YouTube on AppleTV: The new killer app?

This is just a quick entry about my first impressions of the Apple TV.

I got my 160GB model on Monday. Setup was a breeze: the most complicated part was telling my TV to use the second HDMI port as “Input 3″.

Then again I think I started out with a fairly complete system already having two airport extreme base stations set up to provide the wireless part of the equation. The synching does take forever (and a day) but you can stream things to your Apple TV straight away. I haven’t got much video in my collection and over here in Europe the iTunes store carries neither TV shows, nor movies, so it was slim pickings. I tried a few video podcasts, but I’m fairly new to that scene and haven’t found much interest yet.

All this left me with an “iPod” for my living room plus a slide projector. The slide shows are definitely nice to have on your big screen though. Do you remember the “good old days” when you used to show your holiday snaps (or baby pictures) to your assembled family members? This is something has gone amiss with the advent of the digital camera. It’s become easier to share your photos with people over the internet than to people 2 yards away.. a bit sad really.

Well the age of the 5 hour slide show ordeals is coming back with a vengeance. Not that the slide show features are anything to write home about.. it’s fairly bare bones compared to iPhoto. Still, it makes a huge difference seing your shots on a 50″ screen in the lounge, rather than bent over you iBook’s tiny little screen. Oh yes, I nearly forgot: it also doesn’t take all day to start up and find the right program..

All in all, though “it does exactly what it says on the box” and nothing else. An air of disappointment was starting to spread.. only what it says on the box.

Then came yesterday’s “Software Update 1.1″ including the YouTube integration and that changed everything..

Now, I haven’t really used YouTube very much myself (until yesterday I didn’t even have an account) and perhaps that’s because I don’t have much time to waste in front of my computer (hey, I’ve got to make a living!). In fact, the only times I had a look was when somebody sent me a link (ha ha.. that’s a good one) and I dutifully watched the video, so I could report back on its content over the water cooler the next day.

Scanning through the “most popular” category of the Apple TV YouTube menu, I was beginning to wonder “Who watches this rubbish?”. There is a lot of rubbish on YouTube (what the counselor on South Park would call “immature toilet humor”) and having it on my living room TV rather than just having it on my computer does not necessarily count as progress .. until I found something that I did like.

Several hours later, I was still going through the “related” menu, saving my favorites and rating various items.. “YouTube on AppleTV” brought back the same intensely satisfying surfing experience that characterized my first few addictive months on the internet and it felt just as new.. plus this time around there is already lots of ready made content available.

In fact, YouTube on AppleTV is far more addictive than YouTube without AppleTV. This stuff is meant to be watched in the living room as entertainment and not sitting a couple of inches away from an LCD monitor. You use your little remote control to play something interesting and in between clips, you abscond to the kitchen and get yourself a snack. It miraculously transforms the whole experience.

Apple have managed to turn a web site into a free 10,000 channels TV network and something more. Steve Jobs famously visited the Xerox PARC research laboratory and when he saw the first graphical user interface on the Xerox Star system, he had an epiphany: “One day all computers are going to work like this”; the rest, as they say, is history. I think this might be one of those moments again. I (think I) have seen the future of entertainment.. and the Apple TV’s killer app.