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Lucid Nonsense

Apple's Little Hobby

I think I’m starting to see a possible use for the Apple TV, with one slight addition to it’s feature list. Steve Jobs has described the Apple TV as a “hobby” almost since it’s inception and it wasn’t hard to see why. It is a bit of a niche product, restricting owners to watching films and TV shows purchased from iTunes, as well as photo slideshows, podcasts and for playing your iTunes music collection. It’s not for everybody, although possibly that should be followed by “yet”.

I’ve got a Mac mini connected to a Samsung 40” LCD (good screen by the way). The Mac mini is hidden away upstairs and connected via several holes in the walls, floors and ceiling. The Mac mini then has an eyetv diversity connected to it, which lets us watch and/or record up to two Freeview channel simultaneously, as well as the usual “Pause and Rewind Live TV!” DVR features that TiVo and Sky+ based a lot of their early marketing upon. It all works pretty well, and of course we can play DVDs through the mini as well as buying or renting films and TV series from iTunes. That last trick is definitely handy at times and saves a trip to Blockbusters. There is one more trick up it’s sleeve however that has suddenly become a lot more useful: on-demand TV.

The Apple TV lost out as a viable option when I set the Mac mini up because there is no way to connect a TV receiver to it, such as the eyetv USB stick. What is becoming much more of a missing feature however is the lack of a web browser, and the concomitant access to services such as BBC iPlayer. A lot of interesting things have happened recently in the on-demand realm for UK Mac users. Firstly all five of the major UK networks now officially support Macs for their on-demand players. This covers the network’s main channels, but also their secondary, digital-only offerings. They all seem to work pretty well too, even if ITV’s offering requires installing Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin. Secondly the BBC iPlayer downloader is now out of beta for the Mac, although this does require installing Adobe’s Air technology. Finally: iPlayer has gone HD. Only 720p, but still this is the big one for me because currently there are no HD channels available over Freeview and cable or satellite has never been worth the expense to us considering the limited number of channels we tend to watch. It seems somewhat perverse that the best quality television that I can watch on my TV setup as it is, is now via a web browser. Funny old world.

It’s that that is going to make something like the Apple TV a more viable option in a few years time. If Apple add a full version of Safari, with Flash support, or manage to agree an alternate solution with the broadcasters or content owner then suddenly it could be the best solution for a lot of people. It is a bit of a mess with the number of competing technologies (Flash, Adobe Air and Silverlight) but I know that if that problem was solved it would certainly become an option for me next time I’m looking for a box to hook up to my TV.