Posts tagged YouTube

Christmas gifts at protocol 80 were all about TV boxes in 2010.  My brother received a Logitech Revue from my family, which is powered by Google TV, and I received an Apple TV which is powered by iOS.  It kind of makes sense in a way, if there's an Apple "fanboy" at the company that'd certainly be me, and Donny loves Google.  That said, this isn't going to be a post comparing the two devices.  Instead, I'm going to discuss some of the pros and cons of the Apple TV in case you're considering picking one up.

Form Factor

Apple certainly knows how to make beautiful, small products.  The Apple TV is no exception, and the 2nd generation model is freaking tiny.  It's a small black box that's about a quarter of the size of the original Apple TV, about a 20th the size of my Xbox 360 and it kind of just fades into my entertainment center.  Some folks were sad to see the aluminum enclosure go but I think the average person will be happy that the box really doesn't stick out like sore thumb.  It's easy to integrate into your existing setup.  As far as ports go, you have:

• Power
• HDMI
• Micro-USB
• Optical Audio
• Ethernet (also works with wifi)

Accessories

There really isn't much to be said here.  With the Apple TV you get the small aluminum remote pictured above, some manuals, apple stickers (of course) and a power cable.  That's it.  The power cord doesn't have a big brick with it because that's been built into the unit itself, and so all you really have to do is plug in a couple of cables and you're set to go.  One obvious missing accessory is an HDMI cable.  It's kind of annoying that they didn't just include one (you have to supply your own), but I knew that in advance.  It's very un-Apple like to have a product that a buyer might not be able to use right out of the box for whatever reason, so I'm kind of surprised they didn't just include the cable.

User Experience & Interface

From an interface perspective the Apple TV is all Apple.  It's clean, simple to navigate and very easy to use.  The first thing you're presented with are a slew of movie and TV covers that are selectable if something looks interesting.  Below that are just 5 main menus:

• Movies
• TV Shows
• Internet
• Computers
• Settings

And that's it.  You can drill down into each menu depending on what you're looking for.  Movies and TV Shows are fairly obvious, Internet gives you access to Netflix, Youtube, podcasts, your Mobile Me account if you have one, Flickr pictures and also streaming internet radio.  From the Computers menu you can gain access to the music and movies contained on any of your computers that have home sharing enabled, and finally the Settings menu is exactly what it sounds like.

Since I received the Apple TV I've watched a couple of movies using the iTunes streaming service, and I have to say my experience has been middling.  The first movie I watched was Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and as I was watching it had to stop to buffer multiple times.  The quality was exceptional, it's just that a 2 hour movie turned into a 3 hour movie because a couple of times I had to step away for a while to let it buffer.  I'm using wifi so the performance might be better with an ethernet connection and that was also during the holiday so it might just have been a case of the servers being overloaded.  I later watched Inception - again the quality was amazing.  This time I let the movie buffer for a while before watching it and I didn't run into any hiccups.

I have yet to watch a TV show with it because, to be honest, the streaming selection isn't great.  To compare I went to the iTunes Store on my computer and was able to find a lot of what I was looking for, but those shows are for physical downloads.  Hopefully Apple will step the content up moving forward.

Netflix works great on the Apple TV and the interface melds itself right into the rest of the unit.  I've watched a few episodes of Arrested Development and some movies and the quality is great plus there are no buffering hiccups.  Same thing for YouTube videos, home sharing and the streaming radio - all work exceptionally well.

Air Share and iPad Integration

My absolute favorite part of using the Apple TV is how well it integrates with my iPad and other computers.  With Air Share you can instantly start streaming video playing on one of your networked computers or iOS devices on your television.  Say, for example, I'm watching a digital copy of a blu-ray on my iPad.  All I have to do is tap a little button like the one to the left and it instantly starts playing on my TV.  It's pretty incredible.  The most impressive part is that there's almost zero buffering involved.

But that's not all!  Apple also has a really handy free application on the App Store called Remote.  With it you can completely control your Apple TV's playback, including play/pause, scrubbing foreward and backward in the movie...even information like movie chapters gets pulled in automatically.  The best part is using the iPad's on-screen keyboard to input text rather than the remote that comes with the unit which can take forever.  Not to mention interacting with your TV by swiping your fingers back and forth on the iPad is straight up cool.

Conclusion

For only $99 the 2nd Generation Apple TV is a powerful little box.  In some ways it might seem like a box that just lets you pay Apple more money, and if you don't have content on your computers, aren't a Netflix user or heavy into YouTube it probably will be exactly that.  Since Christmas I think I've spent $10 on movie rentals but otherwise I'm enjoying mostly free content.  I'm not sure how well it'd work with PC computers though, so if you're not an Apple computer user you might want to take that into account before pulling the trigger.