Not too long ago, when you downloaded anything from the iTunes Store you were responsible for managing those files – if you lost your hard drive to a crash you were out of luck. When the iTunes App Store arrived, you were finally able to re-download apps you had already bought. iTunes in the Cloud changed things for music – suddenly you could just re-download anything you had purchased from the iTunes Music Store and Book Store as well as Apps. Most recently iTunes Match allows you to add ANYTHING to your music library to download anywhere.
Back in August Apple started allowing re-downloads of TV shows as well, which opened things up quite a bit for those looking to re-watch on Apple TV devices. And even in this case, things were somewhat limited and you were encouraged to back up your shows.
However, Apple never added movies at all, as the image above illustrates. We ran across this while deciding how to use one of the codes we got from the recent Best Buy / CinemaNow Facebook deals, and one of the choices was The Golden Compass, which my younger son had bought on iTunes. We got into a discussion and realized it wasn’t on any of our iTunes computers at this point which led us to check the iCloud status for movies (i.e. none), and then resort to searching backup disks … where we were fortunate to find our copy!
So remember – if you are strapped for space and thinking about deleting that movie from your iTunes library … remember that it is NOT available for re-download, so you might just have to buy it again!