I wanna know how long.... should I buy an apple tv now? ....or wait? I guess thats the question with all apple products.  hmmmm...

Well i bought one last year. I'm happy with it, even though there's no film rental where I am yet. It's a nice addition, though a luxury item, in truth, right now.

If the features interest you now, buy it now, but if (like me) you think you only have the cash for one purchase of the device in the next 18 months, then yeah, hold fire, as I can't imagine Apple will make us wait beyond this time next year. And as it's a luxury right now, you may be able to live without it.

Though I love mine, so that's confusing, isn't it?

Maybe Apple should acquire EyeTV and build their awesome DVR into the Apple TV - EyeTV already has Export to Apple TV functionality. That would be sweet.

An Eye-TV questionnaire popped up on my screen recently. It was basically asking me how likely I'd be to encourage friends to get one, and what would improve on that.

I love the product and am using it to form a system that isn't used for anything but TV (both off-air and the torrent variety). I would not be surprised to see them work with Apple. These are the same folks that developed Toast.

I like to be able to keep entire seasons of shows archived, which is why I just added another hard drive (terabyte at that). I'm also recompressing my recordings to about 1 GB per hour episode (which is 40 minutes or so after ads are removed to save space).

While the Apple-TV could probably be built slightly faster to cope with 1080i stream playback, it would really need to be at least on par with the Core 2 Duo™ laptops and iMacs to be tolerable for recompression. Also, considering that many would like far more storage that laptop-style drives permit, one would need a bigger footprint device. If external drives are used, having eSATA ports would make that far less painful. Copying episodes, or extracting them minus ads, goes vastly faster when done between two drives. And in that case, bigger faster drives, and (e)SATA instead of USB / ATA alternatives, is much faster. I seem to be able to copy about 1 GB per minute over USB, closer to 4 or 5 over SATA. SATA may do even better than that with drives having higher sustained transfer rates.

What this boils down to is a PVR with some editing and recompression features really begs for the power of a full Mac system (and then some). Perhaps as prices and availability of 45 nm CPUs fall, such capabilities can become cost effective (as well as energy-consumption and heat-generation feasible) in a small footprint package.
An 24" Core 2 iMac coupled with external drives and Eye-TV does quite well right now, with the iMac being to present full 1080 mode (1920*1080) on its 1920*1200 screen. Many older 16*9 Plasmas don't even quality as HD, since their lower 1024*768 detail doesn't even do full justice to 720P HD (1280*720). That's one reason why LCD large screen TVs generally look better than Plasma.

Things will be changing rapidly as the US changeover to DTV takes place. For now I'm sticking with larger computer screens. I won't get a big flat-panel TV type display until they've gone to LED backlighting. It's awful how many of these big TVs are failing already. LED backlighting should avoid backlight degradation problems and the much needed energy consumption should make other components a bit more reliable too since the sets can be cooler running.

We should all be pressuring Congress to overhaul the F.C.C., and reverse the ownership rule changes, and also bring back days where a broadcaster had to commit to a maximum number of commercial minutes on license renewal/application.
Competition certainly has failed to keep the number of minutes down. Some "hour" shows in the 1960's were 51 minutes. Now we've got infomercials (all ad), and shows that are barely over 40 minutes of an hour. PVR users would be less apt to skip ads if there wasn't so much. While people may not be searching for 720P x264 on their favorite torrent sites because a 1 GB show is a pretty good sized download, they can still easily skip past ads on a HDPVR.

It's ironic that we're being forced into a wonderful digital TV system in an era when there are so many commercials on TV that broadcasters rarely try to run movies anymore.
I'm grateful for PBS.

 There's already strong links between Apple and ElGato. Interestingly, Apple hired Elgato CEO Freddie Geier (lovely man) in 2005 to become MD of Apple Germany. 

 I'm sorry, but I kind of doubt that adding dvr to the apple tv is what apple really wants to do.  they want you to buy shit from their store not record it.

 I've yet to meet anyone that even owns an Apple TV box.  In fact, rarely do I encounter anyone that's even heard of it.  Guess they might wanna start spending a little more on advertising.

This Wu guy has been so wrong so many times. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to combine my tivo and apple-tv into one device. I'm not holding my breath though.

He's one of the worst analysts I've ever seen. Too promotional, not enough substance or objectivity.

We are currently conducting research on the breadth of the movie rental industry. If you are interested in participating in our research, please visit the following website.

http://gatormba.mar6816.sgizmo.com

Thanks!

Would apple be able link in itunes for people to dl/stream watch movies?