[tallscot]

Quote

The Tivo interface kicks the butt of any cable company DVR.

So you've used all the DVRs from AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner, DirecTV, Dish, Comcast, Cox, Suddenlink, Charter, Bright House, Insight, Broadstripe...more...?

[tmedia1]

One option is to buy an EyeTV and add that to your computer/AppleTV, which will give you tuner/dvr funtionality. Granted it's no Tivo, but it does a pretty good job of doing basic dvr duties and the channel guide is pretty good...

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tallscot said:

An Apple TiVo would fail for the same reason TiVo is failing - most people get the DVR from their satellite/cable provider. I get mine from DirecTV and it's HD and I prefer it over TiVo Series 2 for a few reasons and it costs me $4.99 a month.

The only thing Apple TV has that interests me is the ability to "rent" an HD movie without me having to get up from my chair. Unfortunately for Apple, I have a PS3 and I prefer renting my HD movies on Blue-ray at Blockbuster.

PS3 is a fantastic box, I will not argue that. I want one, even though I don't have much times these days to play games or watch movies. My kids are young, so it would be of limited interest to them at this point. That is the main reason why I have not jumped on getting one yet.

On the other hand, I do have an Apple TV. I am moving my small DVD collection (90+ DVDs), of movies to a hard drive giving me not only a backup copy of the movie, but also a very cool way of accessing my library with out having to rely on a DVD player or disk to watch them. Also this gives me the advantage of having one central digital library of all my movies and music that can be accessed from what ever room has an Apple TV. (I only have one, but plan on getting one more at least). Now with the iTunes Remote free software for the iPhone, the last real draw back of the Apple TV has been removed. The provided remote was cool looking but not very functional, the iPhone makes a very good remote for obvious reasons. I like how Apple is starting to combine their gadgets for interoperability and adding value to older hardware.

[tallscot]

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On the other hand, I do have an Apple TV. I am moving my small DVD collection (90+ DVDs), of movies to a hard drive giving me not only a backup copy of the movie, but also a very cool way of accessing my library with out having to rely on a DVD player or disk to watch them. Also this gives me the advantage of having one central digital library of all my movies and music that can be accessed from what ever room has an Apple TV.

You don't need an Apple TV to do that. You can stream your movies, music and photos to a PS3 (or Xbox 360) with Nullriver software. It works really, really well with my PS3. It's $20.

The PS3 supports more video formats too. It supports the MPEG2 that the DVD is encoded in, so I think you can just use Hand Brake to mux it without encoding it, which makes ripping your DVDs much faster. I don't do this, though, since I'm now renting Blu-ray.

The PS3 supports 1080p.

Not only that, you can easily swap out the PS3's hard drive with any 2.5" off-the-shelf hard drive without voiding the warranty. You just pop in the new drive and go to the system settings and format the drive. It's fully supported by Sony.

The only reason I would want an Apple TV is if I was a sucker and bought a lot of Fairplay media. ;) Then I'd be locked into Apple's products.

The PSP can go through the Internet and access all your content on your Mac from anywhere in the world where there is Internet access.

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[quote name='George76']
>

Grapho said:

> I am already, slowly but steadily ripping my entire DVD collection to my iTunes library. It does not take obscene amounts of storage to do this. In encodes and compresses very well. Older DVD are easer then new ones. But with the cost per GB going down every day, I could have one extra TB drive that could hold hundreds of movies easily. I only rip what I own so I don't feel bad about doing this at all.

Then you're clearly not encoding them at a very high video or audio quality. I have over 40GB of music; I would hate to see how much space encoding all of my DVD's would take (not to mention that I wouldn't consider the time and effort very worthwhile). I went through the process of ripping most of season 8 of Stargate SG-1; each episode was around 800MB. Multiply that by 22 and you have a pretty good chunk of space used just for one season. Multiply that by the other 9 seasons of Stargate, 6 seasons of Smallville, probably 20-30 other full seasons of TV, several hundred movies and you have a rather massive amount of data to store.

As for other comments, including the one in the article about the plethora of ads in the TiVo interface, I am left confused. I have a Tivo Series 2 and a Tivo HD and yes there are a couple of ads, but they are pretty much invisible, usually a text link at the bottom of the current menu. Hardly intrusive, certainly a lot less than the ads some cable boxes spoon into their Guide interface. I am quite fond of both TiVo's, though I haven't got to try out sharing content between them. With the TiVo HD and my PS3 I have pretty close to the ultimate media experience that covers most of the complaints people have listed on this forum. No, neither is an Apple product but they both have quite good GUI interfaces; I'd even consider the PS3's superior to AppleTV's method of drilling down through an iPod-based menu hierarchy.

I don't watch mini series, only full featured films so in my case it is working pretty well. From my 1080p TV set, I can not tell the deference from the original DVD or the ripped copy, so no compromise in quality, or at least none that I can perceive. My MacPro can support up to 4TB of storage and it encodes a full feature film in about 14 to 20 minuets, depending on the length of what I am ripping. Handbrake uses all 8 cores like no other application that I have used. It really is very well written as far as multithreading is concerned. New movies do pose more of a challenge do to newer more draconian DRM used. A movie ends up being 1 to 3 GB depending on how log it is. The Lord of the Rings, extended version ended up being a bit under 5 GB each.

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The problem with the PS3 is that I would need 2 or 3 to have access in deferent rooms. At $400 a pop? Nope, I will get one eventually, but the rest of the house will be sporting Apple TVs.

[bija]

When Apple TV has the recording features I get with TiVo, I will be happy to get one.

[tallscot]

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The problem with the PS3 is that I would need 2 or 3 to have access in deferent rooms. At $400 a pop? Nope, I will get one eventually, but the rest of the house will be sporting Apple TVs.

If I were in your shoes, I'd do the same thing. But remember, the Apple TV isn't the only media streamer out there. There are several. The Xbox 360 is $279...and there are cable/satellite DVRs that stream now. I'm not saying you shouldn't buy an Apple TV. It's a great box. I'm just letting you know in case you didn't know... ;)

[doglesby]

The problem is that the experience is controlled by broadcasters. I don't see Apple going for that. I am frankly sick of the ads on television. Commercials are fine, but then they added little images in the corner of the show, then they took up the entire bottom 5th (right on top of subtitles), now they have sound. It completely pulls you out of the show you're trying to watch. Then there's the interruptions for things like weather. It's frustrating when you are trying to evaluate a pilot for a new show only to get updates on storms from three days ago.
Apple wants people to buy shows from iTunes, the experience is much, much better. If only it could convince the studios to come on board. Given the problems there, I'm surprised anyone would suggest that Apple could somehow resist the entertainment companies better than TiVo.

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Yes, I was aware of the XBox 360 and the PS3 streaming capabilities. Like I said, the PS3 is in my horizon, I would not consider the XBox since the PS3 does pretty much the same things and I consider the PS3 a superior product. To much bad press and reporting has plagued the XBox since it's inception. They might have fixed all the bugs by now, but general negative perception is hard to shake, particularly with electronics.

[wanderso]

I own an apple TV and am pleased with it. Where I think Apple is missing the boat though is that the device should do do the following:
1) Work as a gaming device. Easy enough to do since it is Mac OS X anyway. Some may complain that the graphics won't be as nice as other devices, but there certainly are kids games and the like that is at least some sort of market.
2) Support Skype and iChat directly from within Apple TV. It has a USB port already. I think it is crazy that someone hasn't figured out that it would be very useful to have a small web cam that sits on the top of a flat panel TV. Better yet - a camera built in to the TV like the iMac already has. The Wii console (I have as well) has an elegant IR receiver that sits on the TV so it's not an unreasonable request to have an external camera that doesn't look like a piece of junk like most webcams do. Apple could sell it as a USB, component or HDMI accessory. Users could then do video calls directly from their television, using the network connection in the apple TV. There is no question that the operating system can support it. Apple could promote this as a unique capability.
Oh - and having this capability would make posting youtube videos a snap.

[wanderso]

I own an apple TV and am pleased with it. Where I think Apple is missing the boat though is that the device should do do the following:
1) Work as a gaming device. Easy enough to do since it is Mac OS X anyway. Some may complain that the graphics won't be as nice as other devices, but there certainly are kids games and the like that is at least some sort of market.
2) Support Skype and iChat directly from within Apple TV. It has a USB port already. I think it is crazy that someone hasn't figured out that it would be very useful to have a small web cam that sits on the top of a flat panel TV. Better yet - a camera built in to the TV like the iMac already has. The Wii console (I have as well) has an elegant IR receiver that sits on the TV so it's not an unreasonable request to have an external camera that doesn't look like a piece of junk like most webcams do. Apple could sell it as a USB, component or HDMI accessory. Users could then do video calls directly from their television, using the network connection in the apple TV. There is no question that the operating system can support it. Apple could promote this as a unique capability.
Oh - and having this capability would make posting youtube videos a snap.

[DMacboySJ]

"Apple TV as a TiVo Killer" is essentially a poorly researched and incompetent article.
Background: I have owned stock in TiVo and Apple since the mid-1990s (buying TiVo and Apple around $12 each). I worked for a short time in Apple and I was an early beta-tester for TiVo and a loyal shareholder.
Mr. Siracusa's article is ill-informed. TiVo holds most of the U.S. and worldwide Patents in DVR functionality. The U.S. Court of Appeals recently reaffirmed the lower courts decision that TiVo can pull the plug on EchoStar (owner of Dish Network) in the next two or three weeks.
If Apple, attempts to expand Apple TV which is a hobby for the company, it will possibly engage in a lengthy legal fight. EchoStar will mostly likely attempt a hostile takeover bid of TiVo or license Tivo boxes in Dish Network homes. The most likely outcome is that they will do a licensing deal with TiVo, since TiVo was set up with a hammer clause, preventing change of ownership which translates into EchoStar would have to pay enormous amounts for TiVo. TiVo already has Time-Warner Cable and they may be communicating with DirectTV, which they have previously worked with before. (I bought to two older HiDef DirectTV TiVo's.) So TiVo with their patents is poised to capture the U.S. satelite TV DVR market.
Apple does have enough liquidity to mount a legal fight, but they would be wiser to enter a deal to license Tivo software from TiVo to place it on AppleTV and create a joint venture. This would launch AppleTV-Tivo box into the "must-have" item - the reliability and ease of use of Apple and Tivo to provide a full entertainment experience.
By licensing TiVo with cosmetic changes, Apple could begin selling AppleTV-TiVo boxes much more quickly, because Apple would not have to perfect the DVR technology that DirectTV and Dish have obviously failed at (if you've used DVRs from DirectTV or Dish, you already know how bad they are compared to a TiVo). Apple can stick to their core businesses without spending tons of money to be an TiVo killer.
AppleTV is NOT a TiVo Killer; TiVo on AppleTV is blockbuster money-maker.
Note: Netflix announced that it will rent movies online on Microsoft XBox 360 over the last couple of days. If AppleTV competes through its iTunes Movie Downloads and adds TiVo, it will push Microsoft further down its knees.
Dennis Chiu is the Member Manager and one of the Lead Business Consultants for Silicon Valley Prodigy Consulting, LLC.

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As others have pointed out. TiVo and Apple TV are two deferent ways of solving a similar problem. TiVo essentially is a smart TV recorder. Apple TV is a media extender for iTunes. The faster people understand the main deference the faster they will stop expecting some time of convergence.

Apple TV is about viewing on demand content, TiVo is about recording and seeing broadcast material, usually, with no commercials, but your still subject to studio scheduling. Why would Apple TV record what it is attempting to sell?

On the surface, the two products seem to converge, but it's two deferent distinct approaches to solve a common problem. Personally, I like Apple TV better because I don't watch to many TV shows. But I can see how others could not live without their TiVo.