I spent 20 goddamn minutes trying to get Ponyo playing for movie night with kids last night. This is what happened:

1) I have separate iTunes Store and iCloud accounts with Apple because ages ago this is how you did it

2) used to be, this was fine: explicitly set one account for iTunes/App Store purchases, another for iCloud

3) you could explicitly let an iCloud account use a separate iTunes Store account for purchases

4) at some point, someone decided that tvOS shouldn’t do that, and you can’t specify different iCloud/purchase accounts

5) seriously who tf knows how family purchases work behind the scenes anyway

6) buy ponyo, ON MY ACCOUNT, on my phone. Works fine.

7) try to play it on Apple TV from my library in family sharing (where it shows up in the TV app)

8) “you can’t Re-download this because you didn’t buy it”, stays in spinny progress

9) delete Apple TV user. Add Apple TV user. Sign out. Sign in. Nothing doing. Kids annoyed movie night not happening.

10) you know how I get it to work? Airplaying it from my phone to the tv.

Fuck this. This used to work. It doesn’t now.

11) it’s the next day and I don’t even want to try fixing this, because I bet I can’t. I bet if I talk to support they can’t fix it. I bet if I try to buy something on the Apple TV it probably won’t work either.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

“Convenient” my ass.

May as well buy everything on BD/DVD again. Thanks Apple.

Yeah yeah I know DRM etc

What’s EVEN DUMBER is that the airplaying from my phone to TV was instead I think the airplay from content server to tv, and not server->phone->tv which implies some sort of DRM check is half-working

Forgive me if I have absolutely zero confidence Apple support can help me on this, but if they’ve figured this out for you, let me know and I guess I’ll spend 45 minutes talking with them

This is also worse because ONE THING, ONE THING I CAN DO when we’re trapped because of a fucking mitigatable pandemic response and wildfire smoke is to help my kids so we can watch a movie together easily and now that’s been taken away, too

Same: I KNOW WHY THIS IS BROKEN AND THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO, NOTHING, THAT CAN FIX IT https://twitter.com/Dr_Memory/status/1304861981996969984?s=20

Apple’s TV app is supposed to help with all this discovery shit and all it’s done has made the BASICS worse. I just want to watch something that I bought on my phone, on the same account.

Of course there is nothing else for me to say other than yes, @doctorow warned me over a decade ago.

Btw this entire thread is a textbook example of why government shouldn’t be run “like a business”

Oh and this is the Apple ID verification that keeps coming up which first appeared on my iPad running the public betas (yes, I know) but then spread to my regular phone