# Apple TV Just Became a Great Deal More Useful



## Jungle Jack (Jul 28, 2009)

Hello,
While I have had an Apple TV for some time, my usage with it was roughly 10% of the time. Mostly I had been using it to watch my beloved Atlanta Hawks on the NBA League Pass as the PQ is far better than the SD feed from my Comcastic Cable Box.

As an HBO and Cinemax subscriber I have had HBO GO and Max Go on my iPhone and prior Android phones for quite some time as well. However, last week there was an update for both HBO and Max Go which now supports Airplay.

While my Denon AVR-4520CI is also Airplay compatible, for whatever reason I only get audio from HBO/Cinemax Go. With my Apple TV I get both video and audio. 

This truly is huge as HBO Go offers every single season of every TV Series, Documentary, etc that HBO has offered whereas HBO On Demand offers just a sliver of this.

Now every season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Entourage, Deadwood, and so forth are now easily accessible.
More important to me is being able to watch shows like David Simon's stellar Generation Kill and The Wire, Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Extras, Game of Thrones, and all of HBO's Documentaries are now easily viewed. I am currently watching "41" which is an excellent Documentary about President George Herbert Walker Bush as I am posting this.

I held off a long time buying an iPhone as I refused to do so until there was both LTE and Wireless N support. As the iPhone 5 offered both, I purchased a 64gb model the first day possible. While I still prefer the flexibility of the Android Platform, the software support for iOS is just too strong for me to stay away from it.
Cheers,
JJ


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## Sevenfeet (Feb 2, 2009)

Airplay has two standards, audio streaming (the older one, previously known as Airtunes) and video streaming (the more recent one). Apple has licensed the audio component for awhile now...it's a chip that Apple sells to consumer electronics makers like Denon for support in their products. The nice thing is that it supports iTunes guaranteed and any older DRM'ed iTunes tracks you still might own (although Apple went to DRM free years ago). It also supports Apple Lossless (which FLAC competes with).

Video streaming is still exclusive to Apple products so anything third party you see as "Airplay enabled" won't do video. The video streaming component has been reverse engineered but no one has made a commercial product based on this to not incur the wrath of Apple Legal. And I doubt that the embedded chip that Apple currently sells to third parties would do video anyway even if Apple changed their minds tomorrow.

That being said, HBO GO on Apple TV is pretty awesome.


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