Apple Movie Junkie

The good people over at Boxee released an update today to its media center software for the Apple TV and Mac. Primarily a bug fixing version with fixes coming to the boxee browser to better support Flash sites, improved performance, less jittering and less crashes. The Ubuntu flavor of Boxee was also update with an update to the Windows version coming in June.

For Apple TV, exit boxee, and update the version via the Launcher. It is also highly recommend you update the Launcher to the latest and greatest 3.0 version.

For Mac, the update will show up in boxee, allowing for a direct install. You can also download this version manually at http://app.boxee.tv/download.

We usually don’t cover the movie removals here at ATVJ like we do the new additions. We’ve been burned before where Apple might removal a title one day and then add it back the next. But I thought I would post this list because most of these removals seemed to have happened over the last few days. Really since the new iTunes HD Rentals were added. Most of the titles listed below have been removed all together from iTunes, some of them remain purchase titles, such as Hancock, and a handful were available in HD on the Apple TV.

I like to think that the way the movie studios view the iTunes Movie store is as a sort of hybrid Netflix/cable channel on TV, such as an Spike or TNT. Let’s call it for what the studios see it as, Channel iTunes. From time to time you will see a run of particular movies on those channels, Lord of the Rings, The Godfather trilogy, and so on, and then they are gone for a few months. This seems to happen with the SD and HD titles in the iTunes Store. Like Netflix, iTunes will get a new release right off the bat, will run it for a few months until its time for it to appear on a premium cable channel such as HBO, and it will disappear. iTunes may get it back after the premium channels run of the movie. Then there are the older catalog titles such as National Lampoon’s Vacation, which show up for a limited run of a few weeks or months, and then the title seems to revert back to the cable TV channels.
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