What is Steve Jobs’ goal with the AppleTV?
The AppleTV. Steve Jobs’ self proclaimed “hobby”. But what does Steve REALLY have up his sleeve? Surely what’s been presented as the AppleTV is NOT the final vision of this project, I think we can all agree on that.
But what does he REALLY have in mind? Well here’s what I think:
It’s obvious that Apple wants one of these boxes in the entertainment center of every household, but as just a movie rental/podcast/picture box, it doesn’t have much in the way of appeal. So what can he do to improve that?
Look for him to start working with the big cable providers like Comcast and Cablevision to make the AppleTV as the go-to set top box. It wouldnt be much to add a coax port and a cablecard slot to the back of the device and to add channel guide and DVR into the firmware.
Imagine if you will an Apple designed TV watching experience vs something like your standard issue Scientific Atlanta crapfest of a cable box, and you see the potential for something like this.
It also wouldn’t be a big deal to put a Blu-Ray drive into the enclosure, bringing it closer to a mac-mini sized device. Remember that Apple has indeed been a member of the Blu-Ray association since the beginning, though it’s obvious they were waiting on the winner of the format wars before going ahead with this. Now a Blu-Ray drive is LESS likely because of Apple’s rental structure, but I wouldn’t place it outside of the realm of possibility. Even though the sales of physical media would somewhat undermine the sales of Apple’s digital downloads, the quality of Blu-Ray is higher than a downloaded movie simply because of the higher bitrate that a disc allows. Having a drive installed would give customers the best of both worlds.
The current box really is Steve’s “hobby” because he’s simply seeing how many people are willing to put even a half-functional Apple product in their living room, to watch movies, and look at pictures. From sales thus far, we can be fairly sure that he’s willing to make that next step soon.
In fact, we’ve already seen the first inklings of these steps start to wiggle their way out of apple HQ lately.
According to Engadget , Apple has filed patents for adding DVR functionality to the AppleTV. Check out the pics below:
