When renting movies to watch on iTunes in the past, one of the drawbacks to the service is that if you rented a movie on your iPhone, you were pretty much stuck to watching it on your iPhone. This means that if you wanted to pause the movie and continue watching on your Apple TV or your computer, you’d be out of luck.We’re not sure why there were even such restrictions in the first place, but users will be pleased to learn that in iTunes 12.6, it seems that Apple has done away with these restrictions meaning that you will now be able to watch your iTunes movie rentals on any device. Dubbed “rent once, watch anywhere”, it should be noted that as pointed out by 9to5Mac, users will require to have iOS 10.3 and tvOS 10.2, both of which are currently in beta, although we expect that it probably won’t be too long until they’re released to the masses (assuming those are both platforms you want to watch it on).
There will still be some limitations to this feature, which is that the movie you rented can only exist on one device at a time. According to Apple, “When you move a rented movie from your Mac or PC, it disappears from your computer’s iTunes library. You can move the movie between devices as often as you want, but you can have it on only one device at a time.”
However if you were to rent the movie on your iOS device or Apple TV, you won’t be able to move it and will have to rely on AirPlay to stream the content to another device, such as the Apple TV. It still isn’t quite ideal, but we guess at the very least users now have the choice.