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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Monday, January 14, 2008
17:27 - Renter's Insurance
http://daringfireball.net/2008/01/macworld_expo_predictions

(top)
Gruber:

Jobs has called Apple TV a “hobby” for Apple. I think they have high hopes for it, but calling it a hobby is a practical way to buy time for it. What Apple did with the iPod was start as small and simple as they could — one device, in one configuration, only for the Mac, and all it did was play recorded audio — and then build the platform slowly from there. Things like Windows support, color screens, video playback, and expanding to a range of form factors all came incrementally.

I think that’s the plan with Apple TV. Start simple and humble, and build from there, year after year. One obvious improvement (albeit contingent upon another rumor) would be to allow us to buy (or rent) movies and TV shows directly from the iTunes Store, right from the Apple TV. If the iPhone can do it, the Apple TV should too.

I'm surprised he didn't mention this, but the plain fact is that Microsoft is already in this market space and milking it for all it's worth. It's called the Xbox 360, and it does precisely what the Apple TV is rumored hopefully to do after some changes and earthshaking announcements.

I've seen one at a friend's place—a 360, that is. It's got an always-on connection to the central video store. It's got a browseable catalog of every TV show and movie known to man (well, okay, only 48 titles at its launch in November '06, but one can only assume that was just a starting point). It's got a pricing structure based on those Xbox Marketplace points. The 360 has a keyboard (wireless, naturally) and a mouse, and when you decide you want to watch a movie or a certain episode of South Park, you don't have to go to your iTunes computer, look it up, purchase it, then sync it to your Apple TV or wait till it shows up in the streamed media menus—you just select it right there on the TV screen, like you'd select the on-demand stuff from cable, only with a much higher-resolution display and full-color preview cover shots and so on.

If this is anyone's vision of Apple's future, I hope they're prepared to accept the idea of it being a vision of Microsoft's past.

Granted, I'd love to see Apple do this; it seems like a no-brainer, since if they've gone to the trouble of making the Apple TV in the first place, and of making it so slick and polished and pretty, you'd think they were prepared all along to take the (seemingly trivial) next step of having it be able to rent stuff straight from the iTunes Store. It's not like there are any esoteric technical hurdles to clear. It's not like it can't already browse YouTube. It's not like it doesn't have a hard drive. It's not like it's any less capable a computer than a 360 or a PS3 or a Wii, all of which have nailed-up connections to a central digital store for buying random bits. And in this case it's got a built-in infrastructure in the form of Apple, lock-stock-and-barrel owner of the largest and most widely recognized digital marketplace in the world. It's amazing that they haven't connected the dots yet.

If Apple has any thoughts in its head about keeping the Apple TV alive as a brand and a product, they need to not only match the offerings that Microsoft has had on the market for more than a year now—they need to kick it out in front of the pack, like by having the entire library of iTunes TV shows and movies available for rental, for cash amounts rather than "points", and by offering rental terms that are at least as generous as Microsoft's. Plus more. There needs to be a killer-app-ness to it, something to justify our having to wait around with a weeny stopgap iTunes-to-your-TV bridge for a whole year while the Xbox runs around eating all of Apple's coolness points.

If they don't, they might as well kill the Apple TV brand here and now, because it's already an antiquated idea. Sure, it works great and looks great. But it's only got a fraction of the functionality not only that it could have in an ideal world, but that the general public might reasonably expect it to have, after having ever poked at an Xbox 360 on a pedestal in Best Buy.


UPDATE: Yes... yes, that will do nicely.

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© Brian Tiemann