Your Apple TV Rental Experience

Posted June 28th, 2008 in Movies by Eddie V.

Now that movie rentals have been around for the better part of four months on Apple TV, what has your rental experience been like? What do you think of the overall quality of the picture? Are some movies better encoded then others? Has the sound quality been everything you thought it would be? What have your download times been like? Share your experiences with everyone over at the Rental Experience section of the new ATVJ Forums.

rwhg

They need to have a “basket” of some kind that lets you keep track of titles you are interested in renting. Then when it comes time to decide on what to rent, you can view your basket and make a decision.

What I mean is this — when my wife and I go to a physical video store, we pick up potential rentals off the shelf as we skim the available titles. After we’ve done the circuit of the store we have a little mini-conference and make a decision. The Apple TV needs something to accommodate this way of browsing and deciding. There are a lot of titles to browse on Apple TV. We have at times spent 20 minutes browsing titles, we see a few we’re interested in, but by the time we’re done browsing we’ve sometimes forgotten which ones we liked early in the browsing process. Sounds silly but it’s true — perhaps the bottle of red wine we usually share on “movie nights” has something to do with it. Anyway, I’d love to see this kind of improvement offered by Apple.
pairof9s

I agree w/ rwhg. A shopping cart similar to the one used by iTunes or a quasi-queue used by Netflix would be a nice addition.

But I’d say my biggest gripe as of now is the 30-day waiting period after new releases. You see the “DVD” become available on iTunes but to wait so long until rental is hard to swallow. You can only hope the studios will see the error in this as they did in separating physical DVD sales releases from digital releases. I’ve grown accustomed to the 24-hr viewing period, but I still think it needs to be at least 48 hours.

Overall, I’ve really like my Apple TV rentals, especially the consumer bonus .99¢ Movie of the Week. As the catalog expands, it will become an even more used feature (especially when one considers the not-so-trivial cost of driving to get a movie rental). The HD version movies have been spectacular and I feel no loss of quality in comparison to 1080p counterparts.

I give the whole experience a 7 out of 10 rating.

(Still have to state that the biggest surprise for me on the Apple TV is the ever growing video podcasts!)

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