or why I switched from iTunes to Amazon’s Video On Demand (and so should you).

I don’t have cable so whenever I want to watch a TV show that is not on Hulu or Netflix, I buy it. I used to buy them on iTunes but their awful interface for buying TV shows made me quit it.

I can understand when Apple makes terrible decisions, like forcing programmers to use Objective C to write iPhone programs, when it serves their interests at the expense of users and developers.

It is in Apple’s best interest to make buying TV shows as easy as possible so I have to attribute the failure to do so to incompetence.

So what is the problem with iTunes? I watch several shows and buy new episodes as they are added. Every time I have to search for the show and click several times before I can give my money to Apple. Not a pleasant experience especially when done through VNC (I do it on a remote mac mini that is connected to a projector).

It’s not like it would be hard to improve that scenario: all I need is a way to bookmark show’s page. iTunes store, after all, is just a bad web browser. I’m not even suggesting using alien technology so that iTunes figures out that I watch a given show and alerts me when new episodes become available. That’s clearly too complicated, but a bookmark manager?

I went to the trouble of manually creating a web page with links to shows’ web pages (in iTunes you can copy url of the current page to clipboard) but that doesn’t help much. It still requires many unnecessary clicks before I can give my money to Apple. At least in that case Apple hasn’t lost ability to be self-serving at the expense of users: even if you copy a link to a standard definition version of the show, opening that link always gives you HD (i.e. 50% more expensive) version.

After suffering this process in silent range for months I had an Eureka (which I don’t watch) moment: there is competition.

Amazon On Demand has exactly the same shows, for exactly the same price and I can bookmark the shows because theirs are web pages inside a web browser and not web pages inside a crappy wrapper that takes away bookmarking abilities.

And they don’t try to upsell me on more expensive version of the show by making standard version hard to get to, like Apple does.

This is, therefore, a public announcement: don’t forget, like I did for many months, that when it comes to buying TV shows online there is a more usable alternative to iTunes: Amazon’s Video On Demand