Apple,
I like your products. My wife and I own several iPods, and I’m getting closer and closer to switching my desktop to Mac. I want to buy an AppleTV, but you see, you’re not letting me. I want a good device hooked up to my tv, and the AppleTV looks like it could be what I want. However, no codec support basically makes the product useless to me.
What am I gonna watch? The shows I recorded with my Tivo? The shows I recorded with my Windows Media Center PC? No! You won’t let me. The video clips I recorded with my camera, the home movies, etc. They’re not in your format, so you won’t let me play those either.
Basically, all I can watch is content I buy from you or podcasts. Now,
I’m a fan of Tiki Bar TV, Diggnation, and the like, but that’s not
going to cut it. I’m not going to buy a 300 dollar device just to buy
content from you. You have to let me use the device with MY content.
“But you want me to buy content from the ITMS,” you say. Well, yeah, I can understand that. However, I’m not going to buy your device in the first place if it doesnt play my content. I look at it this way: If i had an AppleTV, I probably would occasionally buy a movie or missed tv episode. The same thing happened with the ipod. I got it, and occasionally, I bought a song.
If you’re not going to let the appletv play various formats, at least give out a free [* –> H.264] transcoder. Would it be that hard? Videora already has one out, but they’ve got an agenda, and I don’t like that their “Videora iPod converter” auto-loads and sits in my system tray every time I reboot. I’d much prefer that YOU, apple, give us a quality tool that does the job. Well, that or make the AppleTV more useful to me than a $300 brick that doesn’t do what I want.
