Starting today (press release), Apple Canada is making movie (and some TV show) downloads available to Canadians through the Canadian iTunes store. Apple says 1200 titles are available at launch, including 200 ‘high-def’ titles.
Despite Canadian dollar parity, as usual Canadians will pay more per rental ($4.99 for new releases, $3.99 for older titles) than our American friends who pay $3.99 and $2.99 respectively. In both countries ‘high-def’* versions cost $1.00 more when available.
Canadians will have 48 hours to view iTunes movies after pressing play. This is surprising because Americans have only 24 hours to finish watching iTunes movies. I expect the U.S. service to follow suit shortly. As in America, Canadians have 30 days after downloading to start watching their rented movie before it is deleted.
I took a quick look at the iTunes Canada movie offerings. There seems to be a good selection of new and older movies. Unlike in the U.S., there are no current prime-time T.V. shows available for download through the service. The available TV shows are either shows you never heard of or older TV shows. I expect that to change over time too. Participating studios include Disney, Paramount , Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, Universal, MGM, Sony, Lionsgate and Maple Pictures.
Below I discuss your iTunes movie play-back options and compare the iTunes movie service to Bell’s recently announced video download store, the Xbox 360 movie download service, the Amazon Unbox-to-TiVo video download service and the pending PS3 movie download service.
