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Comment by trefoiled | Hacker News Reader

this feels like a race to the bottom which every industry player except Apple is competing in. I never would have considered an Apple TV just a few years ago, but my Shield is gathering dust ever since I made the switch.

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My girlfriend's Apple TV setup makes me jealous every time I use it. I don't even like TV, but Apple TV has the best interface by far, and the touchpad on the remote is perfect for scrubbing through video.

You really want to be jealous, have a Mac, and seamlessly be able to use the AppleTV as a monitor

I use my Apple TV as a security camera system, in addition to acting as a TV and extra seamless monitor. Video chatting my whole family on a 65” screen is nice too.

Or easily re-connect AirPods from the phone to AppleTV and watch at night without waking the whole house.

do you mean through Airplay?

Yes, technically that's what it's called, but all I do on my mac is click on the second icon from top right of my screen, click on screen mirroring, and choose my AppleTV.

got it, thank you!

Can you view your own content on an Apple TV? Like with VLC? I don't own much Apple stuff anymore but I'm getting sick of all Android TV options getting so commercialised.

I don't currently subscribe to any streaming service though except Amazon prime (mainly because it's included with the shipping)

Yep!

Not sure about VLC, but I’ve a Plex server locally and Apple TV app works fine for streaming from the server.

Ah ok I don't use Plex. I don't really like it and the way it syncs my library to their cloud (in my country it's not fully legal and one does not 'take notes on a criminal conspiracy' lol :)

The Apple TV App Store is fairly extensive, and has apps for VLC and Plex

Thanks! I don't use Plex but VLC will do great.

Ps does VLC also permit playing from local samba shares?

Yes, but you can do better than that with JellyBean and infuse or whatever it is.

But VLC works fine.

Yes, VLC works on Apple TV for Samba shares, but Infuse is nearly perfection for it.

Thanks never heard of that app. But it looks good. Maybe I will switch over to Apple, I'm getting sick and tired of these ads.

Infuse app is great for streaming 4K MKVs from a NAS. Owlfiles is a great general purpose file browser with good media support.

Biggest wins for me when recently switching from a Firestick to an Apple TV is how much faster it’s been to use and the lack of crud.

Seems the Firestick has some heavy subsidises they make up for with activities like this post.

The Firestick/Roku/Chomecast all sell for roughly the same price point. I cannot believe they are all losing money on the physical device. This just strikes me as continuing to enshitify the platform because they can.

Looking at this it looks like the vast majority of Roku revenue comes from their platform, not devices.

https://www.investopedia.com/how-roku-makes-money-5119488

Within devices/players:

> The segment reported a gross loss of $90.6 million in 2022, a deterioration from the gross loss of $37.8 million one year earlier.

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