iCloud won't let me download some deleted iTunes TV episodes again

Question

I have purchased a bunch of TV shows iTunes.

The original files for these shows are no longer on my hard drive and I probably deleted them. They show up in the iTunes directory, but when I try to play, I get a dialog box that says "The TV show could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?" If I say yes, I get a file dialog. This is not useful, because the files are no longer on my computer.

Now, Apple tells me that if I've purchased a show and delete it from my disk (say, to save space), I can download it from iCloud:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/inside-itunes/2012/03/movies-now-available-on-icloud.html

So, I follow the instructions, go to the iTunes Store, go to purchased TV shows and select the program I purchased, but each episode only says "Downloaded", and there's no way to re-download the missing episodes.

This is not true for all shows. For some shows that are not on my hard drive, I see a little iCloud icon and am able to click & download the missing episodes.

It's possible that the un-downloadable shows were downloaded and deleted before iCloud supported downloading purchased episodes, but I don't know for certain if that's the problem. It just a hypothesis I don't know how to test.

Any thoughts on how to restore access to these deleted shows within iCloud?

Answer 1

Delete them from iTunes, so they don't show up in your TV section. But don't delete them from iCloud. Then they should appear with a download button on the poster for it if iTunes in the cloud is enabled (you will see a cloud in iTunes). You can either click that download button, or go to purchases in the iTunes store and download it from there.

I think what you must've done is deleted the actual file, but not deleted it from iTunes. Normally when deleting something in iTunes, it deletes from iTunes, and then asks you if you want to delete the actual file as well or not.