AppleTV as a simple to use receiver for online shared photos?
AppleTV killer application: Access online shared photos without a computer?
My parents in law are using a TV, they are not using a computer. Sending prints of photos is working fine, but sometimes I just do not find the time for it. If there would be an effortless way to share our family photo collection with them online in a secure way I would go for it. Let us assume we would have found a cheap way to connect them to the internet. How could we leverage their TV user experience to access our online family photo collection?
If you are looking at the AppleTV as a media streamer its out of the box functionality can be from early adopter perspective disappointing. You have to apply hacks to it to overcome some of the restrictions, but if you are finding yourself modifying it so that it becomes a Mac Nano this sort of stuff is very likely anyhow your hobby. And for that reason you do not care that you probably could have achieved more in an easier way by using a Mac Mini.
But where AppleTV shines out of the box is it’s beautiful and simple to use interface. Using a remote control is exactly what my parents in law are very well trained in. Now let’s think about what would be needed to use Apple TV as receiver for online shared photo collections:
Step A - Maintain the photo collection
That is a easy: Use any Macintosh and use iPhoto. If you are using Windows you could use Googles Picasa. Or these guys are right and Apple is going to produce iPhoto for Windows.
Step B – Publish the photo collection to a secure service on the Internet.
Apples online service :Mac could be used for that. All what would be needed is a simple way to give a specific AppleTV device access to a photo collection on my .Mac account. Why to give a specific AppleTV device access and not work with user accounts and passwords? Because user and password are not concepts that my parent are familiar with, it is as simple as that.
By the way: My photo collection is the best example of user created content. No writing, no thinking, click, click, click, with the push of the button I can create content that is for a small group of people (my family and friends) very interesting. No copyright issues, no need for DRM and all the complexity that comes with it.
Step C – Parents access the photo collection with AppleTV
The only enhancement that AppleTV will need is the ability to connect to the .Mac service on the internet. From there on the experience can be exactly the same as AppleTV is demonstrating today. Just swith on your TV and navigate with the remote to Photos and enjoy.
Good that my parents in law need soon a new TV, HDReady flat screens are getting cheap these days. By the way: Is it just pure coincidence that the iPhone has also a camera build in? Or is Apple putting all pieces smoothly together to close another loop of end user needs?
AppleTV, Macintosh, Mac and .Mac are trademarks of Apple Inc.
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April 24th, 2007 at 5:27 pm and is filed under Proposed Solutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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