AnalyzeThis said:
Wow, Apple sold ~ 350,000 more units! LOL. Look around, there are infinite number of set-top boxes with features that would leave AppleTV in the dinosaur age. Just because of you are resident of the "Apple" LA-La world, even failed gadget looks like a success. Mr. Cook should drink less of Steve's "woo-do magic" cool-aid.
AnalyzeThis said:
Try to get popcornhour - the line is like a month long for a new unit. I am sure "vendor does everything in their power to make sure they sell less units as possible".
I sold my used A110 for more than I paid for on eBay, figures...
Popcorn Hour is a subsidiary of Syabas Technologies a privately held company with a total of 70 employees (
http://www.linkedin.com/companies/syabas-technologies-inc -- as apparently provided by an interim CFO of Syabas Technologies). With that as a starting point let's look at some possibilities.
Apple has apparently sold over six million Apple TVs (this number has been reported by several different analysts) and we'll assume an average selling price of $250 USD (very conservative since the price has ranged from the current $229 to a previous high of $399). Okay, so we have 6M x $250 which means that Apple may have sold $1.5B worth of Apple TVs over the last three years (not bad, but see my comments concerning profits at the end of this post).
Now what would be a good estimate of Popcorn Hour's total sales? Well, even the most successful and profitable companies usually average less than $1M in revenue per employee. Thus, we could estimate per-year sales (revenue) of 70 x $1M or $70M for the entire company (which would be a pretty generous estimate that would suggest that Popcorn Hour is doing very well indeed). Now if the average selling price of the Apple TV and the Popcorn Hour is roughly the same (they seem to be) that means that you could estimate that
Popcorn Hour sells on average approximately 280,000 units per year versus Apple's past average of 2M units. That value for Popcorn Hour is arrived at given our $70M yearly revenue estimate and a $250 average selling price (Popcorn Hour ranges in price between $360 and $180). If we assume an average selling price of just $200 for the Popcorn Hour that converts to about 350,000 units for an entire year (still only about one sixth of our estimate for the Apple TV). However, this assumes that all of Syabas Technologies' revenue comes from Popcorn Hour which is somewhat unlikely but we'll make that "leap" to put an upper bounds on the unit sales for the Popcorn Hour.
Of course, if the rate of sales or the number of employees has changed significantly in the recent past then the above estimates are not too good, but I doubt that they are off by more than a factor of two on the high end since we are using revenue/employee which very seldom exceeds $1M per employee (it's usually much less than that value, which would suggest even lower sales numbers for the Popcorn Hour). Note that the average revenue/employee value for small companies in the U.S. was reported to be just $100,000 in 2005, while for Fortune 500 companies this value was just $300,000 (Have things improved since then? Maybe, but probably not by much). On the upper end of the range, Apple produces just over $1M in revenue per employee but they are well known to rank very high on this metric (and in any case we aren't using that to estimate Apple TV sales).
The point of the this disclaimer is that Popcorn Hour's sales are likely much
less than what I have estimated above. Note that revenue/employee pretty much has to operate within a restricted range, if the value is low you are probably losing money and if the ratio is significantly higher than average then you are probably operating in an environment that is outside of the business norm.
As far as sales numbers that we actually do know, Roku (also a privately held company) has said that they've sold 500,000 Netflix players since the product was introduced about two years ago. Roku is reported to have 50 employees (
http://www.linkedin.com/companies/roku ) but the average selling price for the Roku player is about one half the Apple TV. We know that Roku has sold 500K units and let's assume an average selling price of $115 USD (generous considering that current prices range from $80 to $130). The 500K units sales number was reported in Jan 2010 and the Roku Netflix player was announced in May 2008 so that number covers about nineteen months of sales. Thus Roku has averaged about 315K units per year or an average of $36 million in revenue per year. Taking into consideration that Roku has 50 employees that means an average revenue per employee of $36M/50 or $720K. This is lower than what we assigned to Syabas/Popcorn Hour ($1M/employee). However, Roku also produces the SoundBridge hardware which means additional revenue which would increase Roku's total sales (thus resulting in a higher revenue per employee).
Give the above, it might be worth repeating what I said earlier in this thread (and which seems to have invoked such strong "venom" from user AnalyzeThis):
fpnc said:
Based upon some of the rumored sales numbers I've seen for the Roku Netflix player (see link below) I'd say that Apple may have sold more Apple TVs than the Roku player, the Western Digital TV (Live), Popcorn Hour and all of the other lesser known media players combined.
Now one thing that the above numbers don't reveal is the
profit that each company is making on these products. Interestingly, we know that the Apple TV is one of Apple's lowest margin products (i.e. they don't make very much profit per unit sale). In fact, there have even been suggestions that Apple subsidizes the cost of the Apple TV with sales done through the iTunes Store. What this means is that Apple isn't making much money on the Apple TV and this situation would probably change little even if there was new hardware that propelled sales to much higher numbers (unless subsidizes remained and iTunes sales attributed to the Apple TV increased by proportionally greater numbers).
The above is one reason why I posted a comment several weeks ago stating that
we probably wouldn't see a hardware update to the Apple TV until the unit can be redesigned to produce higher margins with equal-to or greater-than prospects for total sales. I think that in the next year we'll be getting close to that tipping point, but that still doesn't resolve the problems that I've previously mentioned with broadband infrastructure in the U.S. and the issues with the pricing of the current on-line and streaming content (IMO, too high in comparison to the "old-school" distribution models).
