All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
With MacWorld just around the corner, let's shift focus for a moment from 3-G iPhones, native apps and ultra-slim laptop/tablet hybrids and concentrate on a device everyone seems to have given up on -- Apple included. Yes, I'm talking about the Apple TV.
For those of you who've been following the stunted evolution of the device, 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.
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."
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."
To say nothing of its "incompleteness" or the lukewarm reviews it originally garnered, the Apple TV has undoubtedly been hurt most by Apple itself. Thankfully, the company can make up for this neglect.
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 - More than anything else, this addition seems primed for a MacWorld debut. But then again that's what everyone was saying at WWDC in June 2007. Nevertheless, there has already been plenty of tantalizing new hints over the last couple months that Apple will indeed introduce movie rentals to iTunes mix at the Stevenote. In November, a developer discovered "rentalBag" evidence in the iPhone's lockdown daemon file, which is responsible for authorizing your iPhone for specific services. And before that, new binary strings were discovered in the iTunes 7.5 upgrade, which included terms like: rental-content, rental-bag, getvodaccountselectionlist, GET VOD ACCOUNT SELECTION LIST and supportsRentals. If that's not code for supporting video-on-demand (VOD) rentals, we don't know what is.
It's undoubtedly studio negotiations that have prevented rentals from happening sooner. Some Apple followers also point out that Apple TV has been crippled by the fact that the company is dealing with "schedules that are not its own." In other words, it's a device dependent on a whole slew of things not in Apple's direct control. You can imagine how well that goes over with Jobs.
"You have to remember (the Apple TV) was highly anticipated in January," Howe said. For whatever reason, Apple got it done and announced it. But unfortunately, that was before all the deals were complete, he continued.
HD Content - Those pending deals bring us to our next much-needed feature: HD movies. Make no mistake, Apple TV was made for HD. In fact, the device even has an HDMI port and is meant for use with "enhanced" or HDTVs. Yet, much to the dismay of people who went out and purchased one, iTunes offerings are only capable of being displayed in 640-by-480-pixel resolution. Also a factor in HD's delay: the fact that studios are dead serious, even religious, about DRM on their high-definition content. As such, they likely want to be assured no one will be pilfering content that resides on iTunes or the Apple TVs hard drive.
The other HD obstacle is distribution. It's unclear how Apple will approach streaming these massive, multi-gigbit files, which are on average four times larger than standard def movies. One interesting theory floated this past summer was that Apple would be embedding a BitTorrent-like client in Leopard or iTunes. Using this model, the company would distribute this high definition content using all of the individual Leopard (or iTunes) users as a massive of peer-to-peer community.
And let us not forget Akamai, an internet content distribution company that Apple is known to have worked with off and on since 2000. In late August, the company quietly announced it had developed a new service optimized to deliver videos with resolutions from 720p to 1080p and 1080i across the interwebs.
Optical Drive - This addition isn't essential…but it would certainly be nice. After all, the world hasn't moved entirely to digital distribution...yet. Because Apple is in the Blu-ray camp, there's the chance the company could even go down that road with Apple TV. As one EPICENTER crew member pointed out, though, Apple tends to be "all about medialessness" so this feature's addition is far from a sure thing. After all, the selling point for the Apple TV really is iTunes content and Apple might not want to undermine the countless hours spent at the negotiating tables by giving people the simple option of DVD or Blu-ray playback.
PVR Functionality - You know that USB port on the back of the Apple TV? Right, the one that you can't use -- at least not without some serious hacking. As many have noted, personal video recorder functionality could ultimately be as easy as offering a USB drive you plug into the back of the unit. Granted, adding television recording to the Apple TV mix will open up a whole new can of worms for Apple. More negotiating, more deals, more...time. Failing that upgrade, though, Apple should at least allow Apple TV owners the ability to hook up an external storage device to the Apple TV. Seriously, why would anyone offer a disabled USB port? According to Apple, it's for "services and diagnostics purposes." Come on...
Larger Hard Drive - Shortly after the debut of Apple TV at this year's MacWorld, Apple started offering a version with a 160GB hard drive for an additional 100 bones. That was a good start, but not even close to what the device needs -- especially if it's going to (partially) store HD content. Apple needs to either bump up internal storage capacities significantly or allow people to use that USB port for something useful.
And that's the short list. There's plenty of other services and upgrades the company could implement in the coming year to make the device more attractive and useful. Indeed, part of what's so alluring about the Apple TV right now is now the fact that there are all these little obvious hints that speak to what the device could be. It's clearly built for high definition, yet there's no HD content on iTunes. There's no on/off button like on your standard DVR, yet you can't record anything. There's a non-functioning USB port, which offers myriad opportunities. Perhaps because of this, the Apple TV has become a hacker's dream, albeit somewhat under the radar. If anything, the Apple TV's hackability further underscores both its innate potential and the fact that people really are interested in additional features.
In the end, Apple needs to either devote itself to improving the Apple TV, or ditch it altogether. Hey, that's what you do with hobbies away, right?
Photo: Flickr/jaronbrass
See Also:
