Renting Movies is less than ideal
1st let me say, I love the Apple Tv. But as I discovered over the weekend holiday, renting movies through the Apple service is, well, terrible. This post is meant to be constructive critisism - I love all the features of it, except the rental process - here's why...
I expected the service to work like Netflix - streaming, able to watch right away.
Not so - we had guests over, and didn't feel like running to RedBox, so we rented a $4.99 movie through the Apple TV. I have a 10Mbit cable connection, so it's not a connection problem, but the movie said "loading...." and then eventually said, "ready to watch in 3 hour, 45 minutes"....eventually it went up to 7 hours...we were eventually able to watch about 2 minutes of it, and then it paused, seemingly because it had to download more.
Needless to say, we couldn't watch the movie that night...so I let it "download" overnight. We were expecting more guests the next night, so we waited to watch it until the early evening.
When we were ready, we starting watching - about 1 hour into the movie, my kids interrupted us, and we had to pause the movie. Mistakenly, I hit the MENU button instead of pause (on my iPhone remote app)....this mistake appararently empties out the cache, because we had to redownload the entire movie....which I might add, we were not able to do, because when we tried to do it, it was past the 24 hour period.
Most frustrating. Someone on another post said the AppleTV doesn't "store" anything - but I disagree - since it would not allow us to start the movie until the entire thing was downloaded. If it truly doesn't store anything, it should, or, at a minimum, "warn" the user if they hit the menu button that they will lose everything if they proceed.
Thanks for listening.
I expected the service to work like Netflix - streaming, able to watch right away.
Not so - we had guests over, and didn't feel like running to RedBox, so we rented a $4.99 movie through the Apple TV. I have a 10Mbit cable connection, so it's not a connection problem, but the movie said "loading...." and then eventually said, "ready to watch in 3 hour, 45 minutes"....eventually it went up to 7 hours...we were eventually able to watch about 2 minutes of it, and then it paused, seemingly because it had to download more.
Needless to say, we couldn't watch the movie that night...so I let it "download" overnight. We were expecting more guests the next night, so we waited to watch it until the early evening.
When we were ready, we starting watching - about 1 hour into the movie, my kids interrupted us, and we had to pause the movie. Mistakenly, I hit the MENU button instead of pause (on my iPhone remote app)....this mistake appararently empties out the cache, because we had to redownload the entire movie....which I might add, we were not able to do, because when we tried to do it, it was past the 24 hour period.
Most frustrating. Someone on another post said the AppleTV doesn't "store" anything - but I disagree - since it would not allow us to start the movie until the entire thing was downloaded. If it truly doesn't store anything, it should, or, at a minimum, "warn" the user if they hit the menu button that they will lose everything if they proceed.
Thanks for listening.
iPhone 4, Windows Vista
