2FKD

When Apple announced Apple TV Take 2, I was bummed to see no mention of streaming radio.  It seemed like such a simple way to add value to the product.  After upgrading my box to the new software, I took a peek, saw there was indeed no radio, and went about enjoying the many other great new features.

A couple days ago I was fooling around in iTunes and discovered that you can create a playlist and drag individual stations from the station browser to it.  That playlist will show up on the Apple TV.  I opened it up, picked ETN.fm 1, and was thrilled to hear music most of my friends hate.  Zeke and I listened for a bit, and went about the evening’s business.

Yesterday as I was preparing for my workout I figured I’d tune into the radio on the Apple TV.  I hit Play and after a moment it resumed the same stream.  Sweet!  Not my favorite style of stuff, but hey - it’s free, and I’ve never heard it.  I got down to business.  About halfway through I was taking a breather and figured I’d change the channel.   I paused the station, tapped the button to see the playlists, and was rather surprised to find that the Radio playlist was gone.  Thinking perhaps I’d managed to navigate to a different menu inadvertently, I took a look around to see if there was any clue.  There wasn’t.  The odd thing of it is that I could hit the Now Playing option, and restart the paused stream.  The indicator even showed the 20 of 71, telling me where in the playlist I was.

I haven’t done any formal testing to prove this, but all of this seems to be unintended behavior.  The Apple TV is configured by default to sync as much content from the host machine as possible, but it has always been possible to stream whatever content is in iTunes on the host machine that for one reason or another (disk space constraints or user choice) aren’t copied to the device.  The original Apple TV software required the user to explicitly choose a host machine from which to stream, but the Take 2 software makes the whole process automatic.  If iTunes is open and properly configured, the Apple TV will automatically mix in the host’s content with the synced.  It’s pretty elegant, and makes the process as seamless as possible.

Well, the Apple TV saw the Radio playlist in iTunes and made those “tracks” available for play.  I had assumed when I first discovered the trick that iTunes was pulling down the stream and passing it back to the Apple TV, but knowing that the host machine wasn’t on when I tried it the last time, it’s obvious that the Apple TV is pulling the stream down on its own.  This proves conclusively that not only is the Apple TV capable of playing streaming radio, but also that the Apple TV software already has a working implementation of it.

What the fuck?!

Apple takes the time to do the gruntwork of building out the actual implementation and explicitly chooses not to allow the end-user to make full use of it?  There are many Microsoft fanboys out there who’ll say that’s just the way things are with Apple, but it wasn’t until this particular issue came up that I actually felt like I’d lost something as a result.  This device has been crippled in a specific way, and I can’t think of a single reason to justify it.

I’m the kind of guy who tends to agree with the decisions Apple makes.  Certainly not all the time, but on the whole I think they’ve managed to figure out a business model that makes me feel like it works for me as much as it works for them.  I make a living hammering away on a MacBook Pro.  I use an iPhone to keep in touch with email and the web when I’m away from the desk.  Apple makes some stuff that I miss when it’s not there.

I’m also the kind of guy who always turns to iTunes or Amazon MP3 when I hear a track I want to own, and it’s rare that there’s something I hear I can’t find legally.  Hell, the very night I discovered all of this I bought one of the tracks I heard streaming on ETN.fm from iTunes!

It’s a shame this company places such limits on its own products.  I totally get Apple not going out of its way to put Flash on the iPhone, but I don’t get Apple explicitly avoiding functionality when it’s already taken the time to implement it.