Among the readers who reported their Speed Test results to me, most have sufficient bandwidth available to them to make cutting the cord to cable TV a viable option. Those of you who subscribe to Comcast have the fastest Internet speed (bandwidth greater than 10Mbps) and those who subscribe to FairPoint DSL have adequate Internet speed (depending on your distance from the FairPoint POP).
In either case, it is likely that your bandwidth may slow down momentarily, and you'll see that "Loading message..." while the Apple TV waits for enough data to continue. Unless you're willing to follow the advice of the FairPoint customer service rep and watch Internet TV in the wee hours of the morning, have patience.
If you are not familiar with Apple iTunes, I should tell you that their model is to sell (technically, rent) you access to almost any music album that exists. If you prefer, you can purchase just a single song. When Apple introduced Apple TV, they expanded the model to include television shows. On Apple TV, you can purchase the entire season of a favorite TV show, or individual episodes. The choice is yours.
I know there are people who are such fans of old TV shows like "Third Rock From The Sun" that they dream of being able to spend a weekend watching all 13 episodes of Season 1, then Season 2, then Season 3, and so on. I'm not one of them, so in that regard, Apple TV is not a compelling model.
More current television shows, such as the networks' late-night offerings (Letterman, Kimmel, Fallon, Stewart, Colbert, etc.) and some prime-time offerings such as Scandal are offered several days after they were originally aired. If you don't mind watching these delayed episodes of your favorite network program, then Apple TV allows you to subscribe to them quite inexpensively, or sometimes for free.
You can also purchase/rent movies on iTunes. Initially, Apple intended that you'd watch these movies on your computer. Like a music album, you can purchase a movie for unlimited use, or rent it for 24-hour use, Your choice. When Apple TV was released, viewers discovered they could watch the same movies on their big, high-definition TVs. This is the preferred viewing experience but, as you might expect, a high-definition TV requires much more bandwidth than a small computer monitor does.
Almost everyone who has reported the results of SpeedTest to me has enough bandwidth to supply at least one high-def television running in their home, so that is the option I would recommend.
If you're looking for real-time news and/or sports, you won't find either on Apple TV. So the quest goes on.
(To be continued...)
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