App TV?
by John Paczkowski
Posted on June 4, 2009 at 10:16 AM PT
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster may not have high expectations for Apple’s WWDC gathering in San Francisco Monday, but he does for the company’s Apple TV device. Big expectations. Munster believes Apple (AAPL) is working an update to the Apple TV — and an App Store to go along with it. While he admits to having no hard evidence of this, Munster notes that a move like this would make sense given the success of the iPhone as a gaming platform and the ease with which the iPhone and iPod touch could be transformed into a game controller.
“If Apple was planning on releasing an updated Apple TV in Sept. (which we are expecting), the company could use [WWDC] to launch an SDK for the Apple TV and announce an App Store for the platform,” Munster writes. “The Apps could include digital video services to expand the content available on the Apple TV (i.e Hulu), but perhaps more importantly, developers could begin developing games for the AppleTV. We believe Apple would likely develop an SDK that enabled the iPhone or iPod touch to be a controller or input device for games on the iPhone. This would enable users to control game features (like driving a car) with the tilt of the iPhone or iPod touch using the built-in accelerometer, but would not enable Wii-like motion sensing, for advanced features like swinging a golf club or aiming a weapon. To be clear, we do not expect this to be announced at WWDC’09 due to its relative complexity; rather, it could be a 2010 event, as the AppleTV and iPhone platforms develop.”
An intriguing idea and one that, frankly, makes perfect sense. In one fell swoop it would add much needed heft to the Apple TV, vastly extend Apple’s reach in the gaming market and extend the iPhone ecosystem into the living room. Why wouldn’t Apple do this?
Comments
Hi John,
While I think that this type of update makes sense and has the potential to be a homerun, timing is the big question for two reasons:
1. Such an update is a logical point for Apple to define forking decisions between abstractions and uniformity, relative to supporting all sorts of different form factors under this platform (e.g., Macs, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod touch, Tablet, keyboard, touch/tilt only, camera, video, TV tuner).
2. Partitioning the platform between open Mac-like layers (i.e., download apps from anywhere) and managed/closed runtime layers (App Store is THE marketplace with a singular SDK, APIs, etc.) is a potential hornet’s nest of technical, user experience and ecosystem decisions.
For more fodder on the topic, check out the post:
Apple, TV and the Smart Connected Living Room
http://bit.ly/FBEk
Cheers,
Mark
Posted by Mark Sigal at June 4th, 2009 at 2:49 pmThis would be great. I have an existing Apple TV and would be perfectly happy to replace it with a more capable box.
Obviously you’d like it to be able to browse the web, though whether that would actually make sense from your couch or not is unclear. An HD TV has decent resolution for this, but you might have to make the fonts quite large to see them from far away, so it might be kind of stupid. Still want it of course.
You’d need a keyboard. An onscreen keyboard maybe, though a keyboard on the remote (an iPod Touch or iPhone sure) would be better.
So now what else can you do?
Okay, play games. Check weather. Check local dining recommendations. I suppose a lot of the applications on the iPhone would make sense on the Apple TV.
Obviously the problem is translating the experience.
You don’t really need the accelerometer, except to the extend it is used in games as a controller. No turning the TV on its side.
But no touch? Well, you could give it up and just do the classic console controller pad with joystick/buttons etc. Remember that since the TV screen is bigger than your iPod’s, and you don’t really want to look away from the TV to press something, using the touch on your iPod probably doesn’t make a lot of sense.
You could just go with a motion-sensitive device like a Wii wand. Point and the screen and click to press. Would probably have to be more accurate than the original Wii controllers. But could work.
Could you use the iPod or iPhone as this device? Doesn’t seem like it. Doesn’t mean you couldn’t use them for some applications, just not sure it would work for games.
Battery life would be a problem as well.
I’m not sure I see them using the iPod/iPhone as a controller really, except in limited ways…
Posted by Glenn Connery at June 4th, 2009 at 4:10 pm