Apple is questioning Apple TV owners on how it can improve the set-top box. But rather than wait for Cupertino to make its next move, we’ve pulled together the top five changes Apple TV needs to make it really take off. Want to see what we’d put inside? It’s all after the jump!

1) On-demand TV streaming
Some Apple fans want to see a TV tuner and PVR inside the Apple TV, but that’s plain wrong. You already have a TV which by now should have a digital tuner inside or a digibox hooked up, and if you’re choosing cable or satellite TV you can probably get a much better experience by choosing their own PVR. What we want from Apple is real on-demand TV, with support for all the existing channels’ services. We want to see Joost, Hulu, BBC iPlayer, ITV Player and 4OD support built in. If Boxee can do it, surely Apple can too.

2) Blu-Ray inside
The next-gen Apple TV should have enough power to process Blu-Ray movies, and with iTunes built in, we can even imagine buying soundtracks from the set top box too. Extra content and trailers from BD Live could also be grabbed from the web, and if a Blu-Ray has a Digital Copy included, it could be synced back to a computer wirelessly for loading onto an iPod or iPhone.

3) A real standby mode
The Apple TV has a standby mode, but at the moment it stays astonishingly hot, even when it’s supposed to be switched off. It also has a tendency to switch itself back on when you’re not around. Apple’s been pushing its green credentials lately, so a new Apple TV would need to include a proper standby mode, oh, and a real off switch wouldn’t hurt either.

4) DivX Support
Apple’s questionnaire shows that it knows Apple TV owners are using their boxes to view video grabbed from “Peer 2 peer, Bittorrent” sources. It must also know those files are in mostly in DivX format. We’d love to see Apple embrace the format. It’s infuriating that one of the most common video formats in the world is being overlooked, especially when the PS3 and Xbox openly support it.

5) A Dock Connector
The Apple TV has a USB connector, but won’t accept connections as it’s for ‘diagnostic purposes’ only. However, latest software from Apple means the Apple TV can buy music and TV shows, and rent movies without a computer. It only seems logical the new version should be able to sync that stuff to an iPod or iPhone in the living room too… and use the TV or Hi-Fi it’s hooked up to to play music from friends’ iPods, like a super-sized speaker dock!

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  • jdtanner

    On-demand TV streaming: are you totally crazy? Remember that the majority of UK households can barely achieve 2 Mbps broadband, so ondemand streaming would be a painful experience.

    It would be so much better if Apple included a dual-DTV tuner and PVR software a’la BT Vision; that would at least leave the door open for streaming as and when the infrastructure allows it.

    JT

  • GJD

    Putting Blu-Ray on the AppleTV is a bit like putting MiniDisc on the iPod. Apple wants you downloading content from their store, why support a competing format, particularly when it would make your device significantly more expensive?

    If nothing else, the iTS has demonstrated that consumers will happily sacrifice quality for the convenience of downloading their content. That’s the market AppleTV is pitched at.

    Streaming on-demand TV content is a far more attractive feature for this market than Blu-Ray. If Apple were to do this, they would be likely to negotiate their own guranteed access to streams, rather than go the Boxee route, which would leave them subject to the whims of the networks who could easily freeze the box out with a tweak to the video stream.

  • Betty Normal

    If I were Apple I would:
    1. Change AppleTV over to the iPOD Touch/iPhone platform and expand the toolkit to support other resolution screens.
    2. Allow AppStore for AppleTV.
    3. Add BlueRay as standard.
    4. Add bluetooth game controllers with iPhone like controls and touch pad.
    5. Rename AppleTV, iPodTV after all that is what it is.
    6. Allow 3rd party service delivery, via Apps on App store?

  • http://www.gravatar.com James Holland

    Apps on the Apple TV would be genius. At CES, *every* TV manufacturer had a telly with weather widgets and news tickers. Only Samsung came close to matching Apple’s style and speed.

  • Betty Normal

    Why put bluRay on AppleTV. People want to buy a BluRay and are waiting to have a good reason to buy. People generally won’t buy AppleTV and BluRay, at least not for a while. Bluray is 1080, AppleTV is bad 720 HD at best.

    If you want to get into the living room do it off the back of BluRay.

  • Ben Sillis

    While we’re on DivX, how about all the other codecs my Quicktime stubbornly refuses to open? Wouldn’t say no to that.

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