Technologizer

Apple TV, iTunes Updated; World Remains Unchanged

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Apple has dusted the cobwebs off of Apple TV with a new software upgrade that introduces a redesigned user interface, which is intended to make it easier to play favorites. iTunes 9.0.2 was released in conjunction with the update. Apple TV 3.0 has a redesigned main menu that adds shortcuts to recently rented or purchased movies. [...]

More Apple TV for Your Money

Monday, September 14, 2009

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I can’t remember if anyone onstage at Apple’s press event last week even mentioned the words “Apple TV.” It certainly didn’t announce any major news associated with it. But the product which Apple loves to tell us is a mere hobby is now a better buy. Apple has discontinued the 40GB model (the one I [...]

Maybe Apple TV Should Be a TV

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

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Alas, poor Apple TV. Its manufacturer likes to treat nearly everything it makes as both a technological breakthrough and sales blockbuster, but when it discusses Apple TV at all, it usually dismisses it as a “hobby.” As New TeeVee’s Chris Albrecht points out, the little white set-top box got nary a mention during Apple’s financial [...]

Life Without Comcast: An Update

Monday, February 23, 2009

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I’ve been remiss in not updating you on my experiment in using an Apple TV with Boxee’s media-center software as a substitute for my pricey Comcast service. “Life Without Comcast” may be a misleading title, since I haven’t tried to go cold turkey–instead, I’ve done some of my TV watching via cable, and some via [...]

Hulu Gives Boxee the Boot. Thanks, Hollywood!

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

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Okay, now this just stinks: Boxee, the cool software that lets you pipe Internet TV and other digital media onto a TV set, is doing away with its support for Hulu, the most significant purveyor of streaming versions of broadcast TV programming. I take the move personally, since I recently bought an Apple TV in [...]

Report: Apple May Enter TV Business

Thursday, February 5, 2009

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Visions of the “digital living room” having been dancing in the heads of industry leaders for over a decade, but no one solution has broken into the mainstream. Now, Apple may be preparing for a significant push based on the success of iTunes and the iPod. Or so predicts analyst Gene Munster of investment bank [...]

The New York Times on Boxee

Saturday, January 17, 2009

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I thought I was being weird and bleeding-edge by attempting to dump cable TV for watching sites like Hulu through Boxee’s open-source media center software on an Apple TV. But the New York Times has a nifty story today on Boxee and its fans–and once something’s in the Times, it’s presumably well on its way [...]

Life Without Comcast: An Experiment in Internet TV

Friday, January 16, 2009

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Maybe the title of this new Technologizer series is unfair. I don’t despise Comcast, the company who I’ve been paying for cable TV service for the past six months. (Until then, at my old pad, I was a DirecTV man.) But I don’t love it, either–especially the part about paying it a large amount of [...]

SlingCatcher: It’s Almost Here–Finally!–and Looks Neat

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

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Way back in January of last year, Sling Media–the inventors of the nifty SlingBox box, which can broadcast TV from your home across the Net to your laptop or phone–announced its second major project. The SlingCatcher, it said, was a new device that would flip around the Slingbox’s functionality, sending video in a multitude of [...]