I have somewhat of a love hate relationship when it comes to cable television. The biggest problem I have with cable television is the staggering price. Apple has called the Apple TV a hobby in the past, but how long before it will be a value driver. Living in the digital age has had a positive effect on our culture and a negative effect on outdated business models.
I owned the Apple TV2 immediately after it was announced, not intentionally. I was playing with Amazon's one click settings. Apparently I had placed an order by mistake and and immediately went and canceled it. Two days later a tiny little box arrived at my house, and to this day my wife believes it was done on purpose. Once the Apple TV arrived I quickly connected it to my television, and the rest as they say was history.
For the past eight years I have not paid for cable television for two reasons one you pay to be bombarded with ads and two, you do not get to watch whatever you want. I know about the DVR systems, but I never wanted to pay for that either. Over the years I have created a substantial library on computer of videos that I actually have an interest in. Despite my best efforts my digital library still lacked something, a television experience. Sure I could connect my mac to the television and watch stuff but it was not exactly what I wanted to do. Front Row was nice (do you still remember that?) but it did not work perfect all the time. The apple tv was a great product that did allow a step closer to my media experience.
Apple TV still has a way to go but it can and I believe it will get better. Specifically I would like to see a better UI and more content providers. My dream would be to "subscribe" to stations or specific programs. I only like a handful of shows and would rather pay a small fee for the content or enjoy the content for free with relevant ads. I personally think Apple should stay far away from a television display for two reasons. Modular systems are better in that they are cheaper and easier to get into homes since most people already have televisions. Can you imagine going to the Apple store to be an entire television display, I don't believe apple could even do this logistically in the stores. Will Apple stock a range of display sizes, how will defective units be handled? To me this does not seem to be logical. But what if Apple were to develop my dream Apple TV, what would it look like? Well it's pretty easy, I want an Apple TV/NAS/Time Capsule/Airport/LTE digital hub, or essentially a tiny awesome consumer server. I would gladly fork over some bucks to get this accomplished, but why would I want this? It's easy, I love multitaskers. It makes sense to store my media on a device that plays media on my television. It makes sense to have blazingly fast LTE speeds to download content. It makes sense to backup my devices that is always active. But if you are to tell me apple is going to make a display, I essentially have that now minus the epoxy to glue my Apple TV to my display. Time will tell what Apple has in store, and who knows what the new apple is going to do, all I know is that the new apple is a much more attentive apple who listens to consumers... and that is not necessarily a good thing.
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