my name is mwd

A while back Laura and I decided to have a somewhat unusual TV setup based around an AppleTV. The AppleTV is basically a device that you plug into your TV and connects to your network to let you watch digital content. Until now it’s been a minority device in the UK, as to get content onto it you had to either rip DVDs or have some other computer record and encode TV for you. Happily, we’re geeks at home so were happy to do this. It’s been a long time since we watched directly broadcast TV, which might annoy some people, but we don’t mind, and it makes us less likely to watch junk, as we need to pick from TV schedules in advance what to record.

But the AppleTV is now set to be a lot more generally useful, as Apple have recently added some TV content to the iTunes Store which could be directly downloaded to the AppleTV, and now they’ve finally announced movie purchasing and rental. This now makes the AppleTV a much more appealing. Essentially if there’s a movie out I want to watch, no need to wait for a TV channel to have it on, no need to wait for Amazon to deliver it or for lovefilm to post it to me (though, lovefilm is an excellent service) – I can select it from my TV, have it download, and we’re ready to go.

It’ll be interesting to see what the download speeds are like. We’ve only downloaded one TV show so far, and it required 20 minutes or so to download. Hopefully the streaming thing will be in place so you can start watching once it’s cached enough. We’ll have to give it a go and report back!