I recently purchased the second-gen AppleTV and I have to say that I couldn’t be happier with my decision!

I knew that I wanted to get some kind of streaming device this year to start the process of “cutting the cord” and dropping Cable TV entirely. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting closer.

There are plenty of choices out there when it comes to streaming devices. Roku has a strong product, Boxee also a string product, and I am sure that there are quite a few others.

My decision to choose Apple over the others was pretty simple. I have quite a few Apple products currently and wanted to take full advantage of them. Roku and Boxee won’t let me stream a video to it from my iPad or iPhone. I have my reasons for wanting to be able to stream video content from my iPad which I will talk about in just a bit.

So, I got the AppleTV just a couple of days after my birthday (8/16) since I used birthday money to get it. Installing it was easy as pie. Plug a couple of cables in (wish it came with an HDMI cable, but I ordered one from MonoPrice for $4.50 and was in business) and turned on my TV and away it went.

The hardest part of the setup was typing in my WiFi pass phrase. I keep it pretty long to make sure no one can break in and “typing” in text on the AppleTV is a bit absurd with the Apple Remote that comes with it. You log into your WiFi and iTunes Home Sharing account and your ready to go.

The services it supports out of the box are pretty good. No Hulu support, but to be fair, with Hulu in all the turmoil it’s in these days, I don’t really mind that. What is supported is Netflix($), YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, MLB and NBA($), and of course, the iTunes Store with all it’s content.

What first convinced me that I had made a great choice was that when I started playing video content stored on my Mac Pro in the basement, I could see the video data being buffered into the AppleTV. Not just a few seconds ahead, but the entire video into memory. The fact that the AppleTV has 8GB’s of memory for just this purpose means that even if you have 802.11g or possibly even ‘b’, you can watch your show without ever seeing the dreaded “buffering…” symbol.

When attempting to stream video to my PS3, I would see all kinds of issues with the video stuttering, or just plain waiting to buffer the content. Even over my MacBook. Not at all with the AppleTV. The only time I see the buffering issue at all is with Netflix, and that is very rarely.

Netflix doesn’t buffer the entire movie into the AppleTV. It just streams it realtime. So if there is a hiccup on the WiFi connection or even Internet connection, you will see the buffering text. I have only seen it a couple of times, and I have watched about 20 or so hours of video from Netflix so far on the AppleTV.

My latest epiphany with the AppleTV came when I wanted to watch MacBreak Weekly on TWiT.TV. I used to use my MacBook, but it’s not currently connected to my TV since the AppleTV took it’s place.

So I started up my iPad and ran the app TWiTPad by Craig Mullaney. I started watching the stream with uStream and used AirPlay to stream the video content to my TV and amazingly, not only did it show up (as one would expect) on my TV, but it was streaming in 16×9 resolution and pretty darn decent quality. I watched the entire 1 1/2 hours via AirPlay.

Thanks to my AppleTV, I really feel that my poor 2006 era MacBook has seen it’s last days of string usage. It’s going to get relegated to the corner for use when… Well, to be honest, I really don’t know. Its battery is pretty much useless and at $160, it’s hard to justify getting a new battery for it. It works just fine if plugged in so, I suppose it could be an OK system for the kitchen for recipes or something like that.

My only complaints with the AppleTV are that there isn’t a quicker way to scroll through hundreds if not thousands of titles. My music collection is 21,000+ songs, so I really don’t want to select “Songs” on the AppleTV. My movie collection is just under 200 titles (on the computer downstairs), so scrolling through that can be tough.

Fortunately, the Remote app from Apple allows you to use the keyboard on either the iPhone or iPad to type in text, so navigating is a little easier with that connection. However, that app really drains the batteries on those devices so you will want to make sure they are plugged in when using them with the AppleTV.

For some reason, when I restart iTunes downstairs, I have to reboot the AppleTV for it to be able to see content. I really don’t understand why that is, but I haven’t done any research to see if there is an easier work-around to getting the AppleTV to see content after iTunes has restarted.

One other thing that bugs me is that I can’t pair my Apple Bluetooth keyboard to the AppleTV. AppleTV could really use an external keyboard for YouTube, Netflix, etc…

Even though the AppleTV is sporting an A4 processor (same as the iPhone 4) and is running iOS as it’s operating system, it doesn’t have the ability to run iOS apps. I would really like to see the ability to run iOS apps. Maybe not Angry Birds, but HBO GO, ABC Player, etc… Give it the ability to stream more than just Netflix, YouTube, etc… content.

My dream AppleTV would be one with an A5 processor, iOS 5, 16/32GB RAM and the ability to not only run special apps that would fall into the “Internet” column on the menus, but have a Games menu that sported AppleTV specific games. Roku now supports games and has Angry Birds to start with. I could easily see games that used the iPhone/iPad as control surfaces, or just have a Bluetooth device that was a gamepad like the PS3 gamepad. I might even be willing to pay $199 for such a beast.

All that said, I give the AppleTV 5 stars for getting a lot of stuff right and having the ability to fix the things they didn’t. It can be updated via the Internet just like iPhones and iPad can, and you don’t even have to physically connect it to a computer!