A New Start to an Old Friend

EDITOR'S NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS A TECHNICAL BLOG ENTRY AND MAY BE BORING TO SOME. BUT FOR THE GEEKS IT'S PRETTY COOL.

  Well now that I've written about our Christmas let me tell you about one of the toys I got on Christmas. My mom gave me something I've been wanting ever since it came out almost 2 1/2 years ago. The gift was Apple TV.

  Now I know I wrote about this already but that was from an observers stand point and not from an owner/user standpoint. Now that I've had it for 48 hours I can give some better impressions about the unit.

  I guess I should explain for those who are unfamiliar with Apple TV. Essentially what it does is store your digital media on it's hard drive as well as access other digital content via it's wired and wireless internet connections.

  The very first thing I had to do was to figure out how I should wire it into my home a/v system in the family room. As you may remember we upgraded our receiver back in August and it has been wonderful ever since. And after a little research in the owner's manual (yes I actually read it from time to time) I figured out a way to wire in the digital audio without having to buy additional hardware or wires.

  The next step was to transfer part of my digital media library over to Apple TV's 40GB hard drive. Bare in mind that I have 3500 songs, 160 movies, 20+ TV shows and 28,000 images currently in my library. Not all of that would fit on the hard drive so I had to decide which would go and which I could stream if necessary.

  I went through my library and selected a dozen movies and all of my television shows to send to the media server in my living room. I decided that I wanted the Apple TV to have more video content than pictures or music as it's main selling point is that it's connected to your HDTV. Might as well make the most out of that.

  Here's one of the draw backs. It took over six hours to wirelessly transfer the 16 GB of content from the iMac in my office to the set top box in the family room. Now if I had the faster WiFi router (802.11n) it may have only taken three hours.

  So right before Cathy and I went to bed the transfer was completed. Man I didn't want to go to sleep after that. I had all this cool stuff that previously I could only watch on the computer, iPods or iPhone. Now it was on my 56" television. Nice!!

  Another draw back is that unless your video is stored as 720p or higher (here's were my Uncle Ron's eyes roll back if he's even made it this far on my blog) it's going to look shoddy. When I was ripping my movies from DVD to iTunes I did so with the idea that the resolution would be for my iPhone. This was mainly because the files collectively wouldn't take up as much room on my iMac's hard drive. A high-def movie will weigh in around 12GB compared to the 370MB my "ripped" movies take up now.

  So my DVD collection doesn't look great but I can always pop them in to the upgrading DVD player if I really want to see it in it's full splendor.

  Another feature to Apple TV is the ability to purchase or rent movies on iTunes all from your living room TV. It even allows you to buy or rent movies in HD. Granted their HD is 720p with 5.1 audio and Blu-Ray is 1080p with 7.1 surround sound (stay with me Ron) but the clips I saw were pretty good.

  It also allows me to watch things such as trailers for upcoming movies, access the full YouTube library or watch a slide show of my various photo galleries.

  In the last two days I've watch more video using the Apple TV than from my Brighthouse cable box. That could be attributed to the fact that it's the new toy or that we've already watched every show saved on the DVR.

  As a quick side note, I read a story in The New York Times a few weeks ago about people who watch a lot of TV shows but don't own a television. They watch all the shows on the networks' websites or download them from iTunes. It's interesting to me that I could essentially do the same thing with Apple TV. The drawback is that I don't feel like spending $35 for a season of House nor do I really want to own all those episodes. Maybe in the future you can pay a smaller amount to "rent" the episode.

  I told Cathy that I could see movie studios in the future distributing first-run movies through something like iTunes and Apple TV. My prediction was based on the fact that movie audiences are shrinking annually and the number one movie this week likely won't be number one next week. So my theory is that studios will still premiere the movies in the theaters but starting the third week or so they'll open them up for premium rentals on iTunes for $25. 

  This could be a boom for studios and especially ones that release family movies. Families with many young children would probably prefer paying the $25 premium for the rental of a first-run movie over trekking out to the mall and spend maybe twice that for the tickets. Not to mention if one of the kids (or Dad) has to use the bathroom or grab a snack from the fridge they can hit pause and not miss a moment. 

  So for those still reading, I am very enthusiastic about my Christmas gift from my mother. Apple TV is simple to use and enjoyable to watch. It does have some drawbacks but I can adjust to those for it's features.