Old Apple TV will NOT get new features

Plus I never looked at it as Apple neglecting anything. I actually liked the fact that I knew my TV would continue to work correctly and I wasn't concerned about being outdated every year. No one says that Nintendo is neglecting its customers by not outdating the Wii every year.

Plus Apple now seems to want to rent TV shows in 720p at 30fps. US shows are 30fps (29.97fps actually) and many broadcast as 720p, which some say is actually better than the broadcast alternative of 1080i. The old TV has never been able to play 720p at 30fps. So new hardware is needed, but the old hardware still does everything we bought it for, including playing the purchased TV shows which seem to have been converted to 24fps. Renting films in HD has never been an issue because film in not 30fps, its 24fps.
As a side note, I should mention though that a decent amount of primetime is actually filmed 1080p at 24fps to begin with.

Ted Hampson wrote:
ATV Flash doesn't say in the FAQ's that it's not possible it says becuase of HULU and Netflix's use of Adobe's Flash that the quality is poor. However that must have been written some time ago. With the new Netflix and HULU app on the iPad and now the iPhone we know that they have to be using something other that flash to run it. (HTML5?) Either way, I think its possible.

All the big ones in the ATV hacking business (Boxee, ATVFlash) have pretty much beat this one to death. It'll run, but it's not usable.

The Hulu and Netflix applications are written for iOS devices with an ARM-based processor.

The 1st AppleTV is an OSX device with an Intel-based processor.
The 2nd AppleTV is an iOS device with an ARM-based processor.

Pretty simple to see why Netflix is a ready option on the new devices.

Time to put this thread to bed. Ninety five percent of the posters here are on a rant to get NetFlix availability on there legacy ATVs FOR FREE. While I don't know if it's true or not that the previous ATVs don't have the "horse power" to stream NetFlix, if it is, that's certainly a good reason for not offering upgrades to the new ATV system.

What confuses me most about this thread is that the new ATV only costs $99. I'm guessing most of the posters on this thread had several Apple products, all costing a good premium over other products. With a history of spending extra dollars on Apple products, what's the big deal about $99 to stream NetFlix to the big screens (another product costing hundreds recently and thousands not very long ago.)

One of the reasons the new ATV only costs $99 is that it DOESN'T have a hard drive. The legacy ATVs with HD have never been a "home run" for Apple for several reasons. All the conventional video providers (cable, satellite,fiber optic, netflix type streamers, etc) have pay movies options. It would seem to me that the ONLY segment of the market that the ATV would appeal to is the people who DONT' subscribe to any cable type services, but still want to watch ONLY movies on their TVs and because NetFlix is only about $10 a month, they now want it with their legacy ATVs. This segment has to be very small.

I don't get it. Personally, I've bought 2 MBs, 1 iMac, 3 Nanos, 3 IPs and 1 ATV in the past 3 years. I have absolutely no need to stream NetFlix, but if I did, I would probably buy a new ATV when they are available.

Agreed.

Except with...
"It would seem to me that the ONLY segment of the market that the ATV would appeal to is the people who DONT' subscribe to any cable type services"
The biggest use of our TVs (which is daily) is streaming our own media to the TV and stereo - mostly home movies.

I'm with Macaby and Pocket. I've already invested in the needed infrastructure and tweaked my 3-ATV system and I buy content from them and have no interest in renting at this time. I'm keeping mine but I'll be keeping an eye on the new one and may buy when Apple adds features that I am interested in, like apps and/or games. Actually, an article came out the other day that some of the big studios are balking at Apple's rental model and price so that "new" feature may turn out to be more smoke than substance.

Message was edited by: tallrad1

I bought my Apple TV a few weeks before the new one was announced, while I appreciate the local storage in it, I am seethingly mad that I receive none of the new features. Apple is punishing us for purchasing their products by not offering SOMETHING for us old Apple TV owners to do - like a partial rebate on the new one for instance. If I could install netflix by jailbreaking the device, I would do so - and that is quite extreme for me.
A discount on the new one? Netflix streaming could work if it was buffered first, then there wouldn't be any frame rate issues. There are ways around the hardware limitations, that if they pigheadedly refuse to offer some measure of compensation for recent Apple TV owners, they could release an update that uses a marginal amount of engineering creativity to deploy.

Agree!

There has been nothing new for several days. There are 3 or 4 camps and all have a legit point but there is not a lot of overlap. It all comes down to define what you want and go for the best actual solution. FWIW, the camps I see are: Netflix on AppleTV (Ok, but don't forget other Netflix boxes and other TV capability); HD (and we don't even agree on what it is and whether we really need it to enjoy a high quality movie - emphasis on need, not on want); the "well what's all the fuss about, just buy a Mini" camp (what do you want and what are you happy to pay); and the TV-1 does what I want and has a really easy user interface (and does not need a computer to be there and on).

So let's all pick the solution we want and move on.

Llamano wrote:
I bought my Apple TV a few weeks before the new one was announced, while I appreciate the local storage in it, I am seethingly mad that I receive none of the new features...

A discount on the new one?

Why would you be "seethingly" mad for buying an ATV that doesn't have some of the features of the new ATV? Would you be more happy if Apple jerked the HD out of your ATV and then fixed it up to receive NetFlix?

A discount on the new one? It's only $99. My advise is to chill out, have an adult beverage, then put a dollar a day in your piggy bank and in a little over 3 months you'll have enough to pickup a new ATV.

What I don't understand is that I can rent a movie in iTunes and then sync the rental to the aTV it plays fine, always has. Now if I download a .99 tv show it wont let me sync that.

I'm not so bothered that I can't stream directly to the device, although I'm a bit concerned about how the streaming will work with multiple new aTVs, I've found iTunes gets a bit iffy if you're streaming a film and somebody tries to play a song on the mac.

An HD film is 720 at 24fps. TV Shows air at 30fps. TV shows you have purchased up to this point have been converted to 24fps to be compatible. I believe the new TV show rentals are at their original 30fps, but the old TV can only play 720 up to 24fps. Its not compatible.

tony b wrote:
What I don't understand is that I can rent a movie in iTunes and then sync the rental to the aTV it plays fine, always has. Now if I download a .99 tv show it wont let me sync that.

Why even bother? Except for when I first got my ATV about 2 years ago, I download/stream all video content directly from my ATV. It takes twice as long to DL to iTunes and then sync over to ATV. Now I can understand if a person was on the fence about watching a show on their computer or ATV, then this would be the way to go since it's a one way street (computer/iTunes-->ATV).

While I watch most of the new movies via my ATV, lately I've started DL'ing an occasional 99 cent'er to my laptop for viewing while traveling. For the most part, it beats any airline movie that been chopped, hacked or reformatted for flight.

Macaby wrote:
Why even bother?

I usually download / stream movies directly to the aTV but the 99c TV rentals aren't available from it's online store, and there was something I missed (which wasn't worth buying so I rented on the iMac.

The "new" ATV is far from new, it's an old concept. And at $100 a pop, it's almost like making fun of the general population. Apple is trying to catch-up against the myriad of devices existing since 2009 that stream NetFlix, e.g., the Sony Blu-Ray BDP-S series, that cost on average $150. So, no need for another streaming box, seriously. But what we forgot to mention here is that the overall population is ignorant, and they were having a hard time using the ATV. Besides, the ATV had several bugs, the last one was fixed only few months ago, and it was the synchronization script. How to solve it? By creating a box that dismisses synchronization... et voila, we have the "new" ATV which is a cable box pretty much.

I wish that the new ATV would have included a functioning USB port to allow us consumers to add their own external storage. Then consumers like myself who have unstable wireless streaming connections (Ethernet is not an option for me in my apartment) could still sync their audio, home movies, etc to the external drive and enjoy interruption-free playback and less power consumption.

All for $99 (OK, a few bucks more for the functional USB). For me, that would be a winner.

Sigh…

Kranepool