Well, my Apple TV finally arrived.

It missed Lord Jobs’ promised September deadline by six days, though it was theoretically ‘dispatched’ nine days earlier via an ‘upgraded shipping method’. Presumably, the upgraded shipping method involved some kind of disabled camel relay team who had to set off from a distant planet.

Still, it came, and it’s beautiful, of course, and tiny. Tiny and light. The chunkiest item in the package is the adaptor plug.

It was simplicity itself to set it up, though I have to admit, I was well prepared for it: I’d run an ethernet cable to the TV room from my router, and I’d got an HDMI switching hub already installed, and an HDMI cable – Apple don’t supply one – all waiting to go. The only cable option to connect your device to the TV is HDMI, so if you don’t have an HD television, you can’t hook up Apple TV.

The device can connect with your WiFi network, but a direct ethernet connection is considerably faster and more robust.

Plug the HDMI cable in at both ends, plug in the ethernet cable and the power, and you’re up and running.

You have to set up your computer(s) to share their content via iTunes. It takes just a couple of clicks on a Mac. The whole setup took just a few minutes.

You then have to enter your iTunes account name and password via the remote control, which is sleek and tiny and doesn’t have a keyboard, of course, making  this part of the process a bit of a rigmarole. You have to scoot through a grid of about 80 letters and characters, selecting each one individually, so it pays to have a short password.

If you don’t have an ethernet connection, you have to join your WiFi network, which involves more scooting through the character grid. I don’t see how Apple could make this easier, but it’s an undeniable pain. Still, you only have to do it once.

I’m an earlier adopter. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, an early adopter is an impatient idiot who buys technology before it actually works and pays a hefty premium for the privilege, only to see a cheaper, better version released onto the market a couple of months later. An early adopter installs overpriced faulty software onto his computer and then spends weeks of anguish and frustration trying to recover from the damage it inflicted on his system. An early adopter queues for six hours in a blizzard to get his frostbitten hands on exciting new hardware, even when there’s no-one else in the queue. Yes, I’m an early adopter. And I have the emotional scars to prove it.

In spite of this major character flaw, I never bought the first generation Apple TV. I wanted to, on many occasions, but I just couldn’t work out what it was for. It didn’t seem to do anything I couldn’t already do in several other ways. Play iTunes content on my TV? I could simply hook up my iPod/iPhone to the television, much, much more cheaply, and was already doing that.

What finally tempted me into making the purchase, besides the more accessible price point, was the option to rent movies and TV shows cheaply, directly to my television, and watch internet content in general. This, it strikes me, is the Future of TV.

The problem is: you can’t do any of that. Not in England. Not yet, at least. In America, TV shows are available from certain studios and networks for 99 cents. The studios and networks making their content available are, basically, Disney, and ABC, which is owned by Disney, which, strangely enough, has Steve Jobs as a major board member. The rest are balking at the price point.

Over here, Apple have precisely no-one on board. You can’t even access BBC iPlayer or Channel 4’s 4OD, which are free services. Since you can’t buy and store content on the new Apple TV, renting is the only option. And the number of TV shows available to rent? Precisely zero.

The latest movies are available as promised, but they cost a whopping £4.49. This is roughly comparable with renting from SKY Box Office, and considerably more expensive than renting from Blockbuster-like postal services with a monthly membership fee. True, you can’t actually guarantee getting a particular movie at a specific time via these postal services, but just how impatient can you be to see a movie? Older movies are even more ludicrously priced. £3.49 for Where Eagles Dare, for instance. You can actually buy and own the DVD for that.

Fortunately for me, I record off-air content onto my computer via EyeTV, and encode it for iTunes, giving me a decent library of movies and TV shows to choose from, so it’s not a total waste of money.

You can buy TV shows from iTunes on your computer, and then watch them on the device. Big whoop.

All in all, a massive disappointment. The hardware’s great, the theory’s terrific. It just needs content. We need an internet movie service – like the American Flixter – available over here. Steve needs to get iPlayer and 4OD on board, and the networks and studios have to prise their heads out of their sphincters, and offer their product at reasonable prices. It’s all very well complaining that cheaper access will damage DVD sales and repeat opportunities, but that fails to take into account the reality that their content is already available free via bit torrent sites and such like.

£4.49 or £0? Personally, I’d like to see a legitimate price point somewhere between the two.

In the meantime, the elegant and simple Apple TV box sits under my television, waiting patiently for the Future.

At least it’s not taking up a lot of room.

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