thomas fitzgerald.net

The Apple TV has proved to be something of a sneaker hit, at least amongst the vocal mac community, and equally so among hacker society too. While many still decry the lack of recording or hd content available from the iTunes store, the humble device is, in my opinion, pretty damn good for a first revision product. What about the future though? Here are some thoughts on what Apple should ad to the Apple TV with a future software update and make this great little device a killer product.

(I know this might not feature some of the big things many people think this device should have, because I have tried to limit it to something they could do relatively easily with a software update)

1. XVID/DIVX Support. I can understand why they might not want to do this, as it has the appearance of supporting piracy, but a lot of people have a lot of content in this format. This has been one of the top priorities of Hackers, so Apple should just bite the bullet and add support for the format. This I suspect is the number one request Apple will get through its feedback channels.

2. iPod support. They should enable you to plug in your ipod to the USB port and have it appear in the “sources” menu. If you then select it you can browse your iPod content as if it were on the device.

3. USB Hard Drive Support. If you plug in a USB drive you should get two options. Option one would be to use it as extra storage for the Apple TV. Option 2 would be to scan the device for playable content and have it appear in its own sub menu. This would be great if you had something you quickly wanted to see on a thumb drive or the like.

4. Add an “Apple Video” section. Much like the movie trailers but displaying various Apple content. Apple has tones of videos, from quick tours of it’s various software products, to interviews in the “pro” section of the website, to all the various keynotes it has done. It would be great if this was all available for streaming from the Apple TV. A bonus to this is they could make content exclusively available to Apple TV users. Such as early streaming of any Keynote or Special Event. I know this would primarily appeal to mac users, but it would really appeal to them.

5. Add a way to “flag” content as you are watching or listening to it. This is something they should add to iPods as well. How many times have you been listening to something and said to yourself, “Oh, I must remember that for later”, and then promptly forget what it is. I know you can kind of use the rating system for this, but it’s clunky and you might be using your ratings for different purposes. It could be as simple as press and hold the play pause button while you are watching something. When the Apple TV syncs the next time the flagged items come up in a special smart playlist.

There are lots more little things they could do too, and plenty of big things. I don’t think they should add recording to the Apple TV, as I don’t think they should try and make it into a one device does all TIVO killer. As for the other much requested option to purchase content directly on the device, I’m not entirely sure this is a good idea. One of the things I don’t like about the way the much touted xbox service works is downloading content directly to the device, thereby locking it into the device. At least with iTunes acting as a central hub you can put your TV shows and movies on numerous devices (Apple ones that is !) and more importantly, back them up. If they were to integrate the store with the Apple TV they would have to find a way to either have it download to iTunes or have it upload back to your main iTunes library from the Apple Tv if it downloaded the content locally. Either way, I don’t think it is as strait foreword, from a user philosophy point of view if nothing else.