2 posts tagged “apple tv”

So, what's been going down in my absence?  After a three month absence I thought I'd better catch up by posting my thoughts on the recent (and not so recent) news stories, so here (in no particular order) are the ones that caught my eye. 

Suitably following on from my last serious post, the Apple TV finally launched - I pretty much stand by all of my previous comments, especially that the Apple TV's success is probably in the hands of the hacking community.  I actually had a play with one in the Regent Street Apple Store the other day and wasn't too impressed, scaling low quality video up to an HDTV (they were using Sony TVs) looks pretty bad and given that HD content takes an age to download and isn't that prevalent I really can't see the need, I might consider it for £99 for the hacking alone but for £199 you can jump.  Also, given that Microsoft are adding more codecs to their Xbox 360 player there's even less of a need for it, I do agree with the crew from Macbreak Weekly that it'll give video podcasts a realistic shot at getting HD content into the living room but I'm not convinced it'll get the critical mass to make a difference. 

In further Apple news, the announcement that EMI would be offering DRM free music.  I really think that this will be the start of a sea-change in how the record companies view digital music one way or the other.  Personally I welcome the move and will definitely begin purchasing music from iTunes if I know that I'm not tied to their platform. 

And finally, in the gaming arena there was the launch of the PS3 in Europe, despite a couple of facts and figures about "record breaking" sales the whole thing went with a bit of a whimper and to date there's still a lot more supply than there is demand.  The problem right now is software and with only two viable titles on release right now (RFoM and Motorstorm) the prospect of laying ot £400 for one is hardly attractive.  We'll have to wait and see, in the long run I expect Sony will catch up but even if they do I doubt that they'll achieve anywhere near the dominance of the PS2 - those days are over.  The other niggling thought at the back of my mind is that Sony were originally touting the PS3 as having a 10-year lifecycle, if that holds true then just as they're hitting the middle of the curve I'd expect both Microsoft and Nintendo to come out with another generation of hardware to challenge whatever momentum Sony have gathered up to that point.   For my money, I'd pick the soon to be released XBox 360 Elite with a larger hard drive, HDMI, better online support, better games, better price, etc. etc.  As for the Wii, I really don't play it as much as I expected to but because it cost less I'm not too upset - I'm sure that at some point they'll release a serious killer app and I'll be straight back on it for a while. 

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.