Here's my experience with the movie rental feature of my new 2nd generation Apple TV. At about 8PM on a Sunday night, very excited to try out the service, my girlfriend and I choose a movie and click to rent. It starts loading and shortly afterward shows a message that says something like "Ready to watch in 1 hour and 10 minutes". Already, we're disappointed. It's supposed to be near instant, right? But no big deal. An hour later we come back and it's ready to play. Excited, we hit play and it starts playing. Fantastic.
Unfortunately there's no sound. I figure it's a problem with the optical audio cable that I just hooked up earlier that day. I pause the movie and try to fix the audio. I test it with music and it doesn't work with music either. After trying a few things, I decide to restart the Apple TV. Test with music again and the audio is now working.
So we go back to the film menu and select the film again. I notice it says "47 hours" remaining on the rental. I guess it started counting down because we played it for 30 seconds. That's fine I suppose. So we hit play again. But instead of playing, the "loading" message pops up again, followed by "Ready to watch in 2 hours and blah blah minutes". Now very dissappointed. We leave this screen on and watch its progress. More than an hour later, the film is again ready to watch. The time remaining on the rental says 45 hours. This means the rental time limit is counting down even though the movie is not playable for most of that time. Most people would call that a rip off. And unfortunately it's now approaching 11:30PM, which is too late for us to watch the movie because we work early the next day. So we watch about 10 minutes of the movie just to make sure it works, which it does, and then, dissappointed, girlfriend goes home.
Oh well, I figure I'll try watching the movie again the following night, alone.
Get home from work the following night, turn on Apple TV, select the movie, and press play. You can guess what happens. First a loading message, followed by a message that says it won't be ready to watch for more than an hour. Meanwhile the rental time limit is still counting down and there is only 20 something hours remaining on the rental. At this point, due to work and my schedule the next night, I simply won't be able to watch it before it expires.
On the same internet connection, I can completely download popular HD films on bittorrent in just a few minutes, so the problem is not my internet connection. To say I'm dissappointed in the service is an understatement. The downloading delay makes the Apple TV rental service completely useless. Beyond useless in fact, since it sets up false expectations and results in a lot of time wasted. If Apple fixes it, great. Until then, the movie rental service is useless.
