The Contradictions of Apple TV

Apple TV is a curious device. Stuck between the digital media and high definition content. In many ways this is a battle of gigabytes. Sony’s Blue Ray’s hold 50 gigabytes of data, ensuring an extremely high definition user experience. Apple’s movies come in at a much smaller size than Blue Ray ensuring the ability for them to be downloaded in a reasonable time, and stored without breaking the bank.

Music from Apple has a similar compromise. We buy music from the Apple music store that is of lower quality than a CD and we do it by the millions. We except this compromise because the disadvantages seem minimal, particuarly when we listen to the music on our iPod earbuds.

But will we except this compromise in our home theatres? Walk into a local Best Buy or Circuit City and you will be baragged by all kinds of numbers. And all these numbers lead to one conclusion, the higher the definition the better.

There is another aspect to this equation too. And that is that the more you pay the higher the quality, and, conversly, the less you pay the less the quality. It is a model that TV viewers have become very accoustmed too. When the DVD first came out players and the disks were more expensive than VHS. But us consumers were fine with that because you got a higher quality image, menus, and more content.

So, what do you get with the Apple TV? Currently you get movies that cost $14.95 and have nowhere near the quality of DVDs let alone Blue Ray. They do not have the menuing features of DVD, and perhaps most startling of all, they movies play in stereo. Now pretty much every Tom, Dick, and Harry have surround sound systems and flat screens. Movies downloaded from the iTunes music store are quite simply an inferior experience.

Yes we can rip our DVDs (note, you first have to buy the DVD, then take the time to do this, plus have pretty ample storage space plus circuvent the law) but the fact is the experience will not be as good as a DVD.

The quality gap gets much worse when you compare what is going on with Bluetooth and HD-DVD. These technologies work best on 1080p devices, something the Apple TV can’t even come close to rendering.

The ultimate question is whether we will trade the convieniance of having our movies as digital files, able to stream throughout our households, with this quality. My personal answer is a strong no. I think the Apple TV is a few years too late. With the growth on-demand viewing with almost all cable and other providers the age of being able to select any move or tv show ever made is becoming very close. It simply is a matter of time. And unlike music consumers have a strong preference and precedent for renting, not owning content. Netflix will no doubt come out with a killer service (they recently demoed an amazing movie viewing interface, that works on PCs and Macs at MIX07). And when they do the Apple TV will just gather dust.