First one was District 13: Ultimatum which is on Netflix. District 13: Ultimatum is a movie by Luc Besson (The Professional, The 5th Element, Taken, Transporter 2) which is the sequel to District B13. I had never heard of either movie and they didn’t have the original one on Netflix but figured I would give the sequel a try. Wow was I ever surprised. This movie is an action packed movie which takes place in what is supposed to be futuristic Paris of 2010 (ok it was done in 2004) where the government have decided to throw all the gangster into a ghetto, build a big wall around it and throw away the key. In the first movie, I believe you get to learn how this undercover cop teams up with a guy from the ghetto to defeat some bomb plot. The cop is a martial art expert while the ghetto guy is a parkour expert.
In this story, a group of realtors want to have the ghetto destroyed / cleaned up so they can build new towers/condos and our pair is there to reveal the conspiracy. The martial art in the show is very good. Well very much like Jackie Chan movies where he makes use of props in his fights. What sets the action apart is some of the parkour in the show. Quite amazing what they can do. I hear the first film has even better parkour stunts. Can’t wait to see it (just bought it on Amazon for $8 since I couldn’t find it anywhere). I give the movie a $8 rating.
Note the movie is in French with subtitles. The story is not that hard to figure out so not much an issue here.

Season 4 takes off about a year where Season 3 left off with Dexter being adjusting to his new life with a new baby and a family. Eventually recently retired FBI Super Agent Lundy (from Season 2) returns to Miami tracking the one serial killer that escaped him. John Lithgow plays this serial killer and it is probably one of his best and scariest performance. The look on his face was just priceless and also sent chills down my spine. Season 4 was a lot darker than the other seasons and you start to see that Dexter’s ways are not so black and white like the first 3 seasons made it seem also one thing you see in Season 4 is that Dexter is having a lot more imaginary talk with his Harry. I am not sure if they did that on purpose to signify that Dexter is starting to lose touch with reality or not but it sure expanded Dexter’s character a lot more. The final episodes are very gripping with the last episode being unbelievable. I am still in shock over the episode and I normally don’t get rattled too much. I think Season 4 is one of the best season of Dexter perhaps on the same level as Season 1. I don’t know how I should rate a TV show dollar wise but it was well worth the price of the DVD package. Well mind you I got it as a gift.

1. Rented movies from iTunes Store
2. Any content from iTunes on your PC/Mac using Home sharing
3. Movies from Netflix
4. YouTube content
5. Pictures from iPhoto or Flickr
6. Music from a good selection of radio stations

Now since I have recently joined Netflix (and have finally decided to keep it for now), I decided to give it a go and watch an episode or two of Heroes on it. The Netflix app is really well done (although I think the Wii app takes the cake) and it was easy to continue my show where I had left off. Picture quality was great even for standard definition. There was no streaming glitches of any kind (going over Wifi).
Once I had that done, I decided to play some music while watching a slide show with pictures from iPhoto. My wife specially likes that. Again easy to browse and work with it.
I then wanted to watch an HD movie I had created using iMovie and stored in iTunes. Well that wasn’t so great. It took about 2-4 minutes to start (sorry I didn’t time it) for a movie that’s 4 minutes long. Now that being said, I am using a middle of the line Linksys Router and not the one that is “optimized” for HD streaming so perhaps that’s the problem but you would think that with a Wireless N router, it shouldn’t be that long. I will do a test on Ethernet later on to confirm.

Next thing is that my wife wanted to try an episode of Nurse Jackie since she had heard good things about it. We try to find it on iTunes and couldn’t. Then she asked about Despicable Me since my daughter wanted to see that. And no. Hmm sounds a lot like the Netflix story from earlier. Well turns out that even though Steve Jobs said that you shouldn’t buy movies anymore, a lot of the movies on iTunes are still only up for purchase. For example, Nurse Jackie and Despicable Me are available for purchase but not for rentals so Apple TV hides them. Now recall the list I had from before which I ran against Netflix with very poor results? Let’s run the same list (well with a few new titles) and see how it compares.

Movies they have for rentals:

1. Night at the museum 2
2. The American
3. Inception
4. The Town
5. City Island
6. Garden State
7. Letters from Iwo Jima
8. The Illusionist
9. The Matador
10. The Interpreter
11. The Flight of the Phoenix
12. Lord of War
13. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Movies they have for purchase:

1. Edge of Darkness
2. Brooklyn Finest
3. Terminator Salvation
4. Getsmart
5. Burn After Reading
6. WALL-E
7. The bucket List
8. Vantage Point (only $4.99 likely lousy movie)
9. Knock Around Guys
10. Pineapple Express
11. Blades of Glory
12. Wild Hogs
13. The Prestige
14. The Weatherman
15. Mean Girls
16. Lost (TV)
17. Entourage (TV)
18. Nurse Jackie

Movies they don’t have

1. The Recruit
2. Dexter

So as you can see, a better percentage than with Netflix but still not quite there yet. It seems that the newer movies are up for rentals already but older movies/shows not quite yet. Actually I haven’t seen a TV show for rentals yet. I am hoping that with times, things will improve. I guess the good thing with Apple TV is that I don’t have to pay anything even if I don’t watch anything. Not like Netflix. Another small nit pick with it is that it is hard to read the titles of the movies. Now I do need glasses but on a 32″ TV (yes I know why so small), it shouldn’t be necessary. I sit pretty close to it. I can see them fine on the Netflix app for example.

Conclusion

Pros:

• Affordable. No monthly fees.
• Very Small.
• Well designed/built.
• Easy to connect to Apple iFamily.
• Great Netflix app.

Cons:
• No HDMI cable.
• Expected greater selection of shows to rent.
• Cheap power cable.
• Poor HD streaming (maybe network though).
• Hard to see titles when browsing movies.

Overall I am pretty happy with the device and really most of the cons can easily be rectified over time. I suspect Apple is working hard with the movie studios to expand their list of titles much like what they have done for music on iTunes so within another year, I suspect the list of non rentals to be much smaller. If that’s the case, then I can safely skip the entire Blue Ray experience. Perhaps that’s what Sony and some of the studios are balking at since they invested so much in the medium.

While holding my new born daughter in one hand, I was able to produce this in about 15-20 minutes (well I did tweak it for another 20 minutes but the bulk of the trailer was done in 15-20 minutes)

Pretty neat I think. Now I suspect it is going to be a fad and there will be tons of trailers done for a while and then die off. Personally I would have preferred to have them include more themes into iMovie 11. Now they did add 3 new ones but really I want to have more like 10-20 to choose from. Actually it would be very nice if people could create their own themes and publish them for others to use.

Movies they have:

1. Lord of War
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Movies they don’t have:

1. Terminator Salvation
2. City Island
3. Getsmart
4. Burn After Reading
5. WALL-E
6. The bucket List
7. Vantage Point
8. Letters from Iwo Jima
9. Knock Around Guys
10. Pineapple Express
11. Blades of Glory
12. Wild Hogs
13. The Illusionist
14. The Prestige
15. The Matador
16. The Weatherman
17. The Interpreter
18. The Flight of the Phoenix
19. Secret Window
20. Mean Girls
21. The Recruit
22. Lost (TV)
23. Dexter (TV)
24. Entourage (TV)

Now granted I did find these movies that I actually want to see:

1. American Psycho
2. Van Wilder
3. Dazed and Confused
4. Before the Devil Knows You Are Dead
5. Amores Perros
6. Volver
7. Mad Men (TV)

So I will make use of my free membership but will likely not continue with it for $7.99 a month.
Now last night I watched Lord of War on the iPad app for Netflix. The app is a bit slow so you can browse the movies and do searches but once you start a movie, the quality is quite good. No stoppages, no blurriness or spottiness, stuff that you typically get in streaming movies say on Global TV’s website.

Update: I just received an e-mail today telling me the CD so I can watch Netflix on my Wii is back-ordered so won’t be able to watch on my TV until October. Now they did extend my trial 2 weeks for that.