Bret asked why I thought going with Apple TV was a good idea and what I had to gain over regular cable.

For me, the calculus is pretty simple. I watch maybe 2 television programs with any regularity. Amanda is pretty much the same.
With Rogers Cable, we're paying for "unlimited access" at a rate of approximately $85 CAD per month (just for programming). Five season passes through the iTunes store would only cost us $250 per year, or roughly $20 per month.

I also have a DVR, but I really hate using it - its an unnecessary step. I mean, why should I have to pay so much extra money just to capture the bits from the cablestream that I'm interested in when I could easily go to the iTunes store and get the same content on-demand for a much lower price?

In sum, those are some pretty compelling reasons to go with Apple TV. Coupled with my ongoing move from my heavily filtered Rogers Hi-Speed Cable internet service to a heavily not-filtered eGate Hi-speed DSL service, I'll be able to backfill with torrent-sourced video that I don't currently have access to. I can do most of this now with my DLINK DSM-320, but the Dlink doesn't have a built-in hard drive, and only supports Wireless A/B/G (no "N" support). This makes for really poor streaming performance - the hardware buffers aren't big enough to do the serious caching that the Apple TV can. Also, I've got a really huge music collection (55gb), really huge photo collection (500+gb) and a growing DVD.iso library (100+gb) - the DLink does a terribly job dealing with big libraries. In fairness, the Apple TV might suck in this area too, but having seen how Front Row and the iPod do with big collections, I'm not totally worried.

So, net-net, the reason why I jumped on the Apple TV was because it really looked like the home media device that I've been looking for. I realize that the Microsoft Media Center can do a lot of these things as well, but something about having a full PC in my livingroom has never sat well with me. I'd much rather hide all the real-tech in the basement somewhere and use the television as a dumb terminal as much as I can - I'm pretty sure that the Apple TV fulfills all the necessary criteria, and I'm really comforted by how comprehensive the iPod/iTunes/iTunes Store combo is. If Apple TV is half as "end-to-end" as the iPod combo, I know I'll end up in a great spot.

BUT, I cancelled my Apple TV order.

*gasp*

Yup, I decided that it was too expensive. Not the device itself, but the "environment". In order to tap into the media savings I described earlier, I would have had to upgrade my existing setup. See, the Apple TV needs an HDTV to talk to. I don't got one of those yet. I bought a monster 36" tube TV about six or seven years ago just before plasmas and LCDs were becoming available. I figured I'd spend as much money as I could on the best TV I could get my hand's on, because I was buying a TV for the next 10-15 years, just like I remembered my parents doing.

Problem was, I didn't realize that I was spending $1200 on a soon to be obsolete, overweight, under-elegant piece of....technology. (A similar TV would cost me about $400 at current prices...yuck). So anyways, given that I need a new roof, a new basement, new floors, a new kitchen, a new vehicle and a gazillion other things, I'm not sure that dropping $3k on a suitably cool HD plasma screen to match my new Apple TV is in the cards.

Soooo...to make a long story short, I broke down and bought an iPod instead. Paying a little bit more for a cradle and cables let's me connect the iPod to my current home theatre setup (a Yammie HTS-5850 with Polk 6.1 surrounds and bass...) which lets me listen to all my music, display slideshows and watch the odd internet sourced movie without a lot of hassle. Hopefully this setup sees me through to when the iTunes Canada store actually sells TV shows and an HD set is in the budget. I think its a fairly decent setup - not very exotic, but probably useful.

I've been using MP3 players since Creative first released their original MP3 jukebox back in 1999, or 2000 at just under $1000 CAD. Since then the Jukebox has fallen out of favor because of capacity and sync issues. It only had a 6gb drive (which I manually upgraded to a 40gb drive with the help of a really geeky co-worker) and only supported USB1.0 syncing which was miserably slow and prone to dropped connections with my PC. It literally took me days to get my entire music library (about 20gb at the time) onto the Creative with the use of special 3rd party software and lots of manual intervention. No wonder the iPod took the world by storm - it worked! :) Since then, I've bought several smaller players from Creative - notably, I've picked up three of their 1gb Nano's in the past couple of years. Way better form factor than the old iPod shuffle, decent price point and more features. Sadly, the quality of these units has dropped so substantially that I wouldn't touch the current crop with a ten foot pole (Amanda has already killed two of these through no fault of her own - a bug in the firmware causes the unit to permanently lockup, requiring factory repair!

One of the benefits of not having an iPod was that I've been able to resist the urge to post snippets of my "now playing" list. The blogosphere doesn't seem to respond well to playlists from the Zune or Creative products ;-)

But, having seen a couple of these lists posted over the last couple of days, here's a list of tunes that have played on my iPod during the last hour or so...(sorted in order of oldest to most recently played...)

Big Brat - Phantom Planet
Everyone's Gonna Be Happy - The Kinks
Bring Me To Life (Live) - Evanescence
Cosmic Movie - The Doors
Hip Hop Worth Dying For - Main Flow
Sunshower - Chris Cornell
Creep - Radiohead
Brian Wilson (Live) - Barenaked Ladies
Let's Be Friends - Bruce Springsteen
Crossroads - Bradley Litwin
Soul meets Body - Death Cab for Cutie
What's this life For - Creed
India - Roxy Music
Keep it Dark - Genesis
Cat Turned Blue - Rusted Root
Stardust - Louis Armstrong
Bad Old Days - Big Sugar (including Mojah, a former Tucows employee!)
The Lengths - The Black Keys
Bring me safely down - The Matthew Show
Dayjob - Gin Blossoms

Having said all that, I feel better for having shared :)

Enjoy your weekend!