Hi wall-e,

I cannot agree with your statement above. I run my AppleTV in streaming mode permanently, without any data on it's hard drive at all. It connects to my Itunes library and simply streams from there.
If my Imac is down, it has nothing to play (which is obviously one of the drawbacks running it in this way, but I have decided that it is a non-issue for me...).

Regards

Leon