The New Apple TV: FAIL.

Yesterday, Steve Jobs unveiled the new version of the AppleTV, and with it a huge assumption - and I think mistakenly - about how people use it.

The next iteration of the AppleTV will feature no onboard storage, but also limits you to renting, not buying, TV shows and movies. Steve Jobs obviously didn't ask anyone with small kids how they use their Apple TV. Owning media is a huge plus for our family. We can buy a season -or a single episode- of iCarly or Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and the kids can (and do) watch the hell out of them. Kristi and I do the same thing with TV shows we've purchased, specifically Mad Men, Toddlers and Tiaras, How I Met Your Mother and Cake Boss.

So Steve Jobs is wrong - people DO want to own their media. And for most people, renting (and paying each time they want to watch) will be simply unacceptable.

This quote from The Apple Blog sums it up nicely:

Call me old-fashioned, but I like archiving my material and I like to have it available whenever I want to review it, or just revisit a favorite scene to make sure I remember it correctly. True, as Steve Jobs said in the presentation, I’ll be able to rent it multiple times for cheaper than I’d be able to buy it, but then I can’t lend it to friends and family, pass it on to my kids or view it again 50 years down the road when its gone out of print.

An easy solution would have been to allow purchases that saved directly to an iTunes-enabled computer. But no mention was made of anything like that. My question is this: will my current Apple TV be crippled by this new limitation,as well? Or will I still have the ability to purchase single episodes of shows?

The new Apple TV represents video-on-demand at its purest. But it's also a step backward 30 years to a time before Beta and VHS tapes allowed people to actually own the movies they loved.

And then there's this: my DSL modem crapped out on me over the weekend and we've been without internet all week, which means no Netflix and no downloading of the TV shows that we've bought season passes to. The movies and TV shows we've already purchased and have stored either on our AppleTV or our computer have been the only thing we have available to watch until our replacement modem arrives.

With a two-year-old in the house, having those shows stored locally is well worth the price of the hard drive they're stored on.