ITunes Movie Rentals vs iTunes Movie Purchases: What are the Differences

iTunes is one of the most popular video vendors, from which you can buy or rent a large amount of movies from multiple categories. So there a question comes, shall we buy or rent movies? What are the difference between iTunes movie rentals and purchases. No worries, here we will get you covered in this article. Please just continue read on. Get the videos in the right way will not only help you save your money but also ensure you get better experience of watching the videos.

Part 1. iTunes Movie Rentals VS. Purchases: What are the same

To get started, let's take a look at the common things. The most important similarity about iTunes movie rentals and purchases is that both are integrated with the FairPlay DRM protection. Under this FairPlay encryption, you are required to authorize the Apple devices or players before you can play the videos and the number of devices is limited to 5 at most. If you have already authorized to more than 5 devices, then you must deauthorize from one device first before you can use it in another one. In addition, you are not allowed to copy the iTunes videos to other non-Apple devices like Android mobile devices, TVs etc. The other common thing is that the video quality is same. Whether you buy or rent the HD/SD movies, you can always enjoy the movie with same image quality.

Part 2. iTunes Movie Rentals VS. Purchases: Is There Big Differences

Though iTunes rentals and purchases have some similarities, there are many differences in several aspects. Following I will list the four most obvious differences.

Price

Generally speaking, the price of rental movies is much lower than the purchased movies. As for the rentals, the lowest price is $0.99 for special promotion and they usually cost $2.99 for SD videos, $3.99 to $4.99 for regular movies, and $5.99 to $9.99 for latest movies. While movie purchases normally costs from $9.99 to $14.99 though some of them maybe offered at a low price too.

Content availability

There are different movies which are only available for buy or rent or both. For instance, some latest movies which are currently in theaters may only be available for rent and some classic movies are only available for buy based on the contracts between the movie studios and Apple Inc. But usually the number of movies for buy is much larger than the one for rent.

Time validity

If you buy a movie, you will be able to watch it repeatedly forever as long as you authorize it on the devices. However, this is completely different with the iTunes movie rentals. After renting, you are only allowed to enjoy the movies within 30 days. If you haven't started to watch it before the deadline, the rental movie will be automatically deleted from your iTunes. Furthermore, if you have started to watch it, you are supposed to finish watching it within 24 hours in USA and 48 hours in other countries in the world, else the movies will be expired.

Playback and sync

For the purchased videos, you can transfer and sync the purchased movies between different Apple devices like Mac computers, IOS devices, Apple TVs for up to 5 devices. And for the rental movies, if you want to sync to other devices like iPhone, iPad and iPod or Apple TV, you must rent them from computers because you won't be able to sync them from IOS devices or Apple TV to computer. The last but not the least is that when syncing the rental movies from computer to your IOS devices, it will be deleted completely when it syncs completely, you can only play rental movie on a device at a time.

Part 3. iTunes Movie Rentals VS. Purchases: Conclusion

From what we have discussed above, we found that the difference between iTunes Movie rentals and purchases is big to some extent and they are actually designed to meet the requirements of various customers. The answer to the question whether buy or rent a movie totally depends on your preferences. If you find a great movie which you want to enjoy repeatedly or backup for future watching, you should go with the purchase option. Else if you only want to watch the movie for one time, you can simply rent the movie to save money.

Finally, we want to emphasize both ways are not perfect because iTunes rentals or purchases are DRM protected. This means you can use the videos freely. If you are tire of this protection, then you can try a third party software DRmare M4V Converter for Mac/Windows to get rid of all the DRM protection as well as convert your iTunes movies to other formats such as MP4, WMV, MPEG, WebM, 3GP and so on. You can transfer them to any devices you have to watch or just keep them for backup. Sincerely hope this DRmare can help you enjoy iTunes digital media files in a easy way. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave your comments below.