How reliable is iTunes Movies in the Cloud?

[PDFierro]

I'm curious how reliable/good streaming of TV shows/movies are through iTunes. I'm ready to get a Mac again as soon as the Haswell rMBP is released, and I'm debating on my hard drive space.

For those of you with a large iTunes video library, do you use cloud streaming and how good is it? I use it sometimes but on a Windows laptop, and it lags quite a bit. But that might be the slowness of my machine.

I honestly prefer to store all my stuff locally, but I'm just wondering how good of a solution Apple's streaming is for quality and responsiveness/buffering. I use other streaming services and they are always speedy.

 

[salimdao]

From my experience, iTunes Movies in the Cloud has been great. I rarely watch it on my MBP, but I do download them locally. I use my Apple TV to stream my movies from the Cloud. I don't think you're allowed to truely "stream" movies on a computer though. You can play them when they're not already stored locally, but it will download as it goes.

 

[Scrub175]

I've only had a couple of instances where I couldn't log into iTunes to watch a movie. In addition there were only a couple of times I could purchase a rental for a movie. I've used the service for over a year. I recently purchased an iMac and downloaded all my purchased movies from iTunes to my mac. So if a title I've purchased gets pulled from iTunes I have a copy saved for streaming.

I have also ripped DVD's and added them to iTunes and that allows me to stream them to my appleTV's which is very handy too.

 

[Kurwenal]

It was a bit daunting to just delete from local storage all of the kids movies and tv shows I had laying around (really, just how many episodes of Dora the Explorer do we need?), but the download-on-demand model works nicely, in my case to Apple TVs and iPads. Depending, of course, on the quality of your Internet connection.