Reaction to the Apple TV shows an Industry that still fails to understand Apple.

Image courtesy of Apple

As has become a regular occurrence with any Apple product launch, the announcement from Apple that their new set top box, the Apple TV is finally shipping has been greeted by the usual round of negativity and doom saying from industry analysts and industry competitors. Once again eager journalists are trading on Apple’s popularity, hoping to be the one to break the story of Apple’s first major failure since the iPod skyrocketed the computer and consumer electronics manufacturer to superstardom. A growing chorus (most of whom probably haven’t even laid their hands on the product) are convinced the Apple TV will be a failure. Like the iPod and more recently the iPhone, they simply fail to grasp the product, fail to understand how it could possibly be a success when it seems less feature-complete that competing products. The Apple TV however is truly groundbreaking for a number of reasons, and unfortunately for them, competitors and journalists are locked into the old way of thinking, and will be scratching their heads in a year or two when the Apple TV is a huge success, wondering how this ever slipped passed them.

When they launched the iPod, Apple did something masterful that took competitors years to grasp. They took what was traditionally thought of as a computer accessory and re-made it in a way that appealed to the non techie, the computer illiterate, and the normal person. Obviously there are many more keys to the iPod’s success, but this demonstrates a simple fact about the Apple TV debate. The industry competitors are predicting its doom because it doesn’t offer this feature or that feature, but most competing products are made for and marketed to the hardcore computer user, the über geek or the casual nerd. The Apple TV on the other hand is made for consumers. It is for the average person, the typical iPod owner, the ones who don’t care how their computer works, who have never heard of bit torrent or divx and who don’t want to spend hours configuring their PC to talk to their set top box. Everyone seems to have an idea of what they think the Apple TV should be, what they would have made, but are so preoccupied with their own ideas that they fail to see past the preconceptions to the simple truth of what the Apple TV actually is. It is an iPod for your TV.

What the Apple TV represents is a complete revolution in the way we consume tv. For the first time since broadcasting began, this humble box offers a completely new way to consume television. Media extenders have existed before now, but unlike most competing systems, that each offer bits of the technology needed in the burgeoning tv download market, Apple offers a complete end to end solution, from broadcasters wishing to deliver their content, to consumers who want to download and watch it. In a television and movie industry desperately trying to find a place in the Internet age, many companies are yearning for change, but few are willing to do what it takes to make it happen. Apple on the other hand thrives on just this sort of challenge.

There are naysayers aplenty though. Some have argued that because it doesn’t let you purchase media directly on the device it is doomed to failure, but Apple have demonstrated that consumers are comfortable purchasing content on their computers. It saves trying to enter credit card details using tiny remotes via unfamiliar interfaces.
The other argument is that it doesn’t offer full HD downloads (yet) unlike Microsoft’s Xbox live store. But it makes sense. The average broadband service is not yet ready to handle regular HD downloads. Microsoft recently posted a free half hour of South Park in 720p on the Xbox live service. It was over a gigabyte in size for a half hour tv show. While most broadband providers now provide reasonably fast connections, many are crippled by bandwidth limitations that would seriously curtail the regular downloading of HD content.

The computer geeks may want an all encompassing dvr, dvd, hd tuner does everything but make your coffee set top box, but that is not what the Apple TV is or will ever be. It is the front end to the iTunes revolution. Like the iPod it eschews complexity for usability, feature bloat for simplicity, and like the iPod that is the key to any consumer electronics device. Everyone still thinks of Apple’s products in terms of computing devices, but the company has clearly shown it is a master of consumer the appliance, and the Apple TV will be marketed as such. Netgear’s device may play divx and xvid videos that people have acquired one way or the other, but in a years time, only the nerds will have ever heard of it. Everyone will have heard of the Apple TV.

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