Apple TV: Unfashionably Late?

This week Macworld saw the launch of the Apple TV (formerly iTV), on the surface it's a pretty good device allowing wireless transfer of video, music, podcasts and photos from up to five Macs or PCs to your swanky HDMI compliant TV set all for a relatively reasonable $299.  Many people might immediately realise that this is not a new idea, in fact I had a device that performed a similar task about 3 years ago (albeit using SCART) and at the time both wired and wireless versions were available.  Actually I don't see this as a problem, there were MP3 players before the iPod and that didn't stop Apple becoming the market leader, Apple have a knack of doing things better than the competition and have got a great reputation when it comes to usability and reliability. 

Despite all this, I'm not really impressed with the Apple TV and as it stands I doubt it will have the impact that everyone expected.  The single biggest drawback of the Apple TV is that it doesn't play all of the popular video formats, it will play anything that iTunes plays but nothing more.  This means that any video you already have in other formats, be it snaffled from bittorrent, downloaded from the web, ripped from DVD or captured from camcorders will not work without going through the laborious process of re-encoding.  This is more than most people want to do and the kind of people who really need a device like this probably use multiple formats and probably have stacks of DivX and Xvid movies that they'd love to watch on their TV and Apple aren't going to be much help at all. 

The secondary factor is that due to Apple's late arrival in this space there are already some pretty good devices out there, though the biggest threat probably comes from their classic rival in the shape of the Xbox 360.  For $399 you get a device that can stream video, music and photos from your PC (though you're stuck with just WMV for video), allows you to directly purchase and download TV shows and HD Movie rentals without even touching a computer, comes with a free headset allowing free phone calls to other Xbox 360 users, also supports video calls with the webcam accessory, and on top of all that is to date the best selling High-Definition games console on the market with over a hundred titles available. 

So the Apple TV has a big hill to climb but if anyone can push it up that hill then surely Apple can.  One light at the end of the tunnel which might generate some additional sales is the already mooted prospect of installing Linux on the Apple TV and using a Linux media player distro to do the rest - now that might just make me buy one.