News
Silent Apple TV update brings TV show purchases [Updated x2]
By Charles Starrett
Contributing Editor
Published: Friday, December 16, 2011
News Categories: Apple TV
A silent, server-side update to the Apple TV has added on-device TV show purchasing to the set-top box in several countries. Engadget reports that Apple TV users in Canada, Australia, and the U.K. are now able to purchase TV shows on the device, and stream any past TV show purchases directly from iCloud to the Apple TV. The same functionality was rolled out to Apple TV units in the U.S. earlier this year.
Update: The TV Shows menu has since disappeared on Apple TV units set to access the Canadian, Australian, and U.K. stores; it is unclear whether this morning’s appearance was a planned rollout that has been pulled due to a technical issue, a premature launch, or something else entirely.
Update x2, December 16: Apple officially rolled out the feature last night to various international locales.
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1
NO UPDATE for Canada!! What gives???
Posted by bobdog on December 8, 2011 at 4:25 PM (PST)
2
As per the additional “Update” note in the article, it looks like it was a glitch of some kind on Apple’s end. The “TV Shows” menu option was there briefly yesterday morning, albeit with very limited content appearing, but had disappeared across the board by mid-afternoon.
Posted by Jesse Hollington in Toronto on December 9, 2011 at 1:05 PM (PST)
3
It looks like you can now do for tv what you can for music and re download purchased content direct to the iPad. Only films to go and apple tv 2 will be as useful as apple tv 1.
Posted by Tony Taylor on December 18, 2011 at 12:26 AM (PST)
4
The features are there but the ‘cloud’ service is terrible. Downloads are slow and failure prone.
Posted by Adrian Lane on December 20, 2011 at 1:29 PM (PST)