The new Apple TV is not the solution for which the mass market is looking, says Ars Technica’s John Siracusa.

“The solution is a device that is unabashedly omnivorous,” Siracusa writes. “Yes, in traditional Apple fashion, it must provide a simple, elegant, user interface. But behind the scenes, it must be willing and able to accept content from as many sources as possible. This is what makes the device valuable and desirable: dealing with and hiding all this complexity!”

Advertisement: The all-new Apple TV is just $99. You know you want one. Free shipping.

“Is this show on cable? Satellite? Downloaded from the Web? Streamed from Netflix? Is it on my Mac? My iPhone? Does it need to be transcoded? Upscaled or downscaled? These are the things geeks deal with manually right now, and regular people have little chance of figuring out,” Siracusa writes. “People will pay for a device that will handle all of this for them. It might take a while, but word would get around about the new device that actually makes your living room less complex, for a change. One box to rule them all.”

“No gradual roll-out of content deals is ever going to give Apple TV the sales volume it needs to accelerate the progress of those deals, regardless of the price of the device,” Siracusa writes. “Content owners are now too savvy to just give Apple the kind of power it managed to attain with its iTunes music business; they’re dedicated to preserving the ‘competitive landscape,’ ensuring that no one device manufacturer or online service becomes dominant. The end result for consumers is a preservation of the status quo: confusion, complexity, chaos.”

Siracusa writes, “The only realistic solution is to make an end-run around the existing players. Instead of trying to establish yet another isolated beachhead, accept and absorb all available content by any means necessary and concentrate on providing a unified interface to all of it.”

Read more in the full article -recommended – here.

MacDailyNews Take: Here’s the thing: Once you get down to $99, Apple TV becomes an impulse buy that, even with “only” ABC and Fox shows, Apple TV may still be able to achieve the sales volume it needs to entice the holdout networks on board. Throw in Netflix, $4.99 HD movies, YouTube, MobileMe, Podcasts, Remote control via iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad, flickr, AirPlay, and all the rest and many people will have more than enough reasons to justify dropping $99 on Apple TV.