Hands-on with iTunes Movie Rentals

Dim the lights and silence your cell phones: movie rentals on iTunes have finally arrived, although only a handful of rentable titles have gone live since yesterday's Macworld keynote. I've already rented a few movies, and so far, I like what I see; that said, rental prices ain't cheap, and viewing restrictions abound.

One of the cooler demos during Jobs' Macworld keynote on Tuesday was watching him browse for and rent movies on the newly revamped Apple TV interface; unfortunately, the necessary Apple TV software update won't be available for a couple of weeks, so I could only test drive movie rentals in iTunes and on my iPhone.

Also, it looks like Apple is still busy stocking up its rental library; as of Wednesday morning, the selection of movies still looked limited to a few hundred titles, and many of them are for purchase only. Some high-profile movies are available for rent now, however, including "300," "Live Free or Die Hard," and "Blades of Glory," along with older, catalog titles like "Moulin Rouge and "Desperado". Since iTunes movie rentals were announced only yesterday, I'm willing to give Apple a pass for now, but I'll be looking for the number of rental movies to grow dramatically in the coming weeks (and for the number of purchase-only movies to dwindle to a bare minimum). Also, keep in mind that no HD movies are listed on iTunes; you'll only be able to rent them on Apple TV. Why, you ask? Good question.

Anyway, once you find a movie to rent in iTunes ($3.99 for new releases, $2.99 for older movies—not cheap, but par for the online rental course), you just click the "Rent Movie" button; your video will begin downloading immediately, and you should see your movie in the left-hand column of iTunes under "Rented Movies" (natch). Want to start watching right away? Just click the title—you should be able to watch within 30 seconds of clicking "Rent" (depending on the speed of your broadband connection).

Of course, if you do go ahead and click the "Play" button, the clock will start ticking on your 24-hour viewing window. In the "Rented Movies" section in iTunes, you'll see a how much time you have left on the right side of the screen. Also, remember that unwatched movies will expire in 30 days—an annoying restriction, but pretty standard when it comes to online movie rentals. (One way to get around this limitation, of course, is to turn back your system clock; see TUAW for more details.)

As promised, you can transfer rentals in iTunes to your iPhone or iPod, but there's a catch: your rentals can only be on one device at any given time. That means when you move a rental to your iPhone, it's erased from your iTunes library, file and all. You can transfer rental movies back to iTunes from an iPhone/iPod, but then the movie disappear from your portable device. Again, an annoying restriction (and probably mandated by the movie studios). Also, remember that the rental clock is still ticking when you move a movie over to your iPod; in my iPhone, I noticed a tell-tale "Expires in 23 hours" tag on the "Live Free or Die Hard" entry in my list of videos.

OK, so much for the mechanics of renting and transferring movies; how does the video actually look? On my iPhone, "Live Free and Die Hard" looked vivid and razor-sharp—but that's on a 3.5-inch screen. On my 20-inch LCD monitor, the image looked, well…OK, but well short of DVD quality. Details looked a little soft to my eye, and static backgrounds looked blocky and indistinct. Still, iTunes movie picture quality is on par with that of the standard-def offerings on the Xbox Video Marketplace, Amazon Unbox, and Vudu. How will the HD iTunes movies look? For that, we'll have to wait for the Apple TV update.

Overall, my impression of iTunes movie rentals is: so far, so good. The rental process is easy, transfer to iPods and iPhones are relatively intuitive, and the DRM restrictions are…well, tolerable. That said, Apple needs to build up its library of movies, and fast. As I've written before, 1,000 movies by the end of February is a good start, but to compete with the likes of Amazon Unbox, Vudu, and Netflix's catalog of streaming movies, Apple will need at least 4,000 titles on-hand by, say, this summer.

So, what do you think? Willing to spend $4 a pop for new-release rentals on iTunes?