Just weeks before Apple launched it’s AppleTV (then known as the iTV), I wrote a post for ZDNet titled: Could YouTube be the killer-app for Apple’s iTV?. My proposition was that if Apple were to open up its set-top-box it wouldn’t be long before the device became capable of much more than streaming content from a Mac or PC.

For starters, think Flickr for photos, and of course YouTube for video. In fact why not embrace all that the internet can offer, and open up Front Row (or whatever software ends up driving the iTV) to third party developers. If this were to happen, I’d bet it would only take a matter of months before we’d see plug-ins released which pull down content from the most popular web services.

However, on the day that Steve Jobs’ finally revealed the full details of the device, I was left somewhat disappointed:

Apple didn’t open up the Apple TV like I had hoped, to enable it to connect to web services other than iTunes. Without the ability to pull down content from elsewhere on the net (such as YouTube or Flickr, for example), the device feels too heavily tied to the iTunes download store.

But that didn’t deter the hackers, who, once they got their hands on the device, have been hard at work building plug-ins and workarounds to add lots of new functionality. In fact, so much progress has been made, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Apple purposely left the door unlocked, perhaps to learn from these early adopters about what future direction the product should take.

In a recent financial call with analysts, Apple’s CFO, Peter Oppenheimer, was reported as saying “…we plan to periodically provide new software features and enhancements, at no charge, to our Apple TV customers.”

So what might the future hold for the AppleTV? Rather than try and read the mind of CEO Steve Jobs, let’s look at a few of the hacks that have already been released or are in development.

RSS feeds

A basic RSS reader for the AppleTV that supports the RSS1.x/2.x format (so no ATOM). It’s not 100% user-friendly, as customizing what feeds are accessible via the AppleTV menu involves editing a text file. Whilst an RSS reader for your television would be useful for some people (think: your own personal teletext), it only really works with full RSS feeds, as the AppleTV (unlike the Nintendo Wii) doesn’t have a built-in web browser.

Likelihood of Apple rolling its own? High.

Sports Scores / Weather

Sports Scores is a simple plug-in to display sports results. Although not very exciting in itself, the idea of enabling the AppleTV to dynamically scrape information from various websites opens up lots of possibilities.

Another example that already exists is a plug-in to display weather updates.

Likelihood of Apple rolling its own? Possible.

Internet radio

Streamer provides the ability to listen to Internet Radio through the AppleTV. The plug-in currently provides an on-screen QWERTY keyboard to input URLs, which is painfully slow to do using the Apple Remote. Although a future version will offer a directory of stations from which to choose from.

Likelihood of Apple rolling its own? High.

Playback of Divx and other non-iTunes formats

nitoTV is a file browser and GUI playlist creator for mplayer (the popular open source media player). This enables the AppleTV to playback video formats which are not supported by iTunes, such as Divx files or DVDs stored on a hard drive.

Likelihood of Apple rolling its own? Zero.

YouTube videos

Currently in development, “A Series of Tubes” adds YouTube browsing and support to the AppleTV. A menu gives the option to browse by ‘featured videos’, most viewed, or most commented on. (See it in action here.) A Series of Tubes looks like it does a pretty good job, although it would be more useful to have the option to tie the plug-in to your YouTube user account, so that you can access channels that you’ve already subscribed to.

Likelihood of Apple rolling its own? Possible.

To keep up-to-date with AppleTV hacks, visit AwkwardTV.org