Infinite Style

So I received an Apple TV as a Christmas gift and figured I would give it a good one over on this blog. The latest generation Apple TV looked pretty interesting when Steve Jobs gave it a demo upon it’s introduction, but what doesn’t look appealing during an Apple keynote? It’s price point of 99 dollars also made it cheap enough that one could go out and buy one as an impulse buy. The only thing holding me back was that it never was released in Sweden, where I happen to reside. 

When I got the Apple TV I was pretty surprised because I’ve never really spoken or shown much interest in it. With it not being available locally come a whole lot of problem. There is no content available for purchase from iTunes, and no NetFlix equivalent available. Remove those two ingredients and the Apple TV loses about 80% of it’s features. Because of this I though about selling it, but then the Apple geek in me got the best of me and I decided to hook it up and give it a try. 

Upon setting it up I had immediate problems with the internet connecting. I couldn’t make it connect to YouTube or Flickr. I would later discover that the Google DNS servers I use on my iMac were cause some form of conflict. I found it pretty strange since these are settings locally on my iMac and not my router, but removing them as improved the connection performance considerably. 

Using it is pretty straight forward, it connects with your computer and can read content from it’s iTunes. This means that the computer and Apple TV both need to be on at the same time, which is a big negative for me. The Apple TV also can’t be connected to two separate iTunes accounts. This made it even more useless to me, as I can’t set it up so both me and my girlfriend can easily stream stuff to it, without having to chance settings each and every time. 

I went out on the web and downloaded some movies in a format that would play nice with iTunes. This task was in itself a bit of a chore, the standard .avi format doesn’t work in iTunes or Apple TV and films aren’t as readily available in the AppleTV friendly .m4v format. Still I managed to find a film (Zombieland) and gave it a go on the Apple TV. The streaming worked pretty much flawlessly, it got hung up once because of the problem with the Google DNS servers but after I figured that out all was well. 

Overall the AppleTV could be great device but the politics of TV licensing are holding it back. Without the ability to purchase film rentals from iTunes or a Netflix equivalent it becomes a rather useless device. I started this review two weeks ago, and since then I couldn’t be bothered to try and find more content that was compatible with it. I don’t see myself ever putting this device to use, unless Apple actually releases it in Sweden and makes content available for it. Unfortunately I’m not too optimistic on that. I think Apple is still trying to iron out it’s television strategy, and Apple TV will never be released here. Especially since previous generations were never made available here. Looks like I got a nice Apple branded paperweight.