The Daily Show: Corruption

ByMike Moffit

… No, not the show nor the intelligent and hilarious Jon Stewart, and it wasn’t even the topic of the day: Last night I downloaded the latest episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (03/20/2006) from the iTunes Music Store (gotta love their Multi-Pass!) only to discover that it was corrupted around 4:32 and all the audio after 4:35 was out of sync. Doh!

Needless to say I was a bit disappointed, especially since I had pre-paid for the episode and you can’t re-download songs & videos from the iTunes Music Store. So, I went over to the iTunes Music Store Support site and filled out the Ask a Video Question e-mail form regarding the issue.

Once you fill out the form and submit it, they say someone will get back to you via e-mail within 72 hours. Now, a show like The Daily Show can easily be watched out of order, so I wasn’t concerned about the wait.

What I was concerned about was whether or not the video got corrupted during the download process or whether the original copy in the iTunes Music Store was corrupted. I sort of assumed that that iTunes did a checksum on the file during/after downloading to make sure it came through intact, why else would it sometimes make you re-download due to an error occurring? I still believe this is the case, judging by download speeds, the amount of time it takes to “finish” the download, etc. But, if it didn’t, would I have to buy it again?

So, this afternoon I received the following e-mail from the iTunes Music Store:

“Thank you for your recent purchase of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
We have discovered that the episode ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart 3/20/06’ contains an error. We are currently working on fixing this problem and will notify you once we have a resolution so that you may download the corrected episode.
We apologize that the episode cannot be properly viewed. We very much appreciate your business.”

Now that’s what I like to hear!

My experience with the iTunes Music Store over the last few years has been flawless and it’s customer service like this that will make it continue to feel flawless, even when the road is a little bumpy.

Of course, my shiny new episode is not in-hand yet…

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