I want to thank everyone for their patience while we resuscitated our web app, with a special thanks to our genius in his dungeon Mr.Miles. Please enjoy Cinemira once again.

To say this outage has been an embarrassment would be an understatement. Yes this is a beta service which we charge no fee to use, but it’s still a bothersome problem for all concerned non the less. Whats the point of offering a service when it’s not reliable. Chalk this up to one more learning experience for a small team.

In the mean time, until we can get Cinemira fully armed and operational again I will be posting updates old school until that is no longer needed.

Again sorry for the inconvenience.

The first review out of the blocks from Evan will be Crazy Heart, a new addition to the iTunes Store which stars Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges. Keep your eyes out for that later this morning.

Welcome aboard Evan!

So much for the Netflix advantage. Websites all over the net are reporting on the new agreement in which Netflix has entered with 20th Century Fox and Universal Studios. All though this agreement means a larger Watch Instantly movie library for Netflix, it also means that it won’t carry new release titles until 28 days after their initial release. The first big titles this affects will be Avatar from 20th Century Fox, and Universal’s It’s Complicated. Both of these titles are currently available for pre-order in the iTunes Store and are scheduled to be released the day of the DVD release.

So if you don’t want to wait 28 days to watch these and other movies, sign up for a free Cinemira account and add them to your Will Call Stack, which will notify you the day they are available to rent.

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• You have 30 days to watch the movie after the download completes. You can start watching the movie while it is still downloading.

• Once you’ve started to watch the movie, you have 24 hours to finish watching the movie (even if you start watching before the download is complete). You can watch the movie as many times as you want within this 24-hour period.

• The rented movie will expire when either the 30 day or 24-hour limit is reached. Once the rental expires, the movie is automatically deleted. You must re-rent and download the movie to view it after your rented movie has expired.

• You can move the movie between devices as many times as you wish during the rental period, but the movie can only be played on one device at a time. If you rent the movie on your Apple TV, it is not transferable to any other device and you must watch it on your Apple TV.

• On your device, the time remaining for you to finish watching the movie appears near the movie title.

• You can only play your rented movies on the computer you rented it from and only if it is authorized to play your iTunes Store purchases and rentals.

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For more The More You Know posts head over to our section of the same name.

I guess its that time of the year when award shows and award events seem to pop up from every corner of the web. Even our little corner of the world in San Diego finally has its very own web awards called #influenceSD and Apple Movie Junkie is up for one. Specifically we’ve been nominated for the San Diego Blog of the year. I have no idea what the blog of the year in San Diego entails, but it sounds like fun. If you get a second feel free to head over to #influenceSD, click on the little arrow next to our name, and show us some junkie love.

Update – Incase anyone is still interested in what came with the update the following is from Apple’s official support page.

Apple TV Software update 3.0.2 includes fixes for Genius playlists, MobileMe gallery photos, iTunes U content, Internet Radio, and other media-related features. The update also includes performance and connectivity fixes for Apple TV.

Along with the announcement of ATVJ becoming the official blog of Cinemira we’ve revamped our Coming Soon page. The page now lists iTunes pre-order movie titles. We aren’t listing every last pre-order title available in the iTunes Store but more of the well known high profile movies. We think this new revamped pre-order page will be the ultimate companion of Cinemira’s Notification tool so that you know the moment your favorite movie becomes available for purchase or rent.

As we wind down initial testing of Cinemira and begin to plan the transition from our blog based movie updates to the automated ones coming with Cinemira, the big question for us was what to do with ATVJ. We knew we had way to much time and energy invested in this blog, not to mention you, our dedicated visitors. So we thought a natural fit for ATVJ would be as the official blog of Cinemira.

What this means is that as Cinemira takes over the majority of the daily movie related updates, we’ll use ATVJ to pass along news and updates related to Cinemira along with our smaller updates such as the weekly $.99 cent movies, top five movie rentals and top five movie sales. A new regular post we’ll be including is the listing of new pre-order movies as they become available. We think this pre-order info will become a very useful companion to what Cinemira will be offering. We don’t expect much else to change around here other then maybe a little bit more of Cinemira’s colors.

For people who are worried about the changes coming to ATVJ and are still not familiar with Cinemira we encourage you to visit www.cinemira.com. We are confident you’ll find that everything you ever wanted in a Apple TV & iTunes movie discovery tool is coming very soon.

We know we’ve been a little slow with official Cinemira news lately but let me assure everyone that we are hard at work on tightening up every last bit of Cinemira DNA and are eager to debut a Beta version soon. In the mean time we’ve made a transition here at ATVJ. We’ve replaced our old manual process for gathering new HD movies for our daily list with the brains of Cinemira. What this means for all ATVJ visitors is a much more accurate list of new HD movies added to iTunes everyday, or at least until Cinemira comes online. We might even be able to tell you what movies have been removed as well. Stay tuned!

For those of you interested in seeing Cinemira in action, head on over to the Cinemira Posterous blog to watch an overview we created of Cinemira’s main features. We plan on creating even more in depth videos as production on Cinemira progresses.

Cinemira’s Posterous

Update - The video is now available at http://www.cinemira.com

BuzzSugar is kicking off their annual Golden Globes ballot contest! If you pick the most correct winners in their 25 categories, you could win a 160 GB Apple TV and $300 from iTunes to fill it up with your favorite Globe-winning TV shows and movies!

To enter just head over to their contest page and start filling out your ballot. You’ll have until noon PST on Jan. 17 to join the fun. You must be a registered member of the PopSugar Network to play, so if you’re not registered, click here to sign up. For the official rules, click here.

Good Luck!

Lets face it, the movie studios have a stake in what gets promoted on the main landing page of the iTunes Movie Store or on the Apple TV. They’re going to push what they think you should be buying or renting. Don’t get me started on the fact that at least half of the movies that are visibly promoted are only available for purchase and not for rent. Add to this the “viewing window of availability” for new titles, allowing the movie studios to remove movies all together, which can make finding a movie you want to rent or purchase that much more challenging.

Apple TV Junkie has set out to overcome these issues by seeking out and discovering newly available iTunes and Apple TV HD movies, finding hidden iTunes movie gems, and digging up the movies which had once disappeared. The idea for us was to find and push as much of this hidden movie content out of iTunes and onto the web as frequently as possible. It’s obvious that Apple is looking to move the iTunes Music Store experience to “the cloud“, we want to do the same for the iTunes Movie Store. We want to bring the entire iTunes Movie catalog out from behind iTunes and onto the web. The challenge for us at ATVJ is doing all this within a “blog” structure. The flexibility to do all that we want is just not there. This is all about to change.

Finish over at http://cinemira.posterous.com… or continue reading.

For the better part of the last year, our small but dedicated, hard working, and bootstrapy team has been working on a more robust solution to managing your iTunes movie catalog and discovering new content, this solution is called Cinemira. Cinemira is being built from the ground up to not only be the successor to Apple TV Junkie, but to be the ultimate management and discovery tool for all iTunes movie watchers. Cinemira is being built using the open source framework Cappuccino, which will give it a desktop application like experience in your browser.

Cinemira is not a complete replacement for iTunes the application. What Appsaurus is to the iPhone App Store, Cinemira is to the iTunes Movie Store. You still need iTunes to rent or purchase a movie. Cinemira will give you movie management tools which iTunes does not offer. Cinemira gives you the ability to search through the entire iTunes Movie catalog or focus your search to only iTunes or Apple TV HD movies, receive alerts when your favorite movie becomes available to rent, keep track of the daily HD movie additions to the iTunes catalog, and keep track of your personal iTunes movie collection. All this from your favorite browser and operating system. It’s no longer necessary to fire up iTunes in order to manage your iTunes movie collection, all you need is a browser and access to the internet. Most of these features iTunes currently lacks.

To start, the focus of Cinemira will be on the management and discovery of iTunes movie rentals. All though you can search and find any movie in the iTunes movie catalog with Cinemira, finding a rental version of a particular movie is always most difficult. The Cinemira team is looking to the end of January for an Alpha launch. Most importantly, Cinemira will be completely free for all, but only through your support and use of Cinemira will we be able to continue its development. Head on over to http://www.cinemira.com to learn more. We’ll be adding more information to the site and this blog as the launch moves closer. If you have any questions regarding Cinemira or its development please feel free to email us at admin at cinemira dot com. Thank you.

As reported by Reuters, looks like Apple is on the verge of signing a deal with CBS and Disney. Before you know it, we might be saying goodbye to the nice folks at the cable companies!

The planned subscription service by Apple may offer television shows from major networks for a monthly fee, which could significantly alter the television business, the paper said, citing people familiar with the matter.

(Reporting by Sakthi Prasad in Bangalore; Editing by Dan Lalor)

Today Boxee unveils their much anticipated beta (link) and for those that can’t be there in person we have a short video demonstration of it’s new look and feel.