shows in, and will it be compatible with my beloved iPhone and Mac? Here’s the rub – Amazon’s downloads come as WMV files that have a layer of DRM protection on them. It’s very near impossible to get WMV files to play on Macs (Microsoft stopped supporting the program that would allow it many years ago). Well, crap. So I download another program that will remove the DRM protection (I paid for these and am not going to be sharing them, I just want to watch them on the plane ride – is that so horrible?). Program worked, took my about twice as long as I thought it would, and the quality wasn’t great, but I was going to be watching on a phone screen on a plane – quality wasn’t my top concern.
So we return from our trip, and I need to start getting these shows off of my PC laptop – they’re taking up a lot of space and slowing the whole thing down. So the DRM-less copies of the episodes aren’t great, and I can’t play WMV files on my Mac, so burning them to DVD that way wouldn’t work for transfer. I return to Amazon chat again, so see if I was missing something – surely there’s a way to download Amazon purchases onto a Mac for offline viewing, right? It’s 2014! Yeah… no. And it’s not listed in the fine print, either. I was completely speechless. But my concerns were forwarded to the appropriate department. That’s not going to fly one bit. I love Amazon, but no. False pretenses and all that.
After some back and forth, I was able to get refunded for my purchase. That I then went and spent on the same series for $10 cheaper over on iTunes.
Moral to the story: Do your research before making a digital purchase. Any digital purchase. Especially if you’re trying to go cross-platform like I was.
I still love Amazon and will remain a faithful shopper. It took some persistence, but they made it right. I just had to learn the hard way that if I want to download something for offline viewing, there’s going to be many, many roadblocks.
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