I was strolling through the local Costco the other day, a sometimes painful-to-my-wallet experience, and stumbled across a pretty good deal for an Apple TV. $389 for the 160GB model. I tried, unsuccessfully, to talk myself out of getting it. The way I saw it, I have a lot of content stored in my iTunes library, so why not try it out. I felt slightly hypocritical about the purchase — after all, I detest DRM, yet here I was pumping money into it. Also, there are a lot of tech pundits out there, such as CNET’s Tom Krazit, questioning the long term viability of the device. Compared to the red hot sales stats for most other Apple hardware (iPods, iMacs and MacBook laptops), Apple TVs are reportedly not burning up the sales charts.

Setup was as easy as all the reviews said it was, especially since I was using an HDMI cable to hook it up to the Vizio LCD TV in our bedroom. The small remote was identical to the remote that came with my MacBook Pro laptop. This was a problem, because I knew a remote that small would easily get lost in the bedroom. Thankfully, I have a Logitech Harmony remote already in this room, and it was simple enough to update its setup to include the functionality of the Apple remote for the new Apple TV. The Harmony is one of the best investments I’ve made (I’ve got two of them).

Once I got it hooked up and the Harmony remote updated, the next step was to get it linked up to some content. It’s fairly straightforward to do this — the Apple TV will appear in the iTunes of any connected PC or Mac under the devices category… it gives you a 6 digit code to enter into the iTunes application on the “source” computer of choice to complete the link up. You can connect it to multiple iTunes libraries, but it looks like only one can be active at a time.

From there, you have some choices to make… such as if you want to simply stream content or synchronize it. Because the network in my home is essentially an all wireless affair and that the Apple TV and source computer were fairly far apart from each other, I knew streaming would not give me the experience I wanted. I did a quick test, which confirmed that, while music streaming worked fairly well, video playback really stuttered badly. So I chose to use the Synch method, which essentially duplicates selected from the target iTunes library to the internal hard drive of the Apple TV. Since the hard drive contained much more capacity than I needed, I just told it to synch everything. It took just over 24 hours to do the initial synch of the 50+ gig tied up in my iTunes library, but it did eventually finish. I loaded up movies, TV shows (some of which were shows that originated on my DVRs that I converted to the iTunes video format using Videora), music, photos and podcasts.

The overall user experience of the Apple TV is quite good. It’s very easy to navigate and bringing all your iTunes content out of your computer and into your living room or bedroom is a good thing. I also love the YouTube capability, although for the life of me, I can’t get signed into my YouTube account. Still, being able to play the “Kitty Kat Dance” video before going to bed is worth every penny. One other cool feature is how it generates photo screen savers during music playback.

Ultimately, I’d only recommend this device to those with extensive iTunes libraries that want to enjoy them outside of the confines of their PC, Mac or iPod. The one feature that I’d love to see introduced is a DVR capability. I realize that this would probably push prices somewhat higher, as well as introduce some legal/copyright issues… but if Microsoft can have their Media Center, why doesn’t Apple cowboy up? Listen Jobs, the box is sitting right there by my TV anyway, why not have it recording content that could then be synched back to the iTunes library on your computer (and then loaded on my iPod touch for my next airline flight). Maybe that would cannibalize TV and movie sales from the iTunes Music Store. Why doesn’t Apple just cut a deal with Elgato? There are a lot of possibilities.