More and more people are now storing music, movies and television shows in digital format and watching them directly on their television screens.

The main benefits of this are

• Convenience. It’s much easier to turn on the television and scan through a list of titles than standing in front of a shelf with your head turned sideways trying to find that elusive cover.
• Smaller Footprint. CD and DVD covers take up a lot of space when they’re organised on a bookshelf so people can scan through them. They take up a lot less space when they’re stacked in a big box in the spare room.
• Cool Factor. Enough said!

There are several products on the market that make this possible. The more technical among us do it with desktop computers and linux, while some others seem to purchase whatever is on the store shelf at the time.

I was never a fan of using a desktop computer, reasoning that it would look too out of place in the living room. Besides, I had to remember that I wouldn’t be the only person in the house using it, so it had to follow the KISS principal – Keep It Simple Stupid.

For many years, I used an original xbox that had been modified to run XBMC, an open source operating system written specifically for serving digital entertainment to the television. Being a games system, it looked like it belonged in the living room, and navigating the menu system was a breeze for even the most technically inept. The xbox solution worked flawlessly when it was properly set up, but upgrading to the latest version of the software was often “interesting”.

When the time came to move to a new country with different electricity standards, I decided to leave the xbox behind and loaded the movie collection onto an external hard drive. I’d worry about how to watch them after we settled in, and in the meantime I’d think about what I really wanted.

I performed a lot of research over the following weeks to try and find the best solution for our needs. I wanted something that was easy for my family to use, and didn’t require me to manipulate code when an update was released. I wanted something that looked like it was meant to be in the living room with the television.

When the decision was finally made, the winner was an Apple TV with 40 GB hard drive. It allows me to keep our entire entertainment collection in another room and stream it over the home network as we watch movies and television shows or listen to music.

The user interface is clean and simple, and the Apple TV looks just like a small white box; so small and inconspicuous that most of our visitors don’t even realise it’s there.

When linked to an iTunes store account, we can rent and buy movies straight over the internet, removing the need to store bulky cases at all. It also has a nifty screensaver function, turning our television into a massive digital photo frame when we aren’t watching a movie or television show.

This is part 1 of a 2 part series. In part 2, I’ll be looking at ways to store the growing collection of movies, music and television shows that we accumulate.