Earlier this year, Apple introduced a product known as Apple TV. The concept was to bring all of the media content from your computer (movies, music, pictures, podcasts, etc.) to your living room via TV. A small box acts as a wired or wireless receiver over your home network and either downloads or streams the content to the particular TV that you have it connected to. Now, this is hardly a new concept, especially with some of the advances in DVR technology over the past couple of years, however, Apple TV has many benefits that I will discuss in a minute.

Years ago, in college, some classmates and I actually "invented" a device like this for a project in one of our business classes. It was a small device that did exactly what Apple TV does, as well as a few other features that I won't bore you with. The reason I mention this little project is to explain just how long ago I started watching for this technology. This was 7 years ago. I already had a TV card in my computer and was toying with different ways to combine computers with normal TV.

Not long after that, I got my hands on a copy of Windows Media Center and was immediately excited. Yes, I am a big nerd. Not completely happy with the offering from Microsoft, I began to try various open source applications for both Windows and Linux. Some of my favorite features included the ability to access TV shows when not at home, scheduling of recordings from any place with internet access and the ability to essentially have my entire DVD collection accessible without ever loading a DVD.

What does all of this have to do with Apple TV?

Well nothing...and everything.

Apple TV is not designed to record TV, in fact, there is no TV tuner at all. It is about changing the way we receive entertainment. With Apple TV, I no longer need a cable subscription. I never have to say that I pay for 1000 channels and nothing is on. I simply jump on iTunes and subscribe to a few season passes for the shows I actually watch. As soon as they are available, they automatically download and show up on my Apple TV.

Don't get me wrong, this is definitely not for the people who like to mindlessly scan through channels and spend hours upon hours watching mind-numbing content. But it is for those who watch a few high quality shows, and want them available on their own time without the hassle of skipping over commercials or wondering if the show ran over the allotted time block on the DVR or dealing with some breaking news story interrupting the show half way into the plot.

One could probably discuss all the pros and cons of this approach to tv content for hours, but I would like to move on to Apple TV and its support for music and movies.

Apple TV has the ability to stream all audio content from your playlists without the need to download any of the files to the Apple TV device. This is a great feature, especially when your library is just over 9,000 songs. You can pick and choose which playlists that you would like accessible as well as which audio content you actually do want copied to the device in the event that your computer is off. This flexibility has made listening to music on the Apple TV very convenient. Another nice feature is the ability to select a playlist to play while the photo slideshow is running on your TV.

But it is named Apple TV, I want real video!

The Apple TV has a very clean and easy to use interface for movies. The iTunes library of movies is always increasing and there are quite a few good titles already available. The biggest problem that I have run into, is the fact that all movies must be copied to the Apple TV before they can be played. You cannot stream the movies. The reason this is a big problem is because of the TINY hard drive that comes in the Apple TV. Yes there are ways to swap the drive, but the reason I bought the Apple TV was because it just works right out of the box.

In my opinion, the best feature of Apple TV is not really a feature of the Apple TV device at all and, for that matter, one that is not very well known. You can copy any DVD to your Apple TV after running it through a free utility called HandBrake. The creators of HandBrake have been kind enough to include a special setting especially for Apple TV so that you can simply insert a DVD in your computer, select Apple TV, click Start and in about as much time as it would take to watch the DVD, it has a copy of the movie on your hard drive ready to be added to your iTunes. Once added to iTunes, you can even add the original movie poster or DVD cover art that will be displayed when searching for movies on the Apple TV. Again, the drawback is that even if you do go through this process with your entire DVD library, you will quickly run out of space on the Apple TV after 20 or so have been copied over.

With all of this said, I am big fan of the first version of the Apple TV and I definitely look forward to future versions. The quick, clean, intuitive interface make it a pleasure to use. It is more reliable than any pc-based media center software I have used and is even more reliable than any Comcast or Verizon DVR I have had experience with. It has all the right connections, including built in wifi and HDMI.

Apple, all you need to do is add some more storage (or allow attached USB drives) and drop the freaking prices on iTunes!