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Screenshots and a tour of the new Apple TV features

The Apple TV update announced last month at Macworld has finally been released to the public and I finished downloading it a couple hours ago. I ran through the options and took a few photos of the new and notable sections, which I'll describe after the jump.

Overall it feels like every inch of the software has been updated. Instead of an empty box that plays music and movies from another computer, it's definitely starting to feel like a standalone settop box capable of quite a bit on its own. Here are a few shots of areas I hadn't seen mentioned or explored in the Macworld previews:

Flickr in the Photos section

The Flickr feature allows you to navigate a single user's recent photos, favorites, and photo sets, but it doesn't use the Flickr API to log you fully into the service. Without the API, you won't be able to view private photos or view photos from your contacts/friends and there doesn't seem to be a way to even follow RSS feeds of photos from Flickr. Still, it's a nice way to view photos if you're a user of Flickr and have friends on the service.

HD Movie Rentals

To test out the movie rental feature, I rented a few HD movies to check download speeds and download priorities. Two things jumped out at me: one is download speed and the other is the lack of simultaneous downloads.

Even on my top speed Verizon FiOS 30Mbit line downloads were quite sluggish. Judging from the first hour of downloading, HD movies will take several hours (about 6-8 hours is my guess) to download in full even over broadband. This may be slow servers on Apple's end of things due to the new feature coming out and causing some slowdowns thanks to demand because my connection can normally download a 2-3Gb file in less than an hour. On the positive side, the HD rentals being downloaded had enough video downloaded in about 15-20 minutes to begin real-time playback of movies, but I didn't try it out with a movie to see if the download rate kept up with the viewing time.

I quickly noticed that only one movie could be downloaded at a time, and the one that took priority was the most recently purchased one. Even on the Downloads page under Settings, I could not change the order if I wanted my first purchase to complete before my 2nd or 3rd. I was happy to see that while movies were being downloaded my connection wasn't being saturated and I could browse and use the web normally on other networked computers.

Podcasts

I'm pretty impressed with the wide array of choices in the Podcast view and how easy it is to browse -- there are popular shows, HD video, animation, and other interesting genres shown front and center. Looking at the vast array of podcast choices (I looked up a dozen of my favorites and found a dozen more I'd never heard of that looked good), this was the first time I kind of realized that podcasting could become the new Cable TV, offering thousands of options for anyone looking to learn something or be entertained (and it was all free!). I noticed a lot of larger podcast/tv/studio networks get their own option and major players like HBO seem to be copying their video on demand content into the video podcast format.

Ordering from the couch

Something I hadn't seen mentioned in the Apple TV previews was that aside from buying and renting movies, you can buy pretty much everything else on the iTunes Music Store. You can buy albums and whole seasons of TV Shows in addition to the movie stuff. I didn't notice any way to buy just a song or a single episode of anything. Also, once you store your iTunes Music Store password, you can save it and make purchasing new items a one-click process.

AirTunes

It was a nice surprise to see AirTunes in the new version of Apple TV. I had no idea they were adding this capability and though it seemed a little weird at first (can't you just stream music from your Apple TV to your computer instead of the other way around?) I realized this could be a cool feature if a friend comes over with a laptop and just wants to stream music quickly and easily. Also, another cool feature is that the Apple remote is functional and actually pauses and advances music on your connected iTunes computer remotely from your couch.

Conclusions

Overall in the short time I've been able to play with Apple TV 2.0, I've seen a lot to like and the biggest change is definitely the feeling that this is now a standalone device that I can use to browse photos and look for podcasts and it's not simply a container for my downloaded music and movies like it was before. As predicted, the Apple TV device did suddenly become a Pay Per View box in that most of the menu options are geared towards browsing, buying, and downloading other content, with just a tiny option at the bottom to look at your stuff. Most of the menus are definitely geared towards other new stuff. It'll be interesting to see how Apple TV evolves when the next update comes along.

by Matt Haughey February 12, 2008 in News

Comments

What's the video and audio quality like on the HD movie rentals?

Posted by: Sean at Feb 12, 2008 4:18:14 PM

I just played the Matrix HD back and it looks great at 720p. It definitely looks better than a standard DVD and I'd say maybe some of the background elements aren't as sharp as a 1080p hi-def disc, but it looked good enough that I doubt most people would notice much difference between 720p and 1080p.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Feb 12, 2008 4:55:41 PM

Good review. Just wanted to add some notes.

You said: "I didn't notice any way to buy just a song or a single episode of anything."

That one is easy: just choose a song or single episode. It will bring you to a detail page with more information (about episodes at least) and will have a nice big "Buy" button.

You also said: "I could not change the order if I wanted my first purchase to complete before my 2nd or 3rd."

You can select any item in the download queue and it will move it to the top of the queue. I realized this because a down arrow appeared when i scrolled to the inactive downloads.

Posted by: Mark at Feb 13, 2008 10:59:59 AM

"You can select any item in the download queue and it will move it to the top of the queue. I realized this because a down arrow appeared when i scrolled to the inactive downloads."

Oh yeah, I learned that shortly afterwards. My first instinct was to hit "pause" on the currently downloading file to get the 2nd or 3rd file to start downloading instead, but it appears to work backwards from there instead.

Posted by: Matt Haughey at Feb 13, 2008 1:39:33 PM

Have you tested out Signal or Remote Buddy on your iPhone to connect to the AppleTV AirTunes? Would love to be able to browse my music library without having to switch on the TV (as I could do with an Airport Express).
Signal: http://alloysoft.com/
Remote Buddy: http://www.iospirit.com/remotebuddy

Posted by: Jish at Feb 14, 2008 10:38:27 AM

Yeah Jish, I'm a fan of Signal and use it often with my Airport Express, but I find it kind of kills my iPhone battery having to constantly refresh a webpage over wifi for a few hours.

Having an apple remote do the ffw/pause stuff is so much simpler.

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