Last month I purchased an Apple TV. While it's not perfect, and not a replacement for cable, it's still a pretty sweet machine and has tons of potential.
Why It's Good:
Airplay. I can stream video and audio from my laptop and to my TV. If I have family over I can play clips of Thanksgiving dinner or my grandparents dancing on their 50th wedding anniversary. My friend from college can see pictures of us from our days as undergrads or watch clips of concerts we have gone to. It's a great way to share memories.
Streaming You Tube content on a TV is super enjoyable. You Tube can be addictive on it's own, but when you are streaming on your TV it is even more so.
There is lots of good content available. between podcast, Netflix, the iTunes store and the ability to stream content from your own computer there is plenty to watch and share. But there could always be more (as you will see below).
What Are the Problems:
the keyboard on the screen is awful. A full on screen keyboard is what you have to navigate when typing and it is awful. It takes forever to type things in.
Second, you have limited content on the device. The selection of movies and TV shows available through iTunes and Netflix is pretty strong but it's not perfect by any means. i can't stream The Wire but I can get a whole bunch of Carlos Mencia stand ups - great. (p.s. I am being sarcastic).
Airplay. Airplay is great but if you keeping downloading movies, music, pictures and TV shows onto your laptop you are going to run out of room on your hard drive. Watching the amount of space on my hard drive go down is depressing, but there is a potential solution down the road (see below).
How Can It Better:
Depends on the content providers. I would love for content providers (networks such as HBO, or NBC) to provide subscriptions to their content, instead of me having to pay for individual episodes. This would be super helpful because even with Netflix and the iTunes store you can't find everything you may want to see. If content providers would cut out middle men, the cable companies, consumers could pick and choose what kind of channels we want (instead of being forced to pay for a bunch of channels we don't watch). Which brings me to my next point...
Apple TV essentially runs iOS (the operating system on iPhones, iPads and the like). Which means that hopefully, one day, apps will be available on Apple TV. ABC already has a video player app on the iPad. It would be great if I could buy an ESPN or HBO app and pay a monthly or yearly subscription for an al a carte list of shows I want to watch.
Lastly, the cloud. I complained about all the space that gets taken up on my hardrive. Hopefully Apple will move their photo, music and video ecosystems (iPhoto, iTunes) to the cloud. I will be able to stream MY content from any computer without having to take up hard drive space.
Apple has to move in this direction. More and more apple products have no storage space (Apple TV for example) or have limited space because they have flash drives (the Macbook Air, iPads and iPods). At the most you will get 64 GBs of space and that simply isn't enough. Apple has to allow users to move their content to some kind of cloud based system and I look forward to that day!
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