I wrote recently about a cheery email I received about Nook. The service is closing in the UK, and the company has reached a deal of sorts with a nothing operator in the space (run by a supermarket!), which will allow you to retain some of your purchases. I received another email today, which had a rather more urgent ‘last chance’ feel to it. Again, it outlined the process customers must take:

To help meet your digital reading needs going forward, NOOK has partnered with award‑winning Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand to ensure that you have continued access to as many of your purchased NOOK Books as possible at no additional cost to you.

If I have purchased something, my assumption would be ongoing and permanent ownership. What would be more honest is the following:

To help meet your digital reading needs going forward, NOOK has partnered with award‑winning Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand to ensure that you have continued access to as many of the NOOK Books you thought you had purchased — but had in fact only sort-of rented (SURPRISE!) — as possible at no additional cost to you.

This kind of thing is why I almost never buy DRM-encased content. Music already solved this problem, after plenty of turmoil, and it’s now actually quite difficult to find downloadable music (outside of streaming, where ownership isn’t presumed) with DRM. Books, magazines and comics rather oddly often cling to DRM, though, to lock you into services or specific stores; on that basis, I have reverted to paper or will only purchase content in formats that lack DRM (such as freely usable PDF or CBR).

When it comes to movies and telly, I fear things won’t change for a very long time, due to studios being blinkered and paranoid. Right now, I could download almost any show or movie entirely for free, and would be able to watch wherever and whenever I like. By contrast, I can pay over the odds for a digital file that only works on specific hardware and/or using specific software, and that might vanish from a cloud library without notice. Subsequently, I almost never buy digital TV shows or movies now, preferring streaming; and on those very few occasions I do succumb, it’s either a rare DRM-free download (for example, from a Kickstarter), or for something that’s inherently disposable that I only really want to watch once.

Frankly, the approach taken by many executives — whether they’re behind Hollywood blockbusters or systems for selling and reading books — needs to die. They are consumer-hostile, and Nook’s misfortune showcases what happens when things go badly wrong. If a publisher folds, you don’t expect someone to silently remove their paper books from your shelves and then say you can have some of them back, for free, because a deal has been struck with a supermarket. The same should be true for digital.

The Guardian has run one of a seemingly endless string of Steve Wozniak articles, which you can find hurled across the internet, like so much toilet roll flung into a tree. This time, he’s moaning about Apple Watch, and specifically its shift into the jewellery market, where the unit you buy is as much about status as functionality.

You’d have to be naive to consider Apple wasn’t already somewhat in this space anyway. While I’ve long argued Apple kit is worth the outlay due to its broadly superior usability compared to rival products, there’s always been a hint of elitism about Apple. And purely within single Apple product lines, there’s clearly space for the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ — after all, there probably aren’t too many people buying the very cheapest iPhone or iPod because they really want that model. With Apple Watch bands, this is even more overt. On this concern, I somewhat agree with Woz, although Apple Watch remains only a small part of Apple’s business rather than something that drives the company.

The problem I have with the report is it highlighting two concerns that come up a lot in interviews with Woz, and then get widely reported as some kind of fact:

Well this isn’t the company that Apple was originally

Good. A stagnant company is one that fails. But also: what is the original Apple? Woz and Jobs in a garage, hacking away at the Apple Computer 1? The company that found a modicum of mainstream success in the Apple II? The company that created the Macintosh, but then found itself almost obliterated by the IBM juggernaut? The company that nonetheless instigated a desktop publishing revolution?

That only takes us through a small part of Apple’s history, but it showcases how the company has changed many times. And during the more recent Jobs/Cook run, we’ve seen shifts towards consumer computing, rethinking media industries, revamping mobile devices, and more. If we still had the company Apple was originally, would we have the iPhone?

or the company that really changed the world a lot

At which point did this stop? The Apple II? The Mac? The iPhone? The iPad? Where’s the cut-off point in Woz’s mind about Apple’s ability to be influential and change the way things are done?

I respect Woz and his various achievements, but it’s odd that so many column inches are reserved for the opinions of someone who has had almost nothing to do with Apple in three decades.

When iOS 9 hit beta last summer, I heard concerns from developers about Game Center. Never Apple’s most-loved app, it had seemingly fallen into a state of disrepair. In many cases, people were reporting it outright failed to work.

Six months later, little has changed. If anything, Game Center has gotten worse, with major problems increasingly widespread. These include the Game Center app launching as a white screen, and Game Center freezing the Settings app when you try to access its options.

You might wave this away as a trifling problem. If so, I imagine you don’t play games. Game Center isn’t just about logging highscores — it’s also crucial for the functionality of many turn-based multiplayer titles. Without Game Center, they cannot and do not work. Additionally, some games freeze on start-up, because developers had quite reasonably expected Game Center would at least be functional. This makes for angry users, who can’t directly contact developers through the App Store and therefore leave bad reviews. Developers are now updating their apps to effectively check whether Game Center is broken, flinging up a dialog box accordingly, and at least allowing players access.

This state of affairs is ridiculous. I have three working iOS devices, and only one now has a functioning Game Center. As someone who writes about iOS games for a living, this issue affects me professionally and impacts on coverage for developers, since I cannot write about games the broken Game Center is blocking access to. But more importantly, it makes me question Apple’s interest in fixing bugs, and especially dealing with anything relating to games.

If a critical bug blocked access to any other default app and caused countless other apps on the system to fail, would we still be waiting for a fix six months later? I’ve no idea whether there’s anyone senior at Apple responsible for and advocating on behalf of gaming. If not, Apple should do some recruiting, because right now it feels like the exec team doesn’t give a hoot about games and gamers, beyond the odd high-end title showing off the power of an iPhone or iPad at an Apple event.

Further reading: TouchArcade thread Game Center Stopped Working, which has over 50 pages at the time of writing.

In January, Netflix expanded to 190 countries. Rather tellingly, Chief Executive Reed Hastings noted: “It will take a while to bring the catalogs together.” That’s something of an understatement. In some countries, even Netflix’s own series are absent from Netflix, due to earlier deals being cut with local cable providers. Elsewhere, to say libraries have slim pickings is putting it mildly.

For many users, this never made any odds. Prior to Netflix showing up, people used it anyway by way of VPN software. This spoofs your location, enabling you to browse and play media ‘geolocked’ to a specific country, for example the Netflix US catalogue if you’re living in the UK. When Netflix expanded, people carried on as if nothing had happened, presumably after looking at their local catalogues and wondering if tumbleweeds were about to bob across the screen.

At one point, Netflix didn’t seem to care about VPNs. Although they were technically against the company’s terms, it was perhaps pragmatic to turn a blind eye. Netflix was still getting paid, and by extension so were the companies who owned the series people were watching. Only media executives don’t see things this way. Instead, they consider people using VPNs the new ‘home tapers’, killing the industry through stopping movie and television companies making local deals. In other words, a single Netflix catalogue is bad for business, when you can in some countries carve off the good bits and sell them to a dozen individual networks, each of which charges for access.

Of late, the most common thing I’m seeing regarding Netflix is people quitting the service, on account of no longer being able to access content they were enjoying. Their alternative, almost without exception: returning to torrenting. I wonder whether movie and television execs will ever wake up to the reality of modern media distribution. Having a service available worldwide is irrelevant if the content doesn’t go with it. And if you restrict the content, people will simply stop paying.

It was recently reported that Napster co-founder Sean Parker was working on a new way to get blockbuster movies into your home on release day. According to Variety, his plan is called Screening Room, and would give you the chance to rent any movie on the day of release, albeit for a vastly inflated charge over a standard movie rental.

In the abstract, this is a fantastic idea, and one I’ve long argued in favour of. For various reasons, many people cannot easily get to a cinema. Some are housebound due to disabilities. Others have babies and young children, making escapes to the cinema some kind of long-forgotten memory.

I belong to the second group, and these days get increasingly annoyed at spoilers being repeatedly fired into my face the second a movie is released, on account of knowing I won’t get the chance to see it for months. The question is what I’d be willing to pay and do in order to avoid waiting months for a home rental release.

Unfortunately, not what Screening Room’s planning. As I noted, it seems smart in the abstract, but the details are tone-deaf. First, you’ll need yet another box to sit under the telly. Secondly, the price of $50 (which would probably be £40 in the UK) is excessive and presumably making the assumption it replaces four ‘lost’ tickets. More bizarrely, a sweetener comes in the form of two free local cinema tickets for any movie rented, despite the fact many people using this system would not be able to get to the cinema in the first place. Odd.

The whole notion of movie windowing seems ridiculous these days, and some indies at least have realised that they can make money by getting movies on to iTunes and the like simultaneously with limited runs in cinemas. I’d happily pay the price of a shiny disc (15-to–20 quid) for a rental of a blockbuster within a fortnight of cinema release, but it seems the industry still isn’t keen on budging nearly enough to make that a reality.