Apple TV: Still a hobby after all these years
Apple dusted off its four-year-old Apple TV "hobby" on Wednesday and gave it some polish. But even with a lower price tag, a smaller, sleeker design, and a few more bells and whistles, the streaming set-top box is still likely to remain a side project.Steve Jobs even referred to it as such when he introduced it at the annual fall event held in San Francisco Wednesday. In place of his famous "One more thing," he said, "One more hobby" when introducing the latest version of Apple TV.There were some interesting new features: the new Apple TV is a quarter of the size of the old model, got a very attractive price cut (from $229 to $99), and added Netflix integration. But none of those things automatically put Apple in the driver's seat when it comes to this nascent category.#nlrText { float: right; width: 170px; padding: 5px; margin: 10px 10px 10px 0; font-family: verdana; font-size: 10px; border: 1px solid #999; background: #FFFFEF; } #nlrText h4{display: block; font-size: 1.4em; padding: 0; margin: 0; color: #900; }Apple's music eventHere's a brief rundown of what Apple announced at Wednesday's press event. iOS 4.1Free update for iPhone, iPod Touch will be available next weekiOS 4.2To come in NovemberNew iPodsA major refresh of iPod lineup, including the Shuffle, Nano, and TouchPingNew iTunes 10 with social-networking music features Apple TVNew, smaller cloud-based Apple TV For more details on these announcements, read our summary post here. There seems to be some interest from consumers in cutting the cord on cable TV (depending on whom you ask, that is) and being able to share content from a PC to a living room device. Shipments of Internet-enabled living room devices, which include Web-connected TVs, set-top boxes, and game consoles, are predicted to rise from 99.3 million sold in 2009 to 430 million by 2014, according to Forrester Research. But how exactly it should be done hasn't been figured out.Apple has never publicly said how many Apple TVs it has sold, and they let it remain a mystery Wednesday when Steve Jobs said, "We've sold a lot, but it's never been a huge hit." But neither has a competitive product, he was quick to note.The digital living room is clearly up for grabs. There have been companies trying to break through--like Roku, Boxee, and now Google with its upcoming Google TV--with set-top boxes. Even Samsung is making a move here, but by taking a different approach and trying to build its own platform with apps and content directly into TVs and Blu-ray players.Though he listed some of the things he and his cohorts at Apple have learned about what customers want from a living room device over the past few years of Apple TV, Jobs still had no larger, articulated vision for Apple TV Wednesday.He spent a lot of time talking about what doesn't work in the living room based on customer feedback. According to him, what people don't want: noisy, large set-top boxes; user-generated content; a computer in their living room; or to have to think about hard drive space.Jobs emphasized that people specifically don't want a computer in their living room. That was his way of taking a swipe at Google, which is taking a Web-centric view of living room content consumption with Google TV. But Jobs' view might be why we didn't see the introduction of apps on Apple TV, as some had predicted. Apps are something associated with computers and other gadgets, so perhaps Apple doesn't want to give the impression that Apple TV is a mini computer.What consumers do want, according to Jobs, is pretty straightforward: Hollywood-quality movies and TV shows ("people don't want amateur hour," he said), cheaper content, and to rent not own.In that case, Apple has plenty of competition. Roku and PlayStation 3 and Xbox have integrated Netflix as well as Amazon Video on Demand content, plus other sources of Hollywood content. And while the 99-cent rental idea is interesting (and not unique--Amazon is offering the same thing), the content isn't quite there yet. When it comes to TV shows, only ABC and Fox have signed on with Apple.For Apple, the main advantage and interest they have in advancing Apple TV is that it adds to the overall ecosystem the company is building with its "iDevices" and its library of music, video, photo, podcast, and book content. Apple now has a phone, music/video player, touch-screen tablet, computer, and now living room device to share content between via a coming feature in iOS 4.2 called Airplay.Now that the price is fairly reasonable, the ultimate success of Apple TV is going to rely on the kind of content people can get and the timetable in which they can get it. And that means working out licensing issues with content owners. That's something Jobs has pioneered before, so it's not impossible that he won't do it again.
More free on-demand audio with Muziic
More free on-demand audio with Muziic
Like Spotify, Muziic offers a free downloadable piece of client software with an iTunes-like interface and offers on-demand access to millions of streaming songs. Unlike Spotify, I had no problem finding huge catalogs from artists that are notoriously prickly about posting their music online, including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and Radiohead. It also did a great job with all of my more obscure test cases.How did an unknown company run by a 15-year-old and his dad pull off this incredible licensing coup? Easy--they've basically built a customized front-end to YouTube. Any song that's been uploaded to YouTube is available in Muziic, including a lot of music that isn't available on most commercial services, like the full Pink Floyd's performance at Live 8 and Led Zeppelin's one-off performance in 2007. Unfortunately, a dispute between Warner Music and YouTube earlier this year means that a lot of recordings owned by Warner are no longer available. But in a lot of cases, users have filled the gaps with (probably unauthorized) recordings from the artists--so while I can't get my favorite studio recordings from Neil Young or the Flaming Lips, there are dozens live nuggets from each of them. With any luck, Warner and Google (YouTube's parent company) will resolve their dispute and these gaps will be filled. In the meantime, the Nelsons can work on some of the fit-and-finish problems I found with Muziic. The Web site doesn't render properly in Firefox 3.0. The high-quality audio option didn't work for me--I think it's supposed to render YouTube's default Flash audio into AAC on the fly, but the description doesn't make much sense so I can't really tell. (The default audio sounded fine anyway--at least no worse than MP3, which of course isn't so great.) They could use some professional design help--I couldn't maximize the player to fill the screen, there's a lot of unused space in the margins, and the black on black toolbar sliders are awfully hard to use for those of us who have no patience to download different skins.Overall, though, this is a pretty interesting and impressive piece of work. Muziic also offers an encoder that apparently lets you upgrade your MP3s before uploading them to YouTube--I didn't test this as I'm more interested in listening than sharing, but I'll give it a look later this week and let you know what I think. More important, Muziic (and Spotify) are finally showing the world how compelling a free, legal, on-demand music service can be--nearly a decade after Napster introduced us to the concept. Follow Matt on Twitter.
Like Spotify, Muziic offers a free downloadable piece of client software with an iTunes-like interface and offers on-demand access to millions of streaming songs. Unlike Spotify, I had no problem finding huge catalogs from artists that are notoriously prickly about posting their music online, including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and Radiohead. It also did a great job with all of my more obscure test cases.How did an unknown company run by a 15-year-old and his dad pull off this incredible licensing coup? Easy--they've basically built a customized front-end to YouTube. Any song that's been uploaded to YouTube is available in Muziic, including a lot of music that isn't available on most commercial services, like the full Pink Floyd's performance at Live 8 and Led Zeppelin's one-off performance in 2007. Unfortunately, a dispute between Warner Music and YouTube earlier this year means that a lot of recordings owned by Warner are no longer available. But in a lot of cases, users have filled the gaps with (probably unauthorized) recordings from the artists--so while I can't get my favorite studio recordings from Neil Young or the Flaming Lips, there are dozens live nuggets from each of them. With any luck, Warner and Google (YouTube's parent company) will resolve their dispute and these gaps will be filled. In the meantime, the Nelsons can work on some of the fit-and-finish problems I found with Muziic. The Web site doesn't render properly in Firefox 3.0. The high-quality audio option didn't work for me--I think it's supposed to render YouTube's default Flash audio into AAC on the fly, but the description doesn't make much sense so I can't really tell. (The default audio sounded fine anyway--at least no worse than MP3, which of course isn't so great.) They could use some professional design help--I couldn't maximize the player to fill the screen, there's a lot of unused space in the margins, and the black on black toolbar sliders are awfully hard to use for those of us who have no patience to download different skins.Overall, though, this is a pretty interesting and impressive piece of work. Muziic also offers an encoder that apparently lets you upgrade your MP3s before uploading them to YouTube--I didn't test this as I'm more interested in listening than sharing, but I'll give it a look later this week and let you know what I think. More important, Muziic (and Spotify) are finally showing the world how compelling a free, legal, on-demand music service can be--nearly a decade after Napster introduced us to the concept. Follow Matt on Twitter.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)