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iTunes Creator Jeff Robbin Heading Apple Television Effort?

HiRez said:
Apple has to control the distribution all the way to the consumer for it to work, and they need to use part of the massive pile of cash they're amassing to achieve it. It reminds me of when Apple decided to take control over their retail experience by opening Apple retail stores. They want no part of the cable companies. That leaves wireless. Current market caps:

• AT&T = $171B
• Verizon = $105B
• T-Mobile = $55B
• Sprint - $8B

AT&T has lots of garbage Apple doesn't want (like credit card services, landline phone service, etc.), and is too expensive anyway. Verizon might be affordable, but they'd have to borrow. Still too expensive. T-Mobile might be affordable, but they're in the process of being bought by AT&T.

That leaves Sprint, which is very cheap (to Apple) at only $8B. Furthermore, Sprint already owes Apple $20B for future iPhones, that makes it even cheaper (if not free). And Apple would immediately sell off or eliminate a bunch of junk they don't need, like the over 1,000 Sprint retail stores. Streaming video requires lots of bandwidth, so let's assume they have to spend a ton of money completing and beefing up Sprint's 4G LTE upgrade, and expanding service area (which could be done over time). Let's say that costs them $25B. So for $25B+, they have a fast, robust, nationwide 4G LTE wireless network. What are the results?

• Apple controls the entire network, and the entire chain of their services, end to end. They can now sell their own wireless plans to iPhone owners signing up with them. Additionally, they can now sell home internet service through the exact same network. And of course, video services. They can make money from this, but it even further cements consumers into the Apple ecosystem, which means more sales of all kinds of hardware, software, and services. And there's even other other opportunities. For example, how about a new A6-based AppleTV box with quad-core GPU, and a $40 Apple wireless game controller? Now you have close to PS3/XBox 360 quality graphics, with games from major publishers and independent developers alike, downloadable right from the App Store. Bye bye consoles.

• Consumers would benefit by lower combined prices, consolidated billing, more flexible video subscription plans, and reduced points of contact for problems (with Apple's support being superior to any known cable, satellite, or phone company). Installation, setup, and upgrading would be easier (and likely done by the user in most cases, not requiring technicians). And that magic single Apple ID would now link and synchronize even more of a person's devices and data.

Currently a consumer might spend $120 on digital cable, $80 on cel phone service, and $50 on home internet. That's $250 per month on 2 to 3 different bills, and that's probably below average. Over $300 would not be uncommon with extra minute and text message plans, channel bundles, etc. Apple could easily offer a package for let's say $200 that includes unlimited minutes and text messages, and as many "channels" (and on demand content) as they could get rights to. They might offer a cheaper option for shows with advertising and a more expensive option for no advertising, or even an a la carte menu, which many people have been demanding from the cable companies for year, and they refuse. Live pro sports could be handled individually by the MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL apps.

Now let's say they offer the content providers a $5B to $10B pre-payment to secure content for a couple years. While they watch dwindling cable subscriber numbers , chances are they are not going to turn down money like that. If they can start with only 1 million subscribers (these could be Apple television sets, or new Apple TV boxes, it doesn't matter), at $200 per month each that's $2.4B per year (including the entire wireless package). Let's say they give 50% of that back to content providers, or $1.2B. That's not enough, but it's a start. They need enough cash flow to show the content providers that they should be taken seriously, and to slowly wrest control away from the cable companies. When subscribers grow to 10 million, we're talking $12B per year to content providers, which is, as they say "real money", while still making a nice profit on the services themselves (they'd have to spend some of that to maintain the network). Essentially, they would become a provider with the same stature as a Comcast, Cox, Time/Warner, albeit (we hope) a kinder, gentler, less infuriating one.

Thee's an insane amount of things that would have to go right for this to happen (including government regulators allowing it), but Apple is perhaps the only company in the world that could pull it off because of their highly-rated consumer brand and consumer trust, ecosystem, industry connections, and of course, giant cash reserves (they'd still have about $50B left over after this). If the things I listed went down, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Netflix, Amazon, Google, Comcast, Cox, Charter, Time/Warner, DirecTV, Dish, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and others would immediately crap their collective pants.
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and the world ends in USA borders.

By bye consoles? Game developers will end to develop for Sony or MS because in the USA there is an Apple TV with an A6 processor?
 
Oletros said:
and the world ends in USA borders.

By bye consoles? Game developers will end to develop for Sony or MS because in the USA there is an Apple TV with an A6 processor?
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Not because of that. The hardware merely enables the games to play. They'll do it because there are millions of boxes with Apple IDs activated and credit cards attached, where their games can be discovered and linked to a hundred different ways, and downloaded with the click of a button. And with tons of new potential customers who didn't previously own a game console, and would never go spend an extra $200-$700 for one.

Or an alternate idea is what if they had the OnLive system built into the AppleTV (like how they have MLB TV now)?
 
HiRez said:
Not because of that. The hardware merely enables the games to play. They'll do it because there are millions of boxes with Apple IDs activated and credit cards attached, where their games can be discovered and linked to a hundred different ways, and downloaded with the click of a button. And with tons of new potential customers who didn't previously own a game console, and would never go spend an extra $200-$700 for one.

Or an alternate idea is what if they had the OnLive system built into the AppleTV (like how they have MLB TV now)?
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Ah, and suddenly all the million of Xbox, Wii or PS/X will disappear.
 
ipedro said:
But having Apple TV as a separate box still gives the cable companies the upper hand. This is the whole problem that Jobs described at All Things D and why AppleTV as a box is still a "hobby". You can't compete with cable companies if people already have cable boxes with PVR's given to them for free. They're not going to go out and buy yet another box, even though the new price of ATV2 made it more attractive @ $99.

The way to beat the cable companies is for a customer to leave the Apple Store with a TV set, get home, plug it in, be prompted to sign in with their Apple ID and already have all their iCloud content on the tv and new content ready to be purchased directly on the tv, without ever involving the cable companies.

This will be controversial but I believe that an Apple TV won't have any of the commonly used ports. No coaxial, no RCA, no Component, and possibly no HDMI either, although Apple may relent on the latter. I expect that it will have Thunderbolt however. Apple is notorious for retiring established I/O in favour of the upcoming technology. Apple skates to where the puck is going to be.

None of the content will come from external boxes like BluRay or PVRs. All the content will come via iCloud and iTunes. Apple already offers to iTunes users all the content available to cable companies except for live tv.

Live TV fits into two categories: News and Sports. Sports are already essentially solved with ATV's already existing apps for NHL, NBA and MLB (NFL will eventually relent). Live news apps already exist on iOS. It's a matter of porting them to AppleTV. A CNN or MSBNC or Fox News (ugh) or any other 24 hour network news feed via an app is the solution here with many local stations offering their feed in iOS apps as well.

What Apple has to achieve is have customers ask these questions: Why pay for cable tv when I can pick and choose which shows I like to watch (not which channels)? Why schedule programs to be recorded on a PVR when I can simply select any of those shows and watch instantly, without scheduling anything? Why do I need a cable PVR box at all? I have iTunes and iCloud already built into my new tv!

I'm guessing that I'll probably get some negative votes from these predictions because a lot of people still hold on to the old way of doing things and want to record tv channels, but many other people including the new generation of consumers understands that content on demand is the future, not channels spewing out content on fixed schedules.

Steve Jobs quoted Henry Ford: "If I had asked costumers what they wanted, they'd ask me for a faster horse!"
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This all sounds awesome!!!! The only problem I see is advertising revenue. How will that work? The current model sees advertisers paying rates to channels for ad time based on ratings numbers. Do you change the revenue stream from ad revenue to download revenue then? If a show with the popularity of "Friends" for example is created and gets around 100 million downloads worldwide for every episode, that's 1 billion dollars in a 10 episode season at 99 cents per episode. That is a LOT of cash. Arguably more than ad revenue? I have no idea, but it is a very sizable sum of money.

Thing is, right the consumer pays, say $100 a month right now for cable. That would leave them with buying on average 100 episodes or items for TV. Day you have one show per day that you follow now. That would be about 30 episodes per month, and you'd then have 70 left if you wanted to stay at the same expense level.

Then you have Live TV and news which could cost more or less...and "premium" content like HBO series ans whatnot...you could get up to $100 a month pretty easily!

Then you have the question of whether you buy the content outright or are just renting it for one viewing or a certain time period...that could be a contentious point among the Content creators. Where would all of their current syndication ad revenue money come from? I highly doubt that the consumer would react well and adopt a system that doesn't allow reviewing or a rental system that has a time limit. However, I could be wrong!

Any thoughts?

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gghootch said:
Siri integration anyone?

'OK, I want channels 18, 24, 63, 109, 87 and the weather channel.'
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Isn't that from Back to the Future II?? :)
 
gghootch said:
It needs a decently sized microphone in an open space. I don't know about you, but my AppleTV is chucked away in a not so audio friendly corner.
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So you need a 1600$ microphone for Siri. Gotcha.

No seriously, the microphone wouldn't be on the TV, it would be on the remote anyhow. Otherwise, too much ambient noise. Heck, on my iPhone 4S, it picks up the car radio instead of my voice and the microphone is right there 1 cm away from my mouth.

Siri is not something that requires a monitor. A TV is just that, a big monitor. Any logic/control can be done with a small box. If Apple is going to do something with a full blown TV, I don't think it's something they could achieve with a small box alone.
 
Lennholm said:
We're not! The Apple TV is a great value product that works perfectly with our existing TV sets and have the potential to do all the things proposed by various people in this thread.
Now, the idea of adding a fixed display panel to it, that's stupid.
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A computer is a great value product that works perfectly with our existing monitors and have the potential to do all the things proposed by various people in various threads.

Now the idea of adding a fixed display panel to it, that's stupid. . . . . Actually it's not a stupid idea. The iMac, the MBA, the MBP, the iPad all all-in-one products with screen attached. And they sell crazy well.

So don't knock the idea on an Apple television. It might work. It might not. But it does have potential.
 
I will just say what I said in the last thread.

When the mp3/mp3-players came Apple entered the "marked" when it still was at a early stage.

When the touch stuff came they did about the same thing. They took the technology at the rigt time and made products that used it a good way and that people wanted.

The TV have been here long and was installed in most homes in the western world before Steve formed Apple.


So perhaps they will make a plain TV with a Apple logo...boring.
 
the8thark said:
Now the idea of adding a fixed display panel to it, that's stupid. . . . . Actually it's not a stupid idea. The iMac, the MBA, the MBP, the iPad all all-in-one products with screen attached. And they sell crazy well.

So don't knock the idea on an Apple television. It might work. It might not. But it does have potential.
Click to expand...

The thing is the competition in all-in-ones really isn't that big. Dell offers some models, HP does too, mostly everything is priced around the same as Apple's offerings. They also interconnect well with the rest of the world.

The TV market is quite different. It's highly competitive with cut-throat margins, even at the higher end. An Apple TV set that is just an Apple logo on a TV is just another choice. And it's a poor choice if Apple goes for high margins.

They need something to set it apart. Locking it to their eco-system won't work as many homes are invested in value add-ons like cable boxes, game consoles, A/V receivers and home theaters and the optical disc playback devices.

If Apple is getting into this, they figured something out that no one on this forum has yet and something I can't come up with either. Otherwise, it's going to remain a "hobby" or become the next iPod Hi-Fi.

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SVegard said:
I will just say what I said in the last thread.

When the mp3/mp3-players came Apple entered the "marked" when it still was at a early stage.

When the touch stuff came they did about the same thing. They took the technology at the rigt time and made products that used it a good way and that people wanted.

The TV have been here long and was installed in most homes in the western world before Steve formed Apple.
Click to expand...

What about the tablet ? The market was old, a lot of stuff had been tried. Apple came in with the right combination. This is the part we're missing, what do they see as the right combination to justify making a TV set.
 
the8thark said:
A computer is a great value product that works perfectly with our existing monitors and have the potential to do all the things proposed by various people in various threads.

Now the idea of adding a fixed display panel to it, that's stupid. . . . . Actually it's not a stupid idea. The iMac, the MBA, the MBP, the iPad all all-in-one products with screen attached. And they sell crazy well.

So don't knock the idea on an Apple television. It might work. It might not. But it does have potential.
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Well, the MBA, MBP and iPad are all portable devices so that's irrelevant. I was actually wondering about the iMac, why not just get a Mac mini and hook it to a cheaper display? Then I looked at it, turns out you can't really get a Mac mini specced comparable too an iMac, the one that comes closest is the server version and then add the display to it and it's not actually cheaper than an iMac at all, so an iMac is actually great value by it's price.

And here's the thing; there's no way Apple could compete with the established TV manufacturers on price, the margins are already razor thin and this is not something Apple wants to get into. Apple would not be able to get a TV cheaper since the panel they would use would certainly be provided by one of these TV makers
 
Legs

Well this rumor is gaining some legs. I'm firmly in the camp that says that TV margins are too tight for Apple to get the margins it wants going into this space. But maybe Apple will get economies of scale if it becomes, like the iPhone the number one item in its space. Maybe Apple's brand will be enough to convince folks to buy a really high-end TV. Most people buy kind of mediocre flat screens these days. Partly because these are huge improvements over their CRT tube TV and partly because they can't justify doubling or tripling their price for just a slightly better picture. But maybe they will if Apple tells them they should and if they get with that better picture a really good interface.

But I just have a hard time figuring out what Apple could do with its own TVs that would be all that different from adding the hockey puck. I've got one on my bedroom TV and it is so easy to throw stuff up on it from my iPhone or iPad. I'm going to get another one (and retire my Apple TV 1, in part because of all the power it uses) for my living room projector.

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KnightWRX said:
If Apple is getting into this, they figured something out that no one on this forum has yet and something I can't come up with either. Otherwise, it's going to remain a "hobby" or become the next iPod Hi-Fi.



That is where I'm coming out as well. There has to be something else that we haven't figured out. It might just be Siri interface. That would certainly be a game changer. But the thing that gives me pause is that could also be added to any TV with the current hockey puck and the iPhone 4S and with an upgraded hockey puck standing alone or maybe coupled with a remote with microphone. Why would Apple make a TV when it could probably add Siri and Apps to the hockey puck and increase the price to $200 for mad margins?
Click to expand...
 
TallManNY said:
KnightWRX said:
If Apple is getting into this, they figured something out that no one on this forum has yet and something I can't come up with either. Otherwise, it's going to remain a "hobby" or become the next iPod Hi-Fi.
Click to expand...

That is where I'm coming out as well. There has to be something else that we haven't figured out. It might just be Siri interface. That would certainly be a game changer. But the thing that gives me pause is that could also be added to any TV with the current hockey puck and the iPhone 4S and with an upgraded hockey puck standing alone or maybe coupled with a remote with microphone. Why would Apple make a TV when it could probably add Siri and Apps to the hockey puck and increase the price to $200 for mad margins?
Click to expand...

It's not just Siri. While they might add Siri to such a device, Siri can't be the only "IT" feature that justifies a TV. Let's face it, I don't want my TV constantly telling me "I don't know about that, do you want to search the web for it ?" (yes, I've yet to find Siri useful on my iPhone 4S, even though I force myself to play with it. It's yet to actually do something worthwhile for me).

Like you say, Siri is something that can be easily added to the 99$ AppleTV with the Mic placed on the remote.
 
Lennholm said:
Most TV's switch automatically to the currently active input so this isn't a problem
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Not needing to switch between things is only one benefit of integrating among many that I can think of. I'm not going to list out all my thoughts on the matter but theres definitely advantages to black boxing much of it (thats not to say you couldn't connect an XBox or whatever onto such a system if you wanted).

The one big concern is that unlike many other items Apple can sell such as their iPhone that can be sold with a two or three year shelf life (thanks to phone contracts), a TV is a longer term investment so there has to be some forward planning in regards to not leaving units obsolete after only two years.

There is of course no reason why Apple couldn't have both a TV set and keep the external unit on the market but. It'd sure make the transition easier into any market.
 
I still think in the end, Apple will NOT build its own TV. The reason is simple: why directly compete against all the established players in the market, especially LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Sony and Vizio in a market with razor-thin profit margins to start with?

Now, a much-upgraded Apple TV box that plugs into any TV with an HDMI 1.3a connector, that's a different story. What I see is a device similar in implementation to Google TV but unlike Google TV, it will have a very elegant on-screen access interface with a real touchscreen controller and will have the content deals to actually make it work delivering TV shows to the device.
 
iTunes is a non-intuitive!

Does that mean that we can expect a non-intuitive interface? Please don't let this guy lead the effort in building Apple TV!
 
iTunes needs all the help it can get first. It's bloated, inconsistent between platforms and still has problems that could be fixed. It also could do much more to curate interest groups around genres of music, movies and more.
 
In any case, does anyone know how old this ''i finally cracked it'' quote is? It could be referring to the already existing :apple:tv.
 
Don't underestimate a company with $80 Billion dollars in cash reserves. The sky's the limit with Apple TV. Think.. built in cameras, built in or modular game console, touch screen support, 3D, built in Apple iTunes ecosystem. Siri Support with built in iOS apps. Face recognition with different iOS profiles.
 
Here's hoping for a 50"+ LED bezeless TV with built-in AppleTV 3, an iSight HD camera and apps running iOS 6. Wouldn't mind some "Kinect" style games/apps and of course Siri built-in as well ;).

Who needs a touch screen when you can talk and use your hand movements(Kinect style) from your couch using your 50" "iPad". Air touch.
 
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