As soon as I found out the Apple TV update was live I decided that I was gonna have to stop by the Apple Store and pick one up. So I bought one, set it up and now that a couple weeks have gone by I thought I’d write a little review.
OK, why did I want one? Well, lemme tell ya…
- Movie rentals: Its nice & convenient. I watch a ton of movies and being able to rent one on a whim, without leaving the house, sounds pretty sweet.
- YouTube integration: I play guitar and watch a lot of how-to type videos. I figured watching these on my TV would be better than on my laptop. Plus the speakers on the laptop kinda suck…
- Music streaming: My TV is connected to a little home theater thing. Its not the best but the sound is way better than any of my alternatives (computer speakers, TV speakers etc). I was stoked at the idea of having my iTunes library play through a decent system (ya i know about AirPort).
So how did the Apple TV fair in light of my goals & expectations? Pretty damn well! But, it’s not perfect.
First off lets talk about the movie rentals:
The rental flow is super easy. Having previews available for their entire inventory is great as well. I’ve rented 3 movies in about 2 weeks and the experience was pretty simple. Once you rent a video it starts downloading and the AppleTV lets you know when it’s ready to watch. The quality of the rentals is just fine. I haven’t rented anything in HD yet but the standard stuff I’ve rented looks just fine.
One thing that would be nice would be a “flag” function. I check a bunch of previews before I rent anything and a bunch of ‘em look good enough to watch. Flagging ‘em or adding ‘em to some sort of list (favorites, queue etc) would be nice. I also don’t see any way to rate how much I liked what I just watched. Some Netflix style rating would be cool to power their yet nonexistent recommendations.
The whole thing’s pretty new but at the same time you can’t help but notice the inventory isn’t too vast. The documentary section had only 3 films the last time I checked (2/23/08). I’m sure they’ll have a bunch more stuff soon. Even though you can’t choose from an endless supply movies they still have enough to make it worthwhile.
So, all in all, even though it’s not perfect, the rentals are a great feature and I’m a fan.
The Youtube integration is fun as well. The quality of some of the videos does suck… especially when they’re scaled to fit the TV. Essentially you should expect the quality to be the same as when you watch a video at fullscreen on youtube.com. The entertainment factor is totally there though. I’ve browsed for and watched a ton of music videos, live performances and random funny clips. It’s a good party trick. A few friends and I have hung out and killed a bunch of time watching BS Youtube clips.
The photo integration is pretty useless to me. The flickr integration is alright. I have more gripes for this feature than any other:
- As far as I can tell the “next” button doesn’t flip to the next image.
- The transitions are annoying. You can change them but hopping through the menus to get to those settings and back is annoying.
- The Apple TV doesn’t seem to be able to pull photos from iPhoto’s Events. From the little bit of poking around I did it seemed to only pull from Albums.
OK. That’s all I remember with the photo stuff. I really don’t care about this feature.
The music streaming is just fine. You can sync songs from your iTunes library to the Apple TV or you can set it up so that it streams without having to sync. I haven’t messed with this feature too much but I’m wondering if it has playlist support and whether the shuffle function supports album, artist and song. I should have checked this out before writing this review but eh… my bad.
I’ve never been a podcast fan but now I’m kinda digging them. The audio podcasts don’t much hold my attention but I have checked out a handful of the video podcasts and they’ve been cool. I particularly dig the podcasts from TV stations (ESPN etc). The ESPN podcast had the winning runs from the Winter X Games which was pretty cool. Like I said; I’ve never cared much about podcasts but now they’ve become a decent way to kill time.
All in all I think the Apple TV is worth the $229 price tag. I’m getting enough value to justify the cost. Is it perfect? No. But it works and does what it says its gonna do. Currently I find the rentals to be the best part of the product. Once the inventory grows it will be that much better… hopefully they’ll tack on search (by actor/actress - maybe pivot search) and some recommendations soon to ground out the rough edges.
It’s a cool gizmo… I’ll give it a solid B for now and hopefully some updates will be on the way to drag that grade up a notch.
Woot!
