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I thought about it a lot, the problem is the content owners/creators. What good is HBO GO/MAX GO etc when the very first thing you must do is sign in to your cable or satellite provider to verify you pay the requisite extortion each month before you can watch a darn thing? :rolleyes:

Give me the option to purchase a direct feed either monthly or for a set block of hours or whatever and I'd be all over it. DIRECTLY. I don't want anything to do with Cable or Satellite! Until this happens I don't see much point of having these companion apps on the Apple TV.

In addition, the 8GB is a problem. I think they need 16GB minimum (8 for buffer and 8 for apps/data) before any serious work can be done.

Just my opinions, I realize not all share my view.
 
I'm hoping apple releases the sdk. As others, I'd love a plex app as well as hbo go.

The only reason I can see apple not releasing an app store is because of the low 8GB storage of an appletv, but then again there are/were 8GB iPods and iPhones.
 
In addition, the 8GB is a problem. I think they need 16GB minimum (8 for buffer and 8 for apps/data) before any serious work can be done.

Think different(ly). An :apple:TV is generally an immobile iDevice. It's not like an iPhone or iPad. No need to load up a bunch of apps on it's local storage as it is unlikely to be going out of reach of the home network and/or iCloud. Thus, all apps could be stored on the home computer's (running iTunes) hard drive(s) and then streamed over on demand (just like movies, TV shows, etc).

It's also (probably) not much of a multi-tasking device. Unlike iPhones or iPads, we probably don't need to rapidly jump app to app to keep up with many things at almost the same time. Instead, it's probably a one-app-at-a-time iDevice and thus (again) on-board storage may not be that important (just stream over the 1 app at a time on demand).

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see some kind of gen 1 resurrection option in which those of us interested in really big local storage could maybe hook up a fat hard drive to that USB port and have a 2-4TB+ :apple:TV. But I can easily see this concern you've identified addressed by the same model of streaming a multitude of movies or TV shows with total file sizes that far exceed the on-board buffer. I'm confident this will "just work" (almost as if the on-board memory was 64GB or more).
 
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