It is a slow start. And quite confusing considering that you would think they would have a dedicated team who's sole job it is to gather masters from the studios and encode them. They should be putting 20 or 30 new movies up each week!

I do have to take issue with one statement in this article though. To say there is no benefit to downloading movies made prior to the 1980's in HD is just silly. Anything shot on film- from ANY time period- is much higher definition than 720. In general, film is rated at 4K, and some 1940's Technicolor films with separated colour elements can be rated as high as 6K. MANY of the film I personally look forward to seeing most in HD are pre-1980; and most films that have seen a DVD release in the last 10 years have been given surround remixes, so that statistic is also dubious.

Whether this a problem on Apple's end or reneging by the content providers (as the number of total movies was just over 800 at one point) this makes Apple look bad,

This does tarnish Apple if they claimed they'd have number of titles certain by a date certain. This is very embarrassing for Steve and for Apple.

Up here in Western Canada, all we have is Shaw Cable for an 'On Demand' option (without going to satellite). The digital box costs $450 and a basic digital cable package is around $80/month. That doesn't include any movie channels or HDTV.
The 'on demand' offerings are lame. We get about 8 - 10 new movies a month, of which 6 are total shit titles like "Jerry Springer - Undressed". There are probably only 100 movies at any given time available for download of which 10 are new releases.

Now the fun part, the quality is horrific. Picture is pixilated, artifacts galore, stalling, hickups and sometimes movies just get dropped. This is because our cable provider wants our government to update their servers. Basically, it's a massive bandwidth problem. (watching a movie at 3am is mostly fine)
None of the movies are in HD and all in 2 channel.

This hockey season, there has been 17 PPV games so far, none in HD. And of all those, only 2 didn't have massive disruptions, blackouts, glitches, or just plain dead air. All that for $12.99.

All this points to one thing... We will never see Apple TV in Canada. To do so would destroy our oh-so-loved cable companies.
Apple TV is flying off the shelves, but thats only because we are a torrent mad country. Apple would have to have over 30% of all it's content 'Canadian Made' before our CRTC would allow the service. Shows like "Anne of Green Gables" and movies like "Brazil"... in other words, it would look like our National channel CBC.

If Apple was able to provide it's service up here, you can bet that it would instantly have millions of customers overnight... and we would be gobbling up those 387 movies with a smile.
So we may have Universal healthcare... but we are 3rd world when it comes to media streaming.
Socialism has it's downsides.

Tell me, oh wise ones of this forum and others like it . . . Is it time to sell the company and give the money back to the shareholders? Sure sounds like it. I guess Michael Dell was right after all.

Just bought an Apple TV and its awesome..a game changer. So many things to use it for, including podcasts in HD. If you haven't checked it out do so;even better than having a large screen(in my case 32" )HD video ipod. It makes You Tube so much more enjoyable(in better quality and on a huge screen). In the future, I can see this or something like it killing blockbuster and Netflix regular service...its great...even better quality movie rental than I can get from my cable service..similar to a DVD...and I'm not even talking about the HD rentals.