2nd Gen Apple TV Owners discussion

As tempting as the price is, I already have a gen 1 AppleTV and Netflix streaming via my TiVo.  The only thing the gen 2 AppleTV would get me (out of the box, at least) is the $0.99 TV show rentals, which I can do without.

In fact, I hooked up an optical cable to my gen 1 AppleTV last night and watched an iTunes movie rental just fine.

Enjoy your new AppleTV, Sam!

I am asking all of you who purchased an AppleTV

to keep the rest of us informed.

I have been thinking long and hard about this....

That Steve Jobs is a genius.  

I'm going to write about this more in another thread

and risk the abuse I am going to receive for writing it....

I don't agree with but understand the reason why 

Steve Jobs doesn't want to adopt Blu-ray into Apple systems.

Jobs sees the future of home entertainment to be via 

downloading.

Let me talk about my predicament.  I have an been an avid 

collector of video since VHS.  Spent thousands of dollars

and I own thousands upon thousands of titles that I will

never watch again.

I have no room for any more DVDs or Blu-rays.  The

other day I looked at my entire two rooms with shelves

filled with titles and I asked myself, "Why?"

Yeah, it's kind of cool having an entire library of films

at your fingertips that you own to watch whenever you 

want.  However, you can say the same for what's

available (or will be) on Apple TV.

Why invest in packaged media that one, will be replaced

by yet another format in a few years and two, is subjected

to disc rot?

What if anytime I wanted to watch a movie I could just

sit in front of my TV and rent it?  Instead of paying $20

for a new release on a disc, I can rent it the day of release

for $4.  If I love it that much, then I buy it on Blu-ray.

Now certainly, as a purist, I understand that something

like Apple TV will not deliver Blu-ray quality to my home.

For that reason, I will still pick up the occasional favorite

release on that format.

However, I can certainly see the general public being

enticed by AppleTV and the fact that they can rent a film

for $4 instead of purchasing it for $20.  We also know that

the general public doesn't really care about the loss of 

quality they receive with streaming.  I mean, Apple helped

destroy CDs and turned people onto lower bitrate downloads.

I think the public will accept streamed television that looks

mostly HD.  Perhaps I am wrong about that.

...and don't misconstrue what I am saying here.  As a purist

I would rather watch films in the best possible format.  However,

I don't need to go out and buy packaged media in the manner

in which I have done all these years.  I have spent thousands.

For me, I have been through 4 format changes since the

late 70s.  I have repurchased titles over and over again only

to realize the process will continue forever.  Why not stop

purchasing the films I really don't need to own and instead

rent them?   

I haven't made a clear decision on all this yet, but the

introduction of these new lower-priced devices like AppleTV

certainly has me questioning the things that I held holy all

these years.  

Ron, if you want streaming, you might consider the Roku, which for the same price as the Apple TV offers 1080p instead of 720p.  Now, granted, Amazon (it's main rental provider) does not offer anything in 1080p.  But that could change over time.

In the time I owned my Gen 1 Apple TV, I streamed audio a few times, played with YouTube, and rented 2 movies.  The last movie is currently in theaters, "I'm Still Here" and it cost $7.99 + tax.  That's about the same price as a movie ticket.  The HD picture was riddled with artifacts.  Maybe the Gen 2 Apple TV would have been better, but I doubt it.

I still use Netflix for disc rentals, and I use my TiVo for Netflix streaming.  The convenience factor is definitely there, so I can see streaming being appealing.  But I still like having physical ownership of media, even if it means I have to pay for it.

Of course, you can buy downloaded movies from both iTunes and Amazon.  You just have to provide the hard disk space.

Decisions, decisions!

Steve,

That's very helpful advice.

Does Roku offer the streaming from PC that AppleTV does?
 

That might be the important trade-off.

Looking at roku.com, it says there is a feature called "MP3tunes" which will sync for free up to 10 gigs of music to "the cloud" which can then stream to any Roku device.  There is a premium version of the service, that presumably allows more music to be synced to the cloud for a fee.

http://mp3tunes.com/cb/rokustep1

So, there is no way to stream directly from your Mac with the Roku.  Score 1 for the AppleTV.

Edited to clarify streaming from Mac to Roku

Steve,

Check out the video below.

It does say that it will stream your iTunes music and video.

Also does something called "air play" whereas if you are

watching a movie, say on your iPad while in the back of

a car you could come home, select that "air play" feature

and watch the rest on your Apple TV.

Yes, even the Gen 1 Apple TV supports streaming from iTunes.  I can't get "Air Play" to work, though.  That's probably exclusive to Gen 2.

The Netflix integration is better than the TiVo, too.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sam Posten 

This may be the first Apple device I will jailbreak, i think it's going to be so huge to have apps on it.

This notion that apps on the aTV will be great: why?

There's no direct touch interface so none of the existing apps, particularly games, will operate well as-is. No keyboard or mouse mechanism, so web-apps like Safari, FaceBook and Twitter don't make sense. And why do you need apps for movie / TV / music / podcasts, when you can download all that already through the iTunes system?

Info apps, like News and Weather tools, could be nice, but that doesn't strike me as a "huge" deal. Isn't it easier to grab your iPhone than turn on the HT to get the weather?

Maybe you mean streaming media services like Pandora? Ok, I can see that. But that's a pretty small slice of the app ecosystem.

So: apps on the aTV...I don't get it???

It's easy to do this poorly. Just slam a conventional OS X mouse-driven interface onto the aTV, use the trackpad like a conventional track and bob's your uncle. But it's not obvious how to use a direct-touch OS in an indirect manner with a remote control that's 0.5% the area of the screen.

Do they convert iOS back to a mouse-driven system, with a new mouse cursor on screen that tracks your TrackPad movements? Does the trackpad map 1:1 with the screen? Or is it a relative motion input device like a conventional trackpad or mouse? How do you know where to tap on the trackpad to plant a Plant or catch a falling Sun on the 96" screen? How do you play the game if your attention is split between the trackpad and the screen?

More practically: why not just buy Plants vs Zombies on your Xbox 360 or PS3 and play today on your 96" screen?

So again...apps???

Well I still wish they would do something about the organizing of Seasons, also a method like alphabetical search when scrolling thru large libraries would be welcome