Making promises you cannot keep is not such a good idea. Back in January when Steve Jobs announced with bells and whistles a deal with all the major movie studios for iTunes Movie Rentals, he said that by the end of February the store would offer one thousand titles and 100 movies in high definition video and with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound.

Promises, promises… Last week, Christopher Breen from MacWorld was ready to check out if Apple had kept its promise. He started browsing to iTunes Movie Rentals from his Apple TV 2.0, but the promised one thousand movies were nowhere to be found.

When Breen selected the All Rentals link he found only 378 titles. When he used the iTunes’ Power Search feature, he discovered that there were 399 titles.

Breen said that in the All HD area, he found that Apple is close to the promise of 100 HD movies, as when verified there were 91 titles available. However, not all are offered with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound, Breen noted.

However, it is hard to say what went wrong. Maybe Apple has overestimated the time needed to post a movie online. Maybe there is a bottleneck in its collaboration with the movie studios. A total of 399 titles is still impressive though. Let’s wait and see how Apple will deal with this problem.

Especially since unlike with its previous experience with iTunes Music, the movie rental business faces an entrenched competition from established firms like Amazon.com and Netflix.