While Apple was painting iPhones red and rolling out new iPads on Tuesday, it also released an update for iTunes that lets you watch movie rentals on any of your devices. iTunes 12.6 for the Mac adds what Apple dubbed “rent once, watch anywhere” which is exactly what it sounds like: You can watch a movie on any of your devices, not just the one where you made the rental.
The catch is that you’ll need iOS 10.3 for your iPhone or iPad, and tvOS 10.2 for your Apple TV to truly free your movie rentals from a single device, and neither is available yet. Both OS versions are still in beta testing.
Since “rent once, watch anywhere” is a thing for the Mac now, it’s a safe bet Apple is close to the official release of iOS 10.3 and tvOS 10.2. Apple isn’t saying when they’ll transition out of beta, but we’re guessing that’s no more than about a week away.
iTunes 12.6 is a free update available through Apple’s App Store app on the Mac.
Can’t watch on a another computer, which is lame.
Home share? Lame unless you have ethernet or 5ghz Wifi for AppleTV 4.
iTunes is a looser app these days. Starting a movie stream from iTunes to an AppleTV 4th gen looses connection continually. The search function is non-existent on the AppleTV OS for you Library shows. Tim Cook needs to take iTunes away from Eddy “Useless” Cue like he did for the App store. Until that happens iTunes will never be a fully functional app like it should be.
Well I would prefer that they cleaned up iTunes, and iOS Music, before adding new features.
Jeff:
Thanks for that clarification on iOS 10.3. For a moment there, I thought I might have missed that update.
As for ‘rent once…’, I feel that this is a welcomed, long overdue feature, and am not sure why it took this long to harmonise the movie rental experience across the system.