iTunes Movie rentals now available

This was a good idea but fails cause you can only watch a movie for 24 hours. You have to pay just as much if not more than a store rental. Also not all of the rental movies are available for purchase.

Well here we are almost 2 weeks after the launch of Rentals and in spite of what is said online you cannot rent a movie and then sync it to your Apple TV. This is in spite of numerous bits of documentation on the apple site that tells you how. After I wasted 2 hours trying to figure it out I called Tech Support and the guy who answered said he was deal with this issue ALL DAY! He said a "patch" is coming, although he didn't say when or to what piece of software. Since I had rented the movie strictly to watch in my home theater environment I asked him how I could get a refund. He pointed me at the webpage that allows you to report problems with itunes store purchases. I dutifully entered all the requested info and the most pathetic part of this whole issue is that some itunes support person handling the report proceeded to tell me that she was sorry that I was misinformed and that indeed I could transfer the rented movie to ATV. She then proceeded to detail how it was done which was a rehash of exactly what had been published in the Apple site - unfortunately it does not work! Apple should be ashamed that they rolled this service out well before it was ready, then published incorrect (misleading & false) info on their site and then have misinformed their support people. I was an early adopter of ATV and had long since given up on it. When the movie rental thing got announced I thought that perhaps ATV could finally be worth something but I guess I will need to wait a bit longer to see. In the meantime DO NOT try to rent a movie and sync it to ATV until the mysterious "patch" gets released.

How long do you get the movies for?

iTunes is still pretty disorganized in terms of accessing rentals.

Here's a current list of titles, sorted by IMDb rating, highest to lowest:
http://teenpartying.blogspot.com/2008/01/itunes-video-rentals-by-imdb-rating.html

Did you catch in the keynote that movies won't be available until 30 days after their DVD release? That seems like a long time to me. If all these studios are on board, why can't they be available on iTunes the same day there are available in Blockbuster and other rental stores?

Face it, "Europe" means UK, France and Germany as far as Apple is concerned. Those of us living in other European countries will just have to continue with the torrents. I don't even want to TALK about an iPhone for the rest of us....

Renting "De-Lovely" now. I wish there was a queue feature--right now I'm clicking Buy Movie when browsing or searching and using my Shopping Cart as a way to remember films I might want to come back to.

Also, in both List view and "Graphic" view, you can't really tell if a movie is rentable or not. It just says "Add Movie" or "View Movie".

You can view fullscreen trailers in Browse view. Something you can't seem to do when on the movie's individual page.

Funny how I'm more willing to rent stuff I'm not so hot to watch.

Doh! I have an early flight out to MacWorld today and I tried to rent a movie while getting ready to leave for the airport. Figured I could watch it on the plane.

The movie got about half-way downloaded, and I had to head to the airport and figured I could download the rest while I was waiting for my flight. Well, guess what. The downloads don't resume. I'd have to start completely over if they are interrupted.

Like I said, doh! I guess I'll watch this free episode of the Terminator TV show.

For anyone who hasn't noticed yet, there are more rentals visible if you browse than if you only use the flashy graphical view.

Rentals are listed with no price, with a button saying VIEW MOVIE instead of the usual ADD MOVIE.

Clicking the button takes you to the movie's page, where there's a rent button and often also a buy button.

I rented Terry Gilliam's Brother's Grimm via the browser view. Haven't watched it yet.

"Rentals" seems like a backasswards way to serve up movies online. I'm disappointed that apple isn't offering a subscription for this service - even if that subscription was netflix like in that you could only have access to a certain number of movies for a certain amount of time. The per movie fee plus time restrictions is lame. I'll keep netflix for now, thanks.