“Last week my colleague, Rob Griffiths, noted that the 24-hour rental period for iTunes movies just wasn’t long enough for many parents. Get the kids to bed by 9:00, start watching the movie, fall asleep in front of the TV at 10:00 and by the time 9:00 PM rolls around again, the movie’s expired,” Christopher Breen reports for Macworld.
“However, Apple has made an accommodation for exactly this kind of situation yet, inexplicably, hasn’t bothered to mention it to anyone,” Breen reports.
Breen was doing some iPod to big screen tests and as the day wound down “paused the movie on the iPod and shut down the TV and AV gear for the night.”
The next evening Breen fired up his TV to find that “the paused image of Spiderman was still on the screen. Giving it a go, I pressed Play on the iPod and the movie picked up where it left off. Expecting the movie to vanish any minute—after all, this was nearly 12 hours after the movie was supposed to expire—I let it play for half an hour. It continued to play without complaint.”
Breen reports, “I decided to see what happened when I pressed the iPod’s Menu button. I was greeted with this nice surprise. An Expired Rental screen appeared that displayed these words: ‘This rental has expired. You can resume to finish your movie.’ Below the words were two options: Delete and Resume.”
“There was no way to legitimately back out of this screen, you have to choose one or the other option and then press Select to enter your choice. If you choose Resume, the movie continues to play,” Breen reports.
More in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Escaport” for the heads up.]
This is nice and makes a lot of sense.
Very interesting… Practical for people needing more than 24 hours to watch a feature film, and good for Apple to track viewing habits of rental customers. Brilliant!
Very interesting.
I wish they would make it 48hrs though, and announce this in sort of press release.
Very interesting. This needs to be tested by others and then when the AppleTV update is released, tested in all the various ways to see what happens.
Then a confirmation from Apple would be nice.
How long will it be before some hacker gets around the DRM on this puppy? My guess is 3 months.
“I wish they would make it 48hrs though . . .”
Yeah, but then the whiners will beg for another 48 hours and that was a terrible sequel.
And this from another thread:
Thu Jan 24 09:40:45 PST 2000
macdandr says:
“Re: Extending iTunes rental times
Finally someone wrote about this feature. I too was amazed that Apple hasn’t documented this feature. As long as you start the movie within the 24 hour period (even if you start it with one minute left) it will let you watch the entire movie. You can even start the movie over and watch it again as long as it never finishes the credits. This also works in iTunes the exact same way and I don’t have an Apple TV to test but I would assume that it works the same way too.”
As Elmer Fudd would say, “yes, vewy, vewy intewesting. . .”
Very interesting, because it is and this is the catch phrase of this string. It could even be snappier.
Yeah, but I truly fall asleep watching my TV. Whatever I’m watching on my DVR plays to the end and if I don’t use my TV’s Sleep function I’d wake up to a screen saver.
If I used an tv and a rental movie I’d end with a lot of expired stuff that my tv thought I’d really watched.
@ Tommy Boy
What you need is a Snore Alarm TV shutoff device. It needs to be USB compliant. Set it up and when it detects snoring, it pauses the movie and shuts off the TV.
Some engineer out there can do this, I’m sure.
This may be a case of Apple, once again, exceeding expectations. The consensus is that the movie studios imposed the 24 hour time limit on Apple so that Apple rentals were in line with their existing rental options from other distributors. If Apple has really extended the 24 hour availability of movies, I doubt they will advertise it since that would probably violate their contract and raise a firestorm of protest from the other vendors. But if they can wangle their way around the time limit and still CALL it a 24 hour time limit then their competitors are screwed. Again.
It will only be a matter of time until the movie companies make Apple fix this “bug”. (wink, wink, Apple)
“What you need is a Snore Alarm TV shutoff device.”
That’s like The Clapper. It senses if your date has an STD and then rings your cellphone so you have a believable excuse to end it and escape.
anaknipedro, above, predicts that hackers will get around Apple’s DRM in about 3 months. I too am pretty sure that hackers will get around the DRM, but I’m not sure it will matter that much. Since Apple rentals are all ported in via iTunes and played on Apple products, Apple has the ability to quickly tweak their DRM in order to thwart the hackers. Of course DRM free movies could be played on non-Apple products but there are already a slew of black market movies and file-sharing options available today. Is it really worth your time to break Apple’s DRM in order to provide the market with something that they already have?
Shhh… no one tell the cable companies…
At $4 ~ $5 per rental THIS IS THE LEAST THEY COULD DO! Redbox has NEW RELEASE rentals at $1/day.
I wonder if using Time Machine would work, also. Just go back to the time you rented the movie, and viola! Fresh rental. Hurry up with the software update for the AppleTV. I wanna play.
“Just go back to the time you rented the movie, and viola!”
Only if the two are in concert.
“Yeah, but then the whiners will beg for another 48 hours and that was a terrible sequel.”
Oh god. You’re one of those. Consumers asking for a feature is not whining, you dipshit. It is merely opinion.
@ Mac_Atty
This is not to compete with the power users or the bargin stops. It competes with Payperview but with a soon to be huge selection. Also regular rentals are $3 – $4.
Pause makes sense, but I also agree that a rental should be 3 days minimum.
I still think there are too many problems with the rental service. Something like Netflix is still much better. You can get the movies a day or two after they come out, you can keep them for longer, watch them whenever you want, take them to a friend’s house, etc.
Apple needs to lower the cost, make the movies come out as soon as they do on video, allow them to be kept for 30 days and watched for 30 days. That’s the only way they are going to be able to compete with something like Netflix.
@ DRM Sucks–
Do you hear that sound whooshing over your head? Don’t worry, it’s nothing harmless… Just another punch-line.
To DRM sucks:
Relax there, little buddy.
I know explaining things ruins the joke but:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_48_Hrs.
Dipshit?
Pot, let me introduce you to Mr. Kettle. He’s serving decaf too.
My son and I discovered this on my computer the other day. We were watching the Simpsons movie as the time expired. We expected the movie to disappear, but a little dialogue popped up and asked if we wanted to finish watching the movie, which we did. When we stopped the movie (during credits) it then disappeared.
This is a very nice feature for Apple to have included: you don’t suddenly have a movie you’re watching vanish right during the climactic battle scene–that would kinda suck
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