The Chronic Consumer

Although I’ve been using iPods for about 5 years now, I have only used the iTunes store on a few occasions. I’m not much of a music fan, so I’m content with filling my iPod with audiobooks borrowed from my public library. I do have some music on my iPod, but all of those songs are either from CDs I already had or from discs I borrowed from friends. To date, I’ve purchased exactly one song from iTunes.

But since I recently received a $25 iTunes gift card, I decided to spend a bit more time browsing around the store. There isn’t really any music I want right now, so I looked at movie rentals instead. Paying $2.99 for the right to watch a film in 24hrs before having it magically disappear from my computer seemed a bit steep, but I did want to give the service a try. I ended up renting Brian’s Song, a film that I’ve been meaning to see for years now.

The download was pretty quick (I think about 10 minutes for a 700+MB file). Once the file was in iTunes, I had a couple of different viewing choices. I could transfer it to my video iPod and watch it on that; I could watch it on my computer; or I could watch it via Apple TV. I don’t have Apple TV and didn’t feel like hunkering down over my Nano for an hour and a half, so I tried watching it on my computer.

Tried being the operative word there.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the damn movie to play! I thought if I clicked on the file, it would automatically open in QuickTime or something, but nothing happened. I tried searching the iTunes store for a Help section regarding watching movies, but that turned up nothing. I couldn’t even find any helpful tips by running a general Google search. I eventually got the audio to start playing, but never did get a picture to come up.

So I had to transfer the file to my iPod and watch it on that. This method worked perfectly; however, as I said before, that wasn’t really the way I wanted to watch an entire movie.

Twenty-four hours after I first pressed “Play” on the movie file, it expired from my iPod and vanished without a trace. (BTW, you have 30 days to start watching the movie after you download it, otherwise it’s gone.)

Overall, I wasn’t too impressed by the movie rental aspect of iTunes. Perhaps I’m missing an obvious point here, but not being able to view the rented flick on my PC was a major hassle. I doubt I’ll ever rent another movie from this source again.