Wost Tech Products of 2007

article fails for not mentioned  bluray 1.0  hardware-- now obsolete.
 

I wanted to get an Apple TV when they had the 160 giggers for a buck 289.  I figured it would be a great poor man's TiVo, that did other stuff.  Bad idea?

What didn't he like about it? (I don't own a Mac yet, so I'm not familiar with what I should expect from an Apple product)

Apple TV's not a TiVo replacement.  It simply facilitates the streaming of your iTunes library to your TV.  You can't capture a TV show, store it on your Mac or your Apple TV and watch it later at your leisure.  You have to buy the show from ITMS.  It's nice for a few things such piping your iTunes music to your audio system with a typically slick Apple UI but definitely not worth the $$ to me.

Mac geeks might want to give this a look - http://www.elgato.com/elg...re/EyeTV/product2.en.html.

There's also the Onkyo dock.  Obviously only works if you have an Onkyo receiver.  I imagine other vendors have stuff like that too.

Early days on this yet (not music really but video for sure.)  The digital living room isn't quite a reality.  We discussed storage and backup in another thread.  Until those two, highly related, needs have simple, workable, affordable solutions it will be a niche market.  Apple is working away towards it with ITMS and movies.  They signed a deal with Fox this week.  Rumors about Microsoft taking over the HDM market through downloads persist.  But at the end of the day, how do I own a video library containing 100s of movies in high-res formats without an enterprise storage solution?  We're starting to see promise in products like Drobo wherein J6P *might* make a run at the technology - but not at that price point. 

Five years.  Maybe three.

Are you asking about the Drobo link? 

Standard DVDs are something like 5Gb and HDM is 30-50Gb.  Obviously there are extras, multiple soundtracks, etc. on those but let's say a SD movie is 4Gb and a HD movie is 20Gb.  It's not going to take long to burn through a 400Gb drive especially if you're HD ready.  On top of that you wouldn't want to leave your investment exposed so you're going to want to back it up.  Double the requirement.  For just 50 HDM titles we're going to need a couple of terabytes

If I'm going to have to purchase hundreds/thousands of dollars of hardware to make downloaded movies work they'd better be priced at next to nothing (seriously, maybe even $2-3.)  Given there are only about 100 HDM titles I'd even want to own if they were free, almost everything else I already have on DVD and maybe ten TV series ever are worth owning I just don't see how I break even.  Plus I have to find room for all the hardware, power it, replace it as it ages or capacity is exceeded, so on.  Right now, I wait for a BOGO or end-cap Target sale and store something the width of a pencil in a drawer or two.  That's an order of magnitude better for me.  YMMV.

Now, if they'd let me download and burn...   

Good point aske.  Bandwidth is another huge hurdle and they will try to beat it through compression/downres which won't appeal at all to the targeted early adopters.