Gift card adapter

This would be funnier if it were reversed.

Recently we received an iTunes gift card in the mail. A culturally relevant gift in a home where the parents are barely their 30s and the youngest child is 9. Surely currency in the most talked about (marketed) digital stuff buying place would be appreciated in a household like mine, and it is, I mean money is money right?

Not any more.

We don't have iDevices. We are PC/Android people. It's how God made us and we are happy.

We have not one device to play back iTunes content save for one of our laptops. So I'll need to download and install iTunes, find something worth watching with the wife and kids in the iTunes store, purchase/rent it in iTunes, and watch it in the iTunes app. If we want it on the TV I'll have to plug in the laptop, which requires adapters. So the good intent is as follows:

Someone paid money to purchase a gift card to send in the mail to my home which we will use to purchase or rent a movie from the iTunes store to watch on a PC based laptop that I will plug into our living room TV using an HDMI adapter because we don't own iDevices since we are a PC/Android family.

I understand that digital delivery is a miracle of science, and I love and take advantage of it. But in this scenario wouldn't it make much more sense to have some kind of common gift card currency or gift card currency exchange program? Why must it be so polarized? Android, Apple, MS, EVERYONE should all accept the same dang gift card.

It's not like any of these companies would lose in this scenario. Android users get an iTunes gift card? No problem, spend it in the play store. Apple users get an android gift card? No problem, spend it in iTunes, and so on. We all have our loyalties and will give the money to whom we choose. What a concept! Right?

Wrong.

Companies need their competitors consumers to buy their products, even if it is through misinformed gift card choices. Which makes me think that actually these gift cards shouldn't exist at all. It's not like anyone is going to realistically have an Apple TV, Chromecast, Fire Stick, Roku, and HTPC all at once is it? That would be wasteful.

Anyway, we will enjoy our iTunes gift card, because that's what we were given. I just wish someone somewhere some way somehow would come up with a viable way of providing actual currency as a gift instead of having to choose something to fit a consumers choice of playback device.

What's that? ...

Oh.