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251 Comments
- stilesja, on 02/23/2008, -6/+111Ehhh... with some caveats. I'm not one of these "put a DVR in it" guys. I "get it" that on demand internet delivery is what apple is going for, but Apple has yet to right one wrong. Apple is right, people want to own music. With take 2 it learned its lesson with movies: Most people want to rent vs. buy. Still going good so far. Here is where they go wrong. People want to SUBSCRIBE to television. CableTV and Sat Services prove this. They do not care to keep their TV shows for ever. You should be able to subscribe to an entire season of a tv or an entire network of TV shows for significantly less money than purchasing one episode for $1.99. You won't be able to keep each episode for ever though, lets say they are viewable for 30 days or 2 weeks from when you first view them... something like that. I'd love for apple to give me a reason to cancel my cable service.
- BrendanSheehan, on 02/23/2008, -5/+65I have some suggestions which I think Apple TV needs:
1. A standard DVD slot to play our existing DVD collection, so we can get rid of our DVD players and clear up some space for a cooler, more simple set-up. The last thing anyone wants is "another" device under our TV's.
2. A longer rental period. As many have stated so far, if you have a kid you might not get a chance to watch your movie in one night if he starts to cry. There's no reason why we shouldn't have a 72 hour rental period. No one is going to watch a movie twice in that period of time, thus it makes zero difference to Apple or the studios. The "you can always buy it" arguments have no weight here. 72 hours merely gives "everyone" an opportunity to finish the movie, which is why we rent them.
3. iTunes TV show subscription service? They could have a few packages. There's are merely examples [actual numbers not the point]. $15 for 3 shows every month. [1 show = all episodes of Lost which air over that month for example.] $30 for 6 shows every month. And $60 for 16 shows every month. $80 = all you can eat.
5. Streaming live news and sports.
6. RSS reader. - WiseWeasel, on 02/23/2008, -11/+65Meh, I have an AppleTV, and they didn't nail anything.
- The new interface absolutely sucks ass for browsing your own library of music and video, now requiring many more clicks to get to the directory listing.
- There's still no freaking music visualizer (I'm sick of watching my album covers and photos already)!
- There's no way to organize movies into playlists or folders, and you have no choice but to browse through your entire movie list to pick the one you want (genres are not an acceptable way to organize movies due to naming variability and movies that fall into several categories).
- There's still no SDK for 3rd party plugin development, so we could get some 3rd party supported divx playback, and other interesting apps to take advantage of this hardware's capabilities.
- The video rental terms of use are unacceptable, with a much-too-short viewing period. I need at least 4-5 days of viewing period, preferably a week, so me and my roommates all get a chance to see it when our schedules allow. I'll be sticking with Netflix until they get that fixed.
- Performance in video playback and even album displaying during music playback is choppy since the update.
They still have a lot of work to do before this can be considered nailed. - chris9902, on 02/23/2008, -48/+102No Xvid support so it didn't nail *****. Go back and try again.
- TheFiestyFaun, on 02/23/2008, -0/+36What happened to 4?
- brycelb, on 02/23/2008, -2/+36Why do people sign their posts? And what's with the random link?
- inactive, on 02/23/2008, -13/+41I nailed your mom the second time around.
- vacax, on 02/23/2008, -0/+27$5 for one 24-hour HD rental? If you watch more than two movies per month, it makes more sense just to get Netflix. For $16.99 I get 3 Blu-rays at a time with unlimited rentals, no 24 hour limits. Not to mention full 1080p and lossless audio. Why should I buy an AppleTV device when it can't even stream my video files?
- phoomp, on 02/23/2008, -0/+25Agreed. I don't want to pay $2 for a TV episode that I'll only watch once. That's way more expensive than what I pay for cable. Let me rent TV episodes.
- vault, on 02/23/2008, -14/+38Don't know why this comment got dugg down, I completely agree...the fact it doesn't have xvid makes it useless to me. I'm not going to convert all my stuff into h.264 just to do things the Apple way.
- fkr3, on 02/23/2008, -3/+27Thanks for your inspiring comment.
Trent Crandall
http://www.*****.com - JigoroKano, on 02/23/2008, -1/+24We don't talk about that.
- BrendanSheehan, on 02/23/2008, -1/+21Like Apple undermine its iTunes music business by putting CD burners in their computers. All things are relative, if downloading a movie makes more sense people will choose to do it, and it does, they just need to extend the rental period.
PS: people don't like when you add your URL on digg like that. It is not a forum and that is not a signature. - Daniel591992, on 02/23/2008, -3/+21Buying DRM'd music is barely owning :(
- Macattack15, on 02/23/2008, -1/+18I bought an Apple TV when it first came out and I really have loved every minute of it. I think the problem is you just have to think outside the box. Before you digg me down for this know I have a 360, a cable box, and a hard modded 1st gen xbox and I feel that all of them have provided a sub-par media experience (maybe not XBMC, but more about that below).
The 360 is just far too complicated and limits you to very narrow formats and basically if you have a mac forget it unless you want to pay even more money. My friends and I also think that the rentals on the 360 are the stupidest, slowest, most confusing thing on the planet, it takes forever to download movies, some things you can do A with or rent for a certain period of time and others have different rules, the quality isnt that great, and I hate converting points to dollars.
The modded xbox? ***** amazing, best thing I ever did to it, it nets me sooo much more use out of something that would have gotten thrown in a closet. XBMC is the ***** and if you can do it, the range of playable formats and visualizers is insane, i really cant say enough good things about it, if you have the component cables it upconverts dvds to high definition and it has imho one of the best upscalers I have ever seen. Alas there is a downside, honestly? how many people can (hard or soft) mod an xbox, I should know, people want easy and simple, average joe schmoe consumer doesnt want to deal with running executable code on a thumb drive so he can install some software he had to get on an underground ftp site, it just isnt going to happen for 99% of people. Finally its also a pain to transfer media onto the xbox, ftp is clumsy and I hate having to keep changing my configuration settings (although the inclusion of fat-32 support in XBMC was great, because i have usb ports on my box for thumb drives).
point 3 of my (now turning into) rant is that I hate Scientific Atlanta, their cable boxes? they suck *****, wanna "restart" and start watching a show from the beginning if you tuned in late? 50/50 chance when you hit A that the box crashes. It randomly stops recording my shows, its slow as *****, digital cable quality sucks, and Time Warners HD channels are sooo compressed i wonder why they bother. Want to mass delete shows? well if your cable box fills up you get a nice screen where you can check a bunch of recordings and delete them all at once, oh you havent filled up the box yet? sorry, you cant get there! 30 minutes later you have deleted 10 shows. its really that bad.
So, finally, the Apple TV, when I first got it I used it exclusively for music, to stream video podcasts to my tv, and to play tv shows, videos, and movies I had on my computer (I have never bought anything on iTunes 'cept music). But now, WOW, renting movies is ***** awesome, for example today there is a giant snowstorm, I don't want to go to the movie rental place, its also cheaper then blockbuster, I can get it in HD (which I think looks on par with uncompressed HD on my 42 inch 720p tv, if you have a bigger tv or you sit 6 inches from the tv then yeah, its not quite as sharp, but still) and I don't have to worry about bringing it back. I thought it was convenient that I could subscribe to podcasts on my computer and have iTunes automatically feed them to the Apple TV, but the ability to browse and subscribe right on my TV is waaaay better. I will probably still buy music on my computer because well, how many times are you in front of your tv and realize that you have to buy some song, although the new airtunes support is sweet as my ATV replaced my airport express and I always though it was a pain that I couldn't have it synced with my other airports expresses. I bought my mom an ATV and she thinks its practically magic that her photos go straight to the TV and I don't think she could be happier. Handbrake + ATV? what more is there to say? match made in heaven, I rip my dvds to the computer and stream them to the Apple TV, thats right stream them, they only had a 40gb when i bought my ATV and thats plenty enough because at least on my network it streams almost instantly. The 5.1 support in handbrake is also great. playing a DVD side by side between XBMC and my ATV is identical. Youtube is gimmicky, but useful occasionally, and if you have a .Mac account its really cool to be able to play your videos and show off your photos right on the TV. Basically I don't get why everyone is getting there panties up in a bunch about iTunes content, I basically get all my stuff from outside sources and it all works great, looks better then cable, and isn't much harder then remembering to record a show (or if your ***** ***** sucking cable box doesn't record Mythbusters for whatever reason you can just torrent it and watch it on the ATV!) I really think if everyone could find a use for it because honestly we all know most people cant set up or deal with an XBMC install and the price is really really reasonable, right in iPod territory and we all know hoe many people buy those, now when XBMC's osx port is mature and stable... well, if you want to spend 600 for a mac mini, do it. My two media center loves, Apple TV and XBMC. - inactive, on 02/23/2008, -3/+19Get with the times. It's the new way to make free money.
Astrosmash
http://coca-cola.com - joshrice, on 02/23/2008, -0/+16Couldn't get it up the first?
- inactive, on 02/23/2008, -6/+21they should just let me rent HD movies on my expensive as hell apple computer already
- brownrecluse888, on 02/23/2008, -7/+21There should be a rule on appletv comments: If you don't own one, or have never used one, then shut the ***** up!! How can you comment/bash a product you've never used?
For me, I purchased a refurbished Apple TV for under $200, and after just 2 months canceled my cable tv. That alone saved me over $800 bucks the first year.
Now, I can sit down in front of my high def tv, and with one extremely simple remote browse my 400+ plus DVD collection(I used the free Handbrake Software to convert my DVD collection to Apple TV Format) and in seconds start watching any of my movies without finding the DVD, loading it my DVD player, etc. And its in 5.1 surround sound and looks just as good as the original DVD.
I can also, with one press of my remote browse my entire music collection, playlists, etc. EVERYONE, and I mean EVERYONE that has seen my setup is completely blown away, especially when I tell them they too can have this beautiful simplicity for a bit over 200 bucks. When my relatives come in town I can in just a minute create an incredible slide show of my last vacation with music, all viewed on my wide screen tv without having to burn DVD's, march them into my office, etc. Each of these features alone is worth the 200 bucks of my investment.
And now I can sit down, this second, and browse thru an impressive selection of movie rentals that are less expensive than blockbuster, and I can start watching them immediately. And this 24 hour window this is *****, you can pause the movie, come back many many days later and still finish the movie.
In addition to all of that, now I can, for FREE, that's FREE folks, browse thru a huge collection of video podcasts, that are essentially a collection of free video content. Tonight I noticed that HBO added Real Time with Bill Maher to the podcast section. Now, I think many are confused on this. What this means is that I can sit down, right now and watch Real Time any time I want, the full unedited HBO show via my apple tv for free, with NO cable costs. Or browse thru all of the National Geographic video podcasts, daily news videos and on and on.
The beauty here is that there are NO, I repeat NO recurring costs!! I do not miss cable at all. Just about everyone who sees my apple tv 2.0 setup is sold from the go.
So before you go blast this system, why not experience it first????
Oh, and by the way, I think I'll go right now and rent a high def movie for 2.99 without driving to the store or waiting five days for netflix, or maybe I'm feeling frugal and I'll browse thru the massive collection of FREE HIGH DEF video selections available via my apple tv..... - mmmmmbiscuits, on 02/23/2008, -0/+14As a new ATV owner and former XBMC fanboy, you sum up a lot of my frustrations pretty well there. If it weren't for the ease with which I reverted to the 1.0 image and patched it up with AwkwardTV, I'd be pretty dissatisfied with my purchase. Size + HDMI + hackability are pretty nice for $200, but it sucks that I have to rely on 3rd-party tweaks to realize any of the true potential of this thing.
- geoken, on 02/23/2008, -8/+21Windows Media Center and AppleTV both fall into the same boat. They heavily bias their services to the point were your pre-existing media becomes a second class citizen. They present you beautiful cover art, sortable tags and descriptive plot summaries for the content they're trying to sell you, but they won't even offer a method for you to do this to your own media. Even the open source apps (mythTV, MediaPortal, etc.) give you the ability to automatically download covert art and plot summaries for all the videos in your library.
- SweetJones, on 02/23/2008, -0/+11yeah but your still buying the season, not renting it for cheaper.
- tolbs, on 02/23/2008, -0/+11I'm Secretary of State, brought to you by Carl's Jr.
- knightboat, on 02/23/2008, -2/+13It's a good thing then that your TV can already play live TV with a coax-in.
- thewebguy, on 02/23/2008, -1/+11this article is strange, seems poorly written
- mmmmmbiscuits, on 02/23/2008, -1/+11SSH + Perian 1.1 = my new AppleTV purchased 2 weeks ago has XviD support, so no complaints here. I'm hoping for some sort of OSXBMC eventually, though, because the ATV interface is not so great IMHO.
- JigoroKano, on 02/23/2008, -1/+10Well... it is your mom we're talking about.
- nolt, on 02/23/2008, -1/+10agreed. wtf.
apple mustve bough him a sammich. - SPThom, on 02/23/2008, -2/+10Not to mention they sell a fair amount of DRM-free tunes too.
- deadbaby, on 02/23/2008, -0/+8$229 vs. $600 for an entry level Mini is quite the jump in price.
- JigoroKano, on 02/23/2008, -0/+8Lossy -> Lossy conversion = a potentially big degradation in quality.
Never do it. - WiseWeasel, on 02/23/2008, -1/+8Yeah, obviously, someone who doesn't own a TV is not going to be in the target market for the AppleTV. It's about extending iTunes to your living room TV and stereo, not for use with a computer which already has iTunes and a bunch more media playback software. Color me unsurprised at your lack of enthusiasm...
- rightmindx, on 02/23/2008, -0/+7Correction, that's 20-25 ad-free EPISODES off of iTunes every month. So if you watch more than 5 TV shows (on average less than one a day), according to your math you're better off getting cable. And we're just talking about shows like "Lost", "24", "House", etc. here. We're not taking into account news channels, sports channels, movie channels, etc.
- deadbaby, on 02/23/2008, -0/+7AirTunes was a huge improvement to the AppleTV. Rentals are nice and all but AirTunes is something I am using constantly.
- Auzy, on 02/23/2008, -1/+8I worked at a apple premium reseller, and whilst this may be true, its still unlikely to sell well (at least here in Aus). We have very limited bandwidth here (most people are capped at 10gb a month still).
Also, the reason they didn't sell before was because there is literally, no benefit to having an Apple TV, if you already own another mac. Only rich customers are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a box, that cant record TV, when they can use their computer. And even the rich customers nearly always ended up buying a Mac Mini anyway, in fact many cases, they actually pointlessly purchased both.
You'll notice a short term improvement in sales again, like the sales we saw when AppleTV was first released, but until broadband is improved in aus, they wont sell well. Anyone who can afford a AppleTV, probably can afford a mac mini instead, which can record TV too, and wirelessly transmit it to ipod touches.
If I was still in sales, do you think I'd be pushing the AppleTV, or a MacMini? - colincornaby, on 02/23/2008, -0/+7The Mac doesn't support HDCP, but the AppleTV does. That's the reason HD movies aren't on the Mac yet.
- chronichyjinx, on 02/23/2008, -1/+8even my $20 dvd player has xvid support
- fahrvergnuugen, on 02/23/2008, -2/+9And who's to blame? Microsoft? Apple? I doubt it.
How about the MPAA?? - mmmmmbiscuits, on 02/23/2008, -0/+6http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/ is where I found all the tricks
- vault, on 02/23/2008, -0/+6Should've guessed there was a hack for that hehe http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/10/how-to-play-div ...
Is that what you did? - joel8x, on 02/23/2008, -3/+9Your interface qualm is flawed. The new interface only requires more clicks to get to your movies the first time you go to them. The next time you highlight movies, your last selection (in this case - my movies) is highlighted automatically. I was afraid of this problem too when I saw pictures of it, but once I used it I was completely relieved as it is just as quick to get to my content as before the update.
- NotaFanboy87, on 02/23/2008, -0/+6You're very right, I applaud you. However, this comparison is invalid. You're comparing owning a movie vs. renting a movie. Apple realized that the movie buying industry just doesn't work online and that renting movies conveniently was the 'right thing.' So to compare TV vs. NetFlix, let's see... 30 second download vs. 3-4 day mail, no skip playback vs. scratched overly mailed DVDs (which are sometimes bootlegged), limited watch time vs. 'unlimited' watch time, buy on-demand vs. subscription scheme (that you have to be a movie addict to actually make worth the money), and automatic 'return' vs. packaging and mailing (often with postage!). Hmmm... how about this, rent the movie in HD on AppleTV and if you like it, go to Wal-Mart and buy the Blu-Ray knowing on the way home that it's going to be even better. Just a lil perspective for ya.
- HeroIgnored, on 02/23/2008, -3/+9Not too impressed. My PS3 + TVersity on my XP box gives me tons of streaming video and music content, straight to my tv. Plus, my ps3 supports blu ray, divx/xvid, dvds and plays some awesome games. Why did I want apple tv again?
- boodog, on 02/23/2008, -1/+7Yeah and you can continue to pay through the nose and continue to support the cable TV business model. One that is over priced and forces you to buy things you dont want. Thank god for the Internet...havent had cable for a few years now
- chronichyjinx, on 02/23/2008, -0/+5Apparently Brent Crandall does
- stilesja, on 02/23/2008, -0/+5What? You got a problem with fat chicks? More cushion for the pushin' bro!
- misbehavior, on 02/23/2008, -1/+6Yep. You can also pair your Apple TV remote with the unit, so it won't affect anything else. This is an option in the menus and covered in the manual.
- misbehavior, on 02/23/2008, -1/+6The point is it is super easy and quick (and legal), and all can be done from the couch on a whim, while browsing the whole selection of tv shows and movies, watching the full previews, etc. and deciding what to download right from the couch.
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