Movies & TV

The Movies & TV app lets you play the rented or purchased movies and TV shows you’ve acquired from the Microsoft Store. It’s also compatible with a service called Movies Anywhere that allows you to access some of the content that you’ve purchased from competing video services, including those from Amazon, Apple, Google, and others.

In some English-speaking markets, Movies & Video is called Film & TV.

Movies & TV dates back to Windows 10 and it has not yet been updated to the new Windows 11 look and feel. But it is a simple app and is readily understood. It provides the following major views.

Explore. This view showcases new movies and TV shows, plus movie trailers. That said, you will need to launch the Microsoft Store app if you wish to purchase any content from Microsoft.

Purchased. Here, you will find the movies and TV shows you have purchased (or rented) from Microsoft. This content is tied to your Microsoft account, so you will need to sign in to that account to access your purchases.

If you connect your Microsoft account to the Movies Anywhere service, you will also see movies you’ve purchased from Amazon Prime Video, Apple iTunes, Google TV, and other compatible services here. This is described later in the chapter.

Personal. This view displays any videos you have on your PC, its removable storage, or the network-attached media servers in your home. These are non-protected videos that you did not acquire from the Microsoft Store.

The Personal view is now deprecated in favor of the new Media Player app, which provides a more sophisticated experience for playing local, non-protected videos. As such, we do not cover the local video functionality in Movies & TV in this book.

Configure Movies & TV

Before getting started with Movies & TV, you should consider configuring a few options. Much of this configuration occurs in the app’s settings interface, which is accessible via More options (“…”) > Settings.

Some settings worth considering here include:

Download quality. Movies & TV lets you purchase or rent content from the Microsoft Store in SD (standard definition), HD, or UHD (4K) formats. Here, you can choose to pick the download format at purchase time (the default) or select from the available format choices.

Download location. By default, purchased content is downloaded to your Videos folder. You can’t choose a different folder, per se, but you can choose to download purchased content to a different drive, if one is available. This configuration occurs in the Settings app, not Movies & TV. Click “Modify your storage settings” to choose a new drive.

Playback. By default, Movies & TV will play videos in a normal app window, and you can switch to a full-screen display manually. But if you would prefer for this full-screen display to be automatic, you can change this option to On.

Account. You can access your Microsoft account, payment options, and order history on the web via a set of links under the Account heading.

There’s also a link for connecting your Microsoft account to the Movies Anywhere service. This functionality is described later in the chapter.

In addition to the settings available in the app, you may wish to configure how subtitles look and work in Movies & TV. You do so in the Settings app, not Movies & TV.

To see your options, open the Settings app and navigate to Accessibility > Captions > Caption style.

Here, you can choose between preset caption styles—the default is called “Default”—or click Edit to customize the look and then save it as a new preset.

Play a video

Movie trailers play immediately, but when you select a purchased or rented video, you are first shown a landing page that can include extras, information about the cast and crew, and related content.

To stream (play) the video, click “Play,” “Restart,” or “Resume.” The video playback experience provides a set of controls that disappear after a few seconds of inactivity.

To display them again, move your mouse, press a key, or tap or press on the screen (if you have a touch- or pen-enabled display).

The following controls are available:

Video scrubber. This progress bar-like control lets you move directly to any point in the video. Or you can “scrub” through the video by dragging the large circular position marker.

Volume. Here, you can set the video playback volume separately from the system volume.

Subtitles and audio. This control lets you enable any subtitles (or closed captions) and audio tracks that may be available in a video.

Playback controls. Here you can access buttons to Play/Pause, Skip back (10 seconds), or Skip forward (30 seconds).

Play in mini view. This control places video playback in a miniature, Picture-in-Picture (PIP) type window that you can size and position on the screen as desired. While in this mode, Movies & TV will visibly remain on top of other on-screen windows, so you can enjoy video content while doing other things.

Full Screen/Exit Full Screen. This control lets you toggle video playback between normal and full-screen modes. In full-screen mode, the Windows desktop, including the Taskbar, disappears and video playback literally occupies the entire screen.

You can also configure Movies & TV to always play video in full-screen mode, as described earlier.

Cast to device. This option, available in the “Show more options” menu (“…”), lets you wirelessly “cast” the playing video to a Miracast-compatible screen. This capability is described in more detail later in the chapter.

Zoom to fill. This option, available in the Show more options menu (“…”), toggles the display of the playing video between its native aspect ratio (16:9 or 4:3, perhaps) and the aspect ratio of the app window (or, if the video is playing full-screen, the aspect ratio of the screen on which it is playing).

Repeat. This option, available in the Show more options (“…”) menu, toggles video playback from its default—play once—to repeat, where the video will loop endlessly until manually stopped.

Autoplay. This option, available in the Show more options menu (“…”), is aimed at those bingeable TV shows that are so popular these days: If selected, it will automatically play the next TV show episode so you can keep watching automatically.

Rent a movie from Microsoft

Windows offers movies for rent via the Microsoft Store, not directly in the Movies & TV app.

Rentals come with rules. Once you pay for a rental, you only have two weeks (14 days) to begin watching it. And once you begin watching a rental, you have 24 hours to finish watching it.

To rent a movie, open the Store app and navigate to Movies & TV.

The Store navigation experience is straightforward, and browsing for a movie to rent works much like other Store content, as described in the Microsoft Store chapter.

New movies are available for purchase but not rent for a short time period when they are first released.

When you find a movie to rent, you have two choices to make.

They are:

Where to rent the movie from. You can rent the movie directly from Microsoft, of course, but you can also rent the movie from Amazon Prime, which requires you to install that app.

We only examine the Microsoft Store experience.

The quality level. Novie rentals are offered in SD, HD, and 4K formats, or some subset of that list.

SD stands for “standard definition,” HD means “high definition,” and 4K refers to a horizontal display resolution of approximately 4,000 pixels. (4K is sometimes referred to as UHD, or “ultra-high definition.”)

Assuming you’ve already configured one or more payment methods with your Microsoft account, you are then prompted to stream the movie online or download the movie to your PC so you can play it back later, even if the PC is offline.

These choices are even more nuanced than is perhaps obvious. If you choose the stream option, you can watch the rental on any Windows 10 or Windows 11 PC or Xbox One, Xbox Series X, or Xbox Series S console, and you can switch back and forth between them if you like during the rental period. But if you choose to download the video, it is “locked” to that one PC, meaning that you will only be able to watch it on the PC you’re currently using. So choose carefully.

After making your choice, you will be prompted to authenticate against your Microsoft account using Windows Hello or some other method. And then you can finish the transaction using your default payment method or by choosing from the other payment methods—credit cards, a PayPal account, a Microsoft account balance, and so on—that you have configured for your account.

Once this multi-step process is complete, the movie will download to your PC, if you chose that option. Or you can simply begin streaming it immediately.

Rented movies appear in the Purchased view in Movies & TV alongside your purchased videos. They disappear automatically after the rental period ends, or after you’ve watched them and the viewing period ends.

Purchase a movie or TV show from Microsoft

Microsoft provides movies, movie bundles, TV show episodes, and TV show seasons for purchase from its online store. Purchased content can be played from any compatible device, including Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs and Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S video game consoles.

This content cannot be played back on a mobile device like a smartphone or an iPad, nor can it be played back on a TV-based video streaming set-top box like an Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, or Roku. If you intend to watch purchased movies on any of these devices, Microsoft Movies & TV is not a viable option.

See the next section for a partial workaround to this issue.

Purchases work much like rentals. And as with rentals, they occur in the Store app and not in Movies & TV.

To purchase a movie or movie bundle, navigate to the content you want, choose a format—HD, SD, or 4K—and then select the “Buy” button.

If you are purchasing TV content, you will see options to purchase an entire season, individual episodes, and, when available, options for previous seasons.

Watch movies you’ve purchased from other services

One of the issues with purchasing content from online video services like Microsoft Movies & TV is that it’s not compatible with other services and applications. Likewise, Microsoft doesn’t offer a mobile version of the Movies & TV app, so you can’t watch purchased content on your smartphone or iPad.

Fortunately, a service called Movies Anywhere partially solves this problem. Movies Anywhere lets you sync the content from the accounts you use on various video services—including Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, DirectTV, Google TV/YouTube, Verizon, and others, in addition to Microsoft’s—and then access any eligible digital movies you’ve purchased from any of them using any compatible app. And since six of the biggest movies studios—Disney, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Universal, and Warner Bros.—are all participating, a good portion of the movies you’ve purchased across various services should become available everywhere, including in Movies & TV in Windows.

There are, of course, some important caveats to know about.

• Three of the biggest movie studios—Lionsgate, MGM, and Paramount—do not cooperate with Movies Anywhere. So digital purchases of movies made by those studios will not be included, and will not appear in Movies & TV (and in other Movies Anywhere-compatible apps).
• Even the studios that are participating with Movies Anywhere do not allow all digital movie purchases to be used with the service. So you may find that some movies you’ve purchased elsewhere that were made by a participating studio do not show up in Movies & TV.
• Movies Anywhere only works with digital movie purchases. It is not compatible with movie purchases in physical formats like Blu-Ray or DVD. It is also not compatible with movie rentals or TV shows.

Despite these limitations, Movies Anywhere is an excellent solution and anyone hoping to use Movies & TV in Windows should link their Microsoft account to the service so that they can access the movie purchases they’ve made elsewhere. In our experience, between one-half and three-quarters of our digital movie purchases are available through the service.

Connect Movies & TV with Movies Anywhere

Before you can connect Movies & TV with Movies Anywhere, you will need to create an account with Movies Anywhere. To do so, open Movies & TV and navigate to More options (“…”) > Settings. Then, select the “Connect to Movies Anywhere” link under Account.

This option will not appear unless you have signed in with your Microsoft account.

A web browser window will open and navigate to the Movies Anywhere website. There, you can create a new account or sign in to an existing one. Then, from the site’s Manage Retailers page, you can link the Microsoft account used by Movies & TV to Movies Anywhere.

While you’re there, you should also link the other online accounts you’ve used to purchase digital movies—Amazon, Apple, and so—to Movies Anywhere.

Access (some of) your movies purchases on mobile

Microsoft doesn’t make a mobile app version of Movies & TV for Android devices, iPhones, or iPads. But thanks to Movies Anywhere, you can still access some portion of your digital movie collection.

To do so, simply use a compatible mobile movies app, including Apple TV (iOS), Amazon Prime Video (Android, iOS), Google TV (Android, iOS), Movies Anywhere, and so on. These apps all include offline support, too, so you can download compatible movies to your device and watch them offline. Or, you can simply stream movies over your Internet connection.

You can likewise access some of your digital movie purchases in your living room using a Movies Anywhere-compatible app on your Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV, Chromecast, Roku, smart television, or similar.