When the Steve announced the iTunes Movie Rentals service at MacWorld, he promised that it would offer at least 1,000 movie rentals by the end of February… and, within those 1,000 rentals, at least 100 of them would be HD rentals. Well, February has come and gone, and those goals were not met.
Using the Apple TV to count HD rentals, MacWorld’s Christopher Breen found a total of 91 HD titles (100 was the target). Another disappointing fact is that not all of these 91 HD titles feature Dolby Digital 5.1… a feature Apple had also promised.
For the total number of rentals available, things get worse. The Apple TV movies section reported a total of 351 movies for rent according to Christopher. 378 were available in the ‘all movies’ section, and only 399 when using ‘power search’. Looks like they have a very long way to go to meet the targets they set out and promised back in January at MacWorld!
One can only suspect that the studios are to blame for the delays on new titles and releases. Licensing issues with the studios could be a problem, and I would not be surprised if one or more studios are delaying the process. No matter which way you slice it, Apple might have mis-judged how compliant and easy it would be to work with the studios on this one. Once all the ‘kinks’ are worked out I’m sure we’ll see the number of movie rentals skyrocket.. but until then… Apple is left with an over promised, and under delivered iTunes Movie Rental Store.
[via arstechnica]
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