A couple of things Apple TV needs to be a succes!

kristoffer4 said:

Ok. The Apple tv is not interestning yet and it is a little too expensive. Anyway i am sure it will get RSS feeds (trailers is a RSS right?) and IPTV.
But there are foure missing which is crucial!

1. Apple tv needs to be able to download DIRECTLY for intunes.
2. Movie rentals! (which I think is comming...)
3. HD content also on movie rentals.
4. Dolby 5.1 content and support.

What do you guys think?

Click to expand...

While I agree that the aTV may need a few more features for it to be a slam dunk, I don't think that it's not interesting yet. For me, it's pretty interesting right now, but it doesn't do several things that I'm looking for, yet.

Anyways ...

1. This would be a great feature. You could set it up so that the aTV can act as a thin client to the sync'd Mac/PC on the network. I'd love to see Apple's implementation of the iTS using just the Apple Remote.

2. I agree whole-heartedly. Movies, for the most part, are ideal for a rental model (I won't go into the whole "all-you-can-eat subscription model). Having a reasonably affordable movie rental model would be fantastic.

3. Yes, HD movie rentals would be even better.

4. To me, this isn't necessary. If they included it, well OK. I wouldn't use it, but others may.

I like these ideas and who knows, Apple may be working on them. After all, it is a "hobby" of theirs.

ft

Shuffle music videos

it is a feature worth developing, 'cause it makes no sense buying videos from itunes store and not be able to view them in shuffle mode with no need to select each one at a time! Please Apple fix this.......music videos shuffle!

pavloskgr said:

it is a feature worth developing, 'cause it makes no sense buying videos from itunes store and not be able to view them in shuffle mode with no need to select each one at a time! Please Apple fix this.......music videos shuffle!

Click to expand...

I've got two questions if you don't mind:

1) Can you view more than one in succession from a playlist with a pre-set order instead of random/shuffle mode?

2) Is this for music videos only or do video podcasts and TV shows have to be selected one by one as well?

kristoffer4 said:

Ok. The Apple tv is not interestning yet and it is a little too expensive. Anyway i am sure it will get RSS feeds (trailers is a RSS right?) and IPTV.
But there are foure missing which is crucial!

1. Apple tv needs to be able to download DIRECTLY for intunes.
2. Movie rentals! (which I think is comming...)
3. HD content also on movie rentals.
4. Dolby 5.1 content and support.

What do you guys think?

Click to expand...

My AppleTV does some of this already - it's called a macMini

theBB said:

I've got two questions if you don't mind:

1) Can you view more than one in succession from a playlist with a pre-set order instead of random/shuffle mode?

2) Is this for music videos only or do video podcasts and TV shows have to be selected one by one as well?

Click to expand...

1) no no no.....unfortunately, you can't play more than one music videos at a time!As the one video ends it takes you back to the previous screen and you have to choose again which one to play next! So no succession in video......

2) Of course it doesn't work with TV shows nor podcasts.....But i don't know that is a problem 'cause usually they don't last 3 minutes that music videos do!

Once again i really hope apple would fix it with a software update, and this would be a great way to promote music videos sales through itunes store! In this way (continuous music video playback) you can turn your apple tv to a nice MTV or VH1 program!

kristoffer4 said:

Ok. The Apple tv is not interestning yet and it is a little too expensive. Anyway i am sure it will get RSS feeds (trailers is a RSS right?) and IPTV.
But there are foure missing which is crucial!

1. Apple tv needs to be able to download DIRECTLY for intunes.
2. Movie rentals! (which I think is comming...)
3. HD content also on movie rentals.
4. Dolby 5.1 content and support.

What do you guys think?

Click to expand...

All good ideas. They should take a page out of either eMusic or Netflix's new VOD service and sell rentals in a discounted, pre-pay, use it or lose it fashion.

What I mean is you pay a flat fee, say $20 a month, and you can "rent" anything in the store for a certain percentage of it's purchase price. All your rentals last for the duration of that billing cycle, with a 5 day minimum... so, for example, the package could be rent stuff for 25% of the purchase price, so a TV show would be $0.50 to rent, movies $2-4 depending on the title. Movies/shows rented on the 1st day of your month would be available for the next 30 days (or until you manually deleted it - no re-downloads) and things you rented on days 26 through 30 would be available to you for 5 days.

Also, purchasing anything you've rented in the same month you rented it would get you a 25% discount (the price of the rental). Lastly, they NEED to be AT LEAST DVD quality (which means WIDESCREEN!!!!) and 5.1 sound to be worth anything at all. HD would be even better, even if it added a little to the price. One of the things that I remember being touted with h264 was the ability to have multiple version of a video in the same container. I'd pay extra - based on the above prices, $0.25 for TV shows and $1 for movies - for an HD download if it also included an iPod version (320x240, maybe pan and scan) as well.

I'd also like an eMusic style music package (pay $10 per month and get up to 15 track downloads but you can't carry them over), but that's another story...

dswoodley said:

My AppleTV does some of this already - it's called a macMini

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No, it's called a Mac mini (http://www.apple.com/macmini/) ... if you're going to be smarmy at least get the right name.

EDIT: Whoops, forgot the main thing I was coming here to say! I think Apple should take a cue from MS and offer an add on HD DVD or BR (or both, be it two separate drives or a combo reader) for the Apple TV. Now, the current ATV won't handle that kind of workload, but assuming they do a ATV 2 they're going to have up the power to handle 1080p high datarate video anyway, and there's already a USB port. I trust Apple to do that with some style, unlike MS; the ATV is a pretty stackable looking unit, so making an optical add-on drive in the same sized enclosure would look nice still, and let people pick and chose what functionality they want.

Plus, with both BR and HDDVD offering some form of managed copy it would be a slick system being able to dump a copy (albeit a lower res one) to the ATV. Come to think of it, Apple could just add a system to accept a managed copy of an HDDVD or BR movie from its host computer that was in a 720p24 @5mbps or whatever the spec it needs.

I've owned an TV for 2 or 3 weeks now and love it. Both syncing and streaming are flawless. Here's what I'd like from an update though (some may be repeats of what is already said above or in other threads):

1. Genre organization for movies - I'd like to be able to go into a certain genre and look for comedy, sci-fi, etc. This could be an automatic categorization by how you label the movie. But not take away the full movie list.

2. The ability to see photos while streaming from my Mac. Right now I don't have my music sync'd b/c there is no way it will all fit onto the 40GB
TV that I have. My photos are sync'd though. When I sync with my Mac it allows me access to my entire iTunes library (movies included) but then I can't back out to look at photos without having to re-sync again for music.

3. The ability to look at photo albums, not just the photos popping up in whatever order I set the albums. I can do this with my Xbox 360 and it's great.

4. Being able to buy directly from the iTunes Store from my TV

5. Dolby 5.1

6. iTunes Movie Rentals and High Definition content

mrgreen4242 said:

No, it's called a Mac mini (http://www.apple.com/macmini/) ... if you're going to be smarmy at least get the right name.

Click to expand...

You're right, sorry, sticky fingers...don't ask...

I think that the reason that Apple has not included direct iTMS purchases from the AppleTV is that they have not come up with an acceptable verification scheme. If it is just left open so that all purchases are automatically debited to your account it is dangerous because anyone else that has access to your machine automatically has access to your account. Also, you might want to be able to set up more than one account at a time to have purchase capability, and this means that there must be some mechanism to switch between different user authentications.

The small remote is nice, but it can seriously limit the capability of the device.

stoid said:

I think that the reason that Apple has not included direct iTMS purchases from the AppleTV is that they have not come up with an acceptable verification scheme. If it is just left open so that all purchases are automatically debited to your account it is dangerous because anyone else that has access to your machine automatically has access to your account. Also, you might want to be able to set up more than one account at a time to have purchase capability, and this means that there must be some mechanism to switch between different user authentications.

The small remote is nice, but it can seriously limit the capability of the device.

Click to expand...

That's possible, but I think they could combat it pretty easily. First, making it an option you can turn on or off would solve much of the problem (for example, I would have no problem with it on, but I can see where if you had kids you'd want it off). Secondly, they could use a 4 or 5 key sequence to validate users (up, down, up, menu for example). Or they could do a 4 digit pin with an input screen like the iPod lock thingy.

I'm sure that's a part of the issue, but I don't think it's the major stumbling point.

mrgreen4242 said:

Secondly, they could use a 4 or 5 key sequence to validate users (up, down, up, menu for example).

Click to expand...

Actually, the code is:

UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A, START

I use the TV now, but only as a music library accessible via a tv menu. I think it needs better browsing capabilities (this probably applies to videos as well) and an on-the-fly playlist creation. Those 2 things would make it perfect for my use.

As for video, the only thing that is going to get me to use it for video is support for 4:3 tv's. Without that it is useless to me and a great percentage of the public at this time. I'm sure that will change over time, but right now there are still quite a few 4:3 tv's in use as the primary tv in the house, and Apple is totally missing out on this market (or they get a lot of returns from unhappy customers).