Waiting for a Blockbuster

Microsoft rentals cost about the same, except for a $6 charge for HD rentals of new releases. But you must pay in Microsoft Points, a made-up currency you buy in advance ($6.25 gets you 500) and then redeem for video rentals or other items at the Marketplace.

Microsoft is also less generous in its terms of service. It gives you 14 days to start viewing a rental, after which you have 24 hours to finish viewing it. Apple allows 30 days to start viewing and lets users exceed its 24-hour limit: If time runs out while you're watching the movie -- or even if you've paused it -- you won't be cut off.

These companies advertise instant viewing -- like most download services, these let you start watching as the download continues-- but slower broadband services will nevertheless require a wait.

On a 1.5 megabits-per-second DSL connection, for example, a standard-definition film wasn't ready to watch on the Apple TV until after about 45 minutes of downloading. Fetching an HD release was an overnight undertaking. On the Xbox, a standard-definition title wasn't ready to watch until an hour and a half after starting the download.

Unfortunately, standard-definition titles looked blurrier and fuzzier than DVDs. High-definition rentals, on the other hand, looked magnificent, with far less evidence of the compression used to squish a movie into a downloadable file.

Apple offers one feature that Microsoft can't -- the ability to watch a rented movie on an iPhone or on most video-capable iPods, as long as you first download the flick with iTunes instead of an Apple TV.

But this option subjects you to a stringent one-screen-at-a-time policy. Moving a movie to an iPod or an Apple TV causes it to vanish from the computer; sending it back to the computer wipes it from the other device. And you can't put the movie on a second computer at all.

All those these restrictions make for a very narrow target market. Somebody who doesn't subscribe to an on-demand cable-TV service, but pays for a faster-than-usual broadband connection. Someone who isn't satisfied with the movies on premium channels like HBO but doesn't want anything too esoteric-- and doesn't watch movies often enough to justify a Netflix subscription.

What about all the other customers? Are the studios that scared of making money off of them online?

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrobp@washpost.com. Read more athttp://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/