My Apple TV came yesterday. I missed the Fedex delivery so had to drive to the Fedex distribution center to get my package. I could have waited until Monday, but you know how it is with new Apple hardware. 2 days is a long time.

For those who don’t hang on Apple’s every word, Apple TV is basically an iPod for your TV. You hook it up to your TV and it will synch itself with an iTunes installation within your house, bringing your iTunes content (music, TV shows, movies) and your photos to the biggest TV in your house. Contrary to its name, Apple TV is not a TV and the box clearly states TV not included.

I use Phanfare for my photos and videos, and I upload them from a bunch of different computers. I use a Mac at home, running Windows within Parallels, and I use a PC at work. And of course, I have a laptop or two. So there is no single iTunes/iPhoto installation that contains my full collection of photos and videos. Hence, my little Apple TV box is unable to show me my most important stuff.

I pretty much knew what Apple TV did before I bought one, so why did I buy one? I bought one because I wanted to see just how buttery such a device could be. And indeed, it does not disappoint. Controlled entirely by a six button remote, you can quickly navigate your content and enjoy it in your most-lean back environment in the house.

Setup was nearly flawless. The only glitch was that i could not get the Apple TV box to associate with either my wireless G or wireless A network, both of which use WPA security. My guess is that they only got it working with WEP. I have a Proxim AP-4000 wireless access point, a business grade access point that typically works properly with any device that follows standards. If the Apple TV had failed to work with a Linksys access point, I would not even mention it .

You pair your Apple TV to your iTunes installation much like you pair a bluetooth keyboard. The Apple TV shows you a 5 digit code on your TV and you type that at your desktop into iTunes to complete the association.

Although Apple’s DRM limits you to playing ITMS content on 5 computers, each one requiring authorization, the Apple TV does not count against this limit. Again, it’s the iPod model.

As far as I can tell, the Apple TV does not show your personal videos on the device, a serious limitation. Even if you have an iPhoto album that contains a video, the video is omitted.

Also, after initial synch, I had to click “sync” in itunes to make it see additional iPhoto content. Possibly it polls once per day and I had not waited long enough, but given the whole thing is on your local network, seems like they could have done better there.

The experience at the TV is pure Apple. When you first start the box, it uses stock photos in an elaborate way to create a screensaver when the Apple TV is idle. Once it is synched with your content, it silently moves to using your images. Slick.

But fundamentally, the concept is flawed. Synching a device with a desktop computer is not really what you want. What you want is to Sync Apple TV with the cloud. Imagine if your Mac was instead at an industrial datacenter and somehow or other, you could could administer it remotely and get your photos and videos onto the computer. Now imagine that it is backed up, on conditioned power and the content is available from any web browser. In this configuration Apple TV would be brilliant for your photos and videos [if it supported videos]. This fungible $300 device could sit next to your TV, sync itself to the net and give you a more immersive experience with your photos and videos.

Of course, what I am describing is a Phanfare/Apple TV combination. Alas, we don’t have the resources to build an Apple TV-like box here. And it is honestly not quite clear that you even need one as time goes on. Once the 25 megabit/second fiber comes to your house, the TV could just browse your content at your Phanfare site. Our slideshows are as good as the Apple slideshow on the Apple TV. True that it would require the network be up in your home to see your content, but that is not likely to be a big limitation in 3 years when your cordless phones also require that.

While Apple TV won’t sync with Phanfare, you can turn your computer into a digital picture frame and pull content from multiple Phanfare accounts using our screensaver.

I know why Apple did the Apple TV. They started with the Mini and Frontrow and realized that consumers did not have any content on the Mini because they still managed their life from their den. So their solution was to create a cheap appliance that syncs with a desktop or laptop computer in your house. But the flaw is the philosophy that you ever needed a media hub in your home.

What you really want are caching appliances in your home that synch themselves with the cloud. In that way, your media is truly “homed” in the cloud. This way of doing business has a bunch of good properties for consumers, not the least of which is that you won’t lose all your photos and videos to your next disk crash, there is a natural solution for multi-client (cell phone, wireless camera [it's coming], and laptop) and when your upgrade your computer, you don’t need to figure out how to migrate your photos and videos.

It works even better for commercial content. Once you buy a song from ITMS, Apple could make sure you have perpetual access to it, and even upgrade the bitrate as time goes by. And of course, just because your local computers are just smart caches does not mean that you could not export an asset and copy it onto a CD or use it for a local project on your computer once Steve Jobs gets his way and kills the DRM.

This is the Phanfare vision. We don’t have it all built yet, but watch us!

TAGS: Phanfare, Apple, TV

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Apple, Digital photography, Digital video, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.