Only months after Australians got access to TV shows in iTunes, Apple has finally launched on demand movies in Australia !
While not massive there’s a decent library of movies available from a variety of genres.
Some movies are available to rent for AU $3.99, however all movies are available to buy for AU $12.99 for older movies, up to $24.99 for more recent titles. Still the price isn’t bad, a little more expensive than you can pick up a DVD for these days, but I’m happy to pay a premium for the convenience.
High Definition movies are available, but disappointingly Apple has decided they’re only available if you own an Apple TV. Naturally HD comes at an even greater premium of AU $5.99 which is pricey enough to consider heading to the video store for, that would be of course if your local store stocks Blu-ray movies, which many still don’t. The HD quality you’ll receive via iTunes is far below that of the same movie delivered on Blu-ray, also worth taking into account, is that there are no special features available, your renting or buying just the movie via iTunes.
iTunes Movie Rentals
The first movie rental is “Me, Myself & Irene”, it’s 1.3GB in size and on my 8Mb connection it’s expected to take around 40 minutes to download.
You can begin playing the movie while it’s only partially downloaded, simply double-click the download item. I was then presented with the following message.
That’s right, renting a movie entitles you to play it as many times as you like for a 24 hour period.
After only a few minutes (less than 5minutes) I received the following message – “The rental period for “Me, Myself & Irene” ends in 23 hours.” I hope this was some strange anomaly, rather than a problem with the service.
Update
Ok now I’m really confused, after reading the ‘Learn more about rentals’ page in iTunes, it says I should have 48 hours to watch the movie (after I started playing), not the 24, or 23 hours I actually now have. This is clearly confusing.
Quality
As expected it’s around DVD quality, which looks fine when viewed at 100%, however without the upscaling available through a current DVD player, at full screen (even 24” monitor) defects are clearly visible.
If you want to check it out now, head to the iTunes Store.
