Apple has been ‘pulling the string’ on the Apple TV for seven years now. Think about that one for a minute, it’s had a set-top box since before the iPhone.
During that time, the landscape of online video entertainment has completely changed, largely as a result of the iPhone, iPad and iTunes Store. While Apple has a long way to go in order to make the Apple TV a decent solution for countries outside of the US, it has made some progress and continues to very slowly iterate on the original premise of an in-home media streaming device.
A large part of that is iCloud, which now allows users to watch any purchases they’ve made from iTunes on any device, including ATV. But there’s still a lot of work to be done if the device is going to become a major pillar of Apple’s business, as I believe that it could be…and should be if cards are played right.
The Apple TV, whether it comes in its current hockey-puck form or married to a flat-panel display, has the potential to create an ouroboros of ecosystem lock-in that could pin closed many doors for other laggards like Google and the much more competitive Amazon.
If the iPad benefited from the iPhone and its app ecosystem and the Mac benefited from the iPad’s millions of newly exposed users, so could an Apple TV that offered hundreds or thousands of ‘apps’ that were familiar to users. Those users would happily buy into a system that offered them easy and convenient access to their in-network content as well as their ‘out of network’ content. This cyclical thinking has worked well as Apple expanded from phones to tablets, and should continue to work on the strength of those efforts.
In order to do so, Apple will need to make some aggressive moves to mature the device. In fact, it needs to move away from being a device at all and finally make the jump to being a platform. I’m not sure anyone disagrees with that, as everywhere you turn people are talking about the potential of apps on Apple TV. Unless you’re blind, you can see the possibilities inherent in turning Apple’s following of hundreds of thousands of developers loose on a screen that’s hosted in your living room. Unlike some very smart folks, however, I’m not so sure that a full Apple TV SDK is on its way ‘soon’, for a variety of reasons.
First, I’m hearing that the current tools offered to Apple TV partners are fairly crude, far from a true software SDK of the likes that developers for Apple’s App Store and Mac App Store have access to. When companies like HBO say that they built apps in-house, what’s meant is that Apple does have some tools and frameworks to offer, but they’re far from the options that are out there for app developers.
Even taking a superficial look at the apps, you can see that these are not truly custom solutions, but modified versions of stock Apple TV menu system.
Here’s the HBO app for Apple TV:
Now compare it to the Vevo app:
There’s a bunch of stuff that can doubtlessly be played with and tweaked by the partners — within Apple’s style guide for current ATV ‘apps’ — but we’re not looking at the freedom that developers on the App Store get.
I haven’t been able to uncover anything about Apple’s timeline when it comes to opening up a set of tools for developers to create apps for ATV, but whatever they are, it’s unlikely that they’re the current tools that partners are using to make apps. Apple has a reputation for creating extensive, mature and easy-to-use developer utilities and documentation. The existing tools are, apparently, not…that.
[h=3]Before an App Store[/h] Beyond the fact that we’ve seen little evidence of a real SDK out there for Apple TV, there are a host of other issues that will have to be overcome on the hardware side before the device is ready to support an app ecosystem.
Matt Braun is the developer of SketchPartyTV, a very cool group-play app that heavily utilizes AirPlay and the Apple TV. Braun, as a game developer, notes that there are some distinct disadvantages of the Apple TV platform that make it a tough sell.
First of all, the current hardware only has 8 GB of flash memory, which is already used to hold current preferences, buffer video and more.
“Frequently a rented video that’s been buffered will get kicked from memory after watching an episode of a TV show or two on Netflix,” says Braun. “With console quality games weighing in in the neighborhood of a high-def movie, the most obvious thing that’d need to happen is an increase in storage capacity.”
The single-core A5 processor in the current Apple TV would need an upgrade as well, as it’s nowhere near the capability of the iPad 4
During that time, the landscape of online video entertainment has completely changed, largely as a result of the iPhone, iPad and iTunes Store. While Apple has a long way to go in order to make the Apple TV a decent solution for countries outside of the US, it has made some progress and continues to very slowly iterate on the original premise of an in-home media streaming device.
A large part of that is iCloud, which now allows users to watch any purchases they’ve made from iTunes on any device, including ATV. But there’s still a lot of work to be done if the device is going to become a major pillar of Apple’s business, as I believe that it could be…and should be if cards are played right.
The Apple TV, whether it comes in its current hockey-puck form or married to a flat-panel display, has the potential to create an ouroboros of ecosystem lock-in that could pin closed many doors for other laggards like Google and the much more competitive Amazon.
If the iPad benefited from the iPhone and its app ecosystem and the Mac benefited from the iPad’s millions of newly exposed users, so could an Apple TV that offered hundreds or thousands of ‘apps’ that were familiar to users. Those users would happily buy into a system that offered them easy and convenient access to their in-network content as well as their ‘out of network’ content. This cyclical thinking has worked well as Apple expanded from phones to tablets, and should continue to work on the strength of those efforts.
In order to do so, Apple will need to make some aggressive moves to mature the device. In fact, it needs to move away from being a device at all and finally make the jump to being a platform. I’m not sure anyone disagrees with that, as everywhere you turn people are talking about the potential of apps on Apple TV. Unless you’re blind, you can see the possibilities inherent in turning Apple’s following of hundreds of thousands of developers loose on a screen that’s hosted in your living room. Unlike some very smart folks, however, I’m not so sure that a full Apple TV SDK is on its way ‘soon’, for a variety of reasons.
First, I’m hearing that the current tools offered to Apple TV partners are fairly crude, far from a true software SDK of the likes that developers for Apple’s App Store and Mac App Store have access to. When companies like HBO say that they built apps in-house, what’s meant is that Apple does have some tools and frameworks to offer, but they’re far from the options that are out there for app developers.
Even taking a superficial look at the apps, you can see that these are not truly custom solutions, but modified versions of stock Apple TV menu system.
Here’s the HBO app for Apple TV:
Now compare it to the Vevo app:
There’s a bunch of stuff that can doubtlessly be played with and tweaked by the partners — within Apple’s style guide for current ATV ‘apps’ — but we’re not looking at the freedom that developers on the App Store get.
I haven’t been able to uncover anything about Apple’s timeline when it comes to opening up a set of tools for developers to create apps for ATV, but whatever they are, it’s unlikely that they’re the current tools that partners are using to make apps. Apple has a reputation for creating extensive, mature and easy-to-use developer utilities and documentation. The existing tools are, apparently, not…that.
[h=3]Before an App Store[/h] Beyond the fact that we’ve seen little evidence of a real SDK out there for Apple TV, there are a host of other issues that will have to be overcome on the hardware side before the device is ready to support an app ecosystem.
Matt Braun is the developer of SketchPartyTV, a very cool group-play app that heavily utilizes AirPlay and the Apple TV. Braun, as a game developer, notes that there are some distinct disadvantages of the Apple TV platform that make it a tough sell.
First of all, the current hardware only has 8 GB of flash memory, which is already used to hold current preferences, buffer video and more.
“Frequently a rented video that’s been buffered will get kicked from memory after watching an episode of a TV show or two on Netflix,” says Braun. “With console quality games weighing in in the neighborhood of a high-def movie, the most obvious thing that’d need to happen is an increase in storage capacity.”
The single-core A5 processor in the current Apple TV would need an upgrade as well, as it’s nowhere near the capability of the iPad 4