This is the interface for syncing TV shows to your Apple TV. I'm surprised Apple, a company renowned for good interface design, allowed this to ship. It's fine if you want to select all unwatched episodes of certain shows, but it's not nearly robust enough for many people.



What if you want to see all unwatched episodes of The Daily Show but you wanted to sync every episode (not just unwatched ones) of Battlestar Galactica? This interface won't allow it, which is a shame. Fortunately, it would be very easy to improve this functionality and bring it up to par with iTunes and the iPod. They just need to add an optional "playlists" ability.

This way, you can use iTunes' "smart playlists" feature to add any complexity you want. Drag and drop all your Battlestar episodes into a BSG playlist. Make a smart playlist called "all unwatched shows". Make a third playlist that combines the first two and name it "Apple TV Playlist". Then you'd sync that master playlist and get all the granularity you want.

Most people would never use the feature, just like most people don't use smart playlists in iTunes. But if Apple TV is to take over the living room, they need to make this syncing as powerful and simple as the iPod. There's no reason they can't.