Hands-On Report--Apple TV "Take Two"

When Apple TV was first announced I thought it was generally a great idea but an incomplete one. I could already stream video, photos and music from my Mac to our TV via an AirPort Express Base Station and a Mac mini. The Apple TV just made the whole operation easier.

One could buy movies from iTunes and download them but I have almost never bought movies on DVD. None of us ever watch a movie by choice more than once, except for my daughter who collected the entire set of Star Wars movies and watches each again now and then. The main thing missing was a library of rental movies to download, replacing the mail order NetFlix DVD's and the nearly weekly DVD hunt at Blockbuster down the street. So I, along with many others, didn't find that Apple TV was really worth $299 for the 40GB model.

Now You're Talking

During his Macworld keynote speech in mid-January, Steve Jobs introduced Apple TV "Take Two" and admitted that too few people actually buy DVDs and watch movies several times. He concluded that while people want to own their music, they want to rent their movies and he is absolutely right as far as I am concerned. The key features of Apple TV "Take Two" are the iTunes movie rental library, implementation of Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound pass-through and the elimination of the Mac as a middleman in the process. They overcame almost all of my concerns about Apple TV's utility.

My only remaining reservation is the 30-day gap between iTunes availability and DVD release. But I'm used to waiting months after the theater release for the DVD rental so, really, what's another 30 days if indeed Apple lives up to that schedule and it doesn't stretch out for months longer?

Fortunately for those who bought the original Apple TV, the new features were implemented completely in software and could be downloaded as a free update. A price reduction to $229 for the 40GB model really sealed the deal for me so as soon as the Apple TV "Take Two" and iTunes 7.6 software were released, I ordered a 40GB model and a $19.95 2-meter HDMI cable from the Apple Store. By the way, the HDMI cable is from ExtremeMac and a real bargain compared with Radio Shack--the 4-meter ExtremeMac HDMI cable is only $29.95.

The Apple TV "Take Two"

The Apple TV was shipped directly from China by FedEx. The box contained the Apple TV with version 2.0 of the software, a power cable and an Apple Remote. I connected it via the ExtremeMac HDMI cable to our HD TV and then plugged the power cord (no AC adapter brick!) into a wall outlet. Then I chose a new input connection (I used "PC" input because the DVD and Cable inputs were already taken) on the HD TV and hoped for the best.

The Apple TV's output appeared on the HD TV's screen but the color was weird, i.e. blue instead of black and yellow-green and pink tints for the colors. I fiddled with the color setting options until one of them (I don't remember which now) gave me the right colors.

Then, the Apple TV went into the setup routine for a wireless internet connection. Try as I would, I could not get the Apple TV to connect to either our "n" WiFi or "g" WiFi network. At first I forgot that I had to enter the Apple TV's AirPort ID into our AirPort Base Stations Access Control window. But even after that, I still could not get the Apple TV to connect to either network. Curiously, the Apple TV wireless network setup did not ask what security protocol we are using on either network. It's WPA-Personal on the "g" network and WPA2-Personal on the "n" network. So I don't know how the Apple TV would know which is being used. Perhaps, this was the problem.

Anyway, I soon tired of trying to connect wirelessly and did not want to reduce the security of our WiFi networks by turning off security. So, I plugged in an ethernet cable from the port on the wall. That did the trick and our Apple TV was up and running.

The first thing I did was rent an HD movie from the iTunes Store, "Jesse James." There are hundreds of movies to rent from $2.99 for movies released more than a year ago to $3.99 for recent releases to $4.99 for movies in HD format. The download started almost immediately and within a few minutes the Apple TV signaled that I could begin watching the movie if I wanted to. That was surprisingly fast but I wanted to wait until the evening. So, I switched the HD TV input back to Cable, leaving the Apple TV to download the whole movie while we watched TV.

Back on my Mac, I opened iTunes 7.6 and it automatically began syncing my videos, photos and songs with Apple TV over our network. When it was done, only some 13GB of the Apple TV's 40GB hard drive was empty. So I went back into iTunes and selected subsets of the videos, photos and songs so that 25GB of Apple TV's hard drive was available for movie rentals and future stuff.

The Results

That first night we watched "Jesse James" and it was terrific in HD with Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound, much better than a standard DVD rental. Since then, we have downloaded and watched three additional movies, all in HD. The Apple TV is one terrific machine. The cost for an HD movie rental from the iTunes Store is about the same as a DVD rental from Blockbuster and we didn't have to leave our house to get or to return it.

The only problem with Apple TV is that the number of available movies for rent on the iTunes Store is still sparse. Steve Jobs promised 1000 by now but there are only 400 or so, mostly "classics." We still have a list of eight relatively recent movies (i.e. within the last year) that we want to download and watch so that gives Apple about 3-4 weeks to stock up the library to the promised level, hopefully beyond, before we start to get cranky about the available selections. [Bill Fox]