Macworld 2008 – AppleTV 2 and iTunes Movie Rentals UK Prices and Specs

Apple TV 2Oddly for a Steve Jobs keynote, he started the Apple TV/iTunes Movie Rentals section on a negative point.   Movies and the Apple TV aren’t performing as well as they hoped, apparently.   I’m not quite sure what they were hoping for, seeing as iTunes has more sales than the rest of the competition put together, but there you go.   By admitting the two products haven’t met expectations, he was implying that they knew what went wrong, and more importantly, how to put it right.

Movie Rentals

Steve Jobs assured the audience at Macworld that Movie rentals will be going international in the near future.   Fortunately, Apple appear to see the UK as quite an important market, so hopefully they won’t be too far away.   In fact, by even mentioning the international market, Apple are as good as announcing a deal has already been struck.

Obviously no pricing has been announced yet but imagine anything between £2 and £4 depending on the quality of the movie.

Apple TV 2

For many, the original Apple TV just wasn’t a consideration.   It didn’t really provide anything that you couldn’t get cheaper elsewhere.   So this new one adds a few bells and whistles.   You’ve now got flickr support (to go with YouTube) and direct access to the iTunes store.   Oddly for Apple, these new features will be provided as a free upgrade to existing users.   Notable by it’s absence is any sort of PVR functionality.

The Apple TV (2) is available now for   £199 (40GB) and £269 (160GB).