Apple TV+ - page 117

Ever since the first rumors creeped out that Apple intended on reinventing its “hobby” AppleTV platform to a $99, iOS-driven streaming media device, people have been assuming that the device would have to support multitouch through some sort of Magic Trackpad-esque remote. Now Dan Wiseman has come along and mocked up what he expects the new iTV remote to look like.

It’s an attractive render, but I’m going to say, “No way.” There are numerous problems with this approach, the least of which is knowing where your fingers are resting on the displayless remote in relation to the elements on the television half a room way. The only way that could work is if the iTV overlay mice-like pointers on your display to show where your fingers were in relation to the trackpad… a clumsy and decidedly un-Apple-like solution.

Then there’s the cost: if the iTV costs $99, and the Magic Trackpad costs $69, how could Apple afford to give one of these away for free with every iTV sold? They can’t. End of story.

If I had to guess, I’d say that the iTV, even if it is iOS-driven, will eschew multitouch as an input method in favor of the tried and true Apple remote. The only possibility I see is the possible ability to pair an iTV to your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to directly interact with the iTV display elements… but surely we would have seen an inkling of that functionality in the iOS betas by now if that was planned, and we haven’t. The iTV may be iOS-driven, but I wouldn’t bet on multitouch.

[via Daring Fireball]

Take this with a pinch of salt, but we’ve been tipped that Apple’s rumored $1 TV subscription service, due to be unveiled next week, is technically correct but missing an important detail.

All the internet scuttlebutt at this point converges upon one big and tasty rumor: Apple will announce a new, iOS-driven AppleTV called the iTV in September, which will cost $99 and have no local storage, but support streaming media only.

If the rumor is true, it’s a bold plan by Apple to transform their “hobby device” into a veritable cable, satellite, HTPC and Netflix killer… but if content carriers aren’t on board and the price isn’t right, even iOS isn’t going to save the new iTV from the ignominy of its predecessor.

According to Bloomberg, though, Apple’s really close to inking deals with News Corp. and Walt Disney to offer $0.99 show rentals over iTunes.

Currently, renting a show for 48 hours through iTunes costs $1.99, which is just enough to keep iTunes from being a competitive way to watch a show, especially when it’s on both the boob tube and sites like Hulu for free… albeit with ads.

$0.99 is a much easier to swallow price for renting a show. It’s a no-brainer price point that is hard to resent, and easily justifiable for most consumers if they can watch a show at their convenience, legally and without ads. It’s also an imperative price point for a streaming iTV with no local storage to reach in order to succeed.

All the stars seem to be in alignment for the iTV: the price now seems set to be right for the device itself and the content it’ll play. If Apple doesn’t announce the iTV in September, this will end up being the most disappointing rumor of the year.

We’ve been hearing rumblings of an iOS-driven AppleTV rebranded as the iTV and priced at $99 for a couple months now, and now it seems that Digg founder Kevin Rose thinks that these rumors have a lot of weight.

Although it’s not clear if Rose has any inside information, he writes: “From what I hear we should expect to see the iTV launch in September.” That would certainly confirm rumors we’ve heard that the new ‘iTV’ will debut alongside a freshly rejiggered iPod Touch at Apple’s iPod event in September, and it makes a lot of sense besides: the AppleTV, after all, has always pretty much been just a big iPod you could hook up to your television.

More to the point, Apple themselves said that their plans for a media-streaming iTunes update would likely be “more limited in scope” than people were anticipating. We all know that the music industry and film industry have been being difficult when it comes to signing licensing agreements with Apple for streaming, but television’s another story… as an institution, they are already quite comfortable with digital streaming. Could that mean that the streaming iTunes rollout will be limited in scope for everything save television at first?

Yesterday’s report that the AppleTV would be rebranded the iTV was something of a puzzlement to Brits. After all, ITV is already an extremely prominent UK television broadcaster, isn’t it? Isn’t that obviously a brand conflict?

That’s just what ITV itself is asking, according to a sketch report by the Mirror, and they are reportedly hopping mad about the rumored name change.

“You only have to look at recent problems with the iPhone 4 to see not everything Apple produces is gold dust,” said an ITV insider. “We all take our ITV brand very seriously and we’ll do everything in our power to protect it.

Yup, they went there: the low blow of Antennagate. And isn’t this all much ado about nothing? A rumored name change does not a lawsuit make.

In fact, it seems like Apple themselves are denying the name change, telling the Mirror that the names won’t be “too similar.” Unless Apple’s being patently disingenuous here —renaming the AppleTV to the iTV won’t be “too similar” to the ITV brand because it will, in fact, be identical to it — that reads like an official denial of a name change.

Or is it? According to 9to5Mac, the original Apple comment cited by the Mirror was the “the names won’t be too similar” quote above, but the Mirror article has since been updated to the standard “Apple does not comment on rumors” response.

In other words, the Mirror is a rag engaging in some shady journalism, and has silently edited its story to eliminate some out-of-character verbiosity on Apple’s part. ITV might be mad about this rumor, but Apple’s certainly not ready to comment about it yet.

Following up their earlier report that the next iteration of the AppleTV would be a $99, iOS-driven device, Engadget is now reporting that when that device arrives, it’ll be an AppleTV no longer. Come this autumn, prepare to meet the iTV.

Internally, the iTV will be very similar to the iPhone 4, right down to an A4 CPU. According to Engadget’s sources, though, the A4 won’t be able to output full high-def, 1080p video, but will max out at 720p… prompting some truly bitter internal debate in Cupertino’s halls, we’re told.

Why not? Engadget’s source says it’s because the A4 CPU can’t handle 1080p output, but that doesn’t make any sense, given the fact that the iPhone 3GS could play full HD video just fine. And why would there be any internal debate about maxing out at 720p if it was an unavoidable hardware limitation, and not a conscious choice? Are they planning the iTV’s second-generational obsolescence right out of the gate?

Shares of DVR-manufacturer TiVo jumped about 5% yesterday after rumors swirled that the company’s next tech revision might get included on the next Apple TV.

It’s a pretty silly rumor. Apple has made it clear time and time again that they want to own the core technology of their devices. Unless Apple sees fit to buy TiVo, then, I don’t see it happening. In fact, why would Apple allow television recording on the AppleTV to begin with? If the AppleTV ever makes the leap from hobby device to serious initiative, it’ll be because Apple wants to give consumers a cheap, set-top box to conduct iTunes purchases.

I just don’t see it. The most compelling rumor right now is that the next AppleTV will run iOS and stream through the cloud. I don’t think TiVo is going to become an Apple partner with the next AppleTV: I think they’ll become even more of a competitor than they are now.

File firmly in the rumor folder, but NewTeeVee is resurrecting the old iOS-driven AppleTV rumor, but with a twist: this time, they say a future $99 AppleTV will feature the ability to stream television shows for just $0.99.

On one hand, such a move would make iTunes television offerings a lot more competitively priced, especially compared to services like Netflix and Hulu Plus… but on the other hand, it seems that this would replace (on the AppleTV, at least) the current purchase scheme of $1.99 – $2.99 per episode, depending on definition.

At the end of the day, though, it all seems a bit expensive to me: $20 bucks to rent a television season is a hard sell when that’s what the DVD will cost. There’s no doubt, though, that a change in the way iTunes currently prices television shows will go a long way to making the AppleTV a lot more popular, though.

It’s easy to extrapolate from the fact that Macs don’t have Blu-Ray drives already (even as an option) that, internally, Apple is banking on digital delivery as the future of high-definition content. Now, for the first time, Steve Jobs has confirmed it in one of his characteristic email exchanges with an Apple fan.

Writing a disappointed Blu-Ray fan about the form’s absence in Apple’s line up, Jobs wrote: “Bluray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD – like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats.”

When his correspondent respond that high-end video formats had a higher uptake, citing the lack of DRM as a main driver behind Blu-Ray growth, Jobs shot down the idea.

No, free, instant gratification and convenience (likely in that order) is what made the downloadable formats take off. And the downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes) so storing purchased movies or TV shows is not an issue.

I think you may be wrong – we may see a fast broad move to streamed free and rental content at sufficient quality (at least 720p) to win almost everyone over.

I think Jobs is write that Blu-Ray is clearly an interim format, although I’m skeptical, right now, of iTunes’ dominant place in the high-definition video digital delivery ecosystem: iTunes isn’t really making the most impressive show when it comes to video compared to the likes of Netflix, and I don’t really think that’s likely to change until Apple starts taking the Apple TV more seriously than “just a hobby.” Apple needs a competitively priced and featured set-top box to really get their video strategy into play.

On the eve of WWDC, a speculative story on mp3newswire.net suggests some interesting possibilities for Apple in the video and media space given the explosive adoption of iDevices:

In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units. This number supported, through advertising, three national television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS (a fourth, Dumont, folded in 1956) and numerous local independent stations. Television was big business by the start of the 1960’s.

Now here are another set of numbers. As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild.

Our good friend Graham Bower likes to occasionally send some of his gorgeous Apple product mock-ups our way. His latest creation is a direct response to the recent rumor that the next Apple TV will be a $99 iPhone OS device that streams media to your television set, and answers the question: how do you control a multitouch operating system without a touchscreen?

The answer: make the remote a touchscreen. Graham’s idea is that Apple would ship the new Apple TV with a remote similar to the Magic Mouse, along with a built-in accelerometer.

I’ve mulled over this idea for the Apple TV’s remote before. On first blush, it seems like a great solution, but here’s the problem: the only way a device like this can work is if it introduces some sort of pointer to iPhone OS. For multitouch to work on a display divorced from the actual input device (ie: for multitouch to work when you’re not directly touching the screen on which graphical elements are displayed), you need some sort of icon to show you where your “fingers” are.

Steve Jobs’ “hobby” device might not be a hobby for long: Engadget reports that sources close to Apple claim that the Apple TV is currently getting a massive overhaul as an iPhone OS, streaming video device.

The old Apple TV was like a big iPod that connected to your set, so it’s not really a surprise that Apple’s re-imagining of Apple TV is essentially as a big iPhone connected to an HDTV. According to Engadget, the new Apple TV will have an A4 CPU, run iPhone OS and only ship with 16GB of flash storage.

Why so little room? Because Apple’s trying to do away with local storage in favor of their cloud iTunes service. The new Apple TV will be capable of streaming your media at 1080p through a web connection (or a Time Capsule, if you still want to store your media locally, but it’s all still streaming).

The biggest reveal? The price. Engadget says the new Apple TV will costs only $99. Wow.

Boxee, the innovative software solution that puts the Internet on your television, has long been among the brightest lights in the strange hinterland inhabited by users of AppleTV.

Friday, the company announced a new partnership with Wolfgang’s Vault, the virtual motherlode of live music recordings, that immediately sweetens the pot for those intrepid souls who dare to invite the Internet into the living room.

Lest one mistake Wolfgang’s Vault for a sparkly bauble dangled at aging Boomers and Hippies lost in nostalgia for the Summer of Love, the company also offers access to plenty of current music, including high-fidelity recordings from artists such as Death Cab for Cutie, Ani Difranco, Sean Hayes and Vampire Weekend.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diTpeYoqAhc&feature=player_embedded

At yesterday’s I/O event, Google officially unveiled their long rumored GoogleTV platform, a software platform that will be baked into new televisions and set-top boxes that merges cable and online video in a single service.

Essentially, Google TV takes advantage of Google’s search business by making it easier for you to find the television you want to watch, whether its pumped out by your cable provider or available on the Internet. Once you find the show you want to watch, you can choose what to do with it, whether that’s watch it, schedule an alarm or record it to your DVR.

Google TV also incorporates a Boxee like home screen, with some special functionality: integration with Android Apps. The service can even augment the television you’re watching: one particularly neat function demonstrated was the ability to automatically translate a television show’s closed caption subtitles into another language in real time.

It looks fantastic… and also makes Apple’s own “hobby” of a television platform look more anemic than ever. If Google can’t prod Apple into taking the home theater market seriously, we might as well just give up on AppleTV for good.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fyx7U7TH2bQ

This fantastic proof of concept video by the guys over at Magic Jungle Software demonstrates their forthcoming game, Chopper 2, being output from an iPad to a 42-inch HDTV, with an iPhone or iPod Touch used as the game’s controller.

It looks incredible, but perhaps more interesting is Distorted Loop’s take on the video, which is that this would be a fantastic direction for a relaunched Apple TV to take: an audio-visual, app-running console hooked up to your television that can be controlled by an iPhone, iPod Touch or even a “future low-cost touch sensitive remote control” that would ship in the box.

A product like that would not only finally realize the wasted potential of the Apple TV product line, but put Apple on track to compete with the likes of the Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as furiously as the iPhone currently competes with the Nintendo DS.

The Boxee beta is finally available for Apple TV.

Boxee is Apple TV done right. It’s a great, Net-connected, “social” media player that allows you to play video from all over the Web as well as files from file-sharing networks. It streams content from sites like Netflix, Pandora and Last.fm, and makes it easy to get entertainment recommendations from friends. It transforms the Apple TV into a truly-useful internet video device.

The beta adds a much-improved that’s easier to navigate. Boxee on Apple TV was previously available only as an early alpha version. The latest beta was released in January but was unavailable for Apple TV users — until now.

A group of Boxee users have updated the ATV-Usb creator to install the Boxee Beta.

Users who already have Boxee Alpha installed on their AppleTV can simply update Launcher and then update Boxee to install the beta, no patchstick needed.

Link to announcement on Boxee blog.

Take a screenshot tour of the Boxee beta after the jump.

Apple’s most useless-out-of-the-box product, the “hobby” Apple TV, has just gotten a minor update.

Don’t expect this to revolutionize (or even improve) the usefulness of your dust-catching Apple set-top. It’s an update so inconsequential that Apple couldn’t even be bothered to write up some change note for it.

That said, Apple TV users are piecing together that the update, once applied, is mainly to improve the way that the new Aperture 3 pro photo software suite shares images with the Apple TV over the local network, while bringing support for iPhoto and Aperture’s Places and Faces features.

If you don’t care about that, there’s another reason to tempt you top upgrade: users are reporting that the update seems to fix intermittent issues the Apple TV has when switching the HDMI output cable.

If you’re interested, you can update the firmware of your Apple TV to 3.0.2 through the “Update Software” option under Settings > General. Otherwise, we’ll be sure to shake you all awake when Apple finally gets serious about Apple TV.

LAS VEGAS — The biggest electronics show in America —  the Consumer Electronics Show (or CES for short) — opens later this week in Las Vegas, but several companies paid big bucks to preview their new wares to the hundreds of journalists at a special preview event on Tuesday evening.

And there, in the middle of the room, was this bright-red Apple TV. Yeah, a high-def, flat-panel TV shaped like an Apple. The question is, what idiot would buy a TV shaped like an Apple?

“It’s unique, it’s fun, it’s apples,” said the flak unhelpfully.

Made by an unknown-to-me Chinese company, Hannspree, perhaps someone thought it might be mistaken for a real Apple TV, made by, you know, Apple? It has a remarkably Apple-like logo on the front (see the pic after the jump). And it does remind you of the old toilet-seat iBooks of old; the transluscent plastic ones with the carrying handle.

But the company was also displaying TVs covered in fur that looked like Polar and Panda bears, so who knows?

Not all boats float on a rising tide. That seems to be the lesson Apple is learning with its Apple TV, a device analysts say has not benefited from increased sales of the company’s other products, including iMacs and iPods and even the lowly Magic Mouse. Apple TV sales rose just 10 percent in 2009, despite an upgraded Apple TV 3.0 OS.

The minor growth was likely due to 2008 being a slow year, not because the streaming device made any inroads into a hard-to-define market, NPD Group vice president of industry analysis Steven Baker said.

Gizmodo toured Apple’s just-opened retail store on the Upper West Side, and calls it a “temple” to the company’s products.

I call it a temple because the architecture conveys a nearly religious aesthetic, a place to worship Apple, beyond any other Apple store you’ve ever been to. The top floor’s a vast open space, enclosed by spartan stone walls which support a massive glass ceiling. The rows of tables in the main room feel like pews.

I can’t tell you – and the pictures can’t show you – how utterly open and expansive the room feels. Apple says it has more demo units than any other store in the world. To give you an idea of the space, the walls are 45 feet tall, and could fit 11 Apple 5th Avenue Cubes inside. It’s the spareness that’s breathtaking. It’s cold. Not literally, but the stone walls, the glass, the sheer space rob it of any sense of warmth or feeling. The only sense of life in room is the products. It’s a temple to them, really.

More pictures after the jump.

As anticipated, Apple has updated the Apple TV software to 3.0, which brings a new interface and home screen with quick access to favorite content. Instead of drilling down to get to a recently-rented movie, it’s now accessible right off the home screen, as are favorite TV Shows, podcasts and YouTube movies.

The update also adds support for iTunes LPs and iTunes Extras, as well as Genius Mixes and internet radio.

The update likely breaks Boxee, the unsanctioned internet media player that actually makes the Apple TV useful, but internet radio is a welcome addition.

To support the new Apple TV software, Apple has also updated iTunes to 9.0.2. As well as being compatible with the Apple TV 3.0 software, the update adds a new “dark” viewing option in Grid View. The iTunes update also once again breaks Palm Pre syncing.

The iPod. The iPhone. Apple TV.

One of these things is not like the other. I’ll give you one guess which one I’m talking about.

Since its inception, Apple TV has been little more than a half-baked idea that appeals only to a niche market. Even Steve Jobs says Apple TV is only “a hobby.”

For a company known for pumping out game-changing products, this is very out of character. Apple TV is great at what it does, but it could be so much more.

A major update of the Apple TV may be in the works.

Apple has slashed the price of the 160GB Apple TV to $229 (from $329) and discontinued the 40GB model. Meanwhile, it looks like Apple’s new iTunes LP — a new format for multimedia music bundles — is designed for high-resolution output on the AppleTV.

The iTunes LP content is output at 1,280-by-720, the native resolution of an Apple TV when hooked to a high-definition TV. Apple’s new iTunes Extras (bonus movie material usually included on bonus DVDs and now available for download on iTunes) is also designed to be output at the same high resolution. While this is natural for movie content, it’s a curious choice for music content, albeit multimedia music content, which might naturally be formatted for playing on computers and laptops.

Which all points to a major update for the Apple TV in the near future. The AppleTV hardware has remained essentially unchanged since its introduction, although it has received a couple of software upgrades.

The 160GB model is the only configuration of the Apple TV now on offer. The 40GB Apple TV was previously priced at $229.

Steve Jobs usually refers to the AppleTV as a “hobby,” and not a real business. The choice of movies for the device on the iTunes store remains relatively limited.

Apple TV on Amazon.

If the TV industry doesn’t invent a digital business that customers want, it risks an “iTunes moment,” when Apple took hold of the online music business, a Microsoft exec said.

“Realistically. I think the industry has about two to three years to adapt or face its iTunes moment. And it will take at least that long for media brands to build credible, truly digital brands,” Ashley Highfield, managing director of consumer and online at Microsoft UK, told the Guardian.

Highfield gave the gloom and doom prediction today as the keynote speaker at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival.

Answering the inevitable question of how to make money from these new ventures, he said “media companies need to embrace controversial targeted advertising techniques, such as behavioral targeting based on users’ web viewing habits, with the ad inventory going into an auction-style model similar to the system Google operates.”

Interesting he didn’t name Apple TV — speculated “dead” as Sony and Microsoft entered the market last year — as a specific threat, but spoke of the success of iTunes.

In 2007, a Forrester analyst said both iTunes and Apple TV were “dead ends” that would be “eclipsed by television and cable networks will quickly shift their content to free ad-supported streaming.”

Ha. I tried out Apple TV for about a week while house sitting this summer.  The interface was nice, the remote control cool. I’d still rather keep the cheapo PVR with a slightly wheezy fan a friend rigged up — because, while it’s an ugly little box and the remote control works about 40% of the time, there’s no DRM.

Via the Guardian

UPDATE: The WSJ has corrected its story to say it is “not clear” Apple will attend CES in 2010. However, we were told in January that Apple will attend. “It’s a done deal,” our source said.

Apple has definitely ditched Macworld in favor of the giant Consumer Electronics Show, the Wall Street Journal reports — confirming news first reported by Cultofmac back in January (and later by Apple Insider).

“Apple plans to attend the show’s 2010 version, marking the first time in memory the Cupertino, Calif., consumer-electronics giant will be there,” said the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

The WSJ says that Steve Jobs has been invited to be a CES keynote speaker but hasn’t returned calls. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Intel CEO Paul Otellini are on tap to deliver the speeches at the show.

Neither Apple nor CES has made any official announcements. Apple last year said it would no longer attend trade shows, saying it could better reach its customers through its retail stores.

CES is held in January in Las Vegas, often conflicting with Macworld. It’s a giant zoo, but nonetheless attracts most of the world’s consumer electronics makers, who show off their wares for the upcoming year.

Apple is now more of a consumer electronics company now than a computer company, making CES a much better fit than MacWorld, the source told CoM back in January.