Robot Apple Monkey Blog

As tasks get longer / more complicated, I find myself leaving things unattended a lot. Software installs are a good example of something that are often left alone. In this regard, most installers are decent about getting the meaty info up front, and then just churning away on their own.

One of the things I’ve been after lately, thanks to blowing my download quota last month and being shaped to 64kbps for eight days, is scheduling downloads to run in the 1am-7am “off-peak” time. But this is not an easy thing to do …

Take iTunes. It checks for podcasts, and starts downloading them. But it has no scheduling ability, it just goes for it. You can pause, but then how do you resume? My solution was Quicksilver, and the handy “run at” command. So I queued up all the downloads, quit iTunes and then had Quicksilver re-launch it at 1am and the downloads all kicked off. In Windows, the Task Scheduler will do the same thing for you. I could’ve done something similar by pausing them and having an applescript resume them at 1am, but again it would’ve had to have been started by a third party program. I want scheduling in iTunes, but at least since iTunes doesn’t ask any questions, this is very easy to kick off and leave unattended.

Now take something from Blizzard. They’ve released the teaser cinematic for their latest World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. I wanted to download the HD trailer, and they offer a customised bittorrent client called the Blizzard Downloader specifically for the purpose. Brilliant. I started it up, selected the save location, then once it had allocated the space and created the partial download, I closed it. Now just because I always like to test these things, I had Quicksilver open the downloader again after a delay, just as I would if I was scheduling it for post-1am. It opens up … and asks for the save location again. Fails the unattended check. What’s worse - when I chose the same location, it didn’t resume, it overwrote.

Sticking with the gaming side of things - the Warhammer Online client also requires authentication before you can patch. Perhaps this is because at the moment it’s a beta, and you need to accept the beta test agreement every time you log in, but it’s still incredibly frustrating, especially since beta games patch frequently, and are often relatively large patches too.

Sure, there are other issues at play here. If Australian ISPs weren’t so damn stingy, we wouldn’t be so focussed on off-peak time. But for now, it’s what we have to work with, so it would be nice if software was obliging!

Tags: broadband, isp

Today Apple announced the availability of movies, for purchase and rental, on the iTunes store. As is to be expected, I have a few issues with this.

Like the TV shows, which were announced earlier this year, there’s a significant price disparity between the iTunes prices and dvd prices. Or rather, there isn’t. The purchase prices for movies on the iTunes store are $10 for “catalog”, $17.99 for “recent” and $24.99 for “new” releases. Obviously these are just guidlines, since Star Trek: Generations, which I would definitely consider “catalog” is $12.99. That’s better than all the other Star Trek movies though, which for some reason are “recent”, and thus $17.99. All of the Star Trek movies can be picked up for around $20 each in a shop, on a physical medium, in a plastic box, shipped from a warehouse. If you buy them all at once, they come down to $15 each. Yes, I’m aware that there are costs associated with digital distribution, not least of all the bandwidth required, but these movies should be significantly cheaper than their dvd counterparts. I suspect that a large portion of the blame for this lies with the big bad movie studios, who can’t seem to see beyond their short-sighted quarterly earnings reports, but I wouldn’t put it past Apple to put all the blame on the studios while not being overly aggressive in driving those prices down.

But that’s just the start of the financial pain train …

Take my aforementioned example of Star Trek: Generations. That comes in at 1h 57min 54sec (thanks iTunes). This translates to 1.39GB. That’s really not that bad, given how cheap storage is and such. But comparing that to the download limits on some typical broadband plans in Australia and it doesn’t look so good.

Say you buy or rent one movie per week. I presume that’s not an unreasonable target … You’re looking at close to 6GB per month, just on your iTunes movie habit, let alone the music purchases you’re supposed to be making, or any other internet usage. So let’s check what we have to spend with the ISPs to get that.

First up -this is going to seem comical, but please, bear with me - let’s have a look at Telstra.
$40/month will get you ADSL, hobbled to 1500kbps download speed, and a massive 400MB (not a typo) of downloads per month. Wow.
$70/month will get you the same blistering speed, but a 12GB limit, so we could rent and download two movies per week. Slow down!
Of course you could get that 12GB limit for $10/month less … if you slowed down further to 256kbps download. On the plus side, at that speed, you wouldn’t be able to download more than two movies per week anyway, so your limit would be pretty safe.

So we’ll move to the other “big” player, Optus. Not that great either, with $50/month getting you 2GB or $70/month getting you 15GB. But with Optus you’re on full ADSL2+ speeds (or as close as the disclaimer will allow).

Since doing this for even just the major Australian ISPs will get boring fast, I’m going to skip to the ISP widely regarded as the best in $/GB terms - TPG. Ignoring off-peak limits (since I think the majority of people included in this example won’t, or at least shouldn’t have to, rent a movie at 3am) we need to spend $50/month to cover our target, and we actually get 18GB of peak downloads, which means a ridiculous three movies per week, plus a bonus movie per week in off-peak time if we’re so inclined.

Seriously - is this really how we are Building Australia’s Prosperity with our National Broadband Network? Okay, it’s not likely to happen via iTunes any time soon, but is 3 movie rentals per week really that odd? There’s a big problem with the iTunes store selling and renting movies, but this one isn’t Apple.

Tags: apple, broadband, isp, itunes, movies, rant