My recent experience with 99p rentals from iTunes has not been entirely successful. As you may know every week iTunes puts up, a usually decent, film for rental for 99p.
My first problem was with renting the re-made Ladykillers starring Tom Hanks.
Anyone who has rented a movie from iTunes knows that you can transfer the rental from the computer to your iPad (or iPhone). So knowing that I was going away I transferred the rental from my iMac to my iPad. However I never did find the time to watch it…
After a couple of days I decided to watch it at home. One of the things I like about the new Apple TV is that it is possible to watch rentals that are on your Mac without needing to transfer them. This means you can rent non-HD films on your Mac and then view them on your TV using the Apple TV. If you rent from the Apple TV, you “have” to rent HD movies and they are £1 more than the SD ones on your computer. Did I say I was a cheapskate? So having decided to stream the film via the Apple TV, I couldn’t find it… ah yes I thought it will still be on my iPad. Ah but it wasn’t… no I couldn’t find it anywhere!
After reflecting a while I realised I had in the intervening period restored my iPad after having a few problems with it and as a result I had “lost” the rental. Of course there is no way to retrieve a rental (you can’t even retrieve a video purchase let a,one a rental).
So in the end what we did was re-rent it, luckily it was still 99p.
As for the film itself, well it was amusing and Tom Hanks was very good. However the original Ealing version
I had another problem with rentals the other day, this time it was more my fault. I had rented another 99p rental, Donnie Darko, a film that I have been meaning to watch for a while. I started to watch the film and before even the studio ident had finished I got called away. So I never got to watch the film that evening. I was out the following night, so alas with only a 48 hour window in which to watch it, I missed the window and iTunes removed it from my computer. A 48 hour window is usually enough for me, but this time I didn’t have the time, and it’s probably why I don’t rent many films from iTunes. It’s the same reason I stopped renting from Blockbusters too, however I still do rent from the Library, where I got the Adjustment Bureau today. Not only was it cheaper than iTunes at £3, whereas iTunes is £3.49, I can also have it for a week!