Apple TV - Opportunity Lost - 5 suggestions to save it!

As a New Year resolution, we dumped Cable TV and and bought an Apple TV box to soften the blow. All I can say is it's a great idea, which seems to have been almost deliberately crippled for no real apparent reason. I am hoping something amazing will be announced tomorrow at Macworld; and below would be my wish-list!

1) Allow external USB storage. Neither 40GBs or 160GBs is enough; considering a HD presented series consumes 20GBs, most people will have 5 - 10 GBs of photos, 20GBs of music or more, plus you need storage for any movies you have lined up. Streaming works just fine (even on a 'g' network), but the downside is that you have to have your Mac up and running, with it's external storage (my setup is a MacBook with a 1TB external drive). If I am out with my MacBook... my wife cannot watch or listen to anything... because...

2) Remove the restriction on syncing to a single Mac. There is no such restriction on the iPod (even for Video) so this is seriously retarded. You can only stream from one Mac, period. I can understand only being able to use a single Apple ID, which would be fine, but a single Mac is too restrictive, especially when you consider most Mac users have portables, which are their own. Yes you can play your iTunes on any Mac and have it play through the Apple TV (via AirTunes), but this is audio only, no video.

3) Allow streaming to work in reverse. Yes, if you can have local storage on the Apple TV + USB drive, then the Mac won't need this to be mounted/unmounted every time I want to updatre my iPod. Add support for backwards streaming, including updating any iPods connected to the Mac.

4) Introduce monthly subscriptions for unlimited TV shows, a-la Netflix. I pay $9 a month for netflix and get many current TV shows available for streaming. The quality is lower than iTunes HD, but at least as good as iTunes SD, and is effectively unlimited. At $2.99 per episode for HD, for something I'll probably only watch once, iTunes might not remain competitive

5) Finally, allow internet audio streaming. Many radio stations use this, and podcasts don't cover all the programming I like, especially from the BBC and NPR. I am sure that internet streaming would be greatly welcomed

Thanks!

Great ideas, all of them - and at least one would sell me on it (Internet Radio Streaming).

Boxee?

Yeah, Apple hasn't included lots of these things, but there are alternatives if you are willing to do a little work.

Scott

celica73 said:

Boxee?

Yeah, Apple hasn't included lots of these things, but there are alternatives if you are willing to do a little work.

Scott

Click to expand...

I don't want to blow the warranty while there is still a chance of some amazing announcement yesterday, and I might want to take it back. It would be nice if these things were supported outside of the box.

i'm actually considering doing the same thing. i have comcast and i'm tired of paying them a fortune for nothing. my plan as of now is drop down to the most basic cable plan they have and keep the internet. and even with the basic basic plan, i'll still get all my local channels in hd.

when i do get the apple tv, i plan on loading boxee for obvious reasons. has anyone done this since the latest firmware release? how hard was it?

I've actually tried Boxee for a few weeks and it's a serious mess. Most of it doesn't work (Hulu keeps getting binned, Netflix is non-existent and will probably never work, the interface is twitchy on anything other than 720p (I have 1080i) and it crashes constantly. In addition, an QT movies played via it stutter and struggle, because apparently the boxee H.264 playback is not accelerated because it doesn't use the Front Row interface, which would be hardware accelerated. BBC iPlayer doesn't work most of the time, and when you pause video, it's impossible to exit boxee and if you exit with the video playing, it will play the audio in the background forever.

OK, so Boxee is free, and it's in Alpha, but too many people are selling it as a solution, when it's nothing more than an experiment.

Having said that, it's very easy to install.