Around four months ago, I gave myself a treat: an Apple TV.

Here’s what I wanted: a way to watch BBC iPlayer in fullscreen on my telly. I have a Mac Mini which runs my iTunes installation; that’s permanently plugged into the telly, but it’s super under-powered, and Flash (on a Power PC-powered Mac Mini) in full-screen gives me about two frames a second. So I seriously looked at upgrading my Mac Mini – then read up on the rather cheaper Apple TV.

Turns out that Apple TV runs Boxee pretty well. In fact, very well. It’s not hard to do, either.

And, as I discovered during CES in January, Boxee comes with BBC iPlayer baked into it. In fact, the user interface looks very similar to the BBC iPlayer bigscreen interface. The Boxee implementation is not an official BBC iPlayer release, so expect it to break as iPlayer does updates to their website (and it does break, though not seemingly for too long).

Adding Boxee to my Apple TV was quick and simple: you need to fiddle with some software on a USB key, stick that USB key into your Apple TV, reboot it, stand on one leg while holding your nose and humming a Beatles track, and watch while you get Boxee on your Apple TV. Then… just play.

I’ve now got access to a -ton- of great TV programming, including the BBC iPlayer, clips from CBS, full shows from Comedy Channel, output from CNet, Current TV, Joost, and a ton more stuff. Radio is also well catered for, with Last FM support, as well as RadioTime (a radio guide) and direct listings for BBC podcasts as well. (That’s also unofficial, a lawyer might remind me to say).

It works beautifully with my nearly 8-meg internet connection; and the picture quality from BBC iPlayer is fullscreen and almost as good as Freeview (I’ve no idea what bitrate they actually use since I can’t right-click on the player window). Further, programmes from Revision3 (DiggNation, Systm, etc) appear to be in HD, which is nice. CNET is a little disappointing, being in fairly blurry low-res; and Hulu appears tantalisingly on the menu but is, so far, unusable.

Better still, I discover that my Logitech 555 universal remote also talks to my Apple TV, which is neat.

I now do all my BBC iPlayer viewing on this thing; and watch a surprising amount of other programming through it. I duck out of Boxee mode occasionally to download the latest version of the software – and go straight back into Boxee mode afterwards.

Boxee isn’t the world’s best user interface – I’m forever activating bits I didn’t mean to – and try as I might, I can’t get it to talk to my Mac Mini to play any music from it. Mind, I don’t particularly care. It’s purely an internet media device, and it does that job pretty well.

Watch a BBC iPlayer programme on it and it’s almost impossible to realise that it’s not off the Sky+ box. Which, given my Sky dish is currently covered by a large tree, is possibly a good thing: I wonder how long I’ll last with Freeview and the BBC iPlayer?

Photo: John Ousby. Used under licence. Thanks, John, and enjoy Texas.

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