An Introduction to Apple TV (IPTV Set Top Box) – AppleTV 4 Jailbreak (appletv4jailbreak.com)
Apple TV is pitched as both a home media player and as as an IPTV (Internet Protocol TV) service. Apple TV offers movies, TV shows, music, radio and more from the internet, direct to your TV.
It is one of the few products released by Apple in recent years not to be considered a break out success in a time where Apple has knocked out huge successes with the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Macbook / iMac range. With this new version of Apple TV, you can access downloadable content via iTunes and your PC, and it also integrates some familiar online services and other download / online streaming options.
If you live in the US or Canada, Apple supports the ever popular Netflix as part of its interface, meaning you don’t have to switch between Netflix and the Apple store when looking for movies. For everyone else there’s YouTube integration as well as MobileMe and Flickr compatibility. Apple is yet to include Zune, Hulu or any other IPTV services in the interface, but if rumours are to believed then that support should come eventually.
Music streaming via Apple TV is easy enough which is great for quick and easy access to your music library. Now you can run all of your computer’s music through your TV’s sound system. With the ability to quickly pull up songs via your TV, the music streaming feature is a great benefit for entertaining, especially when considering just how much of our libraries are already in iTunes on our computers for syncing with iPods and iPhones.
“If you don’t live in North America, your content choices are limited… Without Netflix or the full US iTunes which has far better range than Australia, your content range is restricted to content available from the iTunes Store Australia, YouTube, or content that you’ve stored on your computer and then imported into iTunes”
What is Apple TV & How Does it Work?
Apple TV is small computer inside a very sexy little black box, with a great piece of Apple software providing a slick user interface for browsing and watching digital content. It is predominantly designed as a Video on Demand (VOD) streaming service where new content is streamed to the Apple TV box and the displayed on the TV. Importantly, that means no Freeview TV or Cable TV channels through Apple TV and no saving or recording of content to a digital hard drive as the Apple TV device streams and does not store. If you’ve got your media and movies in iTunes on another computer in the house, you can use Apple TV to stream the content to the TV. If you’re buying a new movie on Apple TV, you will be streaming it down through your broadband connection to your Apple TV.
Previous iterations of Apple TV allowed Apple TV owners to purchase movies online, but that ability has been removed in the latest release…
