Announced by Steve Jobs under the code name iTV during a special Apple event on September 12th, 2006 in San Francisco and released to the public March 21st, 2007 the Apple TV is a device to bring content from iTunes to your television set and can be thought of as an iPod TV as it shares much of the same functionality of the iPod by syncing your files to the internal 40 or 120 GB hard drive or streaming the data directly from 1 or more Mac or PCs. The Apple TV hardware runs an altered version of Mac OS 10.4 Tiger that restricts the user interface to a modified Frontrow, which allows playback of videos, music, podcasts and photos. However, it currently doesn't allow users to purchase music or videos from their home or listen to streaming radio at this time. Apple updated this Apple TV OS to version 1.1, which added support for YouTube videos.

Contrary to popular belief and Apple's own list of requirements the Apple TV does not require a widescreen TV to function. Any TV with component inputs will work, however the image will be stretched vertically and squished horizontally as the Apple TV does not create the black bars to fill in the unused space when a widescreen image is displayed on a standard 4:3 TV. Hopefully this feature could be added in a future software update to allow proper display on any TV with component inputs.

An 802.11n wireless network is not required to stream audio and video. Both 802.11n and 802.11g can be used, however 802.11b can only be used for syncing, as it is not fast enough for video.