I think we still have miscommunication here. I was already aware of everything you laid out in that post. But what you don't address is the end result that I'm looking for:

What does the collection look like?

I currently have no family plan and have an Apple TV logged in as my iCloud account. If I create the family plan and add my wife to it, what becomes of the movie collection on the Apple TV? Are all of the movies the two of us purchased visible in one collection on the screen? Because Apple's own instructions appear to indicate that they don't.

Let me try the scenario one more time: I'm watching TV with my son, and buy him Despicable Me in iTunes on the Apple TV. Another day, I'm out of the house, and my wife is watching TV with my son and he wants to watch Despicable Me 2. Currently, she'd have to call me up and either ask for my password or I could buy it on my phone. That's a pain. I'd like for her to be able to buy it.

From what I understand of the family plan, yes, she could buy it on her account and view it on the Apple TV. But the next time my son wants to watch either Despicable Me 1 or 2, we would have to remember which profile it was purchased under. That's exactly what I don't want.


As John posted, it's a way to combine the movies you bought from various services. Before I had an Apple TV, I already had movies in the other three services because I'd bought from Google and Amazon, and I'd used vudu's digitization service for some of my DVD collection.

I use it because it lets me combine all the places where I've bought movies for my son (now Google, Amazon, and iTunes), and he can see all the movies available to him. As a bonus, it only lets him see the movies in his rating level. This is probably the best part, because before (on the Roku) I'd go into the movies I'd purchased on Google Play, and mixed in with Ratatouille and A Bug's Life was Logan and Mad Max Fury Road

Yes, iTunes has different profiles, but those seem to just display disparate collections of movies purchased by each user, not a combined collection that I can filter.

Frankly, another solution would be if there were simply a PIN code on movie purchases instead of the full iCloud password. That's what I could do on the Roku and it worked fine. My wife could buy movies on the Google Play account with a four digit PIN that was easy to share and to enter. I get tired of entering my iCloud account password every time on the Apple TV...