Life with Apple TV - Episode 1

Monday, January 17,2010:
AppleTV Inception Day

Getting the Goods:
Early in the afternoon, I picked up the AppleTV 2 from the Apple Store in Boulder, CO.  Unfortunately, they had no in-store demo for me to play around with, but judging from my stellar experience with Apple products so far (2 iPhone 4s, 2 iPod Touch 3g, MacBook Pro), I had no reservations.

Installation:
Setting up the Apple TV could not have been easier.  Plug in the power, plug in the HDMI cable, and configure my wireless network WEP key.  Typical Apple - flawless.

First Tests - AirPlay from iPhone 4 to AppleTV
Since I had been reading online about the AirPlay feature built-in to the latest iOS for iPhone, I had to try it immediately.  After firing up a movie on my iPhone 4, the AirPlay icon appeared as expected in the video controls.  Simply choosing the AppleTV device, presto, the movie was playing on the bigscreen within 15 seconds.  Simply awesome.

Expanding on this test slightly, I quickly noticed that it was just as easy to AirPlay from iTunes on my HP notebook.  Somewhat surprised, and impressed, I moved on to some other tests.

Renting a Movie
Navigating to the "Movies" option on AppleTV, which is clearly the iTunes store, the kids promptly chose "Despicable Me" for us to watch.  Having no problem paying a few bucks for a rental, I queued it up for rental.  After using Netflix on several other devices (including my phone, DVD player and WII), I kind-of expected the movie to start playing within a minute or so.  No dice there.  AppleTV notified me that it would be ready in a whopping 32 hours.  At this point, I figured that we would need to queue up some rentals and watch them later.  Disappointed, I abandoned Despicable Me for the moment, and moved on to some other things, presumably while AppleTV downloaded the whole movie (or something).

Netflix on Apple TV
After my disappointment renting a movie from the iTunes store, I wanted to see how the AppleTV worked as a Netflix client.  I easily set up my Netflix account and was able to easily navigate to my instant queue and browse movies to watch.  My kids again selected an animated feature (Fly Me to the Moon) and we started it up.  It took longer than expected to load - perhaps 3 minutes - but did start to play.  The video playback on this run was choppy, stopping more than a dozen times during the 1.5 hour feature.  Another disappointment.  Of course, maybe it was related to the concurrent download of "Despicable Me" from the iTunes store?  In any case, not real thrilled at this point

After the kids were snugly tucked into bed, sitting there frustrated with the poor Netflix performance, I figured I'd try a few things.  First, I just selected a movie from my instant queue and started playing it.  Oddly, it started up quickly and ran flawlessly for the 45 minutes or so that I was able to keep my eyes open.

Conclusion : Inconclusive
So, in conclusion, the results are inconclusive for today.  AirPlay works like a champ, movie rentals from the iTunes store (direct to the AppleTV) are disappointing at best, and Netflix is touch-and-go.  Looks like more testing tomorrow.