In case you didn't hear, Macworld was last week. At Macworld, Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO announced a plethora of new products and services. I was not all that impressed by most of them, but I was intrigued by the movie rentals. He said that every major movie studio had signed up for it, and he demonstrated it with the Apple TV. He went on to say that the software update for the Apple TV would be out in 2 weeks. I verified this by trying to find it with my Apple TV and the software update was not there. So my experience is with my MacBook and iPhone.
iTunes Move Rental Overview -> Overall, the way that the iTunes movie rental service works is simple. You launch iTunes and navigate to the movie rentals section. You can either get there from a tile on the main iTunes page or click on the Movies link on the top left. Now that you are at the movies page you can search for movies, look at top rentals, browse via coverflow, etc... One thing I noticed is that there is no easy way to distinguish between movies that you can rent/buy versus just rent. So say you clicked on a movie and it is available for rent. All you have to do is click on the Rent Movie button, and the movie immediately starts to download. Once the download finishes you have 30 days to start watching it. Once you start watching it you have 24 hours to finish it. After the 24 hours is up the movie will be automatically deleted.
My Experience -> I rented the Simpsons Movie. It was a little less than 1 Gb, and I started downloading it at my house. Then I went to another persons house, so I paused the download, closed my macbook, and went to the other person's house. Once I got there I got on their wireless network and resumed my download. I had to go run some errands, so I paused the download again, ran the errands, and when I got home I finished the download. Once the movie finished downloading it showed that I had 30 days to start watching it. So I synced my iPhone up with my MacBook and moved the movie over to my iPhone. Note that you MOVE the movie to different devices instead of just copy like you would a movie that you own. This is so that you can't trick the timebomb that automatically deletes the movie 24 hours after you start watching the movie. I'm guessing a small percentage of people will get hosed if their iPhone crashes while some rented movies are on them. But anyway, I started watching the movie but only got about halfway through by bed time. The next day I watched it in two other sessions until I finally finished the movie. Every time I want to the Videos section on my iPhone it showed me how many hours I had left. And when I got down to under an hour it told me how many minutes I had left. And when the 24 hours were up it did indeed automatically delete the Simpsons Movie from my iPhone.
My Suggestions -> Overall I'd say the process works. I would like it better if you had roughly a week to watch it after you started it. Why 24 hours? That is too restrictive. Also, maybe a NetFlix-like subscription may work better for most people. I currently use NetFlix to rent movies, and the only way I can see moving to another movie rental service is if (1) it is more convenient than Netflix and (2) it is competative in price with NetFlix, and (3) it has comparable selection to NetFlix. iTunes movie rentals is definitely more conveniant, but I think I watch enough movies so that $3.99 per movie is more expensive than what I pay at NetFlix. Lastly, since iTunes movie rentals just started they do not have the same selection. One last suggestion that I have is that if I rent a movie and like it enough to buy it that I be able to count the rental fee toward the price of buying the movie. That would be kind of like the complete my album that they have for music.
Posted by troutm8 at January 21, 2008 11:50 AM