Sony beat the Apple TV without Google TV

I don't see a compelling reason for a smart display when there is so much competition for cheap boxes that drive displays.

I've got XMBC on an Acer nettop which as well as being an actual full computer, cost the same as an Apple TV with the same size hard drive. It also has a powerful video card that means you don't need to add a video accelerator card, just add a remote (either a cheap USB-IR model, or use your bluetooth playstation remote, or your Android or iPhone, iPad or netbook).

Unlike Apple, who expect you to have their stuff out on show, it came with a mount that attaches to the back of your TV which hides it's cheap'n'cheerful plastic exterior while minimizing cables.

I believe xmbc also does DNLA too if you wanted to plug it into one TV via HDMI and stream to another.

Also, doesn't Hulu Plus have ads? I will pay $10 for a bunch of ads when hell freezes over.

(This is why I don't read magazines.)

I think Hulu really missed something if they named it Hulu Plus and that is what you get, it is like if movies started coming out with BluRay+ and all you got were special features.

I bet they couldn't get the broadcasting networks to agree and that is why it is just a bunch of old content not being shown...

you're missing the point I think, and so did the Author of this post. Its not about the bells and whistles, or features that came built in. Its about the apps that YOU may want to install on it, and not what the manufacturer gets to say you'll get. Who cares if the Sony Bravia has Netflix, YouTube, Pandora and even Hulu bundled in if the Apple TV or Google TV will allow you to install the apps you want. Just like what happened with phones in the past couple of years, its no longer about features, its about how many developers you can bring to your platform to build all the creative applications. If Balmer got one thing right, it would have been this: Developers, Developers, Developers.

> Or maybe they're hoping to pull the same idea off using the iPad->Airplay->Apple TV integration coming later in the year?

Very likely. It seems Apple's strategy is that the Apple TV is a "dumb box", like a modem for your TV, that allows other devices (computers) to talk to it. They don't want to add an App store, because then it wouldn't be a "dumb box" any more.

The Apple TV is as cheap as it is now because they're targeting the market segment that doesn't care about anything other than watching movies, listening to music, and looking at pictures. These people won't comparison-shop based on the internal processor speed, or the hard disk capacity.

Apple got stuck in a spec race with the iPhone, and they don't want to have to do it again with the Apple TV, because spec races inevitably up prices—more speed, more capability, more storage—when what they want the ATV to be is a commodity that every TV has hooked up to it, so people can use their computers (specifically, their Apple computers) to stream things to them.

They want the ATV to do as little as possible, not as much as possible, just to act as a little adapter that brings your TV into your wi-fi network. It's not part of their computer or phone businesses; rather, it an extension of the "ubiquitous networking" strategy they've always had with the Airport Express (in fact, I bet the Airport Express and Apple TV teams are now merged under the "AirPlay" banner.)

You hit the nail on the head – if I was a betting man, I'd put as much money as I had on a 'surprise feature' of 4.2 being that you can use the Apple TV as a screen for outputting from an iOS device.

Why do I think this? http://twitter.com/lllucas - Apple employee, apparently worked on Airplay (note the "happy airplay day!" tweet) Joe Hewitt (of Facebook) tweets "If only iOS apps could use AirPlay to stream their own stuff to AppleTV." and then lllucas replies "what makes you think they can't? :-)"

Why might I be wrong? It doesn't necessarily make sense that an app could output arbitrary video data (namely, what we're all thinking of, 3D games) to an Apple TV unless there was something seriously cool going on behind the scenes, like using a H.264 encoder in hardware to compress the stream.

If that's happening, then I would think certain devices (such as the iPod touch 2G/3G, iPhone 3G) would be incompatible because there's no reason for them to have an H.264 encoder on their chipset since they don't have video cameras. This would be an odd thing for Apple/app devs to try to support, because now you have to worry about OS revisions + device capabilities, and Apple's been fairly good about coming down on the side of keeping things progressing in software even if the hardware is too slow for it in reality (see the iOS 4.0 on iPhone 3G debacle)

I think it's certain given those tweets that you'll be able to at least stream arbitrary H.264 content from your app to the Apple TV, but to be encoding whatever is on the screen in real time and also be putting load on the graphics processor...I'm not sure that would work.

I think that is coming. It doesn't make sense if the AppleTV isn't an iOS device nor if it can't get apps from the app store. You know, it'll be a Jobs moment next year when he says "oh btw, app store for ATV is now available. I don't think they missed any trick, they're playing it by the book with any new device, first version doesn't do everything you hope for, but just enough to get you to buy.

Ex. iPad, no camera? really? next generation for sure then!

It's a pretty good piece of work. Very simple 10-foot interface.

The position of the TV manufacturers reminds me a bit of the ISPs. The ISPs don't want to be just a dumb-pipe so they add on "features" that few want. And the TV manufacturers are the same way. They no longer want to be just a dumb monitor, so they're embedding these features that would be better implemented in an external box that's replaceable.

As far as user-friendly, my experience is that the interfaces look flashy on the surface, but once you dig deeper, you'll find poor integration, bugs and rarely a new release. All the better reason to rely on an upgradeable, external box for these types of features.

I'm personally not a big fan of the interactive TV idea myself. What I am all for is a TV that connects to different sources of media. I have music from Pandora and movies on netflix.

I've used a lot of DLNA devices and servers over the last few years. Most are "meh". They work, but most seem to have a user-interface reminiscent of Windows 3.1 especially when dealing with video. They typically have no photo or video metadata knowledge so you're limited to browsing through directories of files and selecting what your want by filename. Have your non-techie significant other try that. No movie-poster art, IMDB synopsis, etc. When you have a library of hundreds and hundreds of ripped DVDs, good luck.

And format support is spotty as well. There's often a mismatch between what the server will serve up and what the device will play back.

I have a Sony TV with most of what was shown here and I rarely, rarely use any of the Internet features. There's DLNA support built-in, but of the 800 or so videos I have being served up on my network, it refuses to even recognize any more than a dozen or so. Everything else is either ignored or causes an error. And the user-interface is completely divorced and separate from my set-top box. if I want to use the Internet features, I have to find the TV remote vs. the cable-box remote and then deal with a different user interface. The lack of transparent integration is a deal-breaker for many people. Switching back and forth between Internet video sources and "normal" sources has to be as seamless as changing channels. Google and Echostar are working together, so they may pull it off, at least for Echostar set-top boxes. Otherwise, without tight-integration, these efforts are going to be a flop.

Agreed, and at the $99 dollar price point, you can tell they're trying to make it work. Unfortunately, I don't know anybody technical or non-technical that would enjoy it.