Wall Street views new Apple TV as small step, not living room revolution - Page 2

I thought you were going to say it was the fault of bootleggers. No such luck I guess.

While that's sort of true, in a limited fashion, it's a misleading view of what Apple is and has been. Yes, they've always sold hardware, but it's always been hardware with tremendous value added via sofware. One could argue that they are primarily a software company that subsidizes its development costs with hardware sales, but that would be an inaccurate picture as well. They are what they are and what that is increasingly does not fit into simple categories.

These analysts' rant isn't my cup of tea.

The BBC have already announced that iPlayer will be available for iPhone/iPad later this year. I assume you will be able to download iPlayer content directly to your iPhone/iPad then stream it using Airplay & AppleTV to your TV.

Apple make their big profit through sales of software, media and phones. Computer hardware accounts for very little of their revenue overall, as can be see in quarterly sales figures.

Apple TV will be a living room revolution when we connect a USB video cam and apple lets us use FaceTime. Imagine FaceTime from couch, Remote Home Monitoring, and possible games in the next version.

Bottom line FaceTime from living room revolutionizes Apple TV. I bet people will buy an new USB based video cam from Apple from just another $79.99

Goutham

I think it won't take very long before the software updates start. Support for a blue-tooth (or iPad) keyboard input (especially useful when trying to input search text in youtube), BBC iPlayer and other apps streaming directly to the box. Not forgetting the companies out there who provide great alternative operating systems for this thing.

I mentioned this a while back - I reckon a return of the external isight camera, but fully wireless this time, no need for the USB cable.

According to the article above..... "He also believes that 70 percent of the company's gross profits in calendar year 2011 will come from two products: the iPhone and the iPad".

That's the hardware I was referring to, not computers.

It still comes to nowhere near $152

So Wu wants to see 1024-by-768-pixel apps on a 50 inch screen? Maybe he should go back to college. The ATV is a revolution to me because I just bought one! As a result I'm dumping Time Warner's DVR service and subscribing to Netflix. All because of a black $99 hunk of plastic called Apple TV.

It still comes nowhere near $152

It's still incorrect to think of them as (primarily) a hardware company. It's as much the software and services that make that hardware desirable as it is the hardware itself.

It has an A4 chipset and I'd suspect a chopped-up version of iOS. My thoughts are that this device is a few steps away from being a gaming console or at the very least able to stream a game to the TV from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. How much RAM do these devices have?

AppleTV is a huge disappointment to me for few reasons:

no 1080p (i understand the streaming bandwidth issues, but for folks that have in their libraries 1080p content (home movies/blu-ray rips))

no external drive support via USB ( I don't want my Mac on at all times and if I leave the house with my laptop my family cannot watch anything)

Ability to play few more codecs. Specially VideoTS so I don't have to go through the huge hassle of transcoding everything (DVDs) on handbrake to play on AppleTV

Now either I go to a much more expensive and overkill route (MacMini) or will consider boxes like WDTV, Roku or Boxee. The problem with those boxes is the lack of integration between iTunes and iDevices.

Lame Apple. \

With AirPlay you can watch any video from an iDevice on TV.

What if they don't have any iDevice?
I just feel is silly Apple does not allow the USB port to connect to a external drive and have the media stored locally or have a drive connect to Airport Extreme so it can grab content that way.

Fair point. Technically Apple makes most of it's profits from hardware but we wouldn't buy the hardware if there wasn't great software to use on it. I only wish Apple made more software products to buy. I use iWork, iLife, Safari and plan to upgrade to Aperture and FinalCut next year. Apart Filemaker and Logic there isn't much else. For example I would love to see a professional web design and publishing application from Apple to compete with Adobe and Quark.

VideoTS isn't a codec. It's just the layout structure of a DVD. I'm guessing you just flatly copied .VOB files from the DVD to your computer? The problem then is the container, not the codec. The codec is actually perfectly compatible, just the only systems intended to ever read .VOB files are DVD players. Converting the container into, say, .mp4 should be relatively quick through Handbrake if the data is already on the harddrive, since it won't be limited by drive read speeds and there's no transcoding to be done.

Also, Apple is lame because they didn't make a device that caters to your exact needs? If you want an always-available media server, TV isn't it. It's just a device meant to stream media from other machines to your TV. I recommend getting something like a D-Link DNS-323 NAS (awesome little machine) for always-on storage and media sharing (don't know if it'll share to TV, but does to iTunes, Xbox 360, and PS3).

How many homes will have Apple TV and not an iDevice?

Apple TV probably isn't for you if you aren't waist deep in the Apple/iTunes ecosystem already. However, that doesn't make it a bad product for those who it is targeted at, those people who are waistdeep in the Apple/iTunes ecosystem.

Jobs specifically said that people didn't want to deal with storage, and believe it or not, he is right about that for a large portion of the population. That's why it has no local storage or offer the ability to hook up a usb drive. If it did, those people would use that storage and be frustrated when it ran out.

I would agree that you should be able to access drives attached to an airport extreme (or NAS in general) instead of your computer though.

Don't need Apps for the Apple TV it's all about AirPlay (emphasis on "Play"). Once developers have access to AirPlay we'll be beaming games from our iPhone or iPads to our Apple TV using the iOS devises as the controllers.

It's possible. Most of their software is part of the "package" they offer consumers, but, there are some exceptions, like Final Cut. (Although, one could think of that as part of a "pro" package.) I don't think they'll get into the pro web development racket just to be in it, but if they see it as a strategic direction -- e.g., to accelerate HTML5 adoption -- beneficial to their overall goals, it could happen.

And, it only looks like they make their profits from hardware, since that's how they report them. One could say that means they see themselves as a hardware company (just to argue against myself for a moment), but I think it's mostly just an artifact of how they present what they sell to the public.

Look I have iPhone and two Macs. Planning later to get an iPad.
I am not sure my requests are such a big deal. The other boxes out there that compete with AppleTV offers these features and they have similar price points.
My feeling is that Apple crippled the device either because of studios request or they do not want the AppleTV to compete with MacMini as HTPC.

Yes, but who!?

Nope,
Usually I use MactheRipper or Ripit.
It's just a lot of labor then to transcode all those DVDs using Handbrake. For someone who has more than 200 DVDs is a nightmare, but I guess there are rewards for the labor.
My understanding is if I use the MacMini as HTPC I can just use VideoTS and play movies through Plex or XMBC. That's really a huge benefit if it is indeed true.

Shows how ignorant Wall Street analysts are. In my opinion, the new AppleTV and AirPlay were by far the biggest game changes announces yesterday. Let's see what Apple introduced yesterday...

- A reintroducion of the 2nd gen shuffle, admitting they made a mistake with the 3rd gen
- A crippled nano that has fewer features than the previous model with a gimmicky touch screen
- A touch that introduces nothing new relative to the already available iPhone
- A new way to consume your content by being able to stream it from your iDevice to an HDTV
- TV show rentals which make far more financial sense than Apple's previous options

Only the last two items are anything new. AirPlay makes your content portable and sharable (take your iPad to your friends house and watch your movies/TV shows on their TV). And TV rentals (along with Netflicks streaming) marks a big shift in Apple's emphasis on how people consume video content and Apple's willingness to partner with an iTunes competitor. They are putting more emphasis on getting the hardware into living rooms and not just using the hardware to sell content. That last thing has been a flaw in their previous AppleTV attempts.


Read the Tech Specs on Apple's website. Same codecs. I wish they'd at least support the standard QT codecs so I didn't have to transcode my various video files (not pirated) and also be able to play video not in iTunes (ie, access my Mac via file sharing). Another nice-to-have would be the ability to play video_ts from ripped DVDs like FrontRow can play.


Not likely any time soon. I don't think any iDevice has the processing power to encode an HD video stream in realtime. Transmitting an already encoded video file is one thing, creating that stream on the fly is entirely different. Audio, sure it could be done; but not for video.


The current AirTunes/Airport Express combo transmits lossless and does exactly what you want. Any transmitted audio is first encoded into Apple Lossless and sent to the Express. So if you start with AIFF or Apple Lossless and you connect to the Express's digital out, your stereo is receiving an exact copy of your lossless music. Obviously, if you start with an MP3 or AAC file you are limited to the quality of that encoding. The new AppleTV has a digital audio out. If Apple is still using AppleLossless for transmitting audio, you should still get the same results.

So doesn't this now make appletv very portable?

Can't I take this to a friends/parents house, quickly plug into their tv, pop into my Netflix account and watch a movie?

Hook into theirs or my computer/device and see photos, listen to music?

I don't think Apple agrees with your opinion. Go to apple.com and they have a store button, iPod button, Mac button, iPhone button but no Appletv button. Apple considers it second fiddle.

It has? I must have missed that. You mean optical one, not HDMI right?

Some friends might prefer you not mess around behind their flat panel TV and their neatly organized wires, then enable the extra input on their TV. Might be easier just let them know you are coming over to watch TV a movie couple of days ahead of time and they can have Netflix ship the disc.

I love how you've referred to these pirates as "Power Users"

I spend all day integrating systems that aren't meant to go together, frankly when I get home I like something that takes little effort to get working, I've standardized my stuff years ago to make this even easier.

Yeah that single HDMI cable is so difficult to switch around.

The thing takes literally minutes to set up.

While I would agree that 720p is sufficient for most purposes, but there are two instances where I would find 1080p useful. First, my DSLR shoots 1080p video. So I do have a legit and legal source of 1080p content. Having to convert that to 720p would be a major PIA. Although, since the Ethernet connection is limited to 10/100 (no gigabit), I'm not sure I'd be able to stream the high bitrate file anyway.

The other time it would be useful is viewing photos. Even a low megapixel photo is more than 1080p resolution. It would be nice to be able to view my photos at the full resolution my HDTV is capable of.

My opinion is that I think they are right calling it a step in the right direction. It's not there yet, but it could be, I think reasonably easily.

Firstly, we need to just accept that it's not going to appeal to everyone. Some people are never going to get over the 1080p thing, so just accept it - this is not the device for you. Some people are always going to want to play discs, so this is not going to be for you.

What I think Apple have got right is it's cheap, and I would hope can be expanded with software changes with ease. Assuming this is iOS based, you can easily see how some of the promise that we've had with sports for a long time could finally come true, in terms of interactivity. MLB at Bat on the iPad is way better than watching the game on Comcast SportsNet. NHL Centre Ice has some great augmented features. If things like this can now become a reality on the big (TV) screen, this could start to be a real hit.

I think the clever thing is making it only $99. If they can shift enough of them because it's cheap, hopefully it will hit a tipping point whereby the content owners feel the need to act, and it could start to spiral.

Good luck to them - it's nice to see someone trying to break the status quo.

Incorrect. DVDs are MPEG2. AppleTV does not support that codec. You'd have to transcode.


FrontRow included with every Mac also plays video_ts. I've put all my DVDs onto an external drive and put an alias to the folder they are in inside the Movies folder in your home directory. Then just navigate to the movie you want to play from within FrontRow and press play. You'll have full access to all the DVDs menus and extras features just as if you'd put the DVD into your mini's optical drive.


http://images.apple.com/appletv/imag...e220100901.jpg

Sweet! This is getting interesting. It could turn out to be the best and cheapest music player out there.

One thing seriously lacking from the previous Apple TV was a visualizer. If you're going to play music in an HT system a visualizer is a must. Sitting in front of 58 inch plasma chillin' to music with a glass of wine could be so much better than just having a screen saver or front row album covers to look at. I think it ads a lot to the 'sit, listen, veg' experience of unwinding and watching the dancing lights from disco brick and other 3rd party visualizers through iTunes.

Has anyone heard anything about a visualizer with the new AppleTV?

Yes it is easy to switch around. The hard thing would be to talking me into letting someone mess with my connections. Would be easier for me to come over to your house.

Never tried it, but Vudu allegedly offers streaming 1080p video, with Dolby 5.1 audio too:


4.5 Mb/s is commonly available, even in the US.

Wal-Mart owns Vudu, which would seem to indicate expectations of eventual widespread adoption.

Edit: Not to imply 720p is inadequate by any means. For most people, it's "good enough". Examine Apple's product history and you'll find that's a recurring characteristic. Also, bear in mind Apple never emphasizes feature-richness in its products right away - I expect we'll see 1080p in a future update.

What I don't understand why HBO and Showtime is not on board for $0.99 TV Show Rentals? You would think that something like this they be first in line!