iPhone thinking for the Apple TV

[sir42]

Prior to the iPhone, one had to lug around a cell phone, a PDA, and an iPod. Now it's all together in one sleek package. What would happen if we applied the same thinking to the Apple TV?

I'm looking at my TV setup right now and I have the following group of mismatched boxes piled one on top of the other and connected with hundreds of feet of cables:

- cable box
- cable modem
- dvr
- blu-ray player
- audio receiver
- airport express
- network attached storage (okay, I don't actually have this in my setup, but I will when/if Time Machine supports it)


The iPhone Apple TV would receive the television and broadband signals through the standard coaxial cable from your cable company. From there, the Apple TV would do everything else. It would be your wireless base station, DVR and audio receiver all in one. Hi-Def movies would download overnight from iTunes and you could use your iPhone to schedule a recording of your favorite show while you're out on the go. Time Machine would back up all of your computers wirelessly to the Apple TV's hard drive and you could remotely log back into the Apple TV while you're at work. Finally, the video signal would be wirelessly transmitted to your TV while the audio signals would be wirelessly transmitted to your surround speakers. No more wires. All in one box.

Future versions may not even need the coaxial cable once WiMax becomes a viable option.

 

[vandlism]

That no longer sounds like an AppleTV, but more of a home media server per se. But to get at your point, the AppleTV really is the home media version of the iPhone. On the outside, it is a very simple device with only one LED to tell you whether the device is on or not. It syncs with iTunes to give you the latest versions of your TV Shows, Movies, Music, and Podcasts. Perhaps they could build an optical drive into the AppleTV and that would reduce quite a bit of clutter and make things a bit easier to control, on the TV side of things. But in a way its kind of like asking them to put a CD drive in the iPhone. The same goes for TV shows. In an ideal world, we could just subscribe to our favorite TV shows on iTunes, and it will just download them and sync them to the AppleTV whenever they are available. The AppleTV is more about being the catalyst for adopting the internet way of obtaining media and doing away with cable, dvr, dvds and all of that. At the moment, HDMI allows for the use of one cable between the TV and the AppleTV. That's the simplest as you could really ask for, though wireless HDMI is apparently being developed. Once you get into the world of audio receivers and larger home theater setups, well then you might as well have a standalone Blu-Ray player I feel.