Last night I finally tried an HD rental on my Apple TV. I've been meaning to do so for a while to see if the HD rentals are worthwhile. The answer is meh.
Let's look first at the nice bits of the experience.
The Apple TV groups movies in rows, each row has 50 entries, of which about 10 are visible at a time. There are rows for the latest hits, for several categories of movie (horror, comedy, sci-fi/fantasy), recently added, and general featured stuff. Each movie is displayed as its theater poster, clicking it lets you play the trailer, and either rent or buy it in HD or SD. Some titles don't have HD versions available, some titles are only for sale, not rent.
Once you've decided what you want to see, it is a simple process to hit play on the remote, enter your password and get ready to watch.
We selected "A Night at the Museum." This is a fun Disney flick with Ben Stiller as a floundering inventor who takes a job as a museum night guardsman to retain the love of his 10 year-old son. Comedy ensues, our hero overcomes some obstacles, grows as a person, and everyone lives happily ever after. This falls under my "fluffy, fun to watch once, no need to buy a copy" category of movies.
Once we clicked the "Rent HD" button we were informed that we would have 30 days to watch it, and once we started playing it we had 24 hours to finish it. The movie appeared prominently on the main menu of the Apple TV and told us it would be ready to view in 10 minutes. We found this to be an ideal amount of time to make some popcorn, get a tasty beverage, arrange the pillows on the couch, set the lights and generally get ready for the movie.
We were watching it on a Sony 60" SXRD. The Apple TV is connected via HDMI and set to display in 1080i (even though it can only do 720p material), which the TV upscales to 1080p. I don't own a receiver, so we were using the built-in speakers from the TV. I'll refrain from commenting on the audio.
The video file being played is 720p resolution, at a reasonable bit rate making it an improvement over regular DVD resolution. Even upscaled, DVD movies are not as crisp as 720p HD video.
The video quality is good to very good. It wasn't quite the "every pore and wrinkle" that 1080i newscasts showcase, nor razor sharp rendering of every whisker, but the picture has good color depth and detail, and is free of MPEG artifacts. At no point during the movie did I cringe from the video quality.
On the flip side, it isn't the highest quality picture available. While the Apple TV's 720p is legitimately "high definition", it is the low-end of HD. Blu-Ray owns the "best picture" title hands down with its high bit rate video stored on 25GB disks. This is no surprise. Downloading that much data to watch a single movie is only feasible over high-end broadband connections, ruining the experience for most consumers. A 720p picture provides a good compromise between download times and picture quality.
The catalog of movies available from the iTunes store is far from all encompassing. Obnoxiously, several titles are only available for purchase, not for rent. Searching through the catalog is no worse than endlessly walking the aisles of the video store, but I'd like to think Apple could come up with a better way to find what we want to watch.
But the real meh is the price. At $3.99 per HD rental, ($4.99 for latest releases), iTunes rentals are fine if you do less than three movies a month. At the three movie point, an $8.99 per month Netflix subscription becomes a better value.
The PS3 (sitting next to the Apple TV) can play Netflix streamed over the internet, so there is no hardware investment required. Netflix's catalog of HD movies available for streaming is far smaller than that of the iTunes store, but that's something that Netflix will undoubtedly fix over time, and Netflix includes a number of TV shows in their streaming catalog that are only available for purchase from iTunes.
To be fair, I do need to try Netflix streaming to see if it has a similarly clean experience. Reports on the net that rate Netflix's "HD" content as subpar to DVD leave me wondering.
My conclusion of this experiment: The experience is solid but not amazing, all the technicals are in place, but the price makes it hard to justify over the competition for anything more than occasional use.