Apple has finally gotten around to issuing its promised software update for the Apple TV set top box. The biggest change is that users will now be able to download videos from the iTunes store using their Apple TV, no computer necessary. And since Apple also recently launched video rentals, that means you buy or rent movies or TV shows without leaving your house, or your couch.

Users can also view online photos from .Mac and Flickr pages. You can check out your own images or pictures shared by your friends and contacts. You can also listen to music while you play a photo slideshow.

[via TUAW]

The Xbox Media Center team has released the first beta version of XMBC for OS X. If that's a lot of abbreviations for you, let me break it down. Xbox Media Center started off as a software project to turn the original Xbox into a home media center. But over the past year or so, some of the project's developers have decided to port the excellent media center interface to other platforms, including Mac and Linux.

XBMC 0.1 for OS X is still an early release, as the name would suggest. But it already presents a full featured alternative to Front Row for anyone who wants to enjoy their movies, music, and image libraries while sitting more than two feet away from their computer.

[via TUAW]

That low rumbling whirrr you heard coming from the west as you sat down to your Fruity Pebbles this morning was the sound of the generators for the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field coming online. The master took the stage once again today to wow fans, put an end to some of the recent speculation and introduce some new products.

As far as MacWorld's go, this one was a little odd. Most of the keynote was devoted to the new iPhone, with no mention of iLife, iWork, Leopard or any of the computer hardware. You can get the complete rundown on the show, including all the info about the iPhone, from our pals over at TUAW. For our purposes here though, the big news is Apple TV.

Our buddies over at TUAW are discussing a great article in Newsday about how iTunes saved The Office from cancellation. According to the article, the show was about to be canceled at this time last year. And then iTunes happened. Almost immediately after ABC announced it was making shows available on iTunes, NBC followed suit. Since then, The Office, which had mediocre ratings according to Nielsen, has been the most popular downloaded show (only recently being outdone by Lost). It has become a miraculous tool for programs that aren't kicking ass in broadcast ratings to find a second life and to prove to the networks that they are, in fact, popular. And it makes for an interesting comparison. While CSI and Grey's Anatomy are tops according to Nielsen, the story is very different on iTunes. Just look at the Top 50 shows: Lost, The Office, Heroes, and Battlestar Galactica are titans. The next show expected to be saved by iTunes is 30 Rock, a wickedly funny show which is struggling in the ratings and will soon be available online.

Unfortunately, the post title is not referring to episodes of the construction paper cartoon coming to the iTunes Music Store, which I still think that's a little ways out. Instead, this article explains the migration of the animation studio to new Apple Xserve arrays.

GEEK ALERT! "J.J. Franzen, technology supervisor at South Park Studios in Los Angeles, said the show was simply running out of storage space on its digital linear tape (DLT) library and direct-attached disk storage from Ciprico Inc., in Plymouth, Minn. So in May, a new linear tape open (LTO)-2 tape library from Exabyte Corp. in Boulder, Colo. and three Xserve RAID disk arrays from Apple Computer Inc. were installed."