Let's face the music, we've become digital comfort-junkies.
We want to Facebook on the go, look forward to some quality FaceTime with our loved ones or pull a Crazy Face with the iPad.
Whatever happened to social awkwardness?
Well, the good people at Apple are now giving us even less motivation to leave the living room couch. You may have heard of their little hobby, the Apple TV.
That little set-top box recently became even smaller , ditching the internal hard-disk capacity and heat issues (the first generation was known to run from a warm 30 degrees Celsius in stand-by mode to a feverish 50 degrees during full activity) for a streaming black hockey puck. The initial idea is not that revolutionary: connect it to your HDTV and with the included remote select which music, movies or photos you have in your computer's iTunes or iPhoto library or rent new releases directly from Apple's servers. Sales of the device are so far limited to countries where iTunes store movies and TV shows are available, but that shouldn't affect functionality in other countries. You can always get an iTunes account in say Germany with your European credit card and download films and shows with English audio tracks.
But there's an iOS update afoot that has a little feature called AirPlay which makes the interactivity between your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad and the Apple TV even more interesting.
Steve Jobs recently demonstrated AirPlay functionality at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California. Say you're listing to Erykah Badu's new album on the iPhone when you come home from work, but don't want to stop listening just because you're home. Press the AirPlay button and select where you want to push it to and all of a sudden Window Seat is bumping out of your AirPlay compatible speaker set in the Kitchen. Or, and this is where it get's really interesting, you've been catching up on The Colbert Report on the iPad and want to find out how he nails Quincy Jones. Tap the AirPlay icon, select Apple TV and the iPad pushes the whole video, at the point where you are watching it, over to your telly and Home Cinema set-up. Just like that.
Now in my case I could have the kids wanting to watch Sesame Street / Barbapapa / Babar / Muppet Show / The Polar Express / Wall-E / Toy Story 1,2,3, all of which are on a different media, be it DVD, mp4 on an iPod or .avi on our iMac. My main motivation for ordering the new Apple TV is so that I can have everything in one place and at the click of the remote have their requested show or movie playing in seconds. I must add here that we do not let them watch regular television, a big advantage of the digital content age; we control what they see, without advertisements, without violence, without pestilentially dumbed-down songs that nag on in your brain long after the kids have gone to sleep.
As the Apple TV doesn't support .avi files, I will obviously have to do some converting.
Or do I? First reports from beta testers say that AirPlay not only works with Apple's native apps (iTunes, Remote, video) but quite a few third-party apps too. Audio, for example, can be pushed to the Apple TV from Pandora or selected games, be it with a slight delay. This raises the question, would AirPlay work with streaming apps that can play and simultaneously convert .avi videos from the computer? Then you'd have a movie on your desktop being served to your iPhone being streamed to your Apple TV which pushes it onto your TV screen.
"Our suspicion is that audio will be available automatically for routing using AirPlay but video will not," says Matt Gallagher, the Australia-based programmer and founder of
ProjectsWithLove, makers of the ServeToMe/StreamToMe combo. "According to Apple's documentation, routing audio with AirPlay is automatic for most iOS audio." Gallagher adds that on a technical level, StreamToMe plays all audio through the AV Foundation layer and correctly uses the MPVolumeView class in fullscreen which offers the button to switch audio targets. "At this stage though, Apple have not offered any information about how video might work, or if this is available to 3rd party apps at all. Certainly, if it is possible to provide video streaming but extra implementation is required, we will update StreamToMe once it is clear what the requirements for this would be."
On a final note, Gallagher expresses what most Apple TV enthusiasts have long hoped for. "Ultimately, we would prefer to release StreamToMe for the Apple TV itself." The potential for running apps natively on the Apple TV is huge, especially since it seems to be running a version of iOS. Some incorrigible tinkerers have already managed to get a
weather app, a
Wii-mote app and the media center app
Plex running on a jailbroken device. Should Apple decide to open up this little black box to third-party apps like it has iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads, the amount of things you could soon be doing with your TV are limitless, from playing games, to surfing the net, to chatting and who knows, even FaceTiming. And at only €119 per box, that's a whole lotta TV love. You hear us, Steve?
