Back in February of 2008, the CouchGuy introduced you to The Average family and their Apple Home just after Christmas of 2009. I thought of it as a conservatively speculative look at what was (to me) obviously possible and practical based on what we had then.

Well, I somewhat overestimated the speed of adoption of expanding technologies, and underestimated the ability of the industry to drag its feet for no good reason whatsoever.

Despite this, the original visit with the Average family is the most popular post ever on this blog, so let’s take a look at my predictions to see how I did. Later, maybe we will take another look at the Averages, down the road a few years.

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Joe has already plugged his iPhone into a cradle in his office, so he picks up a 16GB iPod Touch from a cradle on the table near his chair. This used to be Joe Jr’s iPod before he got his upgrade to a new 64GB model for Christmas last week. Now, it is the family room Apple TV remote, running Apple’s VirtualRemote software.

Well, I got this one, at least, dead on. The current 64GB iPod Touch is none too big, considering the massive number of applications available for the platform. (My own 32GB model, once top of the line, is feeling a bit cramped these days.)  The Remote software is among my favorite apps, because it gives perfect control over my Apple TV. This works even better under the new Apple TV 3 software.

Joe‘s modest instant-on 56” plasma TV set ... is connected to  an Apple TV Media Server Edition he purchased at the same time, which in turn outputs to the family room’s Dolby 5.1 wireless stereo sound system. 

You can get a 56” plasma, but no one would consider this “modest”. The CouchGuy just replaced his recently-deceased 27” with a only-slightly-less modest 32” model. The best change is 3 HDMI ports instead of one, however, allowing me to at last connect my Sony DVD player without unplugging the Apple TV.

Do I really need a DVD player? Well, yes and no. These days, you can get a standard DVD player for a song, and I bought mine because it uprates normal DVDs to fill the screen of my HDTV. But I haven’t bought a new DVD in a long time — digital downloads via Apple TV is how the CouchGuy rolls now. 

The new Apple TV 3 software is fine, with a much more attractive interface. But iTunes is still a poor way to organize a large video library, and the current Apple TV model — while still a great way to get your iTunes-based video to your HDTV screen — isn’t robust enough to be a real media server.

The new, mightier Mac Mini would be a great basis for an Apple TV Media Server Edition like the one discussed.Apple’s currently bundling it with top-of-the-line server software for under $1000. Give us a more media-oriented version of that and we’ll be right where I predicted.

The only other ornament on the wall is the iSight 2 wireless camera mounted above the plasma screen, which the family uses for Apple TV iChats with Joe’s mother and father in Florida on Sunday evenings. He’ll have to show them the videos from Joe Jr.’s Senior Prom this weekend — if they haven’t already checked them out on the family’s .Mac video gallery account.

The current Apple TV is maybe a bit processor-deprived to drive live video chat on your HDTV screen, but easy video chat seems like a killer app that should have been bigger than it is. Meanwhile, .Mac is now MobileMe — and still not living up to the potential for such a centralized Apple-driven service. Apple’s massive new data center must mean something big is planned that will likely have MobileMe at the center of it. But not yet...

The red alert star indicates a completed download, and this turns out to be the rental copy of Cloverfield II that Joe pre-ordered a few months ago. He’d forgotten it was due for simultaneous Blu-Ray and download release this week. OK, they’d have something cool to watch tonight — or they might save that for the weekend. Joe knew he would probably end up buying the movie, as much as he had enjoyed the original, but the first rental price would automatically be deducted from his purchase price later if he decided to keep it.

The only thing holding up simultaneous releases on DVD and digital download is stupidity and greed on the part of the studios. If anything, we are moving backwards, with Big Media trying to prevent NetFlix from making DVDs available to subscribers until well ater the sales release. Big Media is just driving piracy by trying to force tiered releases, then trying to stop the pirates that they, themselves are encouraging by intimidating their customer base. It won’t wash in the long run, but in the short run this foolishness is holding the direct download market back far more than any rational person would have guessed in February 2008. 

He glances at the Blu-Ray disk slot on the Apple TV Media Server and again wonders why he bothered to buy the unit with that option. It had been useful when he first got it, since most Blu-Ray disks now came with Apple TV compatible versions of the films right on the disk. He moved over some of his Blu-Ray purchases that way, and could use the slot to play the older disks without this feature.

I stand by this one. The price of Blu-Ray has dropped below $100 for some of the Black Friday sales, but I still believe Blu-Ray is a dead issue. Apple iTunes Extras make DVDs even more irrelevant for the future.

All of his old non-HD movies he has long since moved over to the Apple TV Media Server’s drives using Flip4Mac's Drive-In 2 software to archive them. With the old Digital Millennium Copyright Act finally modified earlier this year, it was perfectly legal to keep archive copies of his old DVDs on the server hard drive where they were available with a single touch on his remote.

Talk about stupidity... The decision of the U.S. District Court in Real Networks, Inc. v. DVD Copy Control Association, Inc. killed Drive-In along with RealDVD — for now. It looks like it may take a consumer revolt and the revocation of the insanity of the DMCA to get us to the place where we can store most of our video content, legally, in convenient mass-storage digital format.

The yellow alert star indicates a new podcast of special interest had been detected. Sure enough, on the TwiT.tv channel the new episode of MacBreak Video Weekly was out a day early! He’d look at that later from the bedroom while Kris was getting ready for bed.

Video podcasting continues to grow and Apple TV makes it easy to enjoy this great content on your big-screen HDTV. Others have caught on to this and many top podcast creators (TWIT.tv, Revision 3, etc,) are available through a variety of set-top boxes and internet-connected TV sets.

While he is thinking of it, Joe pulls up the plug-in menu for the EyeTV ATV Edition USB dongle attached to his Apple TV and selects to record the new episode of American Gladiators coming on later that evening.

We can’t do this through Apple TV yet, but the Eye TV iPhone app allows me to set up my recordings from my iPod Touch, which is almost as easy.

There is another feature he is using less often, he mused. Most of the TV shows he and Kris really cared about — Lost, Monk, Star Trek: The Academy Years and Three and a Half Men — they had purchased iTunes Season Passes for when several networks started offering bonus episodes for pre-ordering. (...) Heck, two of their favorite shows, CSI: Atlanta and Joss Whedon’s Luna City, are iTunes Exclusives, produced especially for Apple and not available anywhere else until the once-yearly Blu-Ray DVD collections come out.

For most network and major cable channel shows, it is quite possible to use Apple TV and iTunes season passes to substitute for cable. No major iTunes exclusive TV series yet, but wait for it. (Joss Whedon... call Steve Jobs. You guys need each other.)

Joe thinks about punching up the Games menu on the Apple TV to see if anyone out there is up for a quick game of Worldwide Naval Battle. 

Again, the current Apple TV model is a little processor-light for this, perhaps. It is obvious that gaming is a huge success on the Apple mobile platform, though. It still could be big on Apple TV. Not yet, though...

Instead, he idly checks the drive space available to him on the Apple TV Media Server and is surprised to find he is over the halfway mark on the 2TB built-in drive. Maybe it is time to buy an add-on drive. He could stack a 4TB NewerTech MiniStack ATV right behind the Media Server. (...) Of course, he’d have to add additional drives to the TimeCapsule 2 backup system in his office, but he needs to do that anyway. (...) Adding another 8 to 10 terabyte external drive to the TimeCapsule 2 is no big deal.

Drive size and backup is still a problem for people who manage huge hard-drive-based video libraries. The Drobo is a popular solution right now, and more mega-drive arrays will appear with easy-to-use setups for home video enthusiasts.

Joe gets up and wanders into his office, touching his wireless keyboard to wake up his 30“ iMac Pro and the matching 30” Cinema Display alongside it. (...) Kris had frowned a bit when he purchased the extra Cinema Display for the office, but she had to admit it was convenient for watching movies and other video streamed from the Apple TV Media Server on one screen while working on the iMac’s built-in display.

I got really close with this one, thanks to the new 27” iMac. What a powerhouse! I am amazed, though, that it isn’t set up to handle HDMI input directly and that it doesn;t have an option for a built-in digital tuner. With a little more media-friendly approach, that iMac might have been where my new 32” Magnavox HDTV set is today. Perhaps by next year...

Joe finds he is reluctant to go anywhere without his iPhone these days. The 3G connection brings him the web, video, and books anywhere he goes, although he finds he can rely on quicker (and free) wi-fi access in most places — at home, at the office, and in most restaurants and larger businesses he visits. Last night while at the mall food court waiting for Kris to finish shopping, his iPhone offered him a special price on the download version of the new Tom Clancy novel. He purchased it right then and there, courtesy of the mall’s Barnes and Noble bookstore who co-sponsors the free wi-fi connection there. He read the first couple of chapters while sipping the coffee he had also ordered from his iPhone, which was brought over to his table by a smiling barista from the nearby Starbucks. Joe thinks of his iPhone as an extension of his home computer system, and he can get anything he wants from it with a touch or two, including any movie in his Apple TV Media Server library.

In the last two years, our iPhones and iPod Touches have become the real growth platform for Apple. Where Apple has allowed the living room media market to languish, their hold on the mobile market has expanded at an explosive pace. (And Barnes and Noble’s wireless internet access is now free, so... a win there!)

Kris relies on her MacTablet much as Joe does his iPhone — it is her daily connection to her home and her office. As a real estate agent, she finds the MacTablet perfect for displaying listings to clients on the fly and keeping her busy schedule straight. It syncs directly and automatically with the local multi-listings service, keeping new local real estate listings at her fingertips as they are added throughout the day. It is also the perfect media player and electronic book viewer. — much better for the latter purpose than the smaller iPhone screen.

The much-awaited Apple Tablet is, alas, still much-awaited. Maybe by next year they will be almost as ubiquitous as the iPhone. Or maybe not.

Right now, Joe Jr. is in his room watching music videos on the new iMac Media Edition he got the previous Christmas. The 24” iMac Media Edition has a built-in syncing dock for his new 64GB iPod Touch, and a built-in TV tuner so that Joe Jr. needs no other TV in his room. He uses either the iPod Touch or his Apple Remote and Front Row to watch TV and movies and listen to music in his room, as served by the Apple TV Media Server or resident on his iMac’s hard drive in his own copy of iTunes.

As I noted earlier, we’re still awaiting a true media edition iMac. iTunes is better at sharing among multiple installs, so it is common for various members of the family to have their own media collections — and to share them.

So where will the Average family and their Apple Home be in another couple of years? I’ll tackle that in my next post...