Sharing is not pirating -- I need a solution

Question

I used to be able to go to my vacation home and watch my home videos on my Apple TV or go to my friends house with my laptop and stream my photos to his Apple TV, but now I can't. My family of 6 can only share with 5 computers and we used to be able to stream from everybody's computer to our home theater. All the things we loved about Apple TV are gone. I am needing a solution.

Answer 1

It's not quite what you think...
The "new" Apple TV has no hard drive. The hard drive probably added close to $100 to the cost of the device. By removing the drive, they can drop the price to $99 and this will probably get more business from impulse-buyers who are willing to take a chance on a $99 purchase.
What the new Apple TV has instead of a hard drive, is 8GB of solid-state storage. But it really uses it as a filesystem "cache" for streaming. A single TV show episode might be 2GB. A movie is longer and thus bigger. If the 8GB storage was used the same way the original Apple TV used it's hard drive, it would be full after just a couple of movies or a few TV show episodes. So it doesn't make sense to use it that way. Hence as a "standalone" device, it can really only "stream" and that means you are "renting" from the Internet or streaming from another local computer running iTunes. But the good news is it's cheap.
As for the 5 computers in the house... no problem. In fact the new Apple TV is easier than the old Apple TV because it uses iTunes new "Home Sharing" feature.
To use it, make sure each computer in your house has been upgraded to run the latest version of iTunes. On each computer, go into iTunes -> Advanced -> Turn on Home Sharing. You will need to provide your iTunes ID (this is the email address you use to buy content from iTunes.)
You then turn on Home Sharing on the Apple TV. If you own any iPhones or an iPod Touch, download the latest version of Apple's "Remote" app (free) and turn on "Home Sharing" there as well.
The simplicity of "Home Sharing" is that the Apple TV will "just see" every computer in your house as long as it is running iTunes at the time. No need to set a sharing password on each computer and pair the Apple TV to each iTunes individually.
You can now browse from computer to computer to find movies, TV shows, music, etc.
If you want to use take a computer to your vacation cottage, you'd still need the original Apple TV and/or a laptop. I use a small portable hard drive with my laptop so I can take a copy of my movies with me when I travel.
One last point... old iTunes "sharing" would allow +streaming only+! Even if all computers used the same iTunes account it didn't matter. This was a huge annoyance as content purchased on different computers would not be available on all computers and re-syncing your collection was a pain. "Home Sharing" actually recognizes that the content was all purchased via a common iTunes account so in addition to streaming, it actually allows COPYING. If the content was purchased via iTunes, then syncing is automatic. If the content was purchased elsewhere, you can tell "Home Sharing" in iTunes to display only "Items not in my library". From that screen you can do a select all and drag to your own library.