First, I also wish it was easier to access my local content via iTunes. I have a large library and that is what I use the AppleTV for 90% of the time since my internet connection is very slow.
So what difficulties have you run into playing from your local library? I've had trouble with both Airplay and Homesharing. Using Airplay, I've had problems with movies taking 4 or 5 tries to get them to play all the way through the first 5 minutes. Great when I'm sitting down to hot food and want to watch a movie and I have to keep getting up and restarting the movie on the iMac.
Using Homesharing, I get the spinning sphincter on a black screen sometimes when I start a movie, and I have to restart it several times to get it to play. After going to El Capitan X, it seems to have gotten worse. Sometimes I have to turn off the wifi on the iMac and turn it back on before the movie will play. Again, this kind of defeats the purpose of having remote storage of digital media in the first place, and is a big reason why I'm looking at media software.
But I disagree with you on this point. It seems quite clear that Apple views the ATV as way to sell you media. They would like you to have it all on their servers where they can control it. Just look at how they have stopped offering downloadable iTunes extras recently. Now you have to stream them. And when there's an internet outage, I can't access my libary at all - not even the DVDs I ripped.
I definitely will agree that Apple looks at aTV as a media outlet for profit. Thats what they do. I'm just doubting they want the account signed in to increase that profit opportunity. I've never bought a single bit of data via iTunes, and I don't have a credit card attached to my account. My sole financial contribution since the store came on line was adding a friend's iTunes gift card to my account. That money is still there, too.
If they wanted to make it easy to access your local content, that would be quite simple. So I have to conclude they intentionally make it difficult. But "it is what it is", I still use my two AppleTVs every day and have gotten used to the limitations.
Apple specifically, and the entire computing world in general, seem determined to move everything to "the cloud". (I always put that in quotes to show my disdain for a buzzword that seems to have achieved sentience, like when the word "multimedia" was thrown around at every conceivable instance back in the mid nineties. That made walking around at CES an even worse headache than it usually was.)
The more I think about this sign-in, the more I have to wonder why they do it, since the aTV absolutely HAS to be signed into the wifi router to make it work at all. Thats a big chunk of authentication there, and it should then take only a simple PIN to get it to communicate with the iTunes application on the local machine.
This all reminds me of how Blu-ray players keep notes on every disc put in the player, and then report that information when the player is net-connected. I'm wondering if the iTunes sign-in requirement for Home Share is a way for Apple to monitor what people are watching when they use non-iTunes media? In the case of companies like Plex its immediately apparent to me that they want to have info on everything you watch, but since they aren't a media outlet, why would they want that info? What are they up to? Regarding Apple, you could make the case that they want to make their media offerings more "finely tailored" to the individual user, but every aTV shows the same content offerings on the movie and TV pages. So what is Apple up to?
