Apple previews iTV set-top device
Media junkies will have another item from Apple on their wish list when 2007 rolls around: iTV, or at least, the set-top device currently being referred to as iTV.
True to last week's whispers, Steve Jobs took advantage of the "It's Showtime" media event to offer a glimpse of the new product, which is scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 2007. Boasting a slew of connectors, from the computer-centric USB, ethernet, and 802.11 to yester-year's RCA video connectors and today's more advanced HDMI and optical audio, Jobs & Co. are putting every television in your household in Apple's cross-hairs.
Mimicking the Mac mini's enclosure, the iTV (Jobs said it will be renamed later) features the same shape and aluminum accents, but at less than half the height. It will also sell for half of what a low-end Mac mini goes for, or $299, making media streaming a more affordable endeavor.
In a demonstration to the invited guests at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, Jobs showed off the new iTV, which features a more polished Front Row-like interface, undoubtedly a sign of the improvements yet to come to other Front Row-supported Macs when Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard ships next year.
The iTV will seemingly pull content from other computers on a network. Rather than simply list what media one has access to, as is currently the case with Front Row, Apple's media hub will go a step further, listing a movie's synopsis, stars, and cover, for example.
While Apple is hoping the iTV will encourage more customers to purchase television programming and movies from the iTunes Store, the iTV will not be limited to playing purchased media only. Photo slideshows with accompanying music will be be supported, for example, as is the case with current Front Row Macs.
True to last week's whispers, Steve Jobs took advantage of the "It's Showtime" media event to offer a glimpse of the new product, which is scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 2007. Boasting a slew of connectors, from the computer-centric USB, ethernet, and 802.11 to yester-year's RCA video connectors and today's more advanced HDMI and optical audio, Jobs & Co. are putting every television in your household in Apple's cross-hairs.
Mimicking the Mac mini's enclosure, the iTV (Jobs said it will be renamed later) features the same shape and aluminum accents, but at less than half the height. It will also sell for half of what a low-end Mac mini goes for, or $299, making media streaming a more affordable endeavor.
In a demonstration to the invited guests at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, Jobs showed off the new iTV, which features a more polished Front Row-like interface, undoubtedly a sign of the improvements yet to come to other Front Row-supported Macs when Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard ships next year.
The iTV will seemingly pull content from other computers on a network. Rather than simply list what media one has access to, as is currently the case with Front Row, Apple's media hub will go a step further, listing a movie's synopsis, stars, and cover, for example.
While Apple is hoping the iTV will encourage more customers to purchase television programming and movies from the iTunes Store, the iTV will not be limited to playing purchased media only. Photo slideshows with accompanying music will be be supported, for example, as is the case with current Front Row Macs.
Comments
Either way, I'll buy one!
However who wants to pay $14.99 for a VGA (640x480) video? That will look fine on an iPod but it's going to look nasty on a "big flat screen TV" especially compared to the quality and features of £9.99 DVDs you can play on the £30 DVD player without maxing your DSL download cap (P.S is 6Mb broadband really the norm nowadays?). There is some work to do here. I suspect this is Disney holding back on good value movies at the moment whilst they aren't sure how the service will pan out.
Do a little test for me - whack OS X down to 640x480 on your Mac. Nasty eh?
And in fact most movies at 16:10 or 16:9 will end up at about 640 x 360/400.
VGA is not good enough. These need to be SVGA minimum to play on non-HD TVs (NTSC or PAL) with no degradation.
Really these movies need to be HD but I guess no downloads would be practical and streaming over Airport may be juttery. I'v tried streaming a ripped DVD over original Airport - no go. Airport Extreme should be okay and I'd guess this will be 802.11n by then.
I tried hooking up a mini to my HDTV & then access files that were on my iMac's HD from the mini with Quicktime. It kept pausing every 20 seconds to catch up. Didn't like the size of the type on my TV so I have disassembled that. But I'll be first in line for this. Yeah!!!
Erm I love the concept and so long as it gets S-Video and Composite connectors to make it more universally useful I will be getting one.
However who wants to pay $14.99 for a VGA (640x480) video? That will look fine on an iPod but it's going to look nasty on a "big flat screen TV"
S-Video and composite won't support HD so if you want s-video and composite, get use to 640x480 (or 720x480). HDMI will support HD so maybe something else may be coming when iTV is ready. However, would they really release HD content on iTunes store when there is plenty of competition with HD-DVD and Blu-ray?
With that USB port on the back I'm hoping for the ability to plug a large hard drive in there as I am nervous about the whole streaming thing.
Hard drive? On a device with HDMI output? Can you say HDCP (high-bandwidth copy protection)?
What is the performance hit the host computer gets from being leached by something like this?
Any chance someone snapped a picture of this device... I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say I'm curious as to the design.
Slice the top third off a Mac mini and fill in the optical drive slot (but not the IR port).
Erm I love the concept and so long as it gets S-Video and Composite connectors to make it more universally useful I will be getting one.
However who wants to pay $14.99 for a VGA (640x480) video? That will look fine on an iPod but it's going to look nasty on a "big flat screen TV" especially compared to the quality and features of £9.99 DVDs you can play on the £30 DVD player without maxing your DSL download cap (P.S is 6Mb broadband really the norm nowadays?). There is some work to do here. I suspect this is Disney holding back on good value movies at the moment whilst they aren't sure how the service will pan out.
Do a little test for me - whack OS X down to 640x480 on your Mac. Nasty eh?
And in fact most movies at 16:10 or 16:9 will end up at about 640 x 360/400.
VGA is not good enough. These need to be SVGA minimum to play on non-HD TVs (NTSC or PAL) with no degradation.
Really these movies need to be HD but I guess no downloads would be practical and streaming over Airport may be juttery. I'v tried streaming a ripped DVD over original Airport - no go. Airport Extreme should be okay and I'd guess this will be 802.11n by then.
640x480 will hardly look "nasty" on a big display, or at least no nastier than DVD. Certainly won't look any worse than broadcast or DVD on SD TV, which is the vast majority of sets.
Knocking the res down on your Mac doesn't tell you anything-- the scaling that has to happen to OS X on a fixed res screen is quite a bit different from the scaling done in a modern flat screen video display.
I'm not getting the "how can it not be HD in this day and age" when the only purchasable HD content is barely out the door and has pretty much zero deployment. Was a brand new video dl service supposed to trump blue-ray and HDDVD when those formats are literally months old?
linky
.......Really these movies need to be HD but I guess no downloads would be practical and streaming over Airport may be juttery. I'v tried streaming a ripped DVD over original Airport - no go. Airport Extreme should be okay and I'd guess this will be 802.11n by then.
You now, he DID after all run The Incredibles in HD when he was demoing the thing.. so perhaps there will be a future HD downloading feature? Or you can stream the BR-Disc data right over to the iTV to be decoded there. When watching the Apple HD trailers you can see that 6000-9000kbps h.264 video is delivering pretty decent video. That's by no means hard to stream over airport. I don't know the bitrate of a typical BR-disc movie, but I think it will be possible to stream the data on today's airport, and definitely on tomorrow's.
Pics from engadget:
linky
Hmmmm......
The "settings" submenu in those shots includes "TV resolution" and the article mentions that the Apple guy wouldn't go there.
Hopefully this will support HD video and be able to output 1080p. OK you won't be able to do this with 802.11g but adding an external bridge once 802.11n is available would make it possible. The fact that it includes an ethernet port might well suggest it would be capable.
Making use of either a nVidia or ATI GPU with their excellent video processing might be a good idea.
Also if I want to listen to music would be nice to be able to use without having to turn the TV on.
I'm saving now.
Edit: Another hopefully. Hopefully can pull stuff from a blu-ray or hd-dvd player connected to Mac or PC. And I really hope in the future with hard drives getting larger and cheaper that Apple will look in to the possibility of being able to rip your DVD's which you can then access via iTV.
Anyways it will make air traffic pretty tight. For example you probably won't be able to watch iTV and downloading next episode at the same time.
802.11n is really required for capable media streaming but we'll going to be waiting for that one.