Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer today is challenging Apple to move Apple TV from being a “hobby” to being a real business:
If Steve Jobs wants to make a serious run at owning our living room’s “digital hub,” then Apple TV needs a serious overhaul, ASAP.
Why now? Because even though the industry is still nascent, the [...]

A new version of aTV Flash, a $49.95 software upgrade to enhance the functionality of your Apple TV, has been released that’s compatible with the version 2.1 of Apple TV firmware.
aTV Flash adds support for more video formats, USB external hard drives & web browsing.
Key Features:

Play most video formats (DivX, Xvid, AVI, WMV, [...]

MG Siegler at Parislemon has an interesting take on the current state of movie rentals on the XBox 360, suggesting that it’s not ready for prime time:
Last night I sat down to download The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I figured it would take 5-10 minutes to get enough information to start playing and then go. [...]

There’s a great deal of buzzing today about a few Internet video news items:

Amazon is debuting a streaming video store. The service, Amazon Video on Demand, will offer about 40,000 streaming videos for customers to choose from.
TiVo is adding YouTube support. TiVo’s YouTube support was announced in March, and is available to broadband-connected subscribers [...]

MIcrosoft has announced XBox 360 updates that will give interface a cartoon-like appearance and a deal with Netflix that positions the XBox as an Apple TV killer.
“When people turn on their Xbox 360s this fall, they’ll get an entirely new interface and Dashboard, an entirely new Xbox through the magic of software,” said John Schappert, [...]

Apple’s nice, but limited, Apple TV is the device to beat in the Internet TV space, and the contenders keep on coming.
Kodak has introduced Theatre HD Player, a WiFi-enabled black box that connects to your HDTV, displays images and other multimedia content, and links directly to Kodak Gallery, the company’s online photo-sharing service.
This isn’t [...]

Apple has updated the software for Apple TV, without fanfare, to version 2.1.
The updates include security improvements, support for using the iPhone or iPod touch as a remote, and support for Mobile Me content.
What would really excite us would be if Apple opened up Apple TV to developers, like it has with the iPhone, or [...]

Cynical Peak’s Rivet is a Mac OS X app that lets you access your iTunes media on your Xbox 360.
In a nutshell, it turns your XBox 360 into Apple TV Jr. You can browse, play, and view your pictures, movies, and video through the Xbox 360’s media blade. Rivet will automatically load and give you [...]

YouTube has announced that it’s going to test out hosting long-form videos and even full-length movies, with its new site feature The YouTube Screening Room.
As Internet videos get longer, though, viewing them on your computer starts to look pretty lame. Fortunately, there are a growing number of ways you can get YouTube and other Internet [...]

Apple today announced that it had sold over five billion songs from the iTunes Store.
The company also announced that iTunes customers are now renting and purchasing over 50,000 movies every day, making iTunes the world’s most popular online movie store.
Apple said in a statement that its iTunes Store is now the world’s most popular online [...]