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Comment by Tyrannosaurs | Hacker News Reader

And that's the point the Apple TV goes from a hobby to a major product.

Spending a £1000 on a Mac - I reckon another £100 for an Apple TV with that functionality as the hook is a pretty easy up sell.

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It is unfortunate that AppleTV's video output (out-of-the-box) still does not support true 1080p resolutions and everything is upscaled from 720p.

word on the street is that will change before summer.

I expect to see a 1080p Apple TV this year, since the A5 and upcoming A6 can both do 1080p video. The current Apple TV is A4 based, which is limited to 720p. With the new iPad having a resolution above 1080p, Apple finally has a reason to have 1080p iTunes content.

Beyond that, Apple may not have wanted to take A5 chips away from the iPhone and iPad to sell in Apple TVs. Now that all of the new iPads and iPhones will be A6 based this year, Apple will have more supply of A5s for other devices.

None of this helps people who already own an Apple TV, however

I will buy a new one. :)

Prediction: Apple is the company that takes TV past 1080p into much higher resolution displays (when they actually release an Apple TV). Movies are already shot at much higher resolution, and Apple will introduce Apps (subscribe to a show or network, for example).

If that happens, then I predict the end of all-you-can-eat Internet. ISPs are kvetching enough about Netflix as-is.

And hopefully after that, GoogleISP will launch on all of their dark fiber.

The iTunes Store only supports 720p right now anyway, so in the Apple ecosystem it doesn't make sense to worry about 1080p. I imagine this will change soon though. (A5 based AppleTV + iTunes Store upgrades)

This may be a bandwidth issue. I remember my friend having major issues streaming 1080 to his tv box over wifi. He had to get an N router just to support it. This may be a compromise.

Blu-Ray tops out at 48Mbit, and ATSC is less than half that. Your friend was most likely having signal quality issues, not bandwidth issues.

I would disagree. Neat as Airplay is, it isn't going to move Apple TVs.

Apps and/or Content deals with video distributors (Comcast/Verizon/etc) are going to be where it turns the corner. I suspect the whole hobby has been in a holding pattern while Apple has tried to line up the content deals and that the fallback plan is to just enable Apps and let the chips fall where they may. [1]

That's probably even the stick they'll use to get the cable companies to the table: Either they sign up and get preferential treatment in the interface, or they get shoved into being a dumb IP pipe that much faster.

[1] Delaying as the internals for an Apple-quality, app-running, 1080p set-top box get cheaper and cheaper hasn't hurt, I'm sure.

I don't know how many purchases it will really drive. You can do all those those things with an Apple TV and an iPhone today, and almost all of them with just an Apple TV.

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