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Word is out that AppleTV is getting a couple upgrades in the near future, to include a larger hard drive and the ability to watch YouTube. Neither of these impress me much, if only because I already have a Nintendo Wii, which may not be the best YouTube portal, but if I need to watch YouTube on my TV, I can already do it. The rumour is that the AppleTV’s larger hard drive may herald the coming of high-definition programming, which would be a good thing, but I still have some complaints. Granted, during the regular TV season, I’d have more to look forward to by purchasing an AppleTV, but in the meantime, it appears that my XBox three-shitty may do more than look pretty.

This realization follows a little research into using the 360 as a media appliance. Every Microsoft fanboy knows that the 360 was built to interface with Windows and stream video accordingly, but not everyone knows that third-party software exists to make the 360 play nice with Apple’s OS X. Thus, I mention Connect360, which allows the 360 to synchronize with one’s iTunes and iPhoto libraries. The latter is about as exciting to me as using my Wii to display photos from SD cards, while the former would be similarly meaningless if it weren’t for the fact that iTunes now deals with videos as well as music. In effect, any video I have on my Mac, I can view on the 360 (with some recoding). Okay, maybe not any video file, thanks to Apple’s monopolistic bullshit; thanks to Apple locking down videos purchased off iTunes via DRM, the XBox 360 won’t double up as an AppleTV, which is really the only obstacle at this point. If the main source of one’s videos isn’t iTunes, however, then Connect360 effectively turns the 360 into an AppleTV, only with an inherently bigger media library thanks to all the crap one can purchase via XBox Live.

What’s sad about Apple’s DRM is that it has the opposite effect in this case. Since one can’t watch shows and movies purchased from iTunes on the 360, one isn’t inclined to visit the iTunes store in the first place, which means that the illegal bittorrent route will inherently be favored. So, thanks to overly-restrictive DRM, more piracy becomes probable, rather than less.

It’s doubly sad that the 360 has so more potential to live up to, while poor decisions by Apple (no doubt influenced by the MPAA and broadcasting industry), will send droves of people to illegal download sites because they want to make full use of their existing hardware, rather than purchase hardware from Apple that has only one unique purpose: support poor decisions influenced by the MPAA and broadcasting industry.

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