Apple iTunes quality checks

Some time ago I purchased Mythbusters series 6 and 7 on the iTunes store and downloaded several gigabytes of episodes. I was watching one of the last episodes yesterday and it reliably skipped significantly at a couple of points with a complete loss of audio and video for 10 seconds or so.

I managed to finish the episode and more or less understand what was going on, but made a note to drop Apple an e-mail at some point asking for a fresh copy of the episode as it was obviously rather annoying.

Imagine my surprise this evening when I received an e-mail from iTunes saying that they had noticed that the item had “noticeable quality issues” and so they had placed another copy on my account and I just had to fire up iTunes and get it to check for new items available for download.

Sure enough, a quick trip in to iTunes and the store showed that there was indeed a download of the episode in question available and in a few minutes later I had a pristine new copy (the joys of 50Mbps broadband!).

Undoubtedly some privacy groups somewhere will complain that iTunes sent this data back to Apple, but in the end why should I care? The transmission of this data doesn’t really infringe my privacy in any way and I benefitted as a consumer as a result.

What’s more, my view of Apple as a consumer has gone from potentially irritated or even annoyed to very impressed with the customer service. How better to stop complains than to respond pro-actively?