Expanding Aerial, the Apple TV’s screensaver

The Apple TV is TV at our house, and as such, we see its screensaver a good bit. On the old Apple TV, I had it pulling from a photo album of family photos, but when I installed our new one, I opted to use Apple’s “Aerial” screensaver instead.

If you haven’t seen it, Aerial has a collection of downright stunning flyovers from numerous cities and landscapes from around the world.

Most of the options have both day and night scenes, and the Apple TV plays whichever is appropriate based on the time of day.

I really do like Aerial, and I can’t help but think about ways Apple could do more with this system.

While I’d love to see the collection of footage expanded, (sorry San Francisco) Apple could offer specialized content based on date.

On New Year’s Eve, how great would it be to see fireworks displays over some of the most iconic cities in the world? In late July, it’d be fun to fly over the lunar landscape.

On that theme, seeing our planet from the point of view of the International Space Station would be breathtaking.

Aerial’s files are quite large at roughly 600MB each, so Apple has provided settings on the device to control how often it downloads new content. Settings range from “Never” to “Daily,” which is the option I’ve selected. For those who are willing and able, it’d be fun to have some suprises thrown in the mix.

Expanding the views shown off in a screensaver is probably not the most critical thing the Apple TV team could be working on, but sometimes that’s okay.