“Apple says the future of TV is apps,” John Paczkowski writes for Buzzfeed. “That may or may not prove true, but after a couple days with the new Apple TV, it’s a compelling argument. Turns out custom-building a TV from a broad palette of apps that includes everything from pay TV channels and games to travel accommodation services and Periscope is a great way to get exactly the TV experience you want — or close to it, anyway.”
“The new Apple TV isn’t just an upgraded set-top box, it’s the first ‘true’ Apple TV, one that articulates Apple’s vision of what the TV viewing experience should be. It’s an appealing vision,” Paczkowski writes. “With the exception of Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV offers all the stuff I want to watch — Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, Showtime, and YouTube… Incidentally, that Amazon Prime Video is the exception to the conga line of content offerings above is entirely Amazon’s doing. A ~magnanimous~ Apple tells BuzzFeed News that “all are welcome” on its new Apple TV platform. But Amazon — which recently purged Apple TV from its store — doesn’t have a Prime Video app in the Apple TV App Store. And as of a few days ago, it hadn’t submitted one.”
“Siri is a TV remote that actually makes sense. It does what you want it to do with a minimum of fuss and clutter. There’s a touchpad on one side of the remote, and you can use it to navigate in all sorts of ways. Swiping across a film’s timeline to pinpoint a particular moment, for example, is surprisingly accurate and easy,” Paczkowski writes. ” Universal search — which not only enables searches across multiple streaming video services, but prioritizes the results based on the services you subscribe to — is fantastic. After using it for a few hours, I found myself resenting Apple for not enabling it sooner and leaving longtime Apple TV users like me to suffer with the lousy search function that preceded it.”
Much, much more in the full review – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Dear new Apple TVs that we pre-ordered; Get here already!!!
SEE ALSO:
Apple TV’s Siri search soon to include Apple Music – October 29, 2015
Apple TV review: Channels are dead. The future of TV is apps – October 29, 2015
Mossberg reviews the new Apple TV: ‘This is the one I’d buy’ – October 28, 2015
I still just want to be able to use a trackpad with the old AppleTV.
The Remote app on your iPhone does a lot of that for you. Let’s you type in passwords, search criteria, etc. much more easily than the old physical remote.
I still wish there was an enabled USB port so you can store your Apple content on it so that you don’t have to stream everything from Apple and can keep a local copy.
This is useful particularly for those in rural areas with constrained bandwidth or the growing number of metro areas where Internet providers are putting in more data thresholds.
That’s essentially what iTunes Home Sharing is for, but obviously if you don’t have a computer that’s no good. Since my internet is not fast enough to support streaming of live broadcasts, let alone for watching on multiple tv’s within the household. I’d like SKY (in the UK) to have an app which tapped into their boxes and allowed you to stream content that was being broadcasted to your sky box through your Apple TV but perhaps with interactive features overlaid/accompanying it (more than what a SKY box is capable of)
Not everyone lives in a connected world with gigabit Internet. I do have Home Sharing but you add more complexity as you add more nodes to a system.
You could argue that iTunes home sharing simplifies things if you have more than one Apple TV. Forgetting the fact that my video library is getting on for 3TB now I don’t want to have to replicate that across every Apple TV I have.
You aren’t adding any more nodes. It is the same amount of devices, just more traffic.
You are adding nodes to the TV ecosystem if you’re using Home Sharing instead of a pure steam from Apple TV.
Plus, all of Apple’s new notebook (except the legacy one I know) use SSD which makes it very expensive to order it with expensive storage upgrades for stuff that would workbooks on cheap magnetic media.
That’s why I suggested having an external storage option would be very helpful to a lot of users. I know of some original Apple TV owners that have terabyte drives hooked up to their Apple TV to store all their movie content.
In theory, someone could write a tvOS app to access those WiFi hard drives to stream that content. Does the AppleTV USB port have enough power to support those drives? It seems like it would be a good workaround for local storage.
What on Earth is Amazon’s problem? They’re a retailer, for fsck’s sake. Their hardware only exists to sell their products and services. What does it gain them to keep their services off the Apple TV and try to torpedo the product? Apple’s services must have Amazon pants-wetting terrified for them to take this route.
——RM
I suspect one of amazon’s goals in this is to supply some leverage in their negotiations with Apple regarding apple’s percentage on kindle books and Amazon videos, purchased through the Amazon apps on iPhones and iPads.
Also every fireTV sold instead of an Apple TV is more likely to create a customer for Amazon video as opposed to iTunes video.
It’s an interesting battle.
Each company is uniquely powerful in their respective areas (retail vs hardware). I wouldn’t be surprised to see an agreement come to be where Apple TV gets back in the Amazon store and apple’s percentage on Amazon in-app content sales goes down a wee bit.
BTW
I’m aware that right now there are no sales of Amazon in app content in Amazon iOS apps. This is precisely because Amazon doesn’t want to pay apples percentage.
They’d clearly like to have those sales, but only at w lower percentage.
Maybe I’m oblivious to the finer points of the technology, but I use the Amazon shopping app on iPad a lot, usually paying with OneClick. Apple is facilitating these transactions seemingly within the app. I don’t care one way or the other, but the payment model confusion really ought to be cleared up, so we can talk about other stuff that matters more. Like, why was Goldilocks, rather than the three bears, who was the real intruder?