So yesterday Apple started renting movies through the iTunes Store and I could be happier.  Apple will allow you 30 days to start watching the movie and then after you have started the movie you have 24 hours to finish it.  After the rental period is over the movie is automatically deleted from your computer.  It is limited to just movies at this point.

I don’t understand why you would have a 24 hour limit to finish watching the movies but 30 days to start it.  Why can’t they give you 30 days to watch the movie, period.  You should be able to do what every you want to with the file while you are renting it (good luck ).  If you want to watch it again why should I have to pay for and download the file again?  I think this is thing I don’t like the most because when I rent a movie from Netflix I can watch it as many times as I want (in theory).

I love how convenient this is because I can just download the movie I want to watch when I want to watch it.  Then I don’t have to wait for Netflix to send out the movie or actually drive down to the store and get it.  Another thing is how many times have you rented three or four movies at the store just to have watch just one and have the others sit on your coffee table accruing overdue fees.  Downloading the movies doesn’t have this problem because you download them as you want to watch them.

Finally, I really wish they would start doing TV rentals.  I only watch TV shows once and then they just sit there taking eating up hard drive space.  I don’t want to delete them because I spent two dollars on them and so I eventually burn the files off to DVD.  If we could rent TV shows this wouldn’t be a problem anymore and with a rental they could charge us a dollar less.

I’m going to start messing around with this tonight and I will be really happy when the software update for my AppleTV comes out and I can download the files directly to the AppleTV.