14 DAY TRIAL // Together with today's announcement of the MacBook Air shipment, Apple has also unveiled the mystery surrounding one of the most awaited upgrades by the customers: the AppleTV free software upgrade that will allow every current owner of such a device to rent movies from the major Hollywood studios the Cupertino-based company has signed deals with.
What exactly will you be able to do with your AppleTV after the upgrade will be installed? As written on the AppleTV presentation page: "Want to rent a movie? Just grab the remote. With Apple TV, you don't need a computer to rent digital movies - you rent them directly from your TV. The completely redesigned Apple TV interface makes it easy to browse, rent, and watch movies from every major Hollywood studio. Best of all, you get instant movie gratification. Without losing your spot on the sofa."
Mainly, you will be able to browse the rentals available in the Top Movies, All HD and Genres categories and even to search for a certain movie that you want to watch at a certain moment. After clicking on the title of your choice, you will be offered a plot summary together with the crew and cast list, so you can decide if you want to rent it and watch it from the comfort of your own home sofa.
You will also be offered access to .Mac Web Galleries, an Apple music store, and full-screen access to Flickr web pages - if movies aren't the thing that tickles your soft spot, maybe music or photos will.
To be able to watch a movie using the AppleTV rental service, you will have to pay $3.99 for the new releases, $2.99 for the library ones and, with $1 more, you'll get the HD version, all pimped out with Dolby Digital surround sound. After renting it, you will have 30 days to start watching it and 24 hours later it will expire.
Therefore, be sure it won't take you more than 24 hours to see one of your rentals because it will also vanish from the Rented Movies AppleTV menu. Of course, there will also be some of you (us) that will also see the movie more than one time.
Also, the ones of you that still don't have an AppleTV device near their widescreen TV should know that it comes in 40GB and 160GB models, costing you $229 and $329 respectively. The two versions will allow you to store 50 to 200 hours of video, 9000 to 36000 songs and up to 25000 pictures, all of them for your widescreen viewing pleasure.
As Apple declared, the future upgrade will be delivered to all the AppleTV units as an automatic update or - as an alternate option - it can also be installed using the Update Software Settings menu.