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David Pogue Reviews the Apple TV
necro81 writes "David Pogue of the NY Times has devoted his weekly column to the newly released Apple TV. He also has a video blurb to go with it. He compares it to the XBox360 and Netgear's EVA8000, which also deliver content traditionally trapped in a PC onto a TV set. Apple TV Pros: setup is as easy as can be, it's small and silent form factor will be good for home theaters, and the interface and remote control are intuitive. Cons: HDTV only, playback is limited to formats playable within iTunes, and no internet functionality other than movie trailers."
Already trademarked as the eye TV, I understand. I believe that this is the product that holds that trademark: http://www.elgato.com/
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
TV as we know it is a rapidly dying market. More than half of the people I know don't have an antenna/cable/satellite TV. I haven't had a "TV" for anything other than games and DVD's for 5+ years. The quality of the content on "TV" is consistently "lowest common denominator" and it's beyond absurd to pay for TV (cable or satellite), and then have to sit through advertisements.
I don't respond to AC's.
I was going to ignore, but I had to plug Myth2iPod. Singly the greatest hack I've seen come out of the MythTV community. And, it should work with AppleTV - AppleTV plays DivX content, and Myth will happily transcode to DivX. Setup a feed in iTunes, and fiddle with the encoding settings in myth2iPod (e.g., better quality, maybe encode to h.264) and leave iTunes running on a computer in the basement with a network share. Bingo, instant MythTV feed to AppleTV via iTunes and myth2iPod. And that's available *now*. I'm sure some Mac developer will come up with an even slicker solution - you can run the frontend on a Mac these days, after all.
i'm not sure i understand the point of apple tv. i have a tivo that no only lets me play files off my computer, but also let's me record tv. what's the point of the apple tv (only 50 hours), which costs more than an 80 hour tivo with dual tuner that comes with a 1 year subscription? with my tivo, i can move movies to my computer (currently only windows, but possibly macos as well, i'm not sure), record tv on 2 stations at the same time, have a nice tv guide, watch movies from my computer on my tv, play music on my computer through my tv, show picture slideshows from my computer on my tv, download amazon unbox videos, and watch tivo casts that i get off the internet. what's the point of apple tv if it doesn't even do half of this, yet costs the same? i just don't get it.
please me, have no regrets.
What is going to make AppleTV worth the money is this:
Video Podcasting.
There are already a plethera of great video podcasts available, and with AppleTV you can sit and watch them in your livingroom, not on a computer or 2" ipod video screen.
Sure, a bit of effort every day, you can download the same content and burn it to DVD, or get it to play some other way on your TV, but with AppleTV and a smart iTunes playlist, you can have a couple hours of content that's new and interesting and commercial-free every single night.
This isn't a strike at Tivo, this is a stike at Prime Time programming of all kinds.
I get the fact that it's supposed to be the iPod, but for you living room. It makes sense for Apple's perspective. They have content (in this case TV shows and movies) that they want you to buy and watch. What's a primary factor keeping from people watching? They want to use their TVs.
.. there already).
.. but only if you enjoy spending a lot of extra . It doesn't give unique functionality like an iPod (or any other MP3 player), where portability is essential. It just makes things a little easier.
Now in theory you can take the signal from your computer, and send it to the TV. Of course, you might have to buy some of your own cables/get hardware. Thus Apple's solution. Provide a simple box that takes care of all of that for you. It's a small box that just magically streams all your content (across your various computers) to a single point, which can be hooked up to a TV.
BUT, as a consumer this doesn't make sense. I like the idea of picking what shows I want to watch, but I actually don't want to own most of them. If the Apple TV allowed me 'rent' a show, I would buy one in a second. Or if I could pay a monthly fee (say: 10 shows subscription), again, I'd totally bite. But paying premium to own something I plan on only watching once has absolutely no appeal to me. It's too expensive. It's still cheaper in the long run to just get cable if you go above 4-5 shows (daily show, colbert report, myth busters, robot chicken
I don't see Apple doing this anytime soon, as it seems to go against their current business model. So instead they seem to get some strange compromise. Something almost useful
Maybe Apple has something up their sleeves. I keep waiting, but it isn't looking too likely...
The 360 is a gigantic, noisy Windows PC designed to spread the Win32 monopoly into the living room. The Apple TV is a tiny, silent iTunes streaming device. I'll take the Apple TV.
"Sufferin' succotash."
As far as I understand it, iCal Server was written by Apple using no other OSS, yet they are releasing it as OSS. Therefore, they were not compelled by a license to opensource iCal...they just did it.
By leaving out the tuner, they left out two of the four killer apps for a set top box: pausing live TV and season passes for time shifting TV shows. Of the other two killer apps (streaming content from the internet and from one's private network) one is a bit of a pain because you have to go to a dedicated workstation to buy movies off of the internet. As of right now, I'd rather buy a Mac mini with an EyeTV dongle and add DVD playback and a tv tuner for just over double the cost of the AppleTV.
Too bad I can't afford to do that.
Not that I'm arguing that this product won't be successful. It just won't be as successful as it could have been. I'll wager, though, that Apple will add the missing feature by the end of this calendar year.
Yuck. You still need ANOTHER pc running. which is crap. this thing should be able to grab that rss feed directly. The netgear mentioned in the summary is also crap as it needs a windows PC running universal media plug and play server which sucks.
Honestly the Mediagate 350 is the absolute best choice of ANY stand alone HD video playback device, it can play from the internal hard drive (up to a 500gb) as well as network shares and play every single video format file I can find to throw at it. (I bet it runs mplayer in it's linux os)
I am tired of these medicore devices that come out that require a PC to make them play the content I want. No PC people. the perfect device is a unit that will have some hard drive in it and can play any feed from democracy or RSS feed. Anything else is crap.
Yes I am calling the apple tv product crap. Its great for the locked inot Itunes world, but for real iptv it is utter crap.