4 Ways To Skip The Apple Television And Be Glad You Did (1 Viewer)

Are you unimpressed with all the Apple television hype?
You still have options to bring a smart TV into your home affordable.
The best part is that you won't even need to buy a new TV.
These HDMI sticks are only the size of a USB drive, but they turn your television into a full-featured Android computer.
Instead of shelling out who-knows-how-much money for the Apple television, most of these can be acquired for less than $100.
You'll be playing games, watching movies, and browsing the web, all from your television as quickly as you can plug one in.

Equiso is currently raising money on Kickstarter to fund the production of its Smart TV. Browse the web, play games, watch movies, and use apps all from your television with help from the special "air remote" that comes with it.

Watch a product demo here.

I kickstarted the GameStick, which is very similar, tho like the ouya it is aimed at games and not TV. It's delayed but should be here soon. These boxes are all interesting from a geeky perspective but....Here's the thing tho, none of these really solve the problem, which is the cable company. Fan TV doesn't, Xbox doesn't, Jobs claims to have cracked it before he died but that remains to be seen. Nobody is using the smart TV functions because they are all wonky, incompatible with each other, and slow.Anything that doesn't instant on and allow channel switching for all of your available cable channels at a reasonable rate plus full DVR is dead in the water, it's that simple. Whether that be Apple's solution or someone else's.

Kevin Collins said:

Instead of shelling out who-knows-how-much money for the Apple television, most of these can be acquired for less than $100.

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???AppleTV also available for under $100.

DaveF said:

???AppleTV also available for under $100.

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They are referring to the rumored upcoming Apple TV (the one that is actually a TV).

Sam Posten said:

Here's the thing tho, none of these really solve the problem, which is the cable company. Fan TV doesn't, Xbox doesn't, Jobs claims to have cracked it before he died but that remains to be seen. Nobody is using the smart TV functions because they are all wonky, incompatible with each other, and slow.

Click to expand...

And if they're anything like the smart-TV apps on my Panasonic Viera, they're also not very GOOD.

On VieraCast, I have the usual share of mainstream apps--Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu--a few streaming-radio and useful weather apps, but the rest is like browsing the desperate cheap product at a dollar store:
Viewster with its collection of public-domain movies, Vimeo, DailyMotion and a few other YouTube wannabes, a few low-rent casual-game apps that might be on a five-dollar CD-Rom at Target, and a handful of foreign on-demand TV channels offering me the best in Russian, Chinese and Indian TV, usually untranslated.
Basically you get your pick of whatever lone gold-prospectors are out there in the wilderness still trying to strike the bonanza of "Smart TV", and digging up the same fools-gold nuggets as each other.
(About the only new app-channels I've been using have been 3Doo, a user-submitted 3D channel that hasn't been updated in months, and a "Children's cartoons" channel offering obscure indie and foreign children's-show pilots/samplers that literally seem to have been rejected by the licensing conventions.)

And even then, I end up discovering that what recognizable functions my Smart Viera can do are already done better by my Playstation 3, which already has the major-lable sampling of specially console-made apps for Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, Amazon and Crunchyroll, but also optimized to stream better resolution on faster data. When I'm not using it to play games or watch Blu 3D's, of course.
There's a lot of people amazed by the buzzword of "Smart TV", and a lot of people jumping at the first option that will provide it (just get a Roku user to defend his sometime), but needs to get to the stage where a few leaders start setting the standard to judge by.