I rented Hunt for the Wilderpeople last week, while it was the $0.99 featured rental. I’ve heard good things about this Kiwi movie (I’m a bit of a kiwiholic) and couldn’t wait to watch it.
So today, with a draft of Swift Style pushed up to Pragmatic, I thought I’d set it up for a nice family watch tonight. I opened the Computers > Rentals section on Apple TV and saw this:
I wasted about 20 minutes googling things like “why doesn’t my rental show up on my Apple TV” and checking my iTunes accounts and home sharing setup, when I suddenly remembered this had happened to me before.
With that spark of inspiration lingering in my mind, I went to iTunes on my computer (where I had rented it) and sure enough, it was still up in the cloud. I clicked the download button and got it down to my computer:
About 1.41 Gigabytes later (and several pause/resumes when the download speed got slow — seriously, at one point the ETA jumped from over 40 minutes to under 3), I returned to Apple TV and hopped into my home-sharing library.
Tada.
So if you’re looking for a lost movie, or you can’t find your rental on Apple TV, make sure that if you rented it on your home computer, that you’ve downloaded it from the cloud before attempting to play it from ATV.