In February 2008 I took the plunge and integrated an AppleTV box into my home audio and video system. Apple announced an important feature upgrade in January, which arrived in February, and finally made the AppleTV a viable product. It is not without its limitations, which I discuss below, but all in all is a truly amazing introduction to on-demand movie viewing. To recap, the original AppleTV, introduced a year ago, could do nothing unless paired with a Macintosh on your home network. So you needed to go to the iTunes store on your Mac, purchase a movie, and then you could view it on your big screen TV if the AppleTV were connected to the TV. The big sales pitch, at the time, was that the AppleTV would allow you to youre your iPhoto library photos on your TV, and to watch movies downloaded (and purchased) from iTunes. But you also need to remember that the movie industry saw what iTunes did to the music business, and determined that they were not going to let Apple steal their kingdom away from them. So the movie industry has retained a firm grip on what you can watch, how you can get the content, and how many times you can watch what you bought or rented. Thus the AppleTV with 2.0 software is a marvelous device that does what it claims to be able to do (rent movies from big studios), within the constraints placed on the movie download business by the big studios that must first license the content.

Much like Apples more recent Time Capsule device (a box that lets you back up all your Macs to a central backup location using Time Machine), the AppleTV is a square box about the size of an Airport base station, but instead of 6 network jacks on the back, the AppleTV contains all the video and audio ports you need to connect it to your flat screen (or other) television, as long as your TV supports either component connections or HDMI. (Its sort of like what a Mac mini should have been, basically a Mac devoted to processing video and audio signals.) You can put the AppleTV next to your television, or, as in my situation, in a different room connected to your AV receiver. The AppleTV can join your existing wireless network, or you can plug it in with an Ethernet cable for faster download speeds. Interestingly, the AppleTV does not contain a DVD player, so you cant slip a DVD in there. All content has to be digital. Think Steve is sending a message here? (Note, if Apple wants to jump on the Blu-Ray train, they might try selling an AppleTV with a Blu-Ray drive in it, so it would add more value to the user's existing setup.)

There is a very user-friendly menuing system that is remarkably close to FrontRow on your Intel Mac, which takes over your TV screen when you press the Apple Remote buttons.

The February 2008 is significant in that it un-tethers the AppleTV from your Macintosh. The AppleTV still shows up as a device along the left side of your copy of iTunes, but once it is on your network and configured, it can access the iTunes movie rental store whether your Macintosh is turned on or not. (And it can also access any of the content on YouTube, if you are a YouTube junkie, as well as the iTunes store on Apples web site.) Furthermore, you dont have to buy movies, but rather the AppleTV presents an elaborate interface that displays thumbnails of all the movies available from Apple for rental. Yes, thats right, rental. Basic movies are $2.99 and you have one month to watch them; the few HD titles are $3.99 and offer better resolution, which only matters if you have a very expensive TV. Once you actually start watching the movie, you have 24 hours to finish watching it.

Although the AppleTV comes with a little Apple Remote, I have my universal remote control for the home system configured to let me turn on the TV, select the AppleTV as the input source, and scroll through the available rental titles. Once you have selected a title you want to watch, you can either view a trailer of the movie or rent it. Downloading then begins immediately and you are ready to watch your movie within a minute. (Admittedly, I am on SureWest fiber, so I am not sure what this would be like on a slow DSL system.)

So the big issues for AppleTV are these two: the selection of rentals sucks, and the device will only play back mainstream video content that you download from Apple. For example, Amazon Inbox claims 10,442 movies for rent, but you have to watch them on your computer. (Dont be surprised if Amazon partners with a hardware company to remedy this in the near future.) Apple offers just 770 movies, a large number of them from the Disney catalog, since Steve Jobs sits on Disneys Board of Directors. Only a small number of those are true HD movies. (Apparently the AppleTV up converts movies to 1080i format to match your 1080i television; but since my television is two-years-old and 720p, I was just as happy to tell the AppleTV not to up convert the signal.) The second flaw, for some people, is that the AppleTV wont just play back any old video file you send over to it, and there are some rough edges caused by this new software update that essentially uncouples the AppleTV from your Mac. Thus with the 1.0 software, you could create content on your Mac in movie (preferably HD) and ship it over to the AppleTV.

The new software and the new rental model make it decidedly much harder to ship content over to your AppleTV, and forget it if you want to view a non-commercial file in Diva, Avid, AVI, WMV, MPG, MPEG, ASF, RM, RMVB, MOV, ASX, SVCD, or VCD format. While I have read anecdotal reports of people using iTunes to export their home movies to AppleTV format, I happen to own two Pirates of the Caribbean movies purchase from Apple last year, and while I can view them on my computer using iTunes, I had to do a Google search to figure out how to view a purchased movie living on my Mac on my flat screen TV. (The answer is to use the FrontRow interface on your TV screen to navigate to My Shared Movies, which scans the Mac you have paired with AppleTV, and that will let the AppleTV access movies that you have purchased via iTunes.) So with AppleTV 1.0, this would have been a no-brainer, and with AppleTV 2.0, they seem to have made some things harder so that they could focus on making movie rentals easier. Likewise I easily got my Macs music and photo library to show up on the TV with software version 1.0, but these features come and go with software version 2.0. Sometimes they work, sometimes not. Im guessing there will need to be another software update once Apple figures out how this should all fit together. They certainly need to placate the people who spent the last year buying movies and TV shows from Apple instead of renting them. On the other hand, if youre happy with Apples selection of movies on iTunes, then this is a non-issue for you.

My conclusion is that if youre a grandparent with a technical hankering and have grandkids come to visit periodically, the AppleTV is a marvelous tool that gives you access to all the Disney movies without having to run out and buy or rent those DVDs. At $299 for the top model, its a steal. It also is a good pacifier for people like me who go ballistic when my kids get fingerprints all over the DVDs and make them skip or freeze. Happy surfing! Now you can surf for movies while sitting on your couch.

Movie quality is very acceptable, indiscernible from a DVD in most cases. Of the several movies we have rented, one had some video artifacts that caused me to become quite worried, yet the second one we rented displayed beautifully. And no fingerprints! That leads me to conclude that some of these movies were converted correctly, and some probably need to go back to the drawing board to get reconverted to AppleTV format with a little tweaking. On the subject of how many titles you have to choose from when renting, I feel that some of us have to take the plunge and start generating some demand. Additional titles will come, but Id rather they arrive when they are properly mastered and have 5.1 sound, instead of getting access to 5,000 or 10,000 shoddy digital conversions. Certainly Apples service is not going to compete with Netflix or Blockbuster based on the lack of selection. (And it is common knowledge that Netflix is working on its own piece of hardware to let subscribers access movies via download.) Can you take one of your existing DVDs and rip it to your hard drive, then play on an AppleTV? Im not entirely positive, but I believe the answer is no due to copy protection issues.

The AppleTV works as advertised and easily streams content from the internet. With little effort, it also plays movies or TV shows you purchased from Apple that live in you iTunes library. Most assuredly the revised AppleTV works just like a Mac should, and even the most clueless person should be able to browse content and rent a movie with a few clicks of the supplied remote control (once you have it connected to your TV and connected to your network) assuming you can live with Apples paltry selection of titles.