I'll smoke to that too!! (why not..it's the w/e!) Wooger, and others, lots of possibilities when we hold assets of value.
ot and unrelated
Hoping you won't touch that dial, Apple TV goes PC
SIMON AVERY
From Friday's Globe and Mail
Six years ago, Apple Inc. turned an existing but poorly defined product category into a multibillion-dollar business with the smartly designed iPod.
This week, it will try to repeat its success with the arrival of Apple TV, a $350 device that slings multimedia files from a personal computer onto a high-definition television.
Nobody has yet built a bridge for the masses between their personal computers and televisions. Major technology companies have offered devices to transfer content between the two worlds for a couple of years, but the product category remains murky, much as portable digital music players were before the iPod.
The difficulty comes from the complexity of the products, which beg for home wireless networks and suffer from a lack of compelling TV programming sitting in PCs or available for download off the Internet.
Apple hopes to change that with a sleek, new device that ties in to its iTunes music and video store. The product began shipping Wednesday after being announced last September.
The Cupertino, Calif., company has a reputation for engineering smart products that are relatively simple to use. Apple didn't invent the portable digital music player. But its novel design of the iPod took the idea of MP3 music files from geek communities into the mass market.
Apple TV is already receiving compliments for its design and simplicity of use. “Gorgeous” and “elegant” are words used by the small number of U.S. reviewers Apple allowed to examine the device.
Apple TV is designed to drive business at the company's iTunes website, which dominates the market for legal music downloads and is expanding its collection of movies as fast as it can secure royalty agreements from studios.
“We believe the potential is huge for this small device,” said Jonathan Hoopes, an analyst who follows the company for ThinkEquity Partners LLC in New York. “As a digital media content delivery vehicle positioned in users' living rooms, we think the Apple TV-iTunes combination could become as disruptive to legacy video purchase-and-consumption behaviour as the iPod-iTunes combination has been to the traditional music business model.”
Apple TV could be worth between $5.3-billion (U.S.) and $11.4-billion in new revenue for the company, Mr. Hoopes estimated in a research note to clients this week.
Unfortunately, anyone buying Apple TV in Canada will be limited to playing songs, music videos, podcasts and, of all things, audio books on their devices because iTunes lacks rights to sell movies and TV shows here.
To avoid confusing the mass market, Apple is trying to define its latest product based on existing technology. “Apple TV is like a DVD player for the Internet age,” said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing.
Some analysts caution that Apple engineers sacrificed important features in the device to keep it simple, including a DVD player and any means to record programming or access material from cable or satellite TV companies.
“If you're already paying for cable TV, you're going to want to record shows you're already paying for. It just seems like there's a gap here,” said Matt Rosoff, lead analyst on consumer products and services at Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm in Kirkland, Wash. “Is there enough content on iTunes that people will want to pay $300 for a device to access it? I'm not sure.”
Microsoft Corp. began offering a way to bridge the worlds of PCs and televisions in 2004 with its Media Center software and a piece of hardware called Extender. Through partnerships with Hewlett-Packard Co. and others, Microsoft was able to provide not only a bridge but also a way to record programs on computer hard drive. But the technology failed to catch on with consumers because it was “a complicated overall experience,” Mr. Rosoff said.
Microsoft has reacted by building its own end-to-end system, similar to Apple's. It has added the Extender hardware to its Xbox 360 game console. The company has also formed its own online content store and has begun selling an iPod competitor called the Zune. HP, meanwhile, is building the technology right into some of its latest high-definition televisions.
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