So i’ve been thinking a lot about Apple TV and how it might change the way that people deal with media. At the moment, most people are still listening to CDs and watching DVDs in their lounge, with some people having found “work arounds” for digital files, through media streamers, media centre PCs and plugging their video ipods in to their tellies to view photos and tv shows (albeit with poor resolution). Apple’s latest innovation is about to change that.
Apple TV appears to be a quantum leap in digital media in the living room, simply because it has a nice, simple interface that anyone can use. Coupled with iTunes’ very smart playlists, your Apple TV will sit on your latest, favourite music, photos and movies, accessible within seconds using a nice, simple remote.
This, for me, is a godsend. I will be able to pipe to the lounge my favourite, relaxing tunes, TV shows and movies, and access them in a few seconds whilst still keeping baby Ben entertained. Of course it’s not as simple as that getting the media there. Sure, ripping a CD to iTunes is a doddle, and it supports iTunes store tracks, which is the main reason I have avoided another streamer, but getting movies and DVDs on there is a bit of a laborious process - I have heard rumour that in the future, DVDs will include MP4 and WMV versions of the movie for immediate ripping to hard drive (with the requisite DRM, of course), but it would reduce the ripping time from 30 mins to 5 mins and make life a lot easier.
I do have concerns over the ability of iTunes to handle large libraries - mine is running at just over 100gigabytes and it takes a while to boot up. As movies come in at around 1gb, it won’t take long to fill up a hard drive and give iTunes a bit of a beating. Still, we wait and see whether this really is the beginning of a new era in digital entertainment, or a big fat flop. It does have bluray and HD-DVD chomping on its coat tails, but it has the advantage of being a lot cheaper and not needing a whopping great TV to do it justice, so I’m in.
Have I ordered one you ask? Well, no, not yet, I would like to see one and have a play with it first, but yes the gadget monster is stirring, although my gagdet fund is about to take a bit of a beating when I splash out on 2 child seats for mine and Jenny’s cars for the every growing baby Ben. That does identify another benefit of Apple TV over DVD players and the like - no buttons to push for little fingers, and nowhere at all to insert a jammie dodger.
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