Apple TV is a premium streaming box without ads. The privacy aspect is less clear, but probably better than Samsung, Google and Roku that are all harvesting data.
Apple chargers more and isn't openly selling data (Samsung) or openly selling ads (Google). The commercial activity provides some insight here, that suggests Apple is better for privacy.
For paid options I see no sense in decentralization.
But a standard protocol for rental tied with some protocol for payments (like GNU Taler) to rent movies from any source with one tap and no install would be cool.
How do you set up the IR receiver? I would like to use Linux if possible. It's often such a pain to set up things like this. Took me forever to get my Xbox controller to pair.