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Technology news and Jobs 
Fuzzy Logic YouTube goes AppleTube as Apple TV gets upgrade
Fuzzy Logic YouTube goes AppleTube as Apple TV gets upgrade | YouTube goes AppleTube as Apple TV gets upgrade |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Thursday, 31 May 2007 | |
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Steve Jobs said that “This is the first time users can easily browse, find and watch YouTube videos right from their living room couch, and it’s really, really fun. YouTube is a worldwide sensation, and Apple TV is bringing it directly from the Internet onto the widescreen TV in your living room.” Interestingly, Apple TV users will be able to log into their YouTube accounts on screen but won’t be browsing the live YouTube site. Users will see a custom interface that looks like the rest of Apple TV which will make thousands of ‘current and popular’ YouTube videos available, meaning YouTube’s entire catalog of video content won’t be available from day 1. But YouTube promises to add ‘thousands more videos each week’ until the full Youtube catalog becomes available in the northern autumn, or fall, as YouTube converts their video from the FLV streaming Flash format to Apple’s preferred H.264 video encoding format. In addition, the Apple has announced that the an upgrade to the hard drive of the Apple TV can be made at time of purchase, boosting the size to 160Gb from the original 40Gb, for US $399, or $100 more than the 40Gb model. Apple says this gives enough space for 200 hours of video, 36,000 songs, 25,000 photos or a combination of all three. Apple’s announcement and capacity upgrade comes at a time when doubts had begun to emerge about the strategy with Apple TV, offering 640x480 resolution video for people who must plug the Apple TV into a widescreen, HD TV capable of up to 1920x1080 resolution, and coming equipped with too small a hard drive to build a truly serious video collection on. Other doubts surrounded the Apple TV’s inability to purchase TV shows, music and movies directly from the Apple TV interface, relying instead on you performing those tasks on your PC or Mac first. But Jobs seemed unperturbed by the criticism directed at the Apple TV in some quarters since the launch as he described the Apple TV as a “hobby” at the D: All Things Digital conference. Jobs said the Apple TV’s current stage of development was like when the first iPod was launched, effectively promising great advances for the Apple TV platform in the future and seemingly concentrating on getting the basics right to start with. Besides users hacking the Apple TV to run OS X and even Joost, enabling them to watch Joost’s large channel selection through the Apple TV onto your TV, and pouring through its internals, the software industry has rallied around the Apple TV with supporting applications. CD and DVD burner software creators Roxio, now part of previous competitor Sonic have unveilved ‘Crunch’, letting you convert video to Apple TV, iPod and iPhone formats, while the Slingbox in the US lets you view content stored on your Apple TV from wherever you are, as long as you are connected to a broadband Internet connection. Elgato’s popular ‘EyeTV’ digital TV tuner and recorder software for Macs lets you record TV shows to your Mac’s hard drive and then send to the Apple TV as well, while Steamer lets you hear Internet radio through the Apple TV. All this means plenty of your own existing content can be quickly and easily repurposed for the Apple TV, letting you enjoy your digital media collection through the Apple TV’s arguably easiest to use ‘digital media’ TV interface. That, along with the easy ability to Apple to endow the Apple TV with interface enhancements and new features through software updates, gives Apple a chance to grow the Apple TV platform slowly, surely and steadily, until a tipping point is reached, and the Apple TV does what the iPod did and sells in the tens of millions, instead of the current hundreds of thousands. At least, that would seem to be Apple’s plan. The Apple TV faces much more advanced competition than the iPod did upon its launch, but as an ‘iPod for your TV’, the Apple TV benefits from a thriving iTunes store with movies, music, TV shows, audio books and more. That, and its smooth integration with the Apple TV, the iPod and undoubtedly the iPhone is just all part of the system that shows the best software developers create their own hardware to deliver their software to people. The Apple TV does just that, and it’s only going to get better, even in the face of ever improving competition from the Xbox 360’s video download capabilities and upcoming IPTV edition, the PS3’s upcoming music/movie/TV show download store, competition from Amazon and TiVo, the Windows Vista Media Center and the world’s satellite and cable pay TV companies all with hard disk video recording set top boxes of their own. However it all turns out, one thing’s for sure: this truly is the must-see TV battle of the early 21st century! {moscomment}
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