iPad mini Video: Seeing Is Believing - iPad Mini - page 188

Finding Stuff to Watch
You have a few main ways to find and watch videos on your iPad mini. You can fetch all sorts of
fare from the iTunes Store, whose virtual doors you can open directly from the iPad mini.
Or you can sync content that already resides on your Mac or PC. (If you haven't done so yet, now is
as good a time as any to read Chapter 3 for all the details on syncing.)
The videos you can watch on the iPad mini generally fall into one of the following categories:
Movies, TV shows, and music videos from the iTunes Store: You can watch these by tap-
ping the Videos icon on the Home screen.
The iTunes Store features dedicated sections for purchasing or renting episodes of TV shows,
as shown in Figure 8-1 , and for buying or renting movies, as shown in Figure 8-2 .
Pricing varies, but it's not atypical as of this writing to fork over $1.99 to pick up an episode
of a popular TV show in standard definition or $2.99 for high-def versions. And a few shows
are free. You can also purchase a complete season of a favorite show. The final season of a
classic show, such as Lost, for example, costs $24.99 in standard-def and $29.99 in high-def.
A new release feature film typically costs $19.99 in high definition or $14.99 in standard def.
But you can find HD movies for as little as $9.99 and sometimes even cheaper than that.
You can also rent many movies, typically for $2.99, $3.99, or $4.99, though Apple usually
servesupajuicy 99-cent rental aswell. Notall movies canberented, andwe'renotwildabout
current rental restrictions — you have 30 days to begin watching a rented flick and a day to
finish watching after you've started, though you can watch as often as you want during the
24-hour period. But that's showbiz for you. Such films appear in their own Rented Movies
section in the video list, which you get to by tapping Videos. The number of days before your
rental expires displays.
In some instances, World War Z being one example, purchasing a movie also affords you so-
called iTunes Extras for your Mac or PC, featuring the kind of bonus content that is some-
times reserved for DVDs.
Tap a movie listing in iTunes, and you can generally preview a trailer before buying (or rent-
ing) and check out additional tidbits: the plot summary, credits, reviews, and customer rat-
ings, as well as other movies that appealed to other buyers of this one. See Figure 8-3 . And
you can search films by genre or top charts (the ones other people are buying or renting), or
rely on the Apple Genius feature for recommendations based on stuff you've already watched.
(Genius works for movies and TV much the way it works for music, as we explain in Chapter
7 .) Apple also groups movies by various themes: Date Night Movies and Indie New Releases
being two examples.