“Apple has finally begun shipping pre-orders of its Apple TV wireless set-top, according to news reports. The device can stream media stored on your PC to your TV including music, pictures and 720p High-Definition video,” Phillip Swann writes for TV Predictions. “The company has set the price at $299, but I’m here to tell you that it will ultimately have trouble giving them away.”
Swann writes, “Yes, Apple TV will bomb — and here’s why:”
1. Limited Uses
2. Set-Top Fatigue
3. Compatibility & Confusion
4. Inconvenient
Swann writes, “So, although the tech-intelligentsia will slobber over Apple TV and call it the Second Coming, Apple TV will fail to reach beyond the cultish Mac audience, probably topping off at about three million homes.”
Full article, Think Before You Click™, here.
Good news for Apple! This is the strongest indication yet that Apple TV will be a raging hit as Swann has proven to be uniformly wrong when it comes to understanding Apple products and predicting their success.
Read Swann’s previous idiotic predictions:
TV analyst says Apple’s video-capable iPod is a bust because he says so – May 03, 2006
TV analyst blows it, says Apple’s 12 million video downloads ‘a big disappointment’ – February 08, 2006
TV analyst’s uninformed prediction: ‘video iPod will be Steve Jobs’ folly’ – October 12, 2005
Related articles:
Mossberg hands-on with Apple TV: ‘beautiful design, easy-to-use, classic Apple: simple and elegant’ – March 21, 2007
Apple TV projected to surpass TiVo, Netflix – March 20, 2007
Former Microsoft ‘Enthusiast Evangelist’ Gartenberg looks at impact of Apple TV – March 20, 2007
Apple TV ships – March 20, 2007
Apple shares rise on positive Apple TV analyst comments – March 19, 2007
Analysts: Apple to ride Apple TV + iTunes ‘Trojan horse’ into living room – March 19, 2007
Will Apple TV be even bigger than iPhone? – March 19, 2007
Apple adds 720p Apple TV high-definition export mode to QuickTime – March 19, 2007
Apple planning to buy Miglia to add DVR capabilities to iTunes and Apple TV? – March 17, 2007
Miglia debuts TVMAX+ Mac PVR, TV tuner, content provider for iPod, iPhone or Apple TV – March 16, 2007
Piper Jaffray expects 2 million Apple TV units to be sold in 2007 – March 16, 2007
Apple TV ships – March 15, 2007
Solution providers expect Apple TV to be hot seller – March 15, 2007
Apple TV could help kill traditional TV ads – March 14, 2007
Apple TV manufacturing ramp up to begin as early as today – March 12, 2007
Why Apple TV is more important than iPhone – March 12, 2007
Apple TV concept may eventually catch on with consumers – March 12, 2007
Apple CFO talks Apple TV, iPhone, Leopard and retail (link to full transcript) – March 07, 2007
PC Magazine: Why Apple TV matters – February 23, 2007
Bear Stearns: Apple TV and iPhone have changed the Apple story for the better – February 21, 2007
Deutsche Bank: Apple TV could take 30% of set-top box market within a few years – February 21, 2007
How do Apple TV and Elgato’s EyeTV work together? – February 16, 2007
Apple embraces casual gaming; iPhone, Apple TV to join iPod as gaming devices – February 09, 2007
Former GM of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade: Apple TV to become video game console – February 08, 2007
ZDNet’s Graham: Apple TV hits a number of sweet spots, poised to make a big impact – January 25, 2007
Is Apple out to kill cable television? – January 25, 2007
RUMOR: Apple TV sales blowing away Apple’s internal expectations – January 25, 2007
Steve Jobs: Apple TV is the ‘DVD player for the 21st century’ – January 22, 2007
Apple TV beats out iPod, hits top spot on Apple Store sales chart – January 19, 2007
Report: first batch of 100,000 Apple TVs to ship this month – January 11, 2007
Steve Jobs moves to control the living room with Apple TV – January 10, 2007
Analyst Bajarin: Apple’s iPhone and Apple TV are industry game changers – January 09, 2007
Apple premieres Apple TV: movies, TV shows, music & photos on your big screen TV – January 09, 2007
RUMOR: Apple may enter video game market – December 05, 2006
Could Apple become king of game consoles? – September 26, 2006
@kenc “….then what does he think about the Zune’s 29,000 estimated sales?”
He thinks that´s a failure, too.
Wally Wallet- great idea! If I need a computer, a large screen TV and an apple TV anyway, why not just combine it all together?
Put me down for a 52 incher.
I can’t tell if he is an asshat or a douchebag?
Anaysts do not make good snow shoes.
..once I was stuck in the snow. I needed snow shoes …..I tied on couple of analysts…one to each boot. After about 100 feet one of the analysts started to speak authoritatively about an iminent ice age. He just knew we were in for some global cooling and he was ready to write an opinion piece. The other one wanted to make a confession. “I’ve never been worth shit but now …now, I’m a snow shoe. I’m a snow shoe and I’m helping you get through the snow.” I told him to shut the fk up.
.oh, yeah, …..I think Phillip Swann is going to bomb.
Apple TV appears to be a really great idea. Will I buy one? No. My problem isn’t with Apple TV itself. My issues actually come up with the content.
I have yet to download a movie from iTunes due to the price. I buy a few songs a week from iTunes because it is only a dollar a song and I have the option of not having to get the whole album to get what I want. I actually have an incentive to purchase the songs on iTunes.
Movies on iTunes cost just as much as the physical DVD or can actually cost more. Why would I pay $10 (or more) on itunes for a download when I can get the same movie on DVD at Target for $10 or even less? Where is a compelling reason to buy the download instead of the DVD? On top of the cost I get better video quality, the extras, and the ability to rip the DVD to video format. It’s more bang for my buck. Why would I ever buy a movie from iTunes?
Until they can bring the price down on movie downloads I see no compelling reason to switch from DVD player viewing to Apple TV streaming.
I don’t think Jobs is the one with the price problem it’s the movie studios. Jobs knows that the thing that gets people to buy a computer is the killer application (iLife suite is one of them. The thing that will drive Apple TV is content but the price isn’t quite there yet.
Apple TV has already bombed for me, I don’t have a frikkin’ television. iPhone means nothing either, too many dead zones.
Apple, where’s my new iMac with Penryn chips? I can at least get broadband!
Would there even be an Apple TV if iTunes allowed users to burn downloaded video content to DVDs?
Here’s what’s great about AppleTV:
I have a video I like: it’s hilarious/compelling/cute…
where is it?
in 3 different media most likely.
Not that you can’t do this with Media Center, but who uses the library of media center as a central storage hub. Now, Apple is already suiting customers to be the media hub for their home (with usable software encompassing EVERY media desired by the consumer)
They are the shoo-in.
It’s the library, stupid!
(continuation of my last post)
‘TV analyst says Apple TV will bomb’
Oh, I thought this was an Al Jazeera report…(holy shit!)
Who knows, Apple TV might fail. There’s a lot of confusion in the TV world right now for consumers: HD, full-res HD, Blue-Ray, HD-DVD. If you go to a store and ask technical questions of a sales clerk, it’s obvious that many (I actually think MOST) don’t have a proper grasp of even the most basic HD issues. Americans are technically retarded compared to our Europen neighbors. Apple TV requires not only competence in computers and TV technology, buying into it requires confidence that one has the qualities going into the endeavor. Apple TV might, indeed, fail.
> Apple TV will fail to reach beyond the cultish Mac audience, probably topping off at about three million homes.
What does “Mac” have to do with it? The product is for Mac and PC users. Apple TV makes any HD TV into a giant wireless video iPod. Perhaps he should amend that sentence to say,
“Apple TV will fail to reach beyond the cultish iPod audience, probably topping off at about 90 million homes.”
That’s at the end of 2006 for the 90 millions iPods sold to date. Now some of those iPods are owned by the same household, and many households do not have HD TVs (yet). But even if the current potential customer base was only 10 million, the trend is for more people to buy iPods and HD TVs. Once again Apple has positioned itself for the future instead of looking to the past. And the “analysts” can’t figure it out.
If the Apple TV only plays Apple DRMed video from the iTunes store, then Steve can keep it. If it will accept any video from me computer, whether direct from a DVD or compressed, then I’ll really have to look in to it.
“avi the de facto… HA HA HA!!! ASS!
How so??”
What a bunch of children we have here! AVI is a container format just like Quicktime. Many different video and audio codecs can be used to encode the content inside the container format.
WMV is the defacto standard digital media format. WMV9 VC-1 (HD DVD format) is clearly superior to H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) for encoding HD video. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers formally published the Final Specification for Microsoft’s VC-1 codec, leading to a codec that is well-documented, extremely stable, easily licensable, and accepted by the industry as a standard.
As High Definition video becomes more popular the VC-1 codec will eventually displace WMV as the defacto standard format.
swann song
I agree… what’s da point of Apple TV? It would be compelling to me if it had TIVO features & if you could add a larger USB2 or Firewire hard drive… but the device that’s offered currently just doesn’t appear to be worth the money to me.
Hopefully the next generation will have Tivo features and allow external hard drives to be added.