[jyl]

I've been interested in Apple TV and similar products.

Right now we have cable triple-play (Internet, TV, phone) and TiVO. The TV part of the cable, plus the TiVO, probably cost about $60/month in subscription fees. At $1 per 24-hour rental of a TV show, that would be 60 shows/month on Apple TV. Suppose each show is average 45 minutes (mix of 1/2 hour and 1 hour programs) and we skip the 30% that is commercials and credits, that's 31.5 minutes of viewing, or 31.5 hours per month for 60 shows/month. Divided by 4 people is about 7.9 hours/person/month of viewing, or 1.8 hours/person/week.

We do watch more than 1.8 hours/person/week. So the simplistic math doesn't favor Apple TV, for our situation.

The other thing is, I tend to keep lots of old shows on the TiVO, and watch them repeatedly. Cooking shows, mostly - when I need an idea for what to cook, or forgot how to cook something, I'll often browse through saved shows by Brown, Batali, Burrell, etc. I'll also get on a kick for some TV series, often an old one, record every episode and watch it for awhile, then move on to something else. I have a 1TB drive on the TiVO, enough for around 1,000 shows.

That usage would be inconvenient or expensive to do with Apple TV's rental model.

I do love seeing models like Apple TV, NetFlix, etc proliferate, since the ideal model is different for each family.