[Macworld]

Post your comments for Apple adds movie purchasing to Apple TV here

[flybynight]

Can I assume that you can only rent HD movies, not purchase? So, still no (supported) way to get HD movies off of the AppleTV?

[Jon Seff]

Correct...HD movies are still not available for purchase.

[leicaman]

And can we burn them to DVD. At least as an archive to put back into iTunes?

[Jon Seff]

Once you finish downloading a purchased movie and it transfers over to your computer, you can back it up just as you would any other content in iTunes. You can't burn a video DVD out of it, however.

[garyi]

Yea but what about the frigging UK! America is not the only country on earth. If apple always intend to polax everyone else then the appleTV should be half the price to them, not more expensive than US.
FFS.

[DisabledTrucker]

I'm still waiting to get HD movies on my iMac without the need for the aTV!!!

[Gee4orce]

...and I'm still waiting to get movie rentals in the UK, 4 months on from Macworld...

[flowney]

Being able to back the media up is a consolation both as a disk space conservation and a investment safeguard. However, I'd like to hear more about this. For example, are there any restrictions on where I can play this media or how I might re-purpose it? In short, is there any DRM involved? Given the response that you cannot subsequently burn the movie to a DVD, I'm assuming that there is.

[TheBum]

Did Apple ever increase the resolution of widescreen movies beyond 640 pixels wide? If not, I'll just keep buying DVDs.

[haylo]

Again... what about the UK? No movie rentals, no movie anything... I understand that agreements need to be put in place etc... and they don't want to upset the movie release schedule but surely they could come to some agreement about back catalogue stuff? Meanwhile, this makes the Apple TV more of an audio server than complete media device...
just do the deals....

[cbh]

Same in Canada, unless you count the miniscule, lousy listings of half baked programs currently offered.

[Jon Seff]

flowney said:

Being able to back the media up is a consolation both as a disk space conservation and a investment safeguard. However, I'd like to hear more about this. For example, are there any restrictions on where I can play this media or how I might re-purpose it? In short, is there any DRM involved? Given the response that you cannot subsequently burn the movie to a DVD, I'm assuming that there is.

Nothing has changed in that regard. Movies, TV shows, and all music that isn't iTunes Plus has DRM attached to it and can played on up to 5 computers and any numbers of iPods, iPhones, and Apple TVs. The difference is you can burn DRMed iTunes music to an audio CD (which also strips out the DRM), but you can't burn purchased video files to a format playable in a DVD player.

[elCapiton]

If you're not in the USA just go buy a US iTunes gift card and use that. It works just fine.