We have been playing with our newly update Apple TV for about a week now. It’s really neat! I liked it before, but you had to buy movies in iTunes to play via Apple TV on your TV (or in our case, our big ass big screen HD TV). With the update released a couple of weeks ago, Apple introduced movie rentals, and it has made all the difference!
We are trying to be a little less crazy with the buying of the DVDs (I mean, seriously, does anybody really need the entire American Pie series in their personal collection?), so as an experiment, we signed up for a Netflix account. I set up our queue, and we promptly received the DVDs I selected. Now I should say that we have a Blu-ray player, and really, really like Blu-ray HD quality. Turns out on Netflix they don’t have many Blu-ray rentals. Strike one against Netflix. Of the five movies we have so far rented, three of the DVDs had scratches bad enough to cause some jumps in the playback. Strike two.
Now for the Apple TV experience: I logged in to my Apple account on iTunes and rented August Rush on my computer (figuring that the rentals worked like purchases and I could stream the rental to the Apple TV). Uh, no go. Turns out that you rent the movis on the Apple TV (or on the computer, if that’s where you want to watch it). I can’t call this a strike against Apple – if I had read ANY of the instructions I would have known this. Once that was worked out and we rented the movie on the Apple TV (we went for the $4.99 HD version), we actually watched it and WOW! The quality was absolutely amazing, and there were no blips, burps or other anomalies. the movie started playing less than a minute after we rented it.
So there you have it: our experience comparing Netflix to Apple TV. We have decided to switch Netflix to the smallest amount, $4.99/month, which allows us to rent up to two movies per month, and use Apple TV for other rentals. We’d give up Netflix altogether but the iTunes movie selection is not complete by a long shot, and certainly can’t compare to Netflix in variety. But at least we don’t have to buy the entire Karate Kid series on DVD! Oh wait, we already did…