Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Apple showed their “iTV” box at today’s media event. It’s intended to connect downloaded video to home televisions. Today was a pre-announcement, for a planned release next spring, so you can’t go out and buy one.

In any case, I can tell already that the iTV would probably pass the spouse test in our household. We have gone through an assortment of roll-your-own video and media server projects over the past few years, but it usually ends up that I’m the only one that can get BeyondTV / MythTV / Freevo / whatever running, which generally defeats the purpose.

By the spring, there will probably be competing form factors based on Vista as well. In any case, I’m sure they will be far more acceptable to the rest of our household than the DIY approach.

Update 09-12-2006 13:19PDT: Apparently it’s unclear whether existing video files can be added for use with the iTV (for example, DVDs ripped to disk or personal DV files). If it can only be used with iTunes purchases, this isn’t going to be very interesting.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 11:57 am and is filed under General, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.