“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.]
Goes to show that apple really user tested the software.
Not done enough by many other houses these days… cough, cough Adobe… ahem..CS3 cough. It is the attention to the little frustrations that can be caused during real life use by software and addressing them that really makes GOOD software experience. 95% good is fine, but the 5% undocumented “features”, odd behavior, ond/or just plane user interface unfriendliness make up the bulk of the user remembrance of the software.
@Ampar – like my High School shop teacher used to say when one of us completely missed the obvious.
“you can lead a horse to water…. but you can’t make him think above third grade comprehension level.”
ok, so say you started watching a movie, your half through, then you pause it and shut the system down, and dont use it for a week, or even a month (theoretically it should play again after this if you dont select another movie) and you kinda forgot what the movie was about… so my question is, (has anyone tried this…) can you rewind to the beginning and watch it again from a few seconds into the movie?
Yeah, Netflix is waaay better than Apple. If I want to watch a movie right this minute, I simply go to the Netflix site, put a movie in my queue, wait a few days for it to come, and voila! instant movie. Driving 5 minutes to Blockbuster, or downloading immediately from iTunes is so like, medieval on your ass.
I went and saw Cloverfield the other day with my son, I wish I would have had a expire button in the middle of that thing. I was one of the suckers that got motion sick watching it.
“you can lead a horse to water…. but you can’t make him think . . .”
I thought it was “you can lead a whore to Vassar but you can’t make her think.”
And I rented Transformers from the iTS. I’m glad I didn’t pay the movie theater price. There were some very cool special effects but it had the dumbest dialogue and unbelievably bad acting.
And I rented Transformers from the iTS. I’m glad I didn’t pay the movie theater price. There were some very cool special effects but it had the dumbest dialogue and unbelievably bad acting.
plus loose ends all over the place, made zero sense….BUT…. I assume it was for kids. (nice of them to throw in the “happy time” crap)
> I wish they would make it 48hrs though, and announce this in sort of press release.
I’m sure Apple will do so as soon as it can renegotiate its contract with the studios. Apple’s stated goal for the iTunes Store is to sell more Macs and iPods. Apple is motivated to make content as accessible and inexpensive as possible. But Apple is working against the content providers who want to sell it as expensively as possible. Apple has a big advantage for negotiating music terms. For movies, the studios currently have the advantage, but I’m sure that will change over time.
3.99-4.99 for 24 hours is too much.
Some of us do not wish to rent movies, especially at this price. For about 2x as much I can own it and watch it whenever I please.
No dice.
@ Pricing
3.99-4.99 for 24 hours is too much.
Some of us do not wish to rent movies, especially at this price. For about 2x as much I can own it and watch it whenever I please.
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OK, that is the HD rental price. Are you telling me you can buy a Blu-ray movie for $10?
Just checked Amazon’s top 10 Blu-ray movies. Seven of those were $20 or more. Please show me $10 HD movies for sale.
The other 3 were sets and were more money.
As always it seems Apple is working with restrictions placed on it by the studios themselves. I’m sure if it was up to them they would not impose a 24-hour limit.
Until the studios treat honest people as just that, people that want to pay for the product and watch it within a more relaxed amount of time, there will always be these discussions of time-slots.
It’s interesting to note that the European Commission has imposed on Apple the requirement to charge an identical price for music across all of Europe (I’m in the UK). I believe this was always something Apple wanted to do but was limited by the restrictions in different regions imposed by the studios.
Same old, same old..
OK, here’s a thought. Why not allow us to rent the movies for a 24-hr viewing period? Meaning, if I watch a 2 hr film, then I’ve got 22 hrs. left to watch it again. If we only watch a movie on average one or two times, then this is the best of both worlds!
Just a thought. Would changing your computers date and time give you additional time to watch rental before time limit expires?