It always amazes me when people buy set top boxes like Apple TV etc. when you can go to tigerdirect and get a desktop computer box with one of the latest CPU chips that will hook directly to your HD input of your HD TV and allows you to watch Hulu Netflix youtube and all the Network Internet channels in HD and it costs about 350 bucks. Plus you can play all the latest games and if you are knowledgeable in wares and such you can record most of these things and store them on your hard drive.
You also get the latest in Dolby Digital Sound if you have the proper sound system to hook it to and if you want blu-ray you can get the box with a blu-ray dvd player in it for about 30 bucks more.
And if you watch you can get the same thing for less than 300 when the put them on sale a few times a year.
We love our Computer Box that is hooked to our entertainment system. I am using it right now to make this post. FR looks good on a 58 inch screen!
Right now I have one 1.5 Terrabyte HD in my machine and we are going to get another soon and put all our home movies and pics on it as well as our favorite DVDs. I've already got most of my music on this HD.
I have no problem with a dedicated device, there are certainly instances when one makes sense. Not everyone is tech savvy, and for secondary tv’s a $40 or $50 device to watch netflix is fine..
I just don’t get this particular Apple play, apple has a nice interface, but its overall product is nothing remarkable, and everyone knows apple would love to control TV like it does audio and the smartphone market.. so I can see why they started playing with this thing 5 years ago... However I just don’t see this playing out the way Apple I am sure would want it to. There is just nothing distinctive about this product that could remotely shift folks or cable operators en masse to adopt this and make it a draw in and of itself. IE, I’m going to drop comcast and go to fios because fios offers me an APPLE TV BOX and comcast doesn’t... like what happened with iPhone and the iPod...
I just don’t see this happening in this space. I see this as a commodity item and I just don’t see what Apple can do to it that’s going to make it more than that, of course I am sure they are trying their best to do it, but I just don’t see it.
Speaking of big screens and computers, I can still to this day remember a friend of mine who had is TI 994A tied to a huge projection screen TV back in the day :)
Drawing only 2W and producing no noise while streaming a 1080P movie is a pretty good selling point of these devices vs. a full computer. Apple actually tried your way, since the original Apple TV was just a variant of a Mac Mini. It sold better when they went to mobile device specs and $100.
I have a different vision I’m moving towards: All the media on a server, sitting where nobody sees it. Stream from there to all the devices, including the computers, iPad and even the phones. I’m thinking 4x2 TB in a RAID5, giving me 6 TB storage. It needs a basic case and yard sale grade video card and LCD monitor, but a good mobo with SATA RAID HDD controller and a pretty powerful CPU to re-encode on the fly for low-bandwidth mobile clients.