What do you folks think about the new Mac T. V. coming out end of month?

[baja]

http://www.apple.com/appletv/

[baja]

Works on PCs with I Tunes too.

[OrangeShadow]

be nice if it said how big the tv was. i really dont think its worth shelling out 300 bucks just to watch movies on that thing

[baja]

It syncs your I Tunes with your HD TV so you can play down loaded movies and shows

[alkemical]

Oh i turned my Xbox into something like that.

[baja]

iTunes to Apple TV, wire free.
Apple TV connects to your TV via an HDMI port or component video and audio ports. Its built-in, superfast 802.11 wireless capability syncs your iTunes library to any Mac or PC in the house. Best of all, what's on Apple TV stays in sync: Anytime you change your library in iTunes, it changes on Apple TV — wirelessly, automatically.

What’s on TV? Whatever you want.
Apple TV puts your iTunes library — movies, TV shows, music, and podcasts — plus movie trailers from Apple.com on your TV. And your digital photos from iPhoto on a Mac or Adobe Photoshop Elements or Adobe Album on a Windows PC appear in high definition, so you can put on a stunning big-screen slideshow.

[alkemical]

Yeah i did that with a linux install using something like FreeVo

MS was ahead of the curve with the Xbox and using "push" technologies with Media Centre. I had to go another route due to my own concerns on MS and MAC software.

[Billy Clyde Puckett]

Gates said a couple of weeks ago that TVs will be obsolete in 5 years. He is right. As soon as the content companies come up with a workable revenue model, all show will be "on demand" and viewable on multiple devices. Cable companies are going to get screwed because they don't have the infrastructure to deliver, service or bill for such services. Disney failed in their content delivery model a couple of years ago. Starz has some services that are pointed in that direction.

[alkemical]

Verizon is making the switch soon due to FIOS coming out.

[Billy Clyde Puckett]

Verizon is making the switch soon due to FIOS coming out.

FIOs is just cable with the final delivery (last mile) coming through fiber cable instead of copper. They don't have an infrastructure any better than the cable companies.

[alkemical]

FIOs is just cable with the final delivery (last mile) coming through fiber cable instead of copper. They don't have an infrastructure any better than the cable companies.

IMO having fiber to my door instead of copper is better.

[maven]

Oh i turned my Xbox into something like that.

Same here.

[sixtimeseight]

Once again, Apple comes out with a technology that has been around for a while, pretends they invented it and charges way too much for it.
See also: ipod.

[maven]

http://www.apple.com/appletv/

Where's 1080i or 1080P suport?

[Crushaholic]

Gates said a couple of weeks ago that TVs will be obsolete in 5 years. He is right. As soon as the content companies come up with a workable revenue model, all show will be "on demand" and viewable on multiple devices. Cable companies are going to get screwed because they don't have the infrastructure to deliver, service or bill for such services. Disney failed in their content delivery model a couple of years ago. Starz has some services that are pointed in that direction.

I sure hope not. There's something immensely satisfying about being able to sit on the couch and watch TV every once in a while...

[alkemical]

I sure hope not. There's something immensely satisfying about being able to sit on the couch and watch TV every once in a while...

What is meant is that the way Content is done on television will be changed and cause TV's to be obsolete to the manner they are. Tivo changed the fact you didn't have to watch your show on the networks time, and changed the way you can skip commercials.

Now the next evolution will happen with true ondemand programming - where as networks will be content providers.

Essentially - it's sort of the plan/goal that AOL has had for a while, as well as MS, Google, etc.

[Willynowei]

The iphone will be huge hit.

But i know a flop when i see one, the I-tv died before it started.

[OrangeShadow]

Besides, apples a day late and a dollar short on this. You can buy a cable that can hook your Zune directly to a tv.

[Garcia Bronco]

If it's related to Macs, iTunes, and iPods...it'll suck

[OrangeShadow]

http://www.zune.net/en-us/accessories/monster/tvlink.htm

There, for 30 bucks i can accomplish what that 'iTV' does for 300.

[floats]

http://www.zune.net/en-us/accessories/monster/tvlink.htm

There, for 30 bucks i can accomplish what that 'iTV' does for 300.

I'm not sure how that does the same thing as the iTV. Taking iTunes out of the equation, the iTV is essentially a wireless network media player. That Zune thing you linked to is just a video cable. Now, the Zune (http://zune.pgpartner.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=27828645//) combined with the thing you linked would provide similiar functionality to the iTV, with the added bonus of also being a portable media player. Of course, now you're closer the the $299 you'd pay for the iTV. I don't know of anybody that even owns a Zune.

[El Minion]

http://www.apple.com/appletv/

Some reasoned speculation (http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070216_001673.html):

------------
February 16, 2007
Appeerances Can Be Deceiving: What's that 40-gig hard drive doing inside my Apple TV?


The new Apple TV media extender is supposed to ship this month, perhaps even by the time you read this column, and if you are like me you are wondering what that 40-gig hard drive is doing inside. I'm guessing we won't know for sure until later this year, though of course I also think I know the secret answer, too.

It will be interesting to hear Apple's explanation for the hard drive. It would make good sense, for example, to keep storage close to the attached TV if Apple had some doubts about the speed of the network connection between the Apple TV box and the Mac or Windows machine running Front Row. If we squint hard and enter a state of suspended disbelief that might be plausible. Only that makes no sense.

The native speed for Apple's 640-by-480 streams is 1.5 megabits per second, which could be easily handled by the Apple TV's 802.11g or 802.11n wireless connections and probably even by old 802.11b. The box's wired connection is 100-megabit-per-second Ethernet. No, it's not a network problem that has Apple putting that drive in the Apple TV; if there's a network problem it is between the host PC or Mac and the Internet, and Apple handles that simply by forcing users to download files, rather than streaming them. To a certain extent with downloaded files, slower doesn't matter.

Apple might tell us that the Apple TV can play video from the hard drive without requiring a Mac or PC on the network. This is an answer that I would believe and I really hope it is the case, because wouldn't it be great to still watch a movie even when your computer isn't running in the next room? And it might be true because Apple loses nothing since you'd still need the host computer to load video into the Apple TV.

Or maybe Apple won't mention the hard drive at all, saying only that it is intended for some future software release. I believe this, too, but people are going to have a hard time paying for hardware they can't even use. So I think it is likely Apple will have at least something we can do with that drive.

At $299 the Apple TV is a pretty expensive video extender, but if you think of it instead as a computer, it is darned cheap. It might, in fact, be the prototype for a whole family of Mac Sub-Minis. We know it has an Intel processor, though nobody says WHICH Intel processor. We know it runs an operating system and has a GUI. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Apple TV hardware is based on the iPhone, with the exception that the mobile phone transceiver is replaced with Apple's WiFi bits.

We'll know soon enough the answer to these hardware questions as Apple starts shipping and hackers start tearing apart Apple TV's on the day they are purchased. My wish list for those hackers, by the way, isn't to know the clock speed or the type of processor or the amount of memory installed. I want to know the identity of the Apple TV's H.264 decoder chip. There's a lot to be learned from the identity of THAT chip. Remember you heard it here first.

I'll tell you my theory about the Apple TV in a moment, but first I want to riff a bit on the other components in the new ministack -- the Mac Mini and the new AirPort Extreme Base Station. All three components have the same form factor, very similar cases, and they stack beautifully one atop the other. But why? Under what circumstance would you even want to stack all three together? It makes no sense to me.

If you have an Apple TV next to your plasma screen, why do you need a Mac Mini there, too? The Apple TV runs its own GUI and has its own storage for 50 hours of video or thousands of songs and pictures. You may as well put the Mini in another room and connect by WiFi or Ethernet. Or you could forgo the Apple TV and just connect your Mac Mini to the TV through a DVI or S-Video connection and still use iTunes and Front Row: again no stacking required. The AirPort base station makes the least sense of all since the Mini and the Apple TV can communicate ad hoc just fine using 802.11g.

There is simply no imaginable situation where you would want to stack together these three components that are clearly made to be stacked. Unless what you want to do is somehow connect the Apple TV to the Mac Mini through the AirPort at a range of three inches just to take advantage of 802.11n, which the Apple TV and the AirPort Extreme have but the Mac Mini doesn't. Well that's just crazy.

And yet the components are clearly designed to be stacked, so either there is a part of this story we have not yet been told or Steve Jobs is just screwing with our brains.

I wouldn't put it past him.

<b>Here is what I think is happening with the Apple TV hard drive. I think sometime this summer Apple will ship a firmware upgrade for the Apple TV and it will suddenly gain an important new capability. That's when the Apple TV becomes a node on the iTunes peer-to-peer video network.

If the Apple TV is plugged in it is turned on. Did you notice that? That means the hard drive will have at least the capability of running 24/7. Now envision a BitTorrent-like file distribution system that is controlled primarily by iTunes, rather than by you or me. A centrally controlled P2P system is VERY powerful because it allows for the pre-positioning of content.

Say Disney releases Cars 1.5 -- a direct-to-DVD release expected to sell millions of copies in its first few days. There is no way iTunes could even hope to participate in a launch like that simply because there isn't enough bandwidth at a good price -- or any price. Even BitTorrent would have troubles handling a small part of such a launch until enough seeds were populated and running. But what if the movie was effectively pre-seeded -- loaded over a few days on a distribution tree of thousands of Apple TV boxes which could then deliver the movie locally at high speed if purchased. Or if not purchased the seeded copies could still work together to serve other Apple TVs on the same ISP subnet.

Go back over my columns for the last three weeks and you'll see nearly all the information required to either understand or implement such a system.

There are products like this already in operation, such as GridNetworks from Seattle or Mike Homer's Kontiki network, now part of VeriSign. It isn't rocket science, but to succeed, networks of this sort need lots of nodes, especially nodes that remain on 24/7.

If you are wondering what Apple might accomplish with such a peer-to-peer distribution system, it would be nothing less than the undermining of TV. First Apple would eliminate its current dependence on Akamai, reducing its network costs for iTunes by about 100X, making the network costs effectively free. Hello HDTV!

Second, Apple would have one or many content channels roughly equivalent to an HBO, Showtime, or perhaps Discovery. Yes, I think Apple will do direct content deals, buying programming that it will then either distribute to subscribers or support with Google ads, thanks to Google CEO Eric Schmidt's position on the Apple board. Apple's network will give you the same content with or without ads, delivered from the same servers, one of which may be underneath your TV.

There are only two forces I can see necessary for this P2P deployment: gaining a big enough installed base of Apple TV boxes and the removal of some or all Digital Rights Management (DRM) code from the content. Gaining a critical mass of Apple TV boxes simply comes down to keeping the real purpose secret until there are 500,000 to 1 million units in the field.

Oops, did I just let that secret out?

And removing DRM is what Steve Jobs started preaching about last week and will continue to do so until he gets his way.

Steve ALWAYS gets his way, you know.

The business case for Apple is downright amazing. Lowering network costs by 99 percent will enable the company to add to its portfolio the equivalent of half a Time Warner. Apple becomes a cable company without trucks or network costs. It becomes a whole bunch of cable networks with an instant audience the exact size of the iTunes registered user base, which is frigging enormous. Add $40 billion to market cap, no waiting.

But I STILL don't know why those components were made stackable.</B>

[Rock Chalk]

I sure hope not. There's something immensely satisfying about being able to sit on the couch and watch TV every once in a while...

By TV he means cable/satellite. The actual TV will be transformed from just something you watch to something you do everything on.

Microsoft has been working towards this goal for a long time. Media Center PCs can directly connect to TV and with on demand video and more and more stations putting their series online, cable and satellite companies may soon go by the wayside.

Its already close to being that way in my house.

I have a media center PC, a plasma that has PC input on it, an XBox 360 and a wireless network. With that I can do everything in one place, my TV. Now, normally I use my PC monitor to do computer related stuff but use my videos to stream media from my PC to my plasma in the other room. Now when I bother to upgrade my video card (X1900 series 512 MB ATI card) to something capable of processing HD signals then I will do away with the computer monitor completely and watch TV via my media center. When I can actually get the content via online channels instead of paying for a satellite service my home entertainment center will be complete, I'll save the money I spend on monthly satellite charges and have everything in one place. Further, because the PC has a hard drive and media center acts as a DVR, I dont have to pay extra for the DVR services such as TiVo or from the cable/satellite companies.

ANd when the NFL decides to offer SundayTicket (for a price) via "on demand" content then I will be in heaven.

Hell Id be willing to pay more for my internet service because Id no longer have cable or satellite service to pay for.

ANd the best part, with PIP going widely unused because of the need for two boxes to get separate pictures, you'd be able to use this wonderful little built in feature again. On one side of the widescreen you have your TV while the Donks are on, on the other side you have the Orangemane Chatroom so you can watch and chat at the same time without the need for a laptop.

My wireless keyboard and mouse will allow me to do that from the comfort of my couch and Id never have to get up again. Heaven. I could exploit my favorite of deadly sins, Sloth.

[BroncoBuff]

IMO having fiber to my door instead of copper is better.

Yeah ... and then you can sell the copper to buy drugs. ;D

[Bronco_Beerslug]

Steve ALWAYS gets his way, you know.
Including holding non-existent board meetings and approving back-dating options.

I don't see why this would sell. I output straight from my PC to one of my HDTV's at 1080.

[baja]

Living in Mexico might just get more convenient;

It was Disney exec Bob Iger who dropped the bomb back in September that the Apple TV (then iTV) had a hard drive, something we didn’t expect from a set-top box. The ability to watch downloadable media on a TV does not need an hard drive, so why does it have one?

PBS’s Cringley, always a source of interesting conjecture, thinks he knows. Apple wants to turn your living room into a micro server farm. Cringley believes that the hard drive within the Apple TV will act as a node on a P2P network made up of Apple TV owners, allowing BitTorrent-like distributed sharing of key content.

This serves to eliminate the server-to-client download model that iTunes currently uses, which costs a fortune, as bandwidth is not free. By allowing the Apple TVs to talk to one another and share the content, the burden falls to the local ISPs, though when diffused in this manner, it’s hardly a burden at all.

Is Cringely right about this? Only time will tell, but the though of on-demand HDTV via distributed broadband mesh networks isn’t totally out of the question, and would fundamentally change how digital media is delivered to the livingroom.

What’s that 40-gig hard drive doing inside my Apple TV? [I, Cringely]

[Ratboy]

What's next, Apple Phone? /sarcasm

[Orange_Beard]

Besides, apples a day late and a dollar short on this. You can buy a cable that can hook your Zune directly to a tv.
This is differnt then being able to hook your mp3 player to the T.V. The first video ipod could do this 2 years ago.

The strange thing is that it only has a 40 gig drive, I did not drives this small were still made.

This is the interesting part,

"PBS’s Cringley, always a source of interesting conjecture, thinks he knows. Apple wants to turn your living room into a micro server farm. Cringley believes that the hard drive within the Apple TV will act as a node on a P2P network made up of Apple TV owners, allowing BitTorrent-like distributed sharing of key content.

This serves to eliminate the server-to-client download model that iTunes currently uses, which costs a fortune, as bandwidth is not free. By allowing the Apple TVs to talk to one another and share the content, the burden falls to the local ISPs, though when diffused in this manner, it’s hardly a burden at all."

[alkemical]

it's been sort of done with zune, xbox & mediacentre for windows.

[Popps]

Once again, Apple comes out with a technology that has been around for a while, pretends they invented it and charges way too much for it.
See also: ipod.

Yea, I've seen iPod. Probably because they have about 90% of the market share.

It's not enough to just invent something. It needs to be perfected and marketed properly. Thanks for the news flash that Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, though. Fascinating.

Did they fire you or something? ROFL!

[El Minion]

Including holding non-existent board meetings and approving back-dating options.

I don't see why this would sell. I output straight from my PC to one of my HDTV's at 1080.

The backdating is not necessarily illegal, just the accounting has to be done properly IIRC. Besides the Apple board independent investigation found no wrongdoing by him. Same with the Pixar allegations, he's no Martha Stewart or Ken Lay.

It will sell because it is marketed not to the technophiles but to the homes and family that just want plug and watch, like the Tivo crowd. Just like how no self-respecting audiophile would not use vacuum-tube amps, the do-it-yourselves would rather configure it piecemeal themselves off the shelf.

[sixtimeseight]

Yea, I've seen iPod. Probably because they have about 90% of the market share.

It's not enough to just invent something. It needs to be perfected and marketed properly. Thanks for the news flash that Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, though. Fascinating.

Did they fire you or something? ROFL!

I love how you keep using the market share argument for ipod's superiority, but then macs are somehow exempt from the same standard. You know, cause they have 6% of the MARKET SHARE. Are you really this stupid or is this all just a big act?

[sixtimeseight]

P.S. I look forward to you not responding to that post just like you didn't in the other thread.

Sit down old man.

[Bronco_Beerslug]

The backdating is not necessarily illegal, just the accounting has to be done properly IIRC. Besides the Apple board independent investigation found no wrongdoing by him. Same with the Pixar allegations, he's no Martha Stewart or Ken Lay.

It will sell because it is marketed not to the technophiles but to the homes and family that just want plug and watch, like the Tivo crowd. Just like how no self-respecting audiophile would not use vacuum-tube amps, the do-it-yourselves would rather configure it piecemeal themselves off the shelf.
Wow, he's vindicated then if Apple says he's alright. Oh wait, it seems the SEC and federal government (http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37127) weren't convinced.

[Popps]

I love how you keep using the market share argument for ipod's superiority, but then macs are somehow exempt from the same standard. You know, cause they have 6% of the MARKET SHARE. Are you really this stupid or is this all just a big act?

Poor guy. 30 posts and you're already throwing a temper tantrum because you can't make any sense.

Try to get your head around this... I'll go slow....

Having more market share does NOT necessarily make your product better.
Windows machines are sold dirt cheap at grocery warehouse outlets, so your average Joe trying to save a few dollars is going to stick with what he knows. Quality be damned.

The market share topic came into play as an example that it's not enough to invent something. It's got to be perfected, made practical, etc. You made inference that Apple was wasting their time, or pursuing ground that was already covered. (Wrong, as usual.)

This was all in response to yet another one of your crybaby posts about how you don't like (more likely have no real experience with) Macs. You chose to mouth off about how Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, which everyone on the planet already knows.