Apple Movie Junkie

While it seemed as though most of the Apple TV noise yesterday was surrounding some ridiculous touch screen remote, Apple snuck in a minor update to the All HD menu of the Apple TV.

Now before you run over to your Apple TV and click on Update Software, this update didn’t come as a normal software update. Just as Apple has the ability to remotely control the content which is displayed on the Apple TV without a software update, it appears that they can also control the menu structure of how movies are displayed in the same way.

So what are the changes? The first obvious and most ironic change is that under the All HD menu Apple no longer lists All the Apple TV HD rental movies. Up until a few weeks ago Apple had been listing all of the movies available for rent in HD for the Apple TV, this is gone. What we get now are twelve rows of 25 movies each broken down by genre, along with a Top HD Rentals row and a New Rentals In HD row, with each of those containing 30 movies.

So what does this mean for the average Apple TV user? You’ll no longer have a list of a few thousand HD movie posters to scroll through, but this change also makes it that much harder to find new HD rentals. That is unless of course you visit Apple TV Junkie on a regular basis. When we first started this site we had always assumed that someday Apple would get it right and make it as easy as possible to discover new HD content on the Apple TV, and ATVJ would no longer be needed, so much for that. Based on what we’re seeing, it may be that Apple is making it harder.