“For those of you you’ve been following the stunted evolution of the [Apple TV], you’ve no doubt noticed it’s suffered greatly from the company’s obvious lack of confidence as well as some uninspired marketing. But if Apple plays its cards right, 2008 could be a very big year for Apple TV,” Bryan Gardiner writes for Wired.
“There’s much work to be done, however. In July, the device was almost totally eclipsed by the iPhone launch and ensuing hype. Of course, it also didn’t help that Steve Jobs himself uttered the now infamous ‘hobby’ word at the All Things D conference, when describing Apple’s foray into people’s living rooms. Interestingly, he refused to even call the Apple TV a set-top box, opting instead for: ‘sort of a new DVD player for the internet age,'” Gardiner reports.
“Given those facts it’s not all that surprising to learn that the company has only sold 400,000 units since its debut, according to Forrester analyst James McQuivey…and ‘will be lucky to sell another 400,000 in the year-end holiday rush,'” Gardiner reports.
MacDailyNews Take: So, “only” 800,000 Apple TV units will be sold this year without hardly any marketing on Apple’s part? How many units did competing solutions sell in the past year?
Gardiner continues, “If Apple can line up the necessary deals with movie studios and tweak a few features (a big “IF”), the Apple TV is still poised to go from “hobby” to “hit.” How massive a hit, you ask? Some analysts, like Blackfriars’ Carl Howe, are predicting the company will sell upwards of 7 million Apple TVs next year.”
Here’s a list what could — and in some cases, needs to — happen in 2008 for the Apple TV to assume its rightful place among the company’s star devices:
• Movie Rentals
• HD Content
• Optical Drive
• PVR Functionality
• Larger Hard Drive
Full article here.
Buster-
Mind those fence pickets, or else you’ll be known as Busted….
The next iMac will be as you are dreaming ChrissyOne.
Apple apparently will skip 30″ screens and go to 40 and 50″ iMac with Apple TV on board.
The iMac is the modern TV. The convergence of technology has been there for so long… AppleTV has been an experimental device to see if navigation would Apple-ized in your living room.
With some people living in apartments and actually using iMac for both entertainment (movies/music) the whole experiment shall solidify come Multi-Touch iMacs that are 40-50″ in size.
And Yes – it shall have Blu-Ray… cos HD-DVD red ray / redmond is Macrosloth or the darksides death ray.
Bill thinks it’s a TABLE people want.
Steve knows it’s the Television.
How much disposable income do you guys have? I do pretty well for myself, and if I “video on demand” and purchased every TV show every week, my bank account would scream in agony eventually.
The sort of “they don’t get it” and “people shouldn’t want that” defensive reaction to ANY kind of critical evaluation of an Apple product starts to become old. When AppleTV first came out, I wanted one. Then I realized that its functionality didn’t justify my purchase. AppleTV hasn’t been one of Apple’s big hits for a reason.
DVR may never come (I suspect the studios may have something to say about that). However, if someone thinks Apple couldn’t integrate a PVR and optical drive into the device without creating a byzantine interface… then they would be the ones guilty of underestimating Apple design and innovation. The Front Row interface could easily adapt.
And before I get flamed as a MS shill etc., I both use Apple (and have invested a chunkola into it. Thanks Mr. Jobs!) since before a lot of posters were fully sentient — and stuck through the Spindler/Amelio dark ages.
iPod Nano…
a little video for everyone
the new iMac…
big video for the rest of us
mark my mac
P.S. I do buy from iTunes. Just not necessarily EVERYTHING from iTunes. Both options would be a great product.
And movie rentals… great idea and I hope they do it. Movies are a different beast than music. People want to OWN music. Except for a few select titles, many people would be fine with renting movies online for less and letting them expire. A great model would be that you can keep a certain number on rentals your drive, and renting new ones would eliminate the oldest rental.
For those who argue that a Blu-Ray disk will never happen and that the AppleTV is meant for the Internet age of downloading content, then I suggest that they enjoy themselves playing with their wieners while their 25 GB HD-quality movies are streaming across their pathetic little “broadband” cable and DSL pipes.
The only solution available to Apple that will work is an “instant satisfaction” download of low data rate encoded content followed by a “high quality” Blu-Ray disk in the mail to the customer. This way the customer gets quick access and a high quality, archival media that won’t quickly fill even a TB disk.
And why not DVR for over the air ATSC? The content is already available for free and time-shifting recently broadcast content is a valuable capability that someone will pay out $$$ to own. iTunes can fill the void for archival content from past years.
Buy Joost, or work out a deal to offer, quite a bit of good content
“The Second Coming of Apple TV”
reminds me of when I was a young man….
>MikeK wrote: It’s not that people don’t want it, it’s just that people don’t quite understand it.
What’s there to understand? It doesn’t do what the majority of people want it to do. The misunderstanding is Apple’s!
I would love an Apple TV, but at $300 my Xbox 360, which was around the same price streams movies and music, and is a full functioning gaming device. And as far as digital downloads dominating the future of movie distribution, I hope not. I prefer to own physical copies of content. I buy my music on vinyl and optain mp3s of what I buy. I buy the DVDs of movies I enjoy, especially from smaller, independent studios or artists. And now we even see books being more affected by the digital age with things like the Kindle. Sure buying all of these things digitally would save space but paying for something that I can’t really hold in my hands, lend out to a friend, or even resell if I no longer have use of seems very foolish.