I’ve been following many various discussions around the current state of affairs of the AppleTV and the future of media in its various forms, particularly around the TV experience.
The most recent deep discussion on the topic was Screen Time #40 with Moisés Chuillan, Horace Dediu, and Guy English kicked off a number of thoughts.
It seems to me that the TV discussion can be safely split into two categories:
- streaming media, ie TV and movies
- interactive media, ie games and apps
Streaming media
TV is an extremely provincial affair with intercrossing ownership, copyright and distribution channels that vary from country to country. Then there are the technology variants. Cable is a dominant method in North America, but practically non-existent in much of Europe where over the air, TVoIP and Satellite dominate.
The key factor to remember when observing Apple in this market is that Apple is a global company, and while there’s lots of interesting soap opera analysis to be done regarding the US TV market, it’s only one market in a world where the US represents a shrinking portion of Apple’s revenue.
So any major moves on Apple’s part will have to be scalable to the world. This means that an Apple TV (in the current external box incarnation) will almost certainly not have any kind of direct cable connection.
Interactive media
Here we have some interesting stuff going on. Currently the iOS ecosystem with iPhones, iPod touches and iPads have a thriving gaming ecosystem which dwarfs the gaming console market in terms of people playing games.
Add to this the fact that the current generation iPad with the A6X has a graphics card capable of driving the 2048x1536 pixel display for highly detailed action games. So there’s no good reason that this chip couldn’t be going into the next generation AppleTV driving a 1920x1080 display with a decent gaming experience.
The latest generation of gaming rigs from Sony & Microsoft are targeting the upcoming 4K TVs that are just starting to hit the market but this is a very small rareified market niche.
So Apple already has the core CPU and graphics hardware to transform an AppleTV into a decent, inexpensive gaming platform. In addition they now have 5 years of experience in developing frameworks for iOS aimed at making game development easier and accessible.
Missing pieces
The human/device interface
One thing that currently hobbles the current AppleTV and iOS devices is the lack of physical controls. The AppleTV remote is a minimalist’s dream, but beyond simple screen navigation, it’s pretty useless.
Using iOS devices as remotes is just barely viable, because the key difference for both gaming and driving a TV is that you’re not looking at your device, you’re looking at the TV. The lack of tactile feedback on the multitouch glass screen means you can’t tell where the buttons are on the screen without looking.
Hence it’s clear that we need some kind of device that we can hold where the physical controls can be driven by touch only without requirement for visual interaction.
News is going around that iOS 7 will include APIs for (Apple approved) game controllers using Bluetooth 4. This is a logical step for adding a new type of gaming experience to iOS that will expand the possibilities far beyond what we can do well using a purely multi-touch interface.
In the short term, this enables the iPhone and iPad as portable gaming consoles that can be easily linked to the TV via an AppleTV using Airplay.
While this is a nice solution, the Airplay component is a rather significant bottleneck. This will be mitigated as more people migrate to 802.11ac, but this is going to take time and no matter how good the wireless network gets, radio is going to add latency and lag to the experience.
So the next logical step is to open up the AppleTV with a full fledged app API and go directly from the controller to the device driving the screen.
Now in terms of raw horsepower, even the A6X can’t touch the capabilities of the new Playstation and xBox, but it certainly will be good enough for an awful lot of people. In addition, by starting with a limited API, the existing 13 million AppleTVs could participate immediately and ramping up to more powerful games with a newer model. Assuming the price remains roughly static, I can easily see an AppleTV and two controllers going for less than half the price of a full fledged console which puts it into the impulse buying territory. Breaking it into increments where existing AppleTV owners only need to buy the controllers makes it even easier to justify.
With this in mind, we can easily imagine that many of the current console style games available for the iPad coming to the AppleTV with minimal work for Apple and the game developers.
Handling the mutiplicity of sources
Attempting to solve the TV problem for the streaming portion, the hardware controller is a definite must and I suspect that the same controller APIs will be adapted for a richer input device, but still closer to the existing Apple Remote to anything that currently exists for TV remote controls. So the input/manipulation problem can be solved relatively easily.
Moving onto the content, this is a fight best won by simply avoiding it entirely. Here I’m on shakier ground since the changes I’m going to propose will probably require that the price of the AppleTV be increased. While Apple isn’t shy of charging for their devices, they are pretty canny about knowing how the market values their products.
The current state of affairs for those of us without universale remotes looks something like the following:
- Turn on the TV with the TV Remote
- Select the input I want
- Put down the TV Remote and pick up the tuner/satellite/cable box remote
- Navigate through an awful UI to pick what I want to watch
- Put down that remote and pick up the TV Remote to adjust the volume
The first and biggest hurdle is getting the input switching out of the way which could be solved by adding HDMI inputs to the AppleTV. The HDMI standard does include a control channel (CEC) that is implemented in some systems under a myriad of brand names. Which means that the TV will simple default to input 1 with the Apple TV and waking the AppleTV will wake the TV. Then the jumping off point for input selection, whether from an HDMI input or iTunes is a single screen.
The interest of this approach is that HDMI has become the global video interconnection standard. Whether the box is consuming cable, Satellite input or whatever, the output is almost always HDMI. The weak point of this approach is that the CEC implementation is optional and the controls (channel up/down, browsing menus, etc.) are potentially unique to each device. But that’s a considerably simpler technical problem to solve with integration and compatibility testing rather than arguing over distribution rights in every geographic jurisdiction in the world.
However, adding HDMI ports will require a modification to the form factor and almost certainly add to the price, although the cost per port appears to be fairly reasonable (royalty 4-14 cents per device). The vague part of the licence is that it seems to be per device, and I don’t know if the number of ports on the device is factor on the royalty pricing. And I have no idea on the component and integration cost impact.
So it appears to me that the logical evolution on the software side is an extension of the existing iOS toolchain, with the addition of hardware controllers to extend the interaction possibilities.
On the hardware side, there are more potential choices, from simply making the same box with more powerful internals, to extending the responsibility of the box to other components in the living room. It remains to be seen how Apple will approach this and on what time line, but it seems clear that tying more powerful hardware to an extended app ecosystem is the path of least resistance and most revenue. Attacking the streaming media situation head on is pretty much impossible, but interposing the AppleTV between the screen and the various sources seems to be a viable approach requiring relatively little dependency on the existing players.