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The other night my girlfriend and I decided to watch a movie and inline with the spirit of holidays (and the cold weather in Toronto) we decided to give iTunes a try instead of going downstairs to rent a DVD from Rogers (there’s a Rogers Video literally down the stairs).  Here is what’s broken about the whole process from a user’s point of view:

• Price-wise, I have no incentive to go to iTunes even though price is not really an issue for me as a non-frequent movie watcher.
• Download time: maybe it’s my connection (it isn’t because I’ve done better before!) but the movie took 4 hours to download which was a downer because we ended up having to watch it the next night.  That basically ruined the experience.  Apple should really look into better streaming options (local servers or peer-to-peer come to mind).
  • What’s more is that due to bandwidth caps from my ISP, I would think twice before renting a 1.25GB movie which self-destructs in 24-48 hours!
• iTunes cycles through a few pages to “re-establish” my payment info.  Interestingly enough, the pages were pre-filled with my info anyway.  So I’m not sure what the purpose of this exercise was.
• Search and Browsing through titles was not pleasant because of iTune’s slow interface on my PC. (My MacbookPro is as slow, so it’s the networking within iTunes)
• This is more general about watching movies on computers and no specific to just iTunes.  Until everyone has a media centre computer, a Web/Apple/GoogleTV, or some sort of web-smartbox, you cannot complete with the convenient of a DVD player. Here is what I mean
  • Connecting my laptop to TV through HDMI is a pain.
  • No remote control for pausing and fast-forwarding/rewinding. I have to get off the couch, play with the mouse until I see the pointer, move to FF/RWD button, then move mouse (visible on TV screen not the laptop) to Play button and click again.
• Worst of all for iTunes/Netflix, great for Rogers Video/Blockbuster/etc is that putting together the full connection to the TV (HDMI, iTunes, Downloads page, Search, switch to full screen, etc etc etc) is totally non-geek-hostile!  No normal person would want to go through this pain at this point.

All in all, I believe that the process is still not fully baked.  But once TVs become smarter I can see a lot of the issues addressed.  At that point I’ll revisit the trade-off of not leaving the convenience of our living room versus the time and planning effort required to download the rental movie.  For now, I’ll stick to DVDs.