I'd just go with over-the-air for TV, but the bastids at the FCC sold the spectrum TV used to use and allowed broadcasters to go with dramatically-weaker signals on the digital signals. I could use a rabbit-ears TV any time I wanted with analog (VHF and UHF), good quality signal with minimal multipath; with digital, I have to have a rooftop antenna, so pretty much stuck with cable or uVerse. Bad deal.
That's known as "progress" in government. Didn't you know? Just wait for ADS-B!
(I'm not down on ADS-B, I just see it as typical government "catch-up" to technology that's already outdated, but I suppose they have to do something. I rant about it just because it's all so silly.)
I assume AppleTV can stream / play content from a PC, as long as the PC has iTunes loaded? AppleTV has no storage of its own?
Can AppleTV play from a NAS box?
For the former, I have no clue. I guess I could drag this boring old work laptop home to find out if you like. Let me know.
As far as the latter, no. Not directly anyway. Think of it as an iPhone with no storage that streams everything that they slapped a better UI for using with a remote control on, and you've got the concept. It's likely an iOS device under-the-hood, but I haven't researched to see if the hackers/crackers have figured that one out yet.
It's like all tech, there's always something "better". If you delay your decision to buy one or the other, three more will be out by the time you go to buy. None of the "pundits" are lauding any particular one of the streaming media boxes right now as being the best, and as someone else pointed out, more and more DVD/BluRay players, and even the TVs themselves are getting Netflix, Vudu, and other built-in streaming tech now...
So the external box may be a "thing of the past" in the not too distant future.
I've always thought that Apple might just get into the HDTV biz... get rid of the little box, and build 'em (or license their technology) into someone's TVs. They probably missed that bandwagon, though -- they needed it to be in the solid-state form factor of the Apple TV 2 a few years earlier and stuffed them inside the hoardes of TVs being sold during the HD "transition" to have made that idea wildly profitable. AppleTV 1 with a spinning hard disk inside a TV would have been a nightmare for repair/return, etc...
So, the TV manufacturers putting this stuff inside the set is the next logical jump. Intel also has something else out there that streams anything their video card chipset "sees" in a PC to a properly equipped HDTV with their proprietary streaming tech, but I can't remember what it's called.
I recommend the "HD Nation" podcast with Patrick Norton and Robert Herron from Revision3 for interesting high and low-end HDTV and TV tech commentary. They're usually keeping the pulse of both the high-end buyer and the regular Joe pretty well and mixing up their shows to help out both types of TV "consumer".
TV consumes me usually, not the other way around... so I'm trying to avoid it as much as possible. My wife's utterly addicted though.
