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A couple months ago I purchased a Sony Bravia 46 inch LCD HDTV. The quality and color of HD content on this TV is absolutely phenomenal. The purchase of my new TV prompted me to upgrade my Digital Cable to High Def (HD) Digital Cable. Unfortunately my Series 1 TIVO did not record HD content so I ended up subscribing to the DVR service from Comcast my cable provider. I did consider purchasing a new TIVO Series 3 box but TIVO does not allow transferring of the lifetime subscription from my Series 1 box to a new Series 3 box. I just could not justify the purchasing of a new Series 3 TIVO box and lifetime subscription.
Now that I have a HD TV I want to watch all my TV in HD content. I also wanted to upgrade my DVD player to the new Blu-ray HD DVD. The Blu-ray Disc format provides picture quality beyond anything available, with full capability 1080p/24 resolution which my new TV also supports. Currently Blu-ray discs are around $10 more than DVD's and Blu-ray disc players vary from $500 to $1200, a bit high compared to the standard DVD players. History has shown that new technologies consistently drop in price as time passes. Not wanting to spend a small fortune I settled on the Sony Playstation 3 because in addition to being a great gaming computer it also supports the Blu-ray disc format at a price less than most Blu-ray Disc players.
I have an extremely large DVD collection, many of these DVD's I have converted to a format that would play on my TV via my iPod. However, the bit rate and resolution of these iPod movies did not display very well on my new TV. It was also very inconvenient to swap out my movies on the iPod for playing on my new TV. This problem was eliminated when I purchased the just released Apple TV. The Apple TV supports a much higher resolution and bit rate than that of the iPod giving you a much better picture providing your movies are encoded properly. There are numerous online reviews of the Apple TV so I will refrain from a detailed review only to say that I am thrilled with the ease of setup, features and picture quality of the Apple TV. My only complaint with the Apple TV is Apple's decision to use a meager 40GB Hard Drive for storage. With my large large video and music collection I found myself still needing to re-sync the Apple TV frequently. I was thrilled when Weaknees released a do-it-yourself hard drive upgrade kit for the Apple TV. I purchased the 160GB HD upgrade kit, it came with everything necessary to complete the upgrade promptly and painlessly. The upgrade took less than 20 minutes from the shutdown to restart. If you find your Apple TV lacking storage then I highly recommend the Weaknees Apple TV upgrade. I can now store over 200 hours of video on my Apple TV and I always have something available to watch.
Needless to say I am watching way to much TV :)