mad men and apple tv
I’m not really a TV watcher beyond the Letterman show, Saturday Night Live and the occasional sports channel, I get most of my entertainment needs from the internet. I did invest in an Apple TV though. At first I was less than impressed with this device as I felt that it didn’t live up to the usual Apple standard of quality. For instance, it connects to your computer either by ethernet or wireless - there is a USB slot but that’s for “diagnostics” I’m told - and as I had about 30gb of content, music, video etc, and I can only connect via wireless it took about 4 days to sync the device [I am not kidding either.]
Still I persevered and continued to experiment with it and then discovered that I couldn’t watch the AMC series ‘Mad Men’ via my cable account but could purchase the whole season for download from iTunes. 14 hour-long episodes including a ‘Making of’ all mine to keep and the ability to watch on my flat screen TV, my laptop or my iPhone anytime, anywhere. The portability and convenience alone was worth the price, not to mention that the show itself is an impressive piece of TV, well written and well acted and a great window into the world of advertising back in the ’50’s. The show has received 2 Golden Globe nominations and 2 SAG nominations. I’m looking forward to season 2.

January 2nd, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Hmm…I’d give that USB port a whirl…just to see what happens. They probably even have some good suggestions over at appletvhacks.net - strictly for educational means, of course. :) I almost forgot about this show. Thanks for the reminder.
The show’s premise actually makes me think of the Adam Curtis BBC doco, Century of the Self, although that’s non-fiction and probably a bit more dry…
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:27 pm
@Nick, apparently there’s a hack so that you can use it to dump stuff on there as it has an OS X system too….
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:57 pm
So ZD Net agrees with me on the Apple TV uselessness…