I’ve been streaming a lot of http://Live.Twit.TV when I get home from work in the afternoon and after recently discovering Boxee for the Mac and all of the great geek content on Revision3.com, which is built right into Boxee, I have been thinking about buying an Apple TV.

The idea was to install a browser on the device for streaming Live.Twit.TV + have Boxee to see other stuff.  After a few Google searches on browsers + Apple TV, I finally bit the bullet on Friday and bought the device from WalMart at $228.

I got it all set up, and then set out to hack the hell out of it, as it doesn’t come with a browser.  I know, how stupid is that?  First I had to enable SSH via a patch stick creator http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator Once done, I used a program called FUGU, http://www.freemacware.com/fugu to FTP the "couch surfer" program.  Then a variety of command line keyboard mashes and all of the sudden "couch surfer" appeared in the Apple TV menu.

Unfortunately, it never actually loaded anything.  It would either go to a black screen where nothing was shown, or it would cause the Apple TV to reboot itself.  I tried several versions of the program and eventually even tried installing Firefox. Nothing worked.  After 3 days of reading blog posts and how-to’s I finally got fed up and decided I was going to try http://www.aTVFlash.com, who has a $50 USB stick that is guaranteed to not only install the browser, but Boxee and a few other things.

Now before I dish out $50 on something that who knows if it will work, I “found” a version of the patch stick program on the internet.  I “tried it out” with the intention of, providing it worked, actually purchasing from the website the USB stick.  Now the “found” patch stick program did indeed work, installed Boxee and XBMC, and the couch server browser!

So I was almost on my way….except after this patch stick was applied, the Apple TV’s menu became somewhat flakey, unresponsive, AND it would cause the Apple TV to reboot itself.  This concerned me greatly.  The final nail in the coffin for my Apple TV experience came when I fired up the Couch Surfer web browser the patch stick had installed. I headed over to http://live.twit.tv, which uses a flash player to stream video of Leo Laporte, and saw a blue Lego block in place of where the video stream should have been.

Upon further research, there appears to be a OS X 10.4 Tiger only “framework” called CoreAudioKit.Framework that is required in order to enable flash on the Apple TV.  You can’t use the Leopard version from your installed Leopard OS, you can’t use the Leopard install CD to grab the files…you have to have a Tiger disk and depending on which conflicting blog post you read, you may actually have to have Tiger installed in order to get the proper coreaudiokit.framework files to Fugu over to the Apple TV. 

It was at this point that I began an hours long search for the CoreAudioKit.framework files on the internet, which didn’t net me any results.  I even tried my Leopard version of the file, for giggles, to no avail.  I failed, was unable to get Flash installed and then I had what the religious folks call a “coming to Jesus” moment….

I had spent 4 days straight reading countless blog posts and how tos trying to install a browser.  I had “patched” the Apple TV repeatedly to get SSH enabled, Boxee to work, XBMC to work, Couch Surfer installed, Flash Installed and all I got out of this entire experience was a very angry 4 days, a browser that didn’t do the one thing I wanted it to do, no way (aside from buying a copy of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4, a 4-year-old OS by the way) to get Flash installed, and a jacked up Apple TV menu that was ½ the time unresponsive and would cause the Apple TV to reboot itself for no reason repeatedly.

Bottom line is that I reset the Apple TV to the factory settings last night, packaged it back up in its original packaging, located the receipt and Wal-Mart bag from my Friday purchase, and placed it upon the shelf near the door to take back at my earliest convenience.  Consequently, I hooked up an XP based laptop to my TV using an s-video cable and an audio cable going from the laptop to my TV and was streaming Live.Twit.TV in full screen glory on my 50” Sony 2 minutes later.  Granted, there’s not a Boxee for Windows available for download yet, but I can live with viewing Boxee on my Macbook for a while.

A late Feb. firmware upgrade released by Apple for the Apple TV has broken the Boxee install on Apple TV devices.  Talk in the nerd-o-sphere is that Apple is being hush hush on reasons.  Not much that I have seen will even speculate.  Others, like the lovely and talented Cali Lewis of GeekBrief.TV have flat out begged Apple to re-enable the functionality of the very cool Boxee open source software.

With a late Q1, early Q2 rumor about Apple releasing new hardware updates to a variety of their products, many of which are obviously overdue, I am willing to speculate that the reason Apple bricked Boxee is because of a potential relationship with Netflix.  Boxee ties directly to your Netflix account, a process I just completed within 1 minute.  Within the last 6 months, Apple and Netflix began to play nice, wen the Netflix streaming video functionality for their subscribers was brought to Safari.

So let's have a look.  Apple and Netflix are now smooching sisters.  "Sure, use our browser to stream your content."  "Hey thanks, this is working out well for us to deliver our stuff to your very loyal fan base."  Alright, so now lets toss Boxee into the mix.  "Hey, we're open source, we can put Boxee on anything."  Netflix says "Sure thing, butter cup.  This is a great idea because we, as Netflix, want our customers to be able to see our movies on any device.  We're even streaming to Microsoft XBox and some Blue Ray players, heck even some new LCD TVs!".

Apple takes a second look and low and behold, they are sort of taken out of the picture streaming Netflix to people's TV because Netflix is pushing the Roku player (oustanding device, video evidence).  If they are going to make a push to offer more Apple features on the upcoming release of Apple TV, wouldn't "Hey, stream Netflix too?" be a huge selling point?  YES.  But if you can stream Netflix without having to upgrade your current Apple TV hardware, why would anyone switch over?

I am convinced that Apple killed Boxee with the latest firmware because they have an Apple sanctioned Apple TV Netflix feature on the table and in an effort to sell the new, shiny hardware later this year, they had to disable Boxee on Apple TV in order to make their relationship with Netflix continue to grow positively, despite how such action might affect the Netflix / Boxee relationship.

Any thoughts are welcome.  I am not an Apple Insider, I'm a chubby guy on my recliner in Omaha....but this totally makes sense, correct?