I had to spend a few hours on a plane last night. I figured I’d try Apple’s movie rental process and catch a flick on my iPhone. Yes, Handbrake remains a popular option but I wanted to test Apple’s offering.

I’m a huge Cameron Crowe fan. Almost Famous is probably my favorite movie of all time (Experience it. Enjoy it. Just don’t fall for it). For some reason Singles isn’t in my video collection, so I figured it would be a good one to test.

Buying from iTunes is, of course, easy. The rental “purchase” was as smooth as anything else in iTunes.

The transfer of the file from iTunes to the iPhone was just a simple. You have to be connected to the Internet for that kind of transfer (makes sense from a DRM standpoint I’m sure) but other than that, it is just a few clicks.

From there the rental appears in the iPhone video area under a “Rented Movies” banner. Nice.

When you click to view it the first time, it warns you that you only have 24 hours to consume and lets you cancel out if timing isn’t right for you. I’ve never seen this in a rental interface before and have rented more than one movie twice on the Xbox as a result.

Quality was fine, sounded great, but then again, anything Handbraked looks the same.

Basically, in short, it was a classic Apple experience.

Is the model of $2.99/$3.99 rental movies a good one? That’s another post all together.

Did Apple do the process “right” out of the gate?

Yes.

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