App Culture and the Apple TV
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Apple TV
Poor little Apple TV, how your daddy ignores you as his oldest son’s career takes off, and his other children come into their own. And it can not help that there is a new baby on the way. When will daddy and his team of engineers and marketers ever have time for you?
Well, maybe you need to become more like your other siblings. What if, and I am just throwing this out their as an idea, you started running on the iPhone OS? Obviously I’m not telling you to grow a touch screen and a GSM antenna, I’m just saying maybe you should start running apps.
Now that our cars and printers have apps along with our cell phones, it only makes sense that a device that you connect to the TV or even the TV itself would have apps. With devices like the Roku player and the soon to be released Boxee Box which can run different applications to gather content from different sources online, no wonder the little Apple TV isn’t doing so well. Talk about a bad hobby.
Clearly, as the App Store on iTunes indicates, Apple knows how to do applications on dedicated devices. They are the leader in the cell phone app market by a long shot, no one else comes close right now. And now, the app store will extend through the iPhone, the iPod touch and the new iPad. Why not add a third device? Doesn’t it make sense that Apple TV be open to things like apps from TWiT.tv and Revision3 as well as an app for weather and stocks?
Heck, if Apple adds bluetooth to the Apple TV, there is a whole new market for games on the Apple TV. And it would allow people to use the Apple TV to do email and web surfing as well. Nintendo is already hurting so much from the portable games market on the iPhone and iPod touch, that they have to publiclybelittle the iPad saying it’s not surprising. And Apple could probably convince people to spend $50 extra on a bluetooth game controller for each Apple TV they sell.
It seems like Apple has every little piece that they need to make the Apple TV a smash success, and they aren’t able to put them together. But, maybe Steve Jobs doesn’t think that there is a market for such a device, or maybe he doesn’t want to compete with devices like the Wii and the Xbox 360. Whatever the case is, I wish he would reconsider, because I would like to buy an app supporting, game supporting, iTunes media extender.
