Today Apple announced, among other things, a second try at the Apple TV. It is just a software upgrade but it has made the product significantly more attractive. Let me give you a quick rundown of this revision based on my initial review last year.

Last year I said:

Likes:
Small (Still the same size)
Relatively Inexpensive (Even cheaper now at $229!)
Has HDMI out (No change here)
Intuitive interface (Possible better with more feature integration)
Syncs to 40 GB local drive (Upgraded to bigger hard drives option at 160GB)
Portable (Still very portable at the same size)

Dislikes:
Needs new Airport or needs hardwire (Same)
No DVD playback (Same)
No DVR (Same, probably by design)
No native media acquisition (Much improved now without the need of a computer)
iTunes software is too bulky but required for use (No longer required)
Minor dislike, no 1080p support (Still likely no 1080p but apparently looks very good)

Overall, I think the Apple TV 2.0 is a great improvement over the first iteration. The price cut makes it even more attractive. But I think it is still too expensive for at the $229 price point. If and when it gets closer to the $99 range, I believe they will have mass adoption. For now, I am saving my money for a MacBook Air…

Amber MacArthur from Citytv’s Webnation V2 abruptly left the Canadian television network after her show was canceled earlier today.

She sent this email to her fellow Roger’s colleagues to announce the news
——-

Hi everyone,

Today was my last day at Citytv (was a surprise to me too!). I just found out this afternoon that Rogers has pulled the plug on our show, Webnation V2, because they do not have the budget or commitment to see it through. It’s been a wild ride. Since hosting tech and web shows is what I do, naturally there is no home for me at Citytv.

Thank you to Andrew, Brian, Chris, Sheldon, Dan, Jason, Vik, and everyone else who knew the show was a success and who believe in the future of new media news (ironically, we just found out that we won the Top New Podcast Award for 2007 on iTunes). Go team.

Much thanks as well to the CNI gang and to everyone else in the newsroom who kept me sane over the past year and a half. Also, since everyone forgets the camera department, a big shout-out to you boys and girl!

As for my next steps, I will find a new home for the show and keep on reporting on the ever-changing web-front.

See you online.

——

I guess this is a perfect opportunity for Revision3 to snatch up yet another TechTV alum into their burgeoning online media network.

Here is the description of their service from their own Website:

* Store an unlimited amount of data for only 15¢ per gigabyte
* No monthly subscription fee, no startup fee, no commitment
* Your data is fully encrypted at all times
* Data is stored at multiple Amazon.com datacenters around the country for high availability
* Access files directly from Windows Explorer, Mac OSX Finder, and Linux
* Automatically back up your important files quickly and easily

A friend of mine turned me on to the service last week and I have been playing around with it for a couple of days. So far it has worked very well but it is certainly in beta status. It is essentially a front-end for Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) that makes the storage-in-a-cloud concept as transparent as possible. It literally looks like a local hard drive when it is connected. Locally cached files makes the file appear instantly on the drive while it works in the background to push it all up to Amazon’s servers without you sitting and waiting as in other services. Even if the computer crashes the service is smart enough to resume the upload when it reboots.

Where it shows as a beta product is in the feature set. Currently there is no easy way to map multiple drives using the same or different accounts. There are no privileges you can set for others to have limited access to your files or even make some of your files live on the internet via regular HTTP. Supposedly all of that will come in time at a fair price of a dollar a month or $20 a lifetime. Of course you will incur Amazon S3 charges for the storage and transfer fees but Jungle Disk isn’t seeing any of that.

Amazon S3 Pricing Structure

A typical scenario where this is extremely useful would be for someone who has a home computer as well as a work PC. You can map your Jungle Disk to both machines regardless where they are in the Internet. Files will appear in both locations just like magic. Or if you have a company with virtual employees across the world you can simply enable access to a Jungle Disk and suddenly everyone will be sharing and working on a network drive as if you are in the same network.

As a backup service it is not the cheapest around. Personally I will need close a terabyte of storage to backup my digital life and Amazon S3 will cost me around $150 a month whereas Mozy offers an unlimited backup service at $4.95/month. Where services like Mozy lacks is the transparency of file access.

I’ve been using it for just a couple of days and have been very impressed with the app. To access multiple Amazon accounts and S3 buckets I’ve even written a little script that allows me to ‘one-click’ swap between them. Let’s just hope Amazon hasn’t patented that as well…

This can’t be good for business.