A brief note on the topic of the widely-reported “iTV”
(For the absence of doubt, I am referring to the successor to the Apple TV).
I have little faith in the long-term lifespan of TV-bound applications. Most applications are single-user, and a decent proportion of TVs are shared: this is a not insignificant mismatch.
That’s not to say there aren’t ways in which it can be useful. The bulk of time spent with a video-on-demand app, for example, isn’t in the interaction and programme selection, but the actual watching.
My hunch is that, if this is true, Apple is gunning for the games market. A cheap box plugged into the TV and capable of downloading and running games of a calibre that we see on iOS devices today would be a serious threat to Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo’s casual gamer market segment — Nintendo’s in particular.
Perhaps the biggest factor working against this theory is that Apple isn’t well-known for significantly undercutting competitors when entering a market, but you never know (and Apple would no doubt claim that they were competing with Google TV rather than games consoles in particular, perhaps using the slightly flippant “if you consider yourself a gamer, you should definitely go out and buy an Xbox, Playstation, Wii, whatever” in response to the inevitable question from the press-pit).
One thing is for sure: casual gaming on the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad have left Sony and Nintendo in a difficult position. While iOS devices currently don’t really compete with the DS or PSP families of devices directly, the respective sets of games certainly do, and what the iOS games lack in depth and graphics quality, they make up for with very aggressive pricing (and indeed, I’ve got a few iOS games which blow some DS games out of the water).
The Apple TV is dead. Long live the Pippin.
