13th
AppleTV Take Two
My Apple TV was powered off for the last six months, mostly because it is not better for watching video than my FiOS DVR. The Motorola-based FiOS box has a frustrating user experience (long response lags) but there’s an awful lot of TV shows and movies available on demand, already covered by our (admittedly quite high) monthly charge.
We’ve been waiting almost a month since Steve Jobs announced Take Two, and I finally got it updated last night. The update experience itself was smooth and trouble-free. None of the content or settings on the box were lost in the upgrade—a rare experience in the world of set top boxes.
My initial impression of the new interface is positive—the original was lovely, and now you can see two levels of options in the menus, among other features.
One of the main challenges with the original Apple TV was that it behaved like an iPod: you added content using iTunes on your Mac (or PC) and then sync’d the content to the @TV. This is tedious in many, many ways. Another is that the @TV exclusively supports H.264 video, and most of the video available on the net is in Divx (or the free clone, xvid). Downloading, transcoding, adding to iTunes, and syncing to @TV—that’s four transfer/transform operations per TV episode!
Buying video from iTunes was also quite frustrating. The @TV does a pretty good job with HD, but I couldn’t find any HD content in the iTunes store. The TV selection is limited, and I really dislike the idea of “buying” TV shows in a DRM-locked format.
Take Two offers direct movie rentals from the @TV interface—no more shopping on iTunes and synching. The terms seem pretty restrictive, though. 30 days to start the movie, and you have a 24 hour window once you press play. These are the same terms as the Xbox Live video rental service, and I rented ‘300’ twice without making it through the movie in a single 24-hour period. So we’ll see if we can make it through Superbad in HD for $4. I believe it’s also available in HD via FiOS on-demand for a similar price with a similar 24 window.
The Flickr screensaver is ok, as it removes a few steps from manually synching with iPhoto and iTunes, and will work better for people like me who have a Flickr-centric photo “workflow” more than people who live in iPhoto.
I’ll report back in a few weeks on how much we actually use the @TV compared to the DVR. So far, it looks to be a nice improvement, but we’re unlikely to cancel our FiOS cable subscription.