Is the ATV for me? Will it do...?

BigDave48 said:

I'm trying to figure out what all the ATV is capable of doing. Surprisingly, I can't seem to find the info on Apple's site or MR.

So I'm wondering...

1) Can I stream iTunes music from my MBP and MBA to ATV? (I know I can do go from my iPhone 3GS to ATV)

2) Can I stream pandora from my iphone? From my MBP and MBA?

3) Can I stream 3rd party apps with audio (i.e. MLB Radio iPhone app) to ATV?

Thanks for any help.

Click to expand...

For #1, I think if you have both laptops' Home Sharing in iTunes turned on and activated on the same Apple ID I'll work fine.

For #2 and 3, audio/video streaming from iOS to the ATV for 3rd party apps is supposedly coming in iOS 4.3. At present, you can't. And right now, only iTunes can stream audio from a Mac to the ATV, but again, I think this is coming eventually to 3rd party apps.

In it's current form, the ATV mainly gets your *iTunes* media from your Mac to your TV or from your iOS device to your TV.

1) yes
2) no
3) no

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Under 4.2.1, Most apps will stream audio to the ATV so the answer to #3 is yes for audio (I do this all the time with spotify and tunein radio)

video streaming from 3rd party apps and websites to ATV is coming in 4.3, but it has to be explicitly enabled to work: this includes 3rd party apps (which will need to be updated to support this), and videos embedded in websites which will required an additional tag to enable streaming to the ATV. Without this tag, safari won't allow the video to be streamed to the ATV.

xraydoc said:

For #1, I think if you have both laptops' Home Sharing in iTunes turned on and activated on the same Apple ID I'll work fine.

For #2 and 3, audio/video streaming from iOS to the ATV for 3rd party apps is supposedly coming in iOS 4.3. At present, you can't. And right now, only iTunes can stream audio from a Mac to the ATV, but again, I think this is coming eventually to 3rd party apps.

In it's current form, the ATV mainly gets your *iTunes* media from your Mac to your TV or from your iOS device to your TV.

Click to expand...

You can stream Pandora to the ATV. I do it from my iPad anyway.

2) Can I stream pandora from my iphone? From my MBP and MBA?

Click to expand...

yes. However, to stream from the Mac, you need airfoil. It will take the audio stream that is playing on the Mac and stream it to your Atv2.

You definitely can stream Pandora from your iPhone to your ATV with Airplay. I do it all the time. And yes you can also stream MLB audio to the ATV. All the third party apps currently stream audio. In iOS 4.3 beta, 3rd party apps can now also enable video streaming over Airplay. And yes you can stream iTunes music from your laptops (as well as videos, movies, and tv shows) to the Apple TV using both Home Sharing and Airplay.


So the answers to your questions:

1. yes
2. yes from iPhone; laptop requires airfoil app
3. yes for audio; video coming in 4.3 if MLB enables it