Taking The Plunge With AppleTV
Since we do all of our shooting in HD, I’ve finally taken the plunge and bought an AppleTV to see how it looks and insure our shows play well on the device. It took a while to get the format correct, but now that it’s dialed in, I like that it does a good job with HD content. I can see that on-demand downloadable programming is going to be a big trend. While it doesn’t look as sharp as Blu-ray, it still looks good, especially considering that the program is small enough to be downloaded over the internet.
I don’t think we’ll be able to download a Blu-ray quality program in the next two years. I love watching documentaries and I can find a lot of history and science shows through iTunes. It takes about 10 minutes to download a 40 minute show and size is about 500 MB. It costs $2 and it has no commercials, so the 40 minutes used to take an hour to watch. I figure I’m buying my time back. If $2 saves 20 minutes then I can get my time back at a rate of $6 per hour - a bargain.