Apple TV moves in

Posted by 4season on February 17, 2008 at 10:57:13

The cost of Qwest's fastest (7 megabit) DSL service was looking pretty good to me, and I thought I'd have some fun with that bandwidth by getting an Apple TV and seeing what I could do with it.

For the moment, one of the biggest attractions (to me) was the ability to rent videos on a pay-as-you-go basis, and without tying up one of my computers. Locally, Blockbuster doesn't have a clue when they will get Blu-Ray in the stores, Hollywood Video closed it's big library store, and the #1 shop in town doesn't offer any HD programs at all.

Current selection on iTunes Music Store USA is 300-something titles which puts it about on par with a good supermarket selection. 70+ titles are available in high-definition, and some of those titles don't seem to be available in any other high-def format (Year Of The Dog et al). You have 29 days to watch the movie, and once you start playing it, you have 24 hours to finish it.

I haven't begun watching movies yet: I started downloading "Transformers" in HD at 3:15 in the afternoon, and the download was complete sometime around 9 hours later, but I had turned in by that time. "Napoleon Dynamite" in standard def is downloading much faster--looks like it will be about a 1-hour process: Fast enough that I could probably start watching the movie after the first couple of minutes.

At the moment, Apple TV looks like a pretty good idea with a few expected rough edges and there's lots of untapped potential for it to become more of a general-purpose portal device.

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