iTunes in the Cloud for Movies Matches Digital Copies Included with Disc Purchases

[SBlue1]

cloud streaming is great. but it would be way easier for my slow internet connection if i could stream it from an own hard disc attached to my router, like a personal home cloud. so far i have to start up my mac and click on itunes to be able to stream it to my apple tv.

 

[Jumpman6]

There was a time that when you purchased something from iTunes, you got to download it once.
Apple basically said it was up to you to back it up, because if you deleted it and wanted to download it again, you had to pay again.

It changed when then the App Store came out, as you could download the same apps multiple times... Eventually Music and TV became available to download again as well. My "Purchased" section suddenly filled up with a bunch of songs I haven't listened to in years.

It is news that Movies are showing up, because (like the other stuff), they were NOT available to download again. At least, not on any friendly "Purchased" screen.

I guess I have to avoid Universal and Fox movies, but for other studios, they WILL be getting more money from me. I have a Blu-ray player, and would love to get more Digital movies tied to my account!!!

My BD player will get less play because of this. I never saw myself as a collector with 2000 physical movies sitting on a shelf. But, I could see myself having 2000 movies in my iCloud...

 

[littlepooch21]

I just logged into my iTunes account and there were about 10 movies that I used the Digital Copy in there. Some of which I totally forgot about. I updated my ATV2 this morning and now I can access them from the cloud and they are in HD. This is sweet. I may just start buying movies with the digital copy in there and then just selling off the movie. I may lose about $5 per movie and that will be about it.

 

[Mike Oxard]

Does anyone know if the digital copy you get with the BluRay Triple Play movies is SD or HD? 720p or 1080p?

The UK iTunes store doesn't have much in the way of HD movies so I thought the Triple Play disks would be a good way to build my iTunes HD library.

AFAIK in the UK you can only rent 1080p movies, not buy them, though hopefully I'm wrong.

 

[Explorz]

It would be nice if they gave you access to the HD version of the movie also (especially if you purchased the Bluray).

Exactly. If you purchased a Blue Ray movie then it should be redeemable as an HD movie.

 

[KTK1990]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9B176 Safari/7534.48.3)

I'm not seeing my movie there. Toy story 3.

 

[curitibagarrett]

It seems like it is hit or miss really. I only have 12 of the 40+ digital copies of movies.

I also contacted apple about it and they say the digital copies shouldn't be part of the program since they were code redeemed from the studios.

 

[paulgarb]

another UK moan

all of the above is academic to me - no movies in iTunes on the Cloud for UK users.
Heck I can wait but the repetition of 'talk to the hand' for UK users makes me (to quote from The Fifth Element) VERY DISAPPOINTED!

 

[Cory Bauer]

But unlike for music, you cannot start watching it until it's fully downloaded onto the iDevice.

Actually, you can. I just started the download of a digital copy from the Purchased tab of the iTunes Store on my iPhone, and when I jumped over to the Video App I could begin playing the movie even though only a fraction of it had downloaded thus far. Sort of a hidden feature though, since the download viewer itself gives no indication that you can begin watching right away.

 

[BlindM0nkey]

This works for three of my digital copies. Two of which have iTunes extras that downloaded along with the movie that I didn't have before. Very cool.

One problem I've noticed is that none of my movies have chapter titles when viewing on my iPad like they used to have. They all just have generic "Chapter 1, Chapter 2, etc." that display now. I see the chapter titles when playing them in iTunes. I'm not exactly sure when this change happened, but I just noticed it the other day and it didn't use to be like this. Anyone else having this problem?

 

[Cory Bauer]

Only 10 of my 23 Digital Copies show up. The other 13 are Fox and Universal titles. Hopefully they get that sorted out soon. And hopefully, once a title is available it cannot disappear. With movie studios and their crazy limited distribution windows, you never know. Also, the option to upgrade your digital copies to HD sure would be nice. Can anyone confirm that they stream in HD when played from the Apple TV? I did try one the other day on my 720p Apple TV, and if it was HD it wasn't very sharp.

 

[DrunkSkunk]

When are they going to add this for the Canadians? I mean, come on!

 

[charlituna]

Do you actually have to have the matched version on your hard drive for this to work? It would be great to be able to pop the dvd in, have iTunes match it to the cloud and never have to store it on your hard drive ever.

This is not iTunes match. It is strictly redownloading previous purchases made originally from iTunes

 

[Daws001]

Hrm...I redeemed the digital copy of Thor, have it downloaded in iTunes, but it's not showing up in the purchased section. It's available in the store so I don't understand why it isn't available for me.

 

[littlepooch21]

Hrm...I redeemed the digital copy of Thor, have it downloaded in iTunes, but it's not showing up in the purchased section. It's available in the store so I don't understand why it isn't available for me.

a few times i had to close out iTunes and then open it back up and then it showed up

 

[Larsennet]

Hrm...I redeemed the digital copy of Thor, have it downloaded in iTunes, but it's not showing up in the purchased section. It's available in the store so I don't understand why it isn't available for me.

Enter the code again. I had to do that with Thor and 6 other codes. If the studio makes a change to the movie after you redeem your code it will invalidate it in the cloud. I don't know how many time you can do this but it worked for all of mine that had problems. Lion King, Captain America, Pirates 4, Lady and the Tramp, Cars 2, Top Gun all had to be re-entered.

 

[lordofthereef]

This is actually pretty cool. Most everything nowadays comes with a digital copy. Even if it is SD, I am not terribly broken hearted. It's better than nothing (which is what the digital copies were worth to me before this news).

 

[SteveSwish]

Noticed this yesterday. Unfortunately I was only able to download the crappy low quality version I originally had and not an HD version like I had hoped. Still pretty cool feature!

My thoughts exactly, although I did notice that the new download included the iTunes Extras!

As for distributors: Its only picking up Paramount for me right now. No WB, Universal, or MGM titles.

 

[Daws001]

Enter the code again. I had to do that with Thor and 6 other codes. If the studio makes a change to the movie after you redeem your code it will invalidate it in the cloud. I don't know how many time you can do this but it worked for all of mine that had problems. Lion King, Captain America, Pirates 4, Lady and the Tramp, Cars 2, Top Gun all had to be re-entered.

That did the trick! Thank you

 

[HipHopTrex]

Very nice. I'm excited about this. I just gotta re-enter in a few codes it seems. And also, screw Fox and Universal for this. Hopefully HBO allows this sooner rather than later.

 

[Nermal]

Nope, dvd rips won't work. It'll only work if you bought a blu ray or dvd copy of the movie that comes with a digital copy.

I think part of the confusion is due to "digital copy" being a terrible name. A DVD is digital, so people could legitimately think that a DVD is a "digital copy".

Having said that, I can't figure out how to make this work (with iTunes-based "digital copies"). Are there some step-by-step instructions somewhere?

 

[Omgitsdesmond]

I was getting frustrated. I didn't have any of my digital copy movies show up under the purchased section. I thought all of you were crazy when I read that all you had to do was re-redeem them in iTunes on the desktop. I got mad when it didn't work for iron man 2. I was convinced to sign up on this site and post a comment saying that you all were crazy. Turns out I'm crazy, because I tried it again one more time just to be sure and it worked!

I put in the digital copy disc, clicked transfer to iTunes, put in the activation code, and it downloaded the movie again. The second it started downloading, I checked on my iPad under purchased and iron man 2 was there. Awesome. Unfortunately that's the only digital copy I can get in th cloud right now, all the rest are fox and universal. So, the point of this comment i guess is - if it doesn't work guys, try again.

 

[Grubster]

Can anyone confirm this? I am curious about of streaming to Atv is HD or SD.

I tested with dark knight and it definitely was HD. It looked great.

 

[SPEEDwithJJ]

It seems like it is hit or miss really. I only have 12 of the 40+ digital copies of movies.

You have a higher success rate than I do. I only see 2 out of my 80+ digital copies shown up in the purchased section, although if I clicked on the "purchased" tab under the "store" section on the left of the iTunes software window, I see all of them, but couldn't re-download any of them again.

Worse of all, I've already thrown all those digital copies redeem code slips that came with all my Blu-ray purchases as I thought that I'll never need the codes anymore after redeeming my digital copies previously.

Edit: Rechecked again & found that even for my iTunes movies purchases, not all of them show up in my Purchased section. I wonder how they sort the movies out on which should show up as purchased?

 

[SAIRUS]

I'm really happy with this. A copy of a movie had expired, and I got it back!