[thrownaway2424]

Last time I tried to download a television show on iTunes it took 40 minutes before the iPad thought it was sufficiently buffered to begin playback. That was on my local 5GHz 802.11n backhauled over 100mbps cable. Every time I want to watch something on Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, or Google Play they all start more or less instantly.

I would argue that Google also has a superior app store buying experience, in at least one aspect, that I can use any web browser to install apps onto any of my phones, the usual example being I can install an app on my phone by selecting it in Chrome on my iMac.

As for the rest of their cloud, the "frequently unavailable" thing I am referring to is APNS, which seems to suffer from complete unreachability at least quarterly. This seems to have something to do with their flailover from their east coast to their west coast datacenter.

[eridius]

> Last time I tried to download a television show on iTunes it took 40 minutes...

That video was almost certainly coming from a CDN. If you were experiencing connection difficulties to that CDN, I'm not so sure you can claim that's Apple's fault.

[thrownaway2424]

Using a 3rd party doesn't absolve the first party of responsibility for customer experience. In the iTunes case, the experience was bad, and incongruous with the rest of the iOS experience, which is usually good. That's why I reach for my iPad instead of my Nexus 7 more often than not, because I don't have time to waste on Android bullshit (and anyway, usually the Android's battery is dead). But if I pay for a TV show and then can't watch it until 40 minutes later, that's a terrible experience and it put me off iTunes for TV shows, forever.

[eridius]

One single bad experience which could have just as easily been caused by your ISP, or even by you (e.g. by using a DNS provider that interacts badly with CDN geolocation), turns you off forever from a service that otherwise acts better than its competitors? That's a rather extreme statement to make.

Besides, do you really think the competing services don't have the same potential for problems with whatever delivery network they're using?

[thrownaway2424]

Netflix and Amazon have a different failure mode where they deliver lower picture quality in order to maintain faster-than-real-time delivery. In the case of Amazon, when this happens you get an email within a day refunding the difference between the HD and SD quality stream, if you paid for the HD one. A very good experience.

[eridius]

You consider that a good experience? I hate it when I get a low-quality stream from Netflix. I actually would prefer to be able to force it to buffer the HD stream, even if that means waiting a bit before I start watching.