I had a chance to play with an Apple TV over the weekend and, much to my surprise, I was impressed. I have been as sceptical as anyone in the weeks since the Apple TV was announced. It just about makes sense in the US where there’s is a reasonable amount of movie and TV content on the iTunes Store. But here in the UK and the rest of Europe we’re still waiting for content deals to be finalised, which means that the sum total of video content for the Apple TV is video podcasts, music videos, and movie trailers from Apple’s website.

Then there’s the connectors. HDMI and component make sense in North America where the market for high definition TVs is well established. In Europe, it’s still relatively young and so the proportion of households with a TV that has either HDMI or component inputs is relatively small.

Those issues remain, but somehow, as with most Apple products, they seem much less significant when you actually switch the thing on and start using it. The interface is gorgeous, the icons and text look fantastic on a 40in widescreen TV, and every bit as good on a much smaller 19in widescreen display. Hooking it up to a wireless network is easy, as is syncing it with an iTunes Library (although you have to be patient – filling the 40GB hard drive over 802.11n takes several hours. Add several more if you’re on a 802.11g network). Streaming from a Mac works very well, even on an 802.11g network and adding a new Mac from which to stream content, say when friends come over with a MacBook, is simplicity itself.

The one issue I had when testing was the heat that the Apple TV generated. After only half an hour’s use it became so hot I could barely touch it – and that was without using the hard drive at all. This problem is made worse by the fact that there’s no off switch, it goes to sleep when not in use. That’s not exactly economical or environmentally friendly. In an age where we’re all becoming very conscious of the need to be more efficient in the way we use energy, having an Apple TV spewing out all that heat pains me.

The issues of content and connectivity remain. However, as households gradually replace ageing CRT sets with LCD and plasma models, the connectivity issue will fade away. And Apple tells me that they expect to tie up content deals for movies and TV programmes in the UK ‘later this year’. In any case, for those of us who use EyeTV to watch and record TV on a Mac, the new version, 2.4 makes it very easy, if time consuming, to convert recordings to H.264 and send them to iTunes.

It’s still far from perfect, but the Apple TV has a charm that makes it difficult not to like once you open the box and start to play with it.

Image by Niall Kennedy

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