After my last post about the possibility of using an appleTV to provide a “public collaborative consumption” space for a departments published podcast media, I got a chance to poke at one at the bookstore to test out some concerns that I had.
The big worry that I had was proved true. There is no protection on the device from inadvertent (or even intentional) breaking or overwriting the default sync that you set up. Since the device is created with the living room in mind, this is not too surprising. If you have access to the remote control, you can tell the system to “stop syncing” with the machine is is paired with. If you wish to synch it to a new system, or even stream content to the appleTV, you will be required to enter a PIN that shows up on the TV screen into your computers copy of iTunes. This is protection (so clearly the design of the device took this into account) but this is to protect the owner of the content from having it watched without direct permission. I would like to see the ability to long the sync configuration on the appleTV with a PIN as well. There would have to be an easy way to reset the PIN for the home user (something like the way that apple already has to reset one of their wireless base stations would seem reasonable).
This limitation on the device makes it not a very good match for public use. A private network between the sync computer and the appleTV could protect the system from being synced to some “odd” content, but the manager of the system would still have to check the system to see if it was still synced to the server, and reconfigure it by hand it if was not. Students would also not be able to share (via streaming) their own content if the appleTV was not on a network they could share. This might drive some of them to unsync the system, not out of malicious intent, but rather in attempting to find a way to make the device see their computer. The would then be unable to sync the system back to the mater computer even if they wished to.
But I still see value in the idea of a public, elegant system for showcasing and sharing the content of a department or group. Perhaps one of the other media-center solutions out there would be a more controllable system for this sort of use. If a full computer were used, it might be possible to add more features to this system as well (informative screen savers, customized personal interface, etc). I have looked into making a Mac server this purpose by running FrontRow (the bundled Mac media center) for this purpose over the weekend. It looks like it would work well, and would provide a few new features (internet radio, screensavers, remote control, monitoring, etc) with little work. But it would be a full computer to maintain.