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I agree with all the above...but the feature that gets overlooked so much but is worth the price of admission is the photo streaming...used to be in the olden days photos were in albums and shoeboxes and pulled out every few years to look at. Then came the computer. But who wants to sit around a computer and watch photos? Ugh.

But having AppleTV playing the photos on your HDTV with some light jazz from the internet playing in the background is amazing. When my friends come over they are mesmerized by it. Especially. if I have photos of them in the mix. They can't wait until a photo of them comes on. My photos are viewed more this way then anyway in the past....like I said, worth $99 just for this feature alone! Best

I still have the original Apple TV for a couple of reasons. I can use the hard drive to act as a media storage device, and play my music directly from it without having to have my computer on to stream it. Using the remote app on my iPhone makes it easy to select what I want to play and output it to my amp and speakers in my living room.

Also, my internet connection doesn't always allow me to stream HD. When I rent a movie on the Apple TV, it downloads it to the hard drive, and I can watch it uninterrupted directly from the device.

clh126, on 19 April 2011 - 05:57 AM, said:

Agreed, I love the new photo streaming. I actually have it set up to display the most recent pictures from my Flickr account (i.e. the pics good enough for me to upload for others to see) and it's great to always have the latest showing on the TV.

Does anyone know if it is possible to get a proxy or vpn working on Apple TV? I realize you can probably hack it or buy a VPN capable router but I'm not interested in that. I just want to know if it is an officially supported feature.

This slideshow is an unpaid ad.

I own an Apple TV, and I like it. The interface is excellent and it accesses content rapidly. I also have a Blu-Ray player and a TV that offer streaming content over wi-fi, some of which I think Apple TV should have, such as weather and news. I had to purchase a separate device for Amazon Instant Video because ATV lacks it. A slideshow featuring the content of these other two devices would also show impressive features.

Apple TV is very good but could be better if Apple spared no effort to add content. In my view Apple prevents ATV from becoming the dominant streaming device by dragging its feet about adding content that might compete with its lagging rentals/sales. The ATV cool factor would also be much greater if it were possible to wirelessly use the device with a large TV as a Mac mirror display.

To call MLB a feature is really stretching it. Apple TV still does not support Pandora, which I would greatly prefer to their Internet radio stations. Photo sharing has to first be setup on iTunes and shared from there, rather than being able to simply select an album or event directly from iPhoto. It doesn't run any IOS apps like a Web browser and it doesn't support direct keyboard entry. You have to enter text with an old-style one-letter-at-a-time onscreen keyboard. I do like AirStream and the ability to play everything in my itunes library, but the firmware is still a bit buggy. It's only 720p, which is still very good, but a bit disappointing on a large screen. Oh, the Apple TV still has no music visualizer like iTUnes. That's a real deficit. The Netflix streaming is well-done and the quality seems to be better than the Netflix streaming that's built into my TV. In the end, it's a great way to distribute music around the house, but the Apple TV could be a much more capable and useful device than it is.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the coolest of them all? AppleTV appears to be a cool product but it may not be the coolest.

For an extra $80 and if you don't mind a slightly larger form factor you get all of the above (minus basketball and baseball but you do get photo streaming and you can have Pandora playing in the background) PLUS 1TB of storage PLUS the ability to add storage via USB-connected drives and virtually unlimited from NAS PLUS the ability to 'see' any media you may be sharing on your home network PLUS the ability to play just about any video, photo or music file format in existence PLUS a fully customizable user interface PLUS a bunch of Web services [AccuWeather, Blockbuster, CinemaNow, DEEZER, facebook, flickr, flingo, LIVE 365, Mefdiafly, NETFLIX, PANDORA, tunein, YouTube with Hulu about to join the list] and... yes, it fully supports iTunes - I'm talking about WD's TV Live HUB http://www.amazon.co...=cm_rdp_product

I've been using WD's product for a couple of months now and couldn't been happier even though some users do report bugs. By the way, playback supports 1080p video and 7.1 surround sound. Oh, and it integrates with the Harmony universal remotes.

This post has been edited by arthdenton: 19 April 2011 - 06:49 AM

I have two A2's love them both the only criticisim is the lame search method mentioned above, ie, no keyboard entry. Fix that and it would be great.

brobdingnagian, on 19 April 2011 - 06:15 AM, said:

your TV doesn't have amazon? mine didn't ship with it (sony bravia), but it appeared with a software update! and don't forget there's licensing involved. Netfix has a different business model than itunes so it doesn't directly compete with itunes like amazon - sales/rentals - does.

i don't think there's enough bandwidth in the wifi spec to drive a monitor (at least w/o lag). think about using remote desktop - that's sending the display info to a client machine and it simply isn't fast enough to redraw a youtube video on the remote client nevermind a DVD.... if there was enough bandwidth someone would have come out with a wireless monitor by now.. but they haven't.

I want Macworld to be successful but this "slideshow" format is so transparently a vehicle to get multiple page views and it is really irritating. There's nothing in the content that requires this format. Please, festoon the sides of stories with ads if you must, but allow me to read more than one paragraph at a time.

For the price of the Apple TV it's worth it just to run the 8 bucks a month Netflix service. I use the iPhone app to control it and since the last software update fixed some Netflix streaming problems it has worked like a charm. We used to watch a pay-per-view movie from Cox Cable once in a while, but two movies from them costs as much as a month from Netflix, and the ever-expanding Netflix library of movies and TV shows seems to have that we like than did Cox.

Airplay has turned out the be really cool too for streaming movies and photos direct from the iPhone to TV.

The best feature is not on here.

XBMC on a jb Apple TV!

With MLB.TV, you can not follow your favorite team, because of its ridiculous blackout restrictions. MLB.TV starts at a whopping $99/year, but you can't watch your local team(s), whether they're playing at home or away. In some markets, such as in Iowa, several teams are completely blacked out.
If you want to watch your local team in action, you'll need to subscribe to MLB Extra Innings with DirecTV for twice the price.