Apple TV

Apple gave more details about their entry into the home entertainment market today. Fomerly, iTV, now Apple TV is basically a way to stream movies, TV shows, podcasts, music, and photos from a computer (Mac or PC) to your "widescreen" TV. For some reason, Apple isn't interested in people with TVs that are 4x3 aspect ratio, like myself. The Apple TV can either playback media streamed from a computer or it can play video stored on Apple TV's 40GB hard drive. You add video to the Apple TV's hard drive by syncing it with your Mac or PC using iTunes. The Apple TV supports 802.11b, g, and n wireless standards. I'm guessing g & n will stream video, but b won't, especially not high-def video. Yes, the Apple TV will support video with a resolution of 1280x720. Hopefully, they'll start selling some high-def movies soon on iTunes.

So for Link TV, this is a neat little device to watch our Mosaic podcast. It gets those QuickTime movies that are up on the internet, over to the TV. A cool way to watch Link TV if you don't have satellite TV. But for $299, that's a little pricey. For $399, an Xbox 360 gets you a gaming system with downloadable high-def movives that you can buy and rent. I hope Apple can make their video services more compelling, including high-def content and movie rentals soon. Apple TV should be available in February.

The new iPhone from Apple is really exciting. I won't go into all of the features here, but it is a widescreen video player as well. While it's not going to take over the cellphone market overnight, I could see in 3 years, there being as many iPhones out there as there are iPods now.