I'm a huge fan and advocate of the Apple TV. It straddles that funny position in the 'digital living room' between the Windows Media centre, and the generic media extenders (of which there are many out there), designed to stream content from the computer to the TV.

It doesn't come with a built in tuner, it doesn't come with the ability to play DVD's, and yet it has been a surprising hit for Apple, even if Apple themselves don’t see it as a core business and are still treating it as hoby.

I love the tight integration with iTunes, and am several months into the process of converting my entire catalogue of DVD's into iTunes friendly H264 MP4's, and I occasionaly rent films in glorious HD from the comfort of my living room.

However, the one thing missing to really ellavate Apples’ hobby to the next level is a tight integration with the BBC's spectacular iPLayer service. There were rumours about 18 months ago that there would be an official partnership between Apple and the BBC to enable this feature, but alas, here we are 18 months later, and still no iPlayer integration.

That's when I discovered Boxee. Boxee is a cross platform media centre that can be installed on many different platforms and operating systems, including the AppleTV, and also comes with the ability to hook up to the BBC iPlayer service. This seemed to be exactly what I needed.

Before going down this route, I did some investigation into the requirements for installation, and what the implications were of installing a piece of alpha software on the AppleTV. I certainly didn't want any third party software to have any affect on the core functionality of the Apple TV, but I did want the ability to stream iPLayer content. It's also worth pointing out that this is definately a hack, but the process to 'hack' the AppleTV has been simplified to a point that I was happy to run with it and give it a bash.

I'm not going to give a step by step break down of the process as the excellent chaps over at atvusb creator have already done this. In summary it involves creating a bootable USB stick, plugging it into the back of your appleTV, and a couple of reboots later, Boxee is installed. Minimal tech geek knowledge required.

Impressions

I don't actually like the media centre experience provided by Boxee, it doesn't integrate with your iTunes content, it's still far too 'geek' for the average lay person to be classed as a media centre, and the AppleTV doesn't lend itself to running Boxee as your primary interface. I’ll caveat these comments as being a little on the harsh side though as my primary goal was to enable the iPLayer service on the Apple TV and this is where Boxee comes up trumps. Scrolling down to the 'internet' channel brings up another page with multiple different internet services of which the BBC iPlayer is one. Select this and you are then presented with the familiar iPlayer interface which rather handily detects the type of device it's running on as it is very 'television' friendly.

Quality

I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the stream that the iPLayer service delivers when viewd on a 40" screen. Although I have an 8mb broadband service, I actually receive approx 6mb, which delivers a BBC stream which is probably 90/95% as good as a regular standard definition broadcast.

Summary

It's great that Boxee have integrated the iPLayer into their media centre experience, and as Boxee matures as a product, I'm sure the iPLayer service will feel less of a 'bolt on'. It's not the nice shiny tightly integrated Apple experience, but then again, Apple/BBC still don't offer this functionality out of the box, so in the absence of any other options, going down the Boxee route will meld the iPlayer service into your AppleTV experience.