Randy Weber

I hooked up the Apple TV, accessed iTunes on my Mac mini, and synced my music from my mini to the Apple TV.

Next up was installing Boxee. Not quite as easy as the instructions made it out to be, but I still got it installed and working. There was some overscan on the video but the software has a really easy way to adjust the overscan, so no problem.

Hulu worked, though it listed videos that weren’t available anymore. That was annoying. ABC.com didn’t work, nor did Fox. That’s makes Boxee a lot less useful. Didn’t try You Tube.

I like the Apple TV’s implementation of Front Row for music much better than I like Boxee. I see Boxee as my avenue to Internet video. For that it works well. I had an episode of 24 running from Hulu. It looked great.

The Apple TV and Boxee are definitely worth it.

As I said earlier, the Apple TV is a breeze to setup. I’ve since loaded all of my music onto it. It took forever to load 65GB of tunes via Wi-Fi. But it’s done and it looks and sounds great. It operates pretty much just like Front Row on my Mac mini. So it’s a keeper. I’ve disconnected my mini from the TV and taken it downstairs to the office where it will replace my ancient mini-ITX project PC. My next step is to load my photos onto the Apple TV. Then I’m going to try out Boxee.

I’m setting up my new Apple TV today to replace my Mac mini in my entertainment center. So far, it’s been a breeze to get it connected to my mini and to get it on my wireless network. I’ll let you know more once it’s all set up.

It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you admit it, apologize for it, and fix it. This is a great example from Hulu on doing just that found at 37signals:

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ’’It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’’ were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ’’Sunny’’ episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball…

Well done.

According to the Wall Street Journal, TiVo is now offering a great new product feature done in partnership with Entertainment Weekly. TiVo users can now record shows recommended by Entertainment Weekly. It appears that TiVo looks to do more partnerships like this. Anything that makes it easier to find and record the best shows is great in my book. I love it.

Now if I could easily share my recordings list with my friends, I’d be even happier.

Back in December 2006 I wrote about TiVo not keeping up in the quest to be the provider of the “sofa web.”

Om Malik at GigaOM discusses the new game consoles and the contribution they might make to Internet browsing. He refers to it as the “sofa web.”

It was announced that TiVo and Amazon Team Up - NYTimes.com. This is a positive step towards TiVo becoming part of the sofa web. I can’t wait to see more deals.

Zatz Not Funny! says YouTube on TiVo Launches. I know how crappy YouTube videos look on my iPhone. How bad do you think they’ll look on your big screen TV, especially HDTV? I could see people using this a few times and then dumping it. I say no big deal.

Looks like Netflix has done some thinking. Profiles feature NOT going away. Nice to see that companies can get it right sometimes.

This is the worst customer service move I’ve seen this year. Netflix has eliminated the ability to have multiple queues and reviewers per account. Here’s the details for Ars Technica:

According to an e-mail sent out to subscribers last night, Netflix is eliminating the convenient feature and removing all additional account profiles in September. And to add insult to injury, the additional profiles cannot be migrated to a new account. So all the effort you may have put in to rating hundreds, if not thousands, of movies and carefully crafting the perfect queue will be obliterated. The rental history will be merged with the main account owner, so your recommendations could suddenly change to reflect other profile users’ tastes.

I’d be really pissed if I had to recreate my queue. Maybe they want people to go back to Blockbuster.