Technical information

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you haven’t enabled iTunes Wi-Fi Sync.
Select the iOS device in the sidebar’s Devices list.
Click the Movies tab.
Unless you have an automatic sync option turned on,
such as Automatically Include 3 Most Recent Unwatched, scroll
through the Movies list to find the item you purchased, and
check the box next to it.
Click Sync.
Wait for the synchronization to finish, at which point the
movie is available to play.
If you’re using USB, disconnect the de-
vice’s Dock connector to roam freely.
Perhaps that doesn’t sound as tedious to
you as it does to me, but consider further:
Amazon can let you perform the above op-
eration from any Wi-Fi network (assuming suf-
ficient permission and bandwidth). Apple only
allows that sync to happen from a copy of
iTunes.
It gets worse when you look at how eve-
rything is now split up in iOS 5, something I
expect Apple will need to remedy in a future
version. The Music app manages music stored
on an iOS device, and TV shows and mov-
ies are accessed via the Videos app. But to
download music you purchased that’s not on
the device, you launch the iTunes app, which
is where TV shows may also be downloaded
(purchased movies can’t be downloaded in
this fashion).
Apps are found in the App Store app
for buying, updates, and downloading of pur-
chased items. Books are in the iBooks app,
which contains the iBookstore for downloading already pur-
chased items. The new Newsstand app now holds most pe-
riodicals unless they have a separate app that hasn’t been
integrated yet. (The same is true on the Kindle Fire: some pe-
riodicals manage subscriptions and individual issue purchases
through the Newsstand view; others require use of a separate
app, like The New Yorker.)
The addition of the $24.99-per-year iTunes Match makes
this situation both easier and more complicated in iOS because
iTunes Match only works with music you’ve brought in from
elsewhere, not with books or video, and it only allows down-
loads to iOS devices of music from your collection, whether
matched in the iTunes catalog or uploaded
into your iCloud storage; you can’t stream
music and omit downloading it to your iOS
device.
Now, you can obviate one aspect of hav-
ing all your purchased content everywhere. In
iOS, launch Settings and tap Store, then set
Automatic Downloads to On for any or all of
Music, Apps, and Books. TV Shows and Mov-
ies don’t qualify, and Newsstand purchases
are only managed in iOS. But this means
that every time you buy any of the supported
categories anywhere, all your hardware will
download the purchases at the next available
opportunity. That’s more reasonable with iOS
hardware, which may have from 8 GB to 64
GB of storage than with a Fire, which supports
direct purchased video downloads and has
only 8 GB.
I said earlier that Amazon’s music set-
up requires a footnote, as Apple’s approach,
when you figure in iTunes Match, is definitely
better for that category, omitting the issue of