Why? If it has a ATSC/QAM tuner one can watch OTA transmissions over the cable coax. That eliminates the need for another box plus an antenna.
So you're argument is we should add everything that could help eliminate an additional box no matter how infrequently something might be used? Do you know what percentage of people who are buying 70"+ 4K UHD TVs are using their coax for anything, not just OTA. If you have a modern set you're most likely to be used a cable box, sat box, and/or media extender appliance connected via HDMI. If, you are one of those rare people that want to grab OTA for a 70"+ 4K UHD set then why not allow them to do so with a cheap coax to HDMI converter so that all TV going forward can be a little ess expensive, less complex, and be a little smaller as a result of requiring this archaic and seldom used port interface?
How else do you think cord cutters are getting the OTA channels? With more and more people eliminating their cable subscriptions the need for a built-in tuner in only going to increase.
Why? If it has a ATSC/QAM tuner one can watch OTA transmissions over the cable coax. That eliminates the need for another box plus an antenna.
My Sony TV has an ATSC/QAM tuner, but I can't watch OTA transmissions over the cable coax. My building has an antenna that plugs into the set and I can watch those transmissions, but I have to switch inputs via the remote control. I don't get what OTA transmissions have to do with the cable coax.
That's odd, because that's exactly how I get my local OTA broadcasts. I have a Vizio TV, and connected to it I have a PS3, and a Roku. I don't want another box, and I'd eliminate the Roku, but the disc drive on the PS3 runs even when I'm using it as a streamer which is quite annoying.
Could someone knowledgeable 'splain to me the advantages of console gaming vs iPad gaming in some sort of reasonable priority??
I just don't understand!
My grandson has a PS4 and it seems nothing special to me!
A8 gaming is limited by the graphics processing power of the PowerVR Series 6XT GX6650 GPU, which while very impressive, is still a battery powered device that can't match current generation mains powered desktop/laptop GPUs. My MBPR has an Nvida GT 650M which is a 45W device more or less comparable to what's in an Xbox One. The PS4 GPU is more powerful still, and probably has on the order of 24 times the graphics processing power of a GX6650 GPU.
The other big difference is console gaming is controlled via hand-held controllers which yield a far more versatile and involving experience vs touching a screen.
In this video, you can see the progression in graphics and CPU processing power from the PS1 through the PS2 and PS3 to the current generation PS4. Keep in mind that GX6650 based gaming would probably be somewhere between the PS2 and PS3, but would require a controller to have anything like the game play feel, involvement, control precision, responsiveness and feedback. You need to select the full HD 1080P option and view fullscreen.
Thanks for that video and the explanation.
I compared the YT video on my iMac 5K (Running ElCap) at 1080P to Real Racing 3 on my iPad Air 2 2048x1536 Retina (Running iOS9).
It was hard to judge the YT video because the PS4 portion was quite dark.
I concentrated on the obvious like the reflections and images in the side and rear view mirrors. I also concentrated on the background -- the trees, rocks, structures and sky ...
To my view the iPad Air 2 was considerably better than the PS4 YT video. I suppose to be fair(er) I should load the YT video and run in on the Mac.
Still, the iPad Air 2 is quite good.
The point about the controller is well taken -- my grandson's PS4 has a controller with a joystick. He captured some of his games,, downloaded them to thumb drive, and edited them in FCPX on the iMac 5K.
The iPad Air 2 looks better than these too???
FWIW, Last month I finished my 2nd eye cataract surgery and have better than 20--20 vision.
Possibly, the superior image quality is because the iPad, display, iOS and App are all designed for each other and to exploit the Melal APIs.
Oddly, while I was running Real Racing 3 on the iPad -- I had your video running PIP on it too!
If it is as good as it sounds, it'll be slavishly and blatantly copied in no time, and soon afterwards, the meme will be "oh, Apple didn't create this, it was all obvious." Sigh.
And we know who they'll be in this Forum. No need to name names.
That's a good point - so why not head it off now... Let's invite those people to provide a list right here and right now of all the "obvious" features that should be part of the next TV box product. Include features that are "obvious" to include in the physical product itself, the remote, the on-screen interface, the organization of content and the overall capabilities of the product. The "obvious" features should be those that do not exist in any shipping product today, but that are OBVIOUS upgrades/improvements to ALL manufacturers.
And here's the best part... If the new Apple box introduces something that is NOT on your list - you lose the right to claim it was "obvious" after the fact.
I don't expect to see any replies to this post because the majority of the people here who would claim "it was obvious" don't actually have a clue what "obvious" actually is until they are shown by Apple or some other innovative company.
So anyhow...here's your opportunity...now put up or shut up!
If it is as good as it sounds, it'll be slavishly and blatantly copied in no time, and soon afterwards, the meme will be "oh, Apple didn't create this, it was all obvious." Sigh.
And we know who they'll be in this Forum. No need to name names.
That's a good point - so why not head it off now... Let's invite those people to provide a list right here and right now of all the "obvious" features that should be part of the next TV box product. Include features that are "obvious" to include in the physical product itself, the remote, the on-screen interface, the organization of content and the overall capabilities of the product. The "obvious" features should be those that do not exist in any shipping product today, but that are OBVIOUS upgrades/improvements to ALL manufacturers.
And here's the best part... If the new Apple box introduces something that is NOT on your list - you lose the right to claim it was "obvious" after the fact.
I don't expect to see any replies to this post because the majority of the people here who would claim "it was obvious" don't actually have a clue what "obvious" actually is until they are shown by Apple or some other innovative company.
So anyhow...here's your opportunity...now put up or shut up!
ApplePlay with ApplePay -- Wave your Apple Watch, iDevice or AppleTV Remote to buy content or in-app purchases.
The launch of new Apple TV hardware may have been delayed from WWDC to Apple's Sept. 9 event to allow the company more time to polish its interface, one that will allegedly "blow away" current, "junky" smart TV interfaces.
Interfaces can be COPIED. Just ask Samsung and HTC who are chomping at the bits to copy Apple TV.
The interface won't be make Apple TV successful.
What will make Apple TV successful is the whole product:
* the hardware - e.g. controllers, CPU, storage space, connectivity options, ACCESSORIES
* the software - the operating system, interface, ease of use, ease of navigation
* the services - movies, iTunes, Apple music, Apple TV channels, HomeKit, etc.
* the apps - GAMES, NetFlix, Comcast to Go, HBO, ESPN, etc.
* the experience of using the whole product.
It is the whole ecosystem that makes Apple TV successful. And Ecosystems are NOT easily copied.
Currently, Apple TV has no ecosystem. It is NOT the center of anything. It is a peripheral to Macs and iOS devices.
Hopefully the AppleTV can create its own TAB on Apple.com - placing it on equal footing with Mac, iPad, iPhone, Watch and Music.
If Apple can elevate AppleTV into its own category, then Apple TV will be successful. If it remains a peripheral, it will be a meh product.
I compared the YT video on my iMac 5K (Running ElCap) at 1080P to Real Racing 3 on my iPad Air 2 2048x1536 Retina (Running iOS9).
It was hard to judge the YT video because the PS4 portion was quite dark.
I concentrated on the obvious like the reflections and images in the side and rear view mirrors. I also concentrated on the background -- the trees, rocks, structures and sky ...
To my view the iPad Air 2 was considerably better than the PS4 YT video.
Real Racing is owned by EA now, which is a big publisher. EA makes a lot of money from mobile at ~$500m per year. This is 1/3 of their combined revenue for next-gen and 1/3 of combined for last-gen. EA has the resources to invest in high quality titles and they are one of the top mobile publishers. Unfortunately, they are not representative of the vast majority of mobile games. Racing games are also easier to make look nice because a car doesn't move very much relative to the environment.
If you were to compare Tomb Raider, the one on XBox looks like:
[VIDEO]
[VIDEO]
On iOS, it looks like:
[VIDEO]
[VIDEO]
It's not all about graphics though. Mobile developers make games more like arcade-style games and immersive games are either very old games or downgraded. The revenue model makes the biggest difference because for console games, buyers know they have a reputation for quality and they can pretty much be guaranteed a 10-20 hour gameplay experience. With mobile games they go for addictive gaming. Old-school games like Breakout, Tetris, Space Invaders had basic mechanics where you do a basic action repeatedly. This can be entertaining but it's not immersive. This is the reputation mobile games have and so nobody wants to pay upfront for them, not even $0.99.
High-end games take a lot of money to make and the games that are making money on mobile are the ones that do microtransactions. They get millions of players paying small amounts like $1/month on in-game lives, gems or coins. To each player it's a small amount but the scale makes it very profitable. This model doesn't work well for immersive games. In an arcade, you expect to be prompted to insert another coin to play another round. If you go to the cinema, you don't expect to be charged every 5 minutes while you watch the movie.
Putting the graphics quality aside, the exact same games can be published on any modern platform. The sticking point is the revenue and developers just can't invest the people time. There was a games developer who was frustrated with the state of mobile games called Ryan Payton, he was the director for Halo 4 and producer for Metal Gear Solid 4. He then decided to finance his own mobile studio Camouflaj mostly using Kickstarter:
The aim was to bring console quality games to mobile and he used the episodic model to allow a low price per episode and spread out the development. He got $0.5m from Kickstarter. There's an interview here where he talks about the experience and feelings about mobile games:
They have 20-30 staff so $30k each per year would be $600-900k staff costs per year. They'd have burned through the Kickstarter cash in less than a year and would rely on sales of episode 1 to fund development of episode 2 etc. He refers to the kind of games he makes as 'narrative experiences'. Most high-end console games are of this style where there's a storyline with characters. Console games are often shooters too, which control really badly on mobile because there's no shoulder buttons.
He mentioned how his girlfriend had no problem paying 5,000 Yen ($40) when they lived in Japan for a DS/3DS game but after owning the iPad for a while, she wasn't prepared to pay 4000 Yen ($30) any more. People feel ripped off at game prices but it's because of the development costs. If a game takes 4 years to make, they have to recoup 4 years of staff costs.
iOS should allow publishers to lower the price because there's more users but there's also more competition so it doesn't always work out that you can be profitable selling a game for $5 or less on mobile.
Buyers define the market and on mobile, they are overwhelmingly choosing cheap (free) over good. This simply makes high investment game development unsustainable. Camouflaj has now teamed up with GungHo games, which is the company that made over $1b on iOS from a puzzle game and Camouflaj have made the PC their primary focus for episode 4 of Republique, which they will then have to port back to mobile:
What I can see happening is that as time goes on, big publishers will be able to cash in on old high-end franchises by porting to mobile years after the initial release on consoles. But until there's a more reliable revenue model, they can't do first-run titles. Even if they could seamlessly publish to all devices, they can't lower the price just for mobile because there's the risk that buyers opt for the cheapest version yet don't increase significantly in volume and they go out of business.
Not everyone thinks that high quality games are necessary i.e mashing a button over and over can be fun but it's like saying why bother making movies when we have TV and Youtube. Billions of people watch TV and Youtube just fine. You know the answer to this, people like high quality experiences and are willing to pay more for them just as people pay more for Apple products than ones that are good enough. What is going to help is the commoditization of game development tools. High quality engines and asset reuse helps lower production costs. Inexpensive motion capture, crowdsourced assets like voice actors can help too.
They don't know how to design large scale viewing products. That's why they leave sound for someone else to solve. The TV product should include superb sound quality without adding on anything. That is not the case for any modern TV available today and I think it's a shame. That you cannot get superb sound quality out of the box is a shame, shame, shame.
People are going around thinking this is the way things are, but it doesn't have to be this way. It really seems like literally not one of the designers of these TVs actually watches content on them. It's like the Hollywood big shots—they don't even watch movies.
Phased Array Audio might solve this, although low frequencies would still be an issue I suppose;
Our shared iTunes Library is 5.35 TeraByte and resides on a 28 TeraByte RAID -- with various parts backed up elsewhere.
I would like to see the new AppleTV with a reasonable-sized SSD for active storage and cross-loading. Then have an automatic percolate-up, trickle down interface with the Cloud -- where the files would be archived and distributed across many servers, for reliable access.
That way, the stuff we are currently using is on the AppleTV SSD and everything else can be quickly streamed/cached from the Cloud.
This could use iCloud for the server, but does not need to.
I think this is one of the major reasons that Apple acquired FoundationDB. FDB can run on any 'Nix servers and is designed to be distributed.
So, our personal, encrypted files could be spread across tens or hundreds of servers from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, etc. -- or any combination.
Apple could offer a local, Mac version to provide the same capability to manage a local copy of the files -- it's just another distribution point.
Other than the talent working at FoundationDB I'm trying to figure out the reason for acquiring it. NeXT and later Apple created Enterprise Object Frameworks and Craig Federighi and Jeff Martin were two of the principal architects. My friends are now one Senior VP of Apple and Jeffrey left Apple early to found ReportMill.
A lot of the top architects from NeXT and later Apple left to work with Bertrand's Cloud project still under wraps entitled UpThere.
The lack of genius in that area may be the principal reason for acquiring this company. We never lacked for this skill at NeXT and Apple. Still the dumbest move Steve made was move WebObjects from ObjC to Java and to shit can EOF.
CoreObject/CoreData is nothing compard to the power of EOF and RDBMS when it was being designed. We also had DBKit that built a Soups project of live group editing that never saw the light of day.
Interfaces can be COPIED. Just ask Samsung and HTC who are chomping at the bits to copy Apple TV.
The interface won't be make Apple TV successful.
What will make Apple TV successful is the whole product:
* the hardware - e.g. controllers, CPU, storage space, connectivity options, ACCESSORIES
* the software - the operating system, interface, ease of use, ease of navigation
* the services - movies, iTunes, Apple music, Apple TV channels, HomeKit, etc.
* the apps - GAMES, NetFlix, Comcast to Go, HBO, ESPN, etc.
* the experience of using the whole product.
It is the whole ecosystem that makes Apple TV successful. And Ecosystems are NOT easily copied.
Currently, Apple TV has no ecosystem. It is NOT the center of anything. It is a peripheral to Macs and iOS devices.
Hopefully the AppleTV can create its own TAB on Apple.com - placing it on equal footing with Mac, iPad, iPhone, Watch and Music.
If Apple can elevate AppleTV into its own category, then Apple TV will be successful. If it remains a peripheral, it will be a meh product.
However, Implementations are unique and the hallmark of Patents.
They would then need to have a UI that can be controlled with a controller and a remote. But how do you buy things using a controller or type characters/numbers? Over 90% of all App Store revenue is from in-app purchases and ads. The biggest earning apps look like the following...
Apple will get these guys to port to the ATV. Will it be IAP driven. Yes. Will this upset big game developers and traditional console game devs. No. They'll just change their model or ignore the platform. That model grew over the history of the iPhone and allowed game houses to make more money than up front. It was their response to the "let everything be free" brigade and although annoying it works. Apple has lots of big game devs on the iOS platform as it is.
I also don't think Apple would want people to be switching between two control methods.
They already have an API for this. They encourage it.
I compared the YT video on my iMac 5K (Running ElCap) at 1080P to Real Racing 3 on my iPad Air 2 2048x1536 Retina (Running iOS9).
It was hard to judge the YT video because the PS4 portion was quite dark.
I concentrated on the obvious like the reflections and images in the side and rear view mirrors. I also concentrated on the background -- the trees, rocks, structures and sky ...
To my view the iPad Air 2 was considerably better than the PS4 YT video.
Real Racing is owned by EA now, which is a big publisher. EA makes a lot of money from mobile at ~$500m per year. This is 1/3 of their combined revenue for next-gen and 1/3 of combined for last-gen. EA has the resources to invest in high quality titles and they are one of the top mobile publishers. Unfortunately, they are not representative of the vast majority of mobile games. Racing games are also easier to make look nice because a car doesn't move very much relative to the environment.
High-end games take a lot of money to make and the games that are making money on mobile are the ones that do microtransactions. They get millions of players paying small amounts like $1/month on in-game lives, gems or coins. To each player it's a small amount but the scale makes it very profitable. This model doesn't work well for immersive games. In an arcade, you expect to be prompted to insert another coin to play another round. If you go to the cinema, you don't expect to be charged every 5 minutes while you watch the movie.
Putting the graphics quality aside, the exact same games can be published on any modern platform. The sticking point is the revenue and developers just can't invest the people time. There was a games developer who was frustrated with the state of mobile games called Ryan Payton, he was the director for Halo 4 and producer for Metal Gear Solid 4. He then decided to finance his own mobile studio Camouflaj mostly using Kickstarter:
The aim was to bring console quality games to mobile and he used the episodic model to allow a low price per episode and spread out the development. He got $0.5m from Kickstarter. There's an interview here where he talks about the experience and feelings about mobile games:
They have 20-30 staff so $30k each per year would be $600-900k staff costs per year. They'd have burned through the Kickstarter cash in less than a year and would rely on sales of episode 1 to fund development of episode 2 etc. He refers to the kind of games he makes as 'narrative experiences'. Most high-end console games are of this style where there's a storyline with characters. Console games are often shooters too, which control really badly on mobile because there's no shoulder buttons.
He mentioned how his girlfriend had no problem paying 5,000 Yen ($40) when they lived in Japan for a DS/3DS game but after owning the iPad for a while, she wasn't prepared to pay 4000 Yen ($30) any more. People feel ripped off at game prices but it's because of the development costs. If a game takes 4 years to make, they have to recoup 4 years of staff costs.
iOS should allow publishers to lower the price because there's more users but there's also more competition so it doesn't always work out that you can be profitable selling a game for $5 or less on mobile.
Buyers define the market and on mobile, they are overwhelmingly choosing cheap (free) over good. This simply makes high investment game development unsustainable. Camouflaj has now teamed up with GungHo games, which is the company that made over $1b on iOS from a puzzle game and Camouflaj have made the PC their primary focus for episode 4 of Republique, which they will then have to port back to mobile:
What I can see happening is that as time goes on, big publishers will be able to cash in on old high-end franchises by porting to mobile years after the initial release on consoles. But until there's a more reliable revenue model, they can't do first-run titles. Even if they could seamlessly publish to all devices, they can't lower the price just for mobile because there's the risk that buyers opt for the cheapest version yet don't increase significantly in volume and they go out of business.
Not everyone thinks that high quality games are necessary i.e mashing a button over and over can be fun but it's like saying why bother making movies when we have TV and Youtube. Billions of people watch TV and Youtube just fine. You know the answer to this, people like high quality experiences and are willing to pay more for them just as people pay more for Apple products than ones that are good enough. What is going to help is the commoditization of game development tools. High quality engines and asset reuse helps lower production costs. Inexpensive motion capture, crowdsourced assets like voice actors can help too.
Wow! You've given me a lot to think about -- to ruminate and digest. The second video above is near life-like -- nothing like the mobile versions. I bought République Episode 1 to see how it compares. As I am not a gamer it may take me a while to figure out how to respond to all this.
You should write articles ... Really!
Though, a solution comes to mind -- A new category: Mobile/Console games! A few quality, major, immersive titles that have comparable mobile and console components. Where you could play on either and continue on the other. Priced accordingly. Likely, you'd want to use a controller (if available) but could manage without if necessary.
Our shared iTunes Library is 5.35 TeraByte and resides on a 28 TeraByte RAID -- with various parts backed up elsewhere.
I would like to see the new AppleTV with a reasonable-sized SSD for active storage and cross-loading. Then have an automatic percolate-up, trickle down interface with the Cloud -- where the files would be archived and distributed across many servers, for reliable access.
That way, the stuff we are currently using is on the AppleTV SSD and everything else can be quickly streamed/cached from the Cloud.
This could use iCloud for the server, but does not need to.
I think this is one of the major reasons that Apple acquired FoundationDB. FDB can run on any 'Nix servers and is designed to be distributed.
So, our personal, encrypted files could be spread across tens or hundreds of servers from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, etc. -- or any combination.
Apple could offer a local, Mac version to provide the same capability to manage a local copy of the files -- it's just another distribution point.
Other than the talent working at FoundationDB I'm trying to figure out the reason for acquiring it. NeXT and later Apple created Enterprise Object Frameworks and Craig Federighi and Jeff Martin were two of the principal architects. My friends are now one Senior VP of Apple and Jeffrey left Apple early to found ReportMill.
A lot of the top architects from NeXT and later Apple left to work with Bertrand's Cloud project still under wraps entitled UpThere.
The lack of genius in that area may be the principal reason for acquiring this company. We never lacked for this skill at NeXT and Apple. Still the dumbest move Steve made was move WebObjects from ObjC to Java and to shit can EOF.
CoreObject/CoreData is nothing compard to the power of EOF and RDBMS when it was being designed. We also had DBKit that built a Soups project of live group editing that never saw the light of day.
I toyed around a bit with WebObjects -- but have no knowledge of Apple's EOF and RDBMS.
The DBKit sounds interesting.
You may be right that Apple is filling a genius void.
However, I believe that FoundationDB is more than just another DBMS.
It well may provide a system-level solution to various data management challenges of the desktop, cloud, mobile and large data. The link below illustrates Recipes for implementing various data organizations/structures atop the FoundationDB base -- this even includes an hierarchical structure -- like Apple's File System.
The most complete docs and examples of FoundationDB are Python -- a language which I don't particularly care for.
I can see Apple implementing the FDB primitives into the OSes and adding constructs to the Swift language to support manipulation at a high-level.
Hey, the FDB base layer is an Ordered Key/Value store of Byte-Encoded data -- how difficult can that be.
I've been playing around with a Swift Playground attempting to approximate manipulation of an Ordered, Byte-Encoded K/V store. I'm having some success, but am fighting iOS9 docs and bugs.
If my assessment is correct that FDB is a system-level solution -- maybe it's a solution to FTFF!
@Marvin (The Global Moderator): Your image posts, which then get reposted by people replying to your post, keep keep crashing Safari on my iPad. Can you guys back off a bit with this image-post-fest?
@Marvin (The Global Moderator): Your image posts, which then get reposted by people replying to your post, keep keep crashing Safari on my iPad. Can you guys back off a bit with this image-post-fest?
True but so does every other media player. In addition Amazon has the advantage of creating/distributing, or whatever you want to call it, very good original content.
Just getting cable TV stations to be distributed via the Apple TV is not going to do much unless somehow the experience changed drastically ( like getting rid of ads which is unlikely). The cable companies will just make up for lost revenue by increasing the cost of Internet. So, this is not really about money. Chord cutters will not save by programs being streamed.
The Netflix approach is very appealing. You ha a supermarket of content which you munch on whenever you feel. You obviously can't do that with time sensitive shows such as sports, news and so on ... But you can do it for almost everything else.
I don't think we will be seeing a major change in the video landscape with this new Apple TV. Hopefully we will see a more open device with an App Store that can be used to expand in a variety of ways by developers and users.
Whatever they do, they have to keep the price reasonable.
Comments
How else do you think cord cutters are getting the OTA channels? With more and more people eliminating their cable subscriptions the need for a built-in tuner in only going to increase.
That's odd, because that's exactly how I get my local OTA broadcasts. I have a Vizio TV, and connected to it I have a PS3, and a Roku. I don't want another box, and I'd eliminate the Roku, but the disc drive on the PS3 runs even when I'm using it as a streamer which is quite annoying.
Thanks for that video and the explanation.
I compared the YT video on my iMac 5K (Running ElCap) at 1080P to Real Racing 3 on my iPad Air 2 2048x1536 Retina (Running iOS9).
It was hard to judge the YT video because the PS4 portion was quite dark.
I concentrated on the obvious like the reflections and images in the side and rear view mirrors. I also concentrated on the background -- the trees, rocks, structures and sky ...
To my view the iPad Air 2 was considerably better than the PS4 YT video. I suppose to be fair(er) I should load the YT video and run in on the Mac.
Still, the iPad Air 2 is quite good.
The point about the controller is well taken -- my grandson's PS4 has a controller with a joystick. He captured some of his games,, downloaded them to thumb drive, and edited them in FCPX on the iMac 5K.
The iPad Air 2 looks better than these too???
FWIW, Last month I finished my 2nd eye cataract surgery and have better than 20--20 vision.
Possibly, the superior image quality is because the iPad, display, iOS and App are all designed for each other and to exploit the Melal APIs.
Oddly, while I was running Real Racing 3 on the iPad -- I had your video running PIP on it too!
And here's the best part... If the new Apple box introduces something that is NOT on your list - you lose the right to claim it was "obvious" after the fact.
I don't expect to see any replies to this post because the majority of the people here who would claim "it was obvious" don't actually have a clue what "obvious" actually is until they are shown by Apple or some other innovative company.
So anyhow...here's your opportunity...now put up or shut up!
ApplePlay with ApplePay -- Wave your Apple Watch, iDevice or AppleTV Remote to buy content or in-app purchases.
A "polished Apple TV interface" will not sell Apple TV's. And this is because, in this era, content is king.
Netflix has House of Cards etc. HBO has Game of Thrones etc.
Apple has...?
You can't be successful by making a better TV. You can only be successful right now by making a unique TV show.
Until Apple gets serious about stepping up and creating original content, the Apple TV has low growth potential.
Or at least, so says this one opinionated individual lol.
The Apple TV has both those apps.
The launch of new Apple TV hardware may have been delayed from WWDC to Apple's Sept. 9 event to allow the company more time to polish its interface, one that will allegedly "blow away" current, "junky" smart TV interfaces.
Interfaces can be COPIED. Just ask Samsung and HTC who are chomping at the bits to copy Apple TV.
The interface won't be make Apple TV successful.
What will make Apple TV successful is the whole product:
* the hardware - e.g. controllers, CPU, storage space, connectivity options, ACCESSORIES
* the software - the operating system, interface, ease of use, ease of navigation
* the services - movies, iTunes, Apple music, Apple TV channels, HomeKit, etc.
* the apps - GAMES, NetFlix, Comcast to Go, HBO, ESPN, etc.
* the experience of using the whole product.
It is the whole ecosystem that makes Apple TV successful. And Ecosystems are NOT easily copied.
Currently, Apple TV has no ecosystem. It is NOT the center of anything. It is a peripheral to Macs and iOS devices.
Hopefully the AppleTV can create its own TAB on Apple.com - placing it on equal footing with Mac, iPad, iPhone, Watch and Music.
If Apple can elevate AppleTV into its own category, then Apple TV will be successful. If it remains a peripheral, it will be a meh product.
Real Racing is owned by EA now, which is a big publisher. EA makes a lot of money from mobile at ~$500m per year. This is 1/3 of their combined revenue for next-gen and 1/3 of combined for last-gen. EA has the resources to invest in high quality titles and they are one of the top mobile publishers. Unfortunately, they are not representative of the vast majority of mobile games. Racing games are also easier to make look nice because a car doesn't move very much relative to the environment.
If you were to compare Tomb Raider, the one on XBox looks like:
[VIDEO]
[VIDEO]
On iOS, it looks like:
[VIDEO]
[VIDEO]
It's not all about graphics though. Mobile developers make games more like arcade-style games and immersive games are either very old games or downgraded. The revenue model makes the biggest difference because for console games, buyers know they have a reputation for quality and they can pretty much be guaranteed a 10-20 hour gameplay experience. With mobile games they go for addictive gaming. Old-school games like Breakout, Tetris, Space Invaders had basic mechanics where you do a basic action repeatedly. This can be entertaining but it's not immersive. This is the reputation mobile games have and so nobody wants to pay upfront for them, not even $0.99.
High-end games take a lot of money to make and the games that are making money on mobile are the ones that do microtransactions. They get millions of players paying small amounts like $1/month on in-game lives, gems or coins. To each player it's a small amount but the scale makes it very profitable. This model doesn't work well for immersive games. In an arcade, you expect to be prompted to insert another coin to play another round. If you go to the cinema, you don't expect to be charged every 5 minutes while you watch the movie.
Putting the graphics quality aside, the exact same games can be published on any modern platform. The sticking point is the revenue and developers just can't invest the people time. There was a games developer who was frustrated with the state of mobile games called Ryan Payton, he was the director for Halo 4 and producer for Metal Gear Solid 4. He then decided to finance his own mobile studio Camouflaj mostly using Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/486250632/republique-by-camouflaj-logan
The aim was to bring console quality games to mobile and he used the episodic model to allow a low price per episode and spread out the development. He got $0.5m from Kickstarter. There's an interview here where he talks about the experience and feelings about mobile games:
http://www.develop-online.net/interview/republique-the-four-year-mobile-game/0198922
They have 20-30 staff so $30k each per year would be $600-900k staff costs per year. They'd have burned through the Kickstarter cash in less than a year and would rely on sales of episode 1 to fund development of episode 2 etc. He refers to the kind of games he makes as 'narrative experiences'. Most high-end console games are of this style where there's a storyline with characters. Console games are often shooters too, which control really badly on mobile because there's no shoulder buttons.
He mentioned how his girlfriend had no problem paying 5,000 Yen ($40) when they lived in Japan for a DS/3DS game but after owning the iPad for a while, she wasn't prepared to pay 4000 Yen ($30) any more. People feel ripped off at game prices but it's because of the development costs. If a game takes 4 years to make, they have to recoup 4 years of staff costs.
iOS should allow publishers to lower the price because there's more users but there's also more competition so it doesn't always work out that you can be profitable selling a game for $5 or less on mobile.
Buyers define the market and on mobile, they are overwhelmingly choosing cheap (free) over good. This simply makes high investment game development unsustainable. Camouflaj has now teamed up with GungHo games, which is the company that made over $1b on iOS from a puzzle game and Camouflaj have made the PC their primary focus for episode 4 of Republique, which they will then have to port back to mobile:
http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPad/Republique/news.asp?c=65833
What I can see happening is that as time goes on, big publishers will be able to cash in on old high-end franchises by porting to mobile years after the initial release on consoles. But until there's a more reliable revenue model, they can't do first-run titles. Even if they could seamlessly publish to all devices, they can't lower the price just for mobile because there's the risk that buyers opt for the cheapest version yet don't increase significantly in volume and they go out of business.
Not everyone thinks that high quality games are necessary i.e mashing a button over and over can be fun but it's like saying why bother making movies when we have TV and Youtube. Billions of people watch TV and Youtube just fine. You know the answer to this, people like high quality experiences and are willing to pay more for them just as people pay more for Apple products than ones that are good enough. What is going to help is the commoditization of game development tools. High quality engines and asset reuse helps lower production costs. Inexpensive motion capture, crowdsourced assets like voice actors can help too.
Talking TV's for a moment have you looked at the new LG OLED HDTV's? The latest is advertised as thinner than a smartphone at under 5mm.
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/lg.unveils.4.8.mm.thick.tvs.thats.thinner.than.a.smartphone/61049.htm
Sony has an LED one coming in at .2 inches.
http://theslanted.com/2015/06/19437/sonys-new-4k-hdtv-models-are-almost-impossibly-thin/
They don't know how to design large scale viewing products. That's why they leave sound for someone else to solve. The TV product should include superb sound quality without adding on anything. That is not the case for any modern TV available today and I think it's a shame. That you cannot get superb sound quality out of the box is a shame, shame, shame.
People are going around thinking this is the way things are, but it doesn't have to be this way. It really seems like literally not one of the designers of these TVs actually watches content on them. It's like the Hollywood big shots—they don't even watch movies.
Phased Array Audio might solve this, although low frequencies would still be an issue I suppose;
http://hackaday.com/2014/04/14/steering-sound-with-phased-array/
Other than the talent working at FoundationDB I'm trying to figure out the reason for acquiring it. NeXT and later Apple created Enterprise Object Frameworks and Craig Federighi and Jeff Martin were two of the principal architects. My friends are now one Senior VP of Apple and Jeffrey left Apple early to found ReportMill.
A lot of the top architects from NeXT and later Apple left to work with Bertrand's Cloud project still under wraps entitled UpThere.
The lack of genius in that area may be the principal reason for acquiring this company. We never lacked for this skill at NeXT and Apple. Still the dumbest move Steve made was move WebObjects from ObjC to Java and to shit can EOF.
CoreObject/CoreData is nothing compard to the power of EOF and RDBMS when it was being designed. We also had DBKit that built a Soups project of live group editing that never saw the light of day.
However, Implementations are unique and the hallmark of Patents.
Apple will get these guys to port to the ATV. Will it be IAP driven. Yes. Will this upset big game developers and traditional console game devs. No. They'll just change their model or ignore the platform. That model grew over the history of the iPhone and allowed game houses to make more money than up front. It was their response to the "let everything be free" brigade and although annoying it works. Apple has lots of big game devs on the iOS platform as it is.
They already have an API for this. They encourage it.
http://www.raywenderlich.com/66532/ios-7-game-controller-tutorial
Wow! You've given me a lot to think about -- to ruminate and digest. The second video above is near life-like -- nothing like the mobile versions. I bought République Episode 1 to see how it compares. As I am not a gamer it may take me a while to figure out how to respond to all this.
You should write articles ... Really!
Though, a solution comes to mind -- A new category: Mobile/Console games! A few quality, major, immersive titles that have comparable mobile and console components. Where you could play on either and continue on the other. Priced accordingly. Likely, you'd want to use a controller (if available) but could manage without if necessary.
More later ...
I toyed around a bit with WebObjects -- but have no knowledge of Apple's EOF and RDBMS.
The DBKit sounds interesting.
You may be right that Apple is filling a genius void.
However, I believe that FoundationDB is more than just another DBMS.
It well may provide a system-level solution to various data management challenges of the desktop, cloud, mobile and large data. The link below illustrates Recipes for implementing various data organizations/structures atop the FoundationDB base -- this even includes an hierarchical structure -- like Apple's File System.
https://foundationdb.com/key-value-store/recipes
The most complete docs and examples of FoundationDB are Python -- a language which I don't particularly care for.
I can see Apple implementing the FDB primitives into the OSes and adding constructs to the Swift language to support manipulation at a high-level.
Hey, the FDB base layer is an Ordered Key/Value store of Byte-Encoded data -- how difficult can that be.
I've been playing around with a Swift Playground attempting to approximate manipulation of an Ordered, Byte-Encoded K/V store. I'm having some success, but am fighting iOS9 docs and bugs.
If my assessment is correct that FDB is a system-level solution -- maybe it's a solution to FTFF!
Thanks.
Guilty ... Sorry! What iOS?
iOS 8.3, iPad 3. (Am waiting for iOS 9, and iPad Pro).
True but so does every other media player. In addition Amazon has the advantage of creating/distributing, or whatever you want to call it, very good original content.
Just getting cable TV stations to be distributed via the Apple TV is not going to do much unless somehow the experience changed drastically ( like getting rid of ads which is unlikely). The cable companies will just make up for lost revenue by increasing the cost of Internet. So, this is not really about money. Chord cutters will not save by programs being streamed.
The Netflix approach is very appealing. You ha a supermarket of content which you munch on whenever you feel. You obviously can't do that with time sensitive shows such as sports, news and so on ... But you can do it for almost everything else.
I don't think we will be seeing a major change in the video landscape with this new Apple TV. Hopefully we will see a more open device with an App Store that can be used to expand in a variety of ways by developers and users.
Whatever they do, they have to keep the price reasonable.
I would put both behind the purchase of NeXT.
Given that NeXT threw in Sterve Jobs, and thus 'saved' Apple, I would have to agree.