A while ago I bought an AppleTV, mostly on a whim because I had some store credit.  I liked the form factor and the HDMI output and thought it might provide a good solution for getting pictures from my ReadyNAS onto the TV.  Sadly, the AppleTV software is geared toward synching content instead of streaming it.  Streaming is possible, but it’s not the default mode of operation, is hard to set up and so far has proven flaky.  This is a big flaw as far as I am concerned.  I have almost 1TB of storage available and well over 200MB already taken up by photographs and short video clips.  Everything is fairly well organized in folders with generally one folder per trip or event or time of year.  The ReadyNAS includes various servers which make the files available on the network.  The default mode of operation for the AppleTV should be to discover this share and easily let me select a folder and view both the images and short clips from that folder. That’s what my Sonos does for music and it simply works – no extra effort required on my part.  Instead, with the AppleTV I have to first route images through iPhoto, enable iPhoto for my AppleTV in iTunes, select which albums to share and in the default synch mode wait for the selected albums to transfer to the AppleTV (and then I only get the pictures and not also the short video clips).  Yes, it is possible to use a “streaming” mode instead, but half the time I try that, the AppleTV and iTunes can’t agree on what albums are in fact available (seems that occasional restarts of the Mac mini and the AppleTV get them confused). I know that I could hack my AppleTV to get streaming working as I think it should, but my point is that this should be the default mode as it is on Sonos.