Apple TV: No Video Playlists. No Sharing.
January 20th, 2008
More feature disappointments for the new version of Apple TV.
No Video Playlists.
One of the amazing features on the audio side of Apple TV is the ability to play audio playlists. Select a playlist full of songs and you can listen all day. Why not the same for video?
A local wine company displays a video of visits to the wine country using the Apple TV. Shouldn’t they be able to have a playlists of videos from multiple trips running? I would love to have a continuous run of music videos, for example.
Obviously, this is something that can be updated in future revisions.
No Sharing.
Oh, if you have more than one Apple TV, you are not going to be able to share rented content between them. If you rent something on your Apple TV, that content is locked to that device. You can not bounce it back to iTunes or transfer it to any other device.
If you rent it on iTunes, you can bounce it where you need it. Just remember that iTunes rentals will be lower quality than direct-to-device rentals.
January 21st, 2008 at 8:49 am
A playlist of sorts is in the Apple TV. If you do a Get Info on a video in iTunes you can make it a TV Show. Entering a name for the series will put all of the videos under the same heading. If you are wanting it to play each video one after the other, I am not sure how you do that.
January 21st, 2008 at 10:39 am
Video play list? You must be the ultimate couch potato!
February 4th, 2008 at 1:23 am
Steve W, you must be the ultimate loner. Video playlists are fun for parties. My friend bought an Apple TV months ago, assuming this very simple and ordinary “feature” was included, and bought a whole bunch of music videos from the iTMS for playing at a party. I can’t find the words for how disappointed I am in Apple at this hour.
After all, the video iPod can do it, why not the Apple TV? Answer that.
February 21st, 2008 at 9:23 am
I make videos for companies and and do a lot of them for trade show booths. I just purchased two Apple TV for use in trade show booths and I assumed that the simple functionality of “repeat” was a given, not so much. I have product images floating around as a screen saver, music (licensed of course) loaded on and a video that I would love to repeat all day. This little box would be perfect for what I do and I would buy these by the truckload for other trade show videos I do but this omission is sending me to buy into Blu-Ray. Sorry Apple!!
February 1st, 2009 at 4:21 am
[…] it did not have movies playlist. After Googling for a while, I wasn’t alone. Here is a blog entry four days ago. And I found out the Apple TV Software Update 2.3 allows movies playlist in iTunes to […]