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Your previously purchased movies are available to stream from the cloud to your iOS. Unless they aren’t.
Bastards!

The Fine Print Taketh Away...

With the recent release of iOS 5.0 for Apple TV, I was eager to check out one new feature in particular: Streaming Movies from the iTunes Cloud.

One of the improvements touted in the release announcement was that users would be able to stream their previously purchased movies directly from the cloud in the same way as they could with TV shows and music. Early reports from people who updated their second generation Apple TV to iOS 5.0 also suggested that this applied to the “Digital Copies” of movies included on many Blu-Ray discs as well.1

But what at first seemed to be a clear step forward for movie lovers turned out to be, predictably, more complicated.

“When purchased, this movie will not be available from iTunes in the Cloud”

After updating my Apple TV to iOS 5, I was mystified when it told me that I had no purchased movies. I don’t generally buy movies from iTunes, but I have purchased a few — and so the notion that “The Princess Bride” wouldn’t be available to stream like Apple said it would be was sort of inconceiv… uh, I just found it hard to believe.

Peter Kafka2 from All Things D is now reporting that Fox and Universal have an existing deal with HBO which currently prevents these movies from being available via iCloud. These movies have a disclaimer on their iTunes Store purchase page — “When purchased, this movie will not be available from iTunes in the Cloud”.

You can still use Home Sharing to stream them from your computer to Apple TV but, for now, Apple’s promise of making purchased movies available from the cloud has a big asterisk next to it.

  1. For more on this, check out this great guide to using “Digital Copies” with iTunes by Gabe Gagliano at Tech of the Hub [↩]
  2. A reporter whose surname, I thought, was completely appropriate to the coverage of Hollywood’s approach to digital rights [↩]

Gabe Weatherhead, the writer and publisher of Macdrifter.com, asked me to share some details about my writing workflow with his readers. The resulting interview is now available there.

If you haven’t checked out Macdrifter before, you’re in for a treat! Gabe regularly posts original features and interviews, links to interesting content, ideas for using the Mac productively, and his observations on the cultural context of technology. I was honored that he asked me to participate in his “Writer Workflow” series and I’m happy to report that Gabe says I may have set some sort of land/speed record for the use of hypertext in my responses.

Lots of clicky goodness for you there…. so be sure to check it out!

One more thing: I also used this as an opportunity to take the lid off of something I’m putting together for the new Veritrope: a Writer’s resource page of Tools, Apps, and accessories. I’m adding items regularly and, if you have any suggestions, please send me a message with the Contact Form or a note on Twitter!

Quickly build open-ended lists of information from a variety of sources without opening Evernote. Fantastic for general purpose list making!

To-do lists, packing lists, Lists of things I need to remember, Lists of things I’d like to learn. I live in lists.

I know I’m not alone. You don’t have to be Umberto Eco (or my friend Larry for that matter) to have experienced the “Vertigo of Lists” at one time or another — and so I wanted to share a really useful tool that I developed to help me manage many of my open-ended lists.

It’s called the Evernote List Builder!
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