iTunes for movies, in UK

I'm happy to be informed that I can now rent movies on iTunes here in the UK. So maybe now I don't even have to get up from the chair to change a DVD. How much more couch potato can you get? Except maybe, like the boy in Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently book (I think it's the second one, The Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul), who is living in the attic, watching TV 24/7, and has a hose connected to an electric kettle and a big crate full of instant noodle meals, and only goes to the toilet during commercial breaks...

Nicely, Apple has amended their ways, at least here, and now offers movies for rent for 48 hours instead of 24. But then it's not exactly cheap. £4.5 for an HD rental if the movie is pretty new. That's nine dollars at current rates. Given that the cost of delivering the movie is nil*, I'd think they could rent them cheaper. Lovefilm mail DVD rental is much cheaper, and they have to pay postal costs and replace worn out DVDs.

Delivery is very quick over broadband. The HD movie I'm trying out right now was ready to start viewing after downloading just two minutes. I'm amazed, I did not think we were there yet, real time movie viewing over the Net, and in HD. But Apple is using the excellent Akamai network and it's always been much faster than the Net is on the average.

The picture quality is good. Not quite as good as Blue-Ray (at least yet), but it looks close. According to this bitter article, it is not 1080p, only 720p, and quite compressed. I dunno.

Finally something to use my Apple TV for. It's been languishing.
HD movies are only available over Apple TV, not a computer, for some reason.

* OK, not nil, but I'm guessing insignificant in the whole game. Interesting question though. Bandwidth pricing is dropping fast all the time. Over a year ago, I found 5TB use per month hosting for down to $300. Say $200 now. Say an MP4 compressed HD movie is 5MB. That's a thousand movies delivered for $200, that's 20 cents per movie. But iTunes/Apple is a monstrous customer, surely they can get a much better deal than that, say under five cents per HD movie. I'd say compared to a nine-dollar rental price, that's insignificant, it's less than one percent.