Jan 19, 2008. Xbox Live versus Apple TV for your movie rental dollars.

The Apple TV harware costs one hundred dollars less than a 360, which probably doesn't matter to you or anyone who visits this site since we all own 360s. But the Apple hardware is also smaller and less likely to fail since it can only be used to watch movies so there's no gaming GPU or complicated chips.

Apple movies also cost $1 less for renting and you can purchase them for around $10 to $15, although the standard hard drive is only 40GB. But there's no HD TV shows on the Apple system yet.

Just like iTunes, the Apple iTV has support of every major Hollywood studio including Fox, Universal, and Sony (surprise). This is a major blow to Microsoft since these three studios produce some great movies. We expect the Apple lineup to be in the thousands, while the 360 lineup is pretty small at around 300 movies. Neither format has any B-movies or porn.

Apple rentals last 30 days instead of the standard 14 days on Xbox Live. Both use a compression format to reduce the size of the file, which means both suffer some loss in quality. So if you have an LCD TV, you will see that the movie is very dark in night scenes.

There's also other alternatives like Netflix and the usual Cable and satellite TV. The one major complaint with Netflix is that the DVDs may be scratched and there is definitely more effort in returning them and having to wait in line for a popular movie.

The times are a changing as more people jump onto the digital age. We highly recommend going digital for families. It saves a trip to the movie store with hyperactive kids. Why waste time and gas? But for the single guy, the selection of titles in digital format is sorely lacking because of the lack of porn or B-movies.