PRODUCT REVIEW
Apple TV: A Sophisticated Device Hobbled by Limitations

Jobs and company recently tinkered with the device, making it a whole lot more compelling. However, the company has more work to do before Apple TV's a bona-fide hit.

Apple TV is one of a growing number of so-called media extender or digital living room devices. These gadgets, which include everything from the latest TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO) boxes to devices made by companies such as Vudu and Netgear, help to bring the digital music and movies you can find on the Internet from your PC to your TV set and stereo system.

Earlier this year, in an effort to boost Apple TV's sales, Apple slashed the price of the base model from US$299 to $229, added a model with a larger hard drive, gave Apple TV's on-screen interface a makeover and added the ability to rent -- rather than just buy -- movies, including some in high definition. Additionally, the company added the ability for users to buy music and movies directly through the set-top box. Previously, users had to use iTunes on their computers to order such content before transferring it to the device.

Easy Does It

I've been looking for something like Apple TV ever since I got my iPod several years ago. I have my entire music collection on my computer and a handful of movies and television shows as well. What I didn't have was an easy way of getting that content into my living room.

Apple TV is nothing if not easy, assuming, of course, you already have a home network in place. I literally went from taking my review unit out of the box to being able to view some of my pictures and listen to some of my digital music through Apple TV in less than 10 minutes.

Apple has redesigned Apple TV's interface so that it's built around a series of on-screen menus. The menu set-up will be familiar to just about anyone who has used an iPod in recent years. Select "movies," for instance, and you'll have the option of looking at movies you've already rented, scanning through movies in the iTunes store arranged by genre or popularity, searching for particular titles, or looking at your own movies that you've stored in iTunes.

The software is sophisticated enough that all of this is done with an included remote control that has just six buttons.

However, if you're purchasing rather than working with content you already own, Apple makes it easy to buy or rent it: As soon as you find the content, you just click a button on the screen. Movies sometimes take a while to download, but Apple TV will tell you when it's retrieved enough information for you to start watching them. In the meantime, since the machine can multitask, you can listen to music or view pictures or check out the latest on YouTube .

Serious Shortcomings

However, as fun and easy as Apple TV is, it has some serious shortcomings.

Most notable is the limited number of movies for rent through iTunes. Apple's ambition for Apple TV is for it to be the DVD player of the 21st century, but with just 600 movies available for rent on iTunes right now -- and only 200 of them in high definition -- it has a hard time matching up with the corner Blockbuster.

Not surprisingly, there are significant gaps in Apple's library. My son, for instance, is into both "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" right now, but we couldn't find movies from either series on Apple TV. In fact, despite having seen few movies in the theater in recent years, I found just three movies I was interested in watching in the list of Apple's HD titles -- and one of them I'd already seen before.

Apple representatives noted that the music content on iTunes when it launched also was similarly sparse, but grew more complete and diverse over time. The company has similar expectations for the movie selection, which is already growing gradually.

Rental Options

Once you rent a movie, you have 30 days to start watching it before it expires. That's great.

What's not so great is that once you start watching it, you have just 24 hours to watch all of it before the movie becomes unplayable. That means if you started watching a two-hour movie on a Friday at 8 p.m., say, and go through half of it, you'd have to finish the other half by 8 on Saturday night, or be forced to rent the movie again.

I don't know about you, but my wife and I, with two young kids, hardly ever hold to that kind of schedule in watching a movie these days. We're often lucky to finish a movie a week after we started it, much less within a day.

To be fair, the terms are similar to the ones on other digital video rental services, such as those offered by Amazon.com and Vudu. However, that doesn't make them any more compelling.

I also wasn't terribly impressed with the HD movie I watched on Apple TV.

The film -- "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" -- did look better in high-definition than in standard definition, but not stunningly so. Meanwhile, the experience was a lot worse. Apple representatives said that newer movies tend to look better in HD.

I was able to start watching the standard-definition version within a couple minutes of pressing the "rent" button. In contrast, I waited nearly 30 minutes to start watching the HD version to no avail. I ended up giving up and coming back to watch it hours later.

Apple says that users with a 6-megabit or better broadband connection should be able to start playing high-definition movies within a minute. However, if you're like me and you've got a 2-megabit or slower DSL (digital subscriber line) connection, you should expect to wait two hours or more to start playing such films, because of the large file size.

For me, the high-definition version wasn't good enough to wait that long.

Hobbled Here and There

I have other issues with Apple TV, both narrow and broad. While you can search the iTunes store for movies or music, Apple TV doesn't include a search feature that you can use to find music or movies within the library stored on your own PC. If you're like me and have thousands of songs in your library, you face a potentially tedious task of scrolling through a list of songs or artists to find the right one.

The bigger problem I have with Apple TV is that as much as I like what it does, I was frustrated by the ways in which Apple has hobbled it. Basically, the only features you can use on Apple TV and the only ways to get content on it are those that Apple has built into the device.

This limitation is most problematic when it comes to video. In recent years, there's been an explosion in the amount of video you can get online. Unfortunately, Apple TV allows you access to only a small fraction of that. While you can view YouTube videos, you can't watch streaming TV shows from ABC.com, or movies from Amazon's Unbox service or news reports from The New York Times or other sites.

That's unfortunate, because the seemingly unlimited amount of video online would go a long way to supplement Apple's own very limited video selection.