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My Samsung TV has most (if not all) of that, and already has Hulu Plus. And Hulu Plus was a huge disappointment. For those that don't know, ONLY 'plus' content can be streamed to a device directly. You can't watch the vast majority of Hulu's catalog directly on your TV/PS3/whatever. It cost me $10 to learn that.
My Samsung TV has most (if not all) of that, and already has Hulu Plus. And Hulu Plus was a huge disappointment. For those that don't know, ONLY 'plus' content can be streamed to a device directly. You can't watch the vast majority of Hulu's catalog directly on your TV/PS3/whatever. It cost me $10 to learn that.
I bet they couldn't get the broadcasting networks to agree and that is why it is just a bunch of old content not being shown...
My Samsung TV has most (if not all) of that, and already has Hulu Plus. And Hulu Plus was a huge disappointment. For those that don't know, ONLY 'plus' content can be streamed to a device directly. You can't watch the vast majority of Hulu's catalog directly on your TV/PS3/whatever. It cost me $10 to learn that.
Also, doesn't Hulu Plus have ads? I will pay $10 for a bunch of ads when hell freezes over. (This is why I don't read magazines.)
The Hulu Plus content was also disappointing (compared to what's offered on the free Hulu site).
The big downside is that right now most of the TV chipsets (outside of the latest models) are severely underpowered, and no one wants to upgrade a TV, when they can upgrade a box for about 10-20% the price.
If you want a TV with all the cool interactive bells and whistles wait for the TV's which can run full flash 10.1 - not so much for the flash, but so you know you have something that will be able to handle much of what's being thrown at it.
Apple has missed a trick it should have learned from the iPhone in the value of allowing controlled third party apps on to a platform. Apple TV + downloadable/purchasable iOS apps aimed solely for TV use would be awesome. Or maybe they're hoping to pull the same idea off using the iPad->Airplay->Apple TV integration coming later in the year?
Why do I think this? http://twitter.com/lllucas - Apple employee, apparently worked on Airplay (note the "happy airplay day!" tweet) Joe Hewitt (of Facebook) tweets "If only iOS apps could use AirPlay to stream their own stuff to AppleTV." and then lllucas replies "what makes you think they can't? :-)"
Why might I be wrong? It doesn't necessarily make sense that an app could output arbitrary video data (namely, what we're all thinking of, 3D games) to an Apple TV unless there was something seriously cool going on behind the scenes, like using a H.264 encoder in hardware to compress the stream.
If that's happening, then I would think certain devices (such as the iPod touch 2G/3G, iPhone 3G) would be incompatible because there's no reason for them to have an H.264 encoder on their chipset since they don't have video cameras. This would be an odd thing for Apple/app devs to try to support, because now you have to worry about OS revisions + device capabilities, and Apple's been fairly good about coming down on the side of keeping things progressing in software even if the hardware is too slow for it in reality (see the iOS 4.0 on iPhone 3G debacle)
I think it's certain given those tweets that you'll be able to at least stream arbitrary H.264 content from your app to the Apple TV, but to be encoding whatever is on the screen in real time and also be putting load on the graphics processor...I'm not sure that would work.
There's a company called PlayOn. They use DLNA to stream things like Netflix, Hulu, and your files to DLNA capable devices. DLNA is actually built into 8,000+ devices such as XBOX,PS3, and some of these snazzy new TVs. PlayON is installed on one computer and then streams the rest. Is anyone here well versed in DLNA?
And format support is spotty as well. There's often a mismatch between what the server will serve up and what the device will play back.
I have a Sony TV with most of what was shown here and I rarely, rarely use any of the Internet features. There's DLNA support built-in, but of the 800 or so videos I have being served up on my network, it refuses to even recognize any more than a dozen or so. Everything else is either ignored or causes an error. And the user-interface is completely divorced and separate from my set-top box. if I want to use the Internet features, I have to find the TV remote vs. the cable-box remote and then deal with a different user interface. The lack of transparent integration is a deal-breaker for many people. Switching back and forth between Internet video sources and "normal" sources has to be as seamless as changing channels. Google and Echostar are working together, so they may pull it off, at least for Echostar set-top boxes. Otherwise, without tight-integration, these efforts are going to be a flop.
* MKV support
* 1080p support
* Subtitles (.sub/.idx/.srt)
* Remote control
XBMC on a Gen 1 Apple TV with a Crystal HD card is pretty simple to get going, and has decent performance.
I've tried:
* Gen 1 XBox running XBMC (no 1080p on a Celeron)
* XBox 360 with WMC (flakey codec support, requires separate Windows PC, no subtitle support, remote control via Media Control is bad). Microsoft fluffed this one so bad. All the codec packs for it require you hacking your standalone host system to bits to get playback working.
* DLNA on my Sony Bravia to PlayOn. PlayOn sucks, to put it kindly. Still requires a seperate standalone PC.
In 2008, XBMC streaming over SMB directly from a NAS was the answer.
It still is, if you don't want to muck around for hours fiddling trying to get stuff going by following the cargo cultish forums that exist for video playback (blind leading the blind).