Just watched Apple's keynote and it appears they are trying a new approach with the Apple TV. They seem to be more focused on movies this time around as they introduced the ability to rent standard and HD movies through iTunes. You can rent movies with Apple TV without even having a computer. You can still stream stuff from iTunes but its not needed to rent movies. And apparently, it takes less then 30 seconds to view once you click that rent button. Wasn't too interested in ol Apple TV before but now I'm somewhat intrigued. Thoughts...

I have an Apple TV now and for our family needs it's great. We keep the kids on mostly PBS Kids shows and other educational stuff. They also have a handful of Disney movies I've transcoded. We have our music library in iTunes on our Mac Mini.

We can access the entire iTunes library on the other side of the house. Works great for us because the cheapo LCD is located in a cabinet where there is no cable line. But I can get a network connection for AppleTV.

I also use this in conjunction with El Gato's EyeTV. (And I did get the EyeTV and HD USB Tuner yesterday at Macworld for $99). This is basically a DVR on a Mac. It records kids shows and automatically converts them to Apple TV format and dumps the vid into iTunes. Then when you go to the Apple TV, the new shows appear automatically. Some of the new features of this allow you to use your iPhone/iTouch via Wifi and view the same EyeTV content. Seems you can also do it via EDGE but haven't tried.

I also have Tivos that can pull video (yeah, I'm an engineer...). But I rarely do that because EyeTV works so well.

If you give into iTunes and you have iPods, then yes, it's a good option. I'm not going to get into DRM and Apple's monopoly blah blah blah. It works and it's very easy. Can't speak for the rentals yet because it's not for 2 weeks. But the concept is much better than before.

That's pretty neat that EyeTV will convert shows automatically for Apple TV. My dad has it and I can see how that would be a nice alternative. I'm mainly interested to see how this whole renting business is going to play out. Could be a nice way to get HD content. I saw that HD means 720p and offers 5.1 while standard def is in stereo. Once you are able to download the update, I would love to hear your impressions.

One other quick question. When streaming videos, music, etc. does it freeze up at all during playback or is it pretty smooth?

If you're doing it wirelessly (you don't have to since it has an ethernet jack) you should have 802.11n to get the best video streaming performance. From what I saw at the expo, even HD content was smooth as silk. It supports streaming over 802.11g, as well. Music streaming is trivial and works flawlessly even over 802.11b.

Depends how big the file is and how your network is configured. I have a wired network (which is much more stable than wireless, even 802.11n). But my video files are stored on a network hard drive (NAS). That means iTunes reads the file from the network, then it streams it to the Apple TV. That 2.2GB file will noticeably skip.