After taking the unprecedented step of forecasting it would sell at least 1 million Apple TV units last week, the Cupertino, Calif. company Monday confirmed it had met its goal. The milestone shatters Apple’s previous high-water mark for the $99 device set it October: 250,000 units. At the time, CEO Steve Jobs remarked he was “thrilled.”

This latest sales announcement seemed more to do with increased competition from the likes of Roku and Google than any real revenue benefit to Apple. Last week analysts described the $400 million in revenue from sales of 1 million Apple TV as “fairly immaterial.” Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu, however, said the Apple TV could become “a more material contributor and game changer in the TV space,” if Apple creates an App Store for the device, similar to how the Cupertino, Calif. firm has done for other products, such as the iPhone and iPad.

The one guy at Apple who programs their fantastic iOS Remote.app seems to have been busy before Christmas break: a new update was pushed live yesterday, adding AirPlay control on the AppleTV to the app’s already great list of features.

The new Remote.app is now at version 2.1 and, as usual, is available on the App Store as a free download. You can now use it to control iTunes on your Mac to stream videos directly to your new AppleTV, as well as play rented Movies and TV shows on your Mac without ever getting up from a supine position.

Internet Radio support is also new, and there are a slew of new stability and performance improvements as well, as well as some bug fixes for issues connecting to an iTunes library or Apple TV.

Grab the new Remote.app here

Yesterday we reported that Google’s DNS service might be to blame for AppleTV’s slow HD streaming speeds on some devices.

Here was the problem, as we summarized it at the time:

Basically, iTunes streaming content is hosted by Akamai, which uses different local servers to route downloaders to the fastest available connection. Services like Google DNS, or other generic DNS providers, are trying to route all users the same way… the equivalent of trying to cram a few thousand people through a single door at the same time.

OpenDNS has just reached out to us, though, to assure both Cult of Mac and its readers that users of their service that they can expect fast AppleTV streaming, all the time.

Laura Oppenheimer of Open DNS writes:

OpenDNS has arrangements with a number of CDNs that make this a non-issue for the vast majority of OpenDNS + Apple TV users. That said, with Akamai, especially internationally, it’s still suboptimal. It’s entirely workable, but not as optimal as it could be.

In general, North America isn’t really an issue since we have a sufficiently dense network topology. That said, we’re very open to working to improve end-user CDN routing with Akamai, just as we have with other large CDNs.

In short, if you’re having problems with your AppleTV and you live in North America, give OpenDNS a try. If you’re an international user, though, Apple’s Akamai hosting isn’t what it could be… and you might experience problems no matter what DNS provider you use.

AirPlay may have been a little bit of a disappointment upon arrival, but TUAW’s Erica Sadun just keeps on managing to make it better. Just a week after her release of AirPlayer, an app that tricks AirPlay into thinking your Mac’s an AppleTV, comes her brand new tool, called AirFlick… and it’s everything that AirPlay should have been out of the box.

What does AirFlick do? It allows you to stream video content from your Mac to your AppleTV: AVIs, MP4s, even streaming video files on the Internet. You name it! “It” being non-Flash video.

Although the second generation AppleTV is certainly sexy, it’s not quite as “magical” a device as we’ve come to expect from the wizards at Cupertino. Not only are the media offerings a bit limited compared to the competition, but the new AppleTV is prone to some technical problems… most notably reports of bog slow downloads.

It looks like a potential cause for those tortoising downloads on the Apple TV has been identified, though, and it’s not Apple’s fault: it’s Google’s.

Don’t have an AppleTV, or even a TV, but interested in beaming some of your iPhone’s videos to that inviting 27-inch iMac display? TUAW’s always ingenious Erica Sadun has put together a tricky new piece of software that fools your iPhone or iPod Touch into thinking its an AppleTV.

Pop some acid and the above video above will look chromatically normal to you, but as some owners of Sony and Philips brand televisions are discovering, dropping some lysergic bliss is about the only way to get the new AppleTV to play nice with their sets.

If you’ve got a second generation AppleTV and looking to add a couple of o’s to its oomph, Fire Core have just announced that they’ve got you covered: they’re porting their popular aTV Flash software from the first-generation AppleTV to the second, complete with Last.fm and browser support.

It is widely rumored that when the Mac App Store finally launches early next year, it’ll launch with the iWork ’11 productivity suite available as separately purchasable applications… but could iWork also be delayed to make sure there’s enough time to bake AirPlay support into Keynote?

Maybe. An email from Apple CEO Steve Jobs strongly implies that when iWork ’11 drops, Keynote ’11, at the very least, will support AirPlay functionality.

We personally love it, but not everyone thinks the new AppleTV is much of an improvement over the old model, which featured local storage, legacy outputs, was fairly easily upgradeable and was easily hackable with great media center software like the Boxee Box.

If you’re one of those nostalgists and think the AppleTV took a step back when it became a streaming media only affair, good news: Apple’s dropped the price of the 160GB first-gen AppleTV from just $50 more than the new model.

Of course, buy that and you’ll miss out on the inevitable fun that everyone is going to start having once jailbreak developers start really mastering the capabilities of the new iOS-driven AppleTV, but heck, there’s always room for both in your entertainment center.