Apple TV is for You and YouTube

Like complaining about the lack of a display on the iPod Shuffle, or the lack of an FM tuner on the iPod, complaining that the first version of Apple TV is only 720p is a non-starter.

HD is not the point. Home movies aren’t yet shot in HD.

Simplifying the experience of getting internet video – youtube, video blog, etc – onto a television is the point. All the current offerings are awful. I’ve talked about this before.

Maybe HD will come later. Doesn’t matter. We need faster bandwidth, bigger hard drives, and better cameras to support HD delivered this way before then. Notice there’s no DVD drive on the Apple TV.

Apple TV does for television what Airport Express did for your home stereo. Extends iTunes. Just as Steve Rubel states:

“..although certainly exciting from a consumer POV, offers very little value for advertisers. The reason is that it’s basically a media extender.”

TiVo faired pretty well on the news, their stock inched up 0.2 points. Same with Palm (up 0.8). Compare that to RIMM – down 11 points). Yahoo has the graph

More later. Maybe.

LATER
In the comments, Michael Markman is right. There’s not specific tying Apple TV to YouTube (a really good thing). Any RSS feed sending audio or video to iTunes can be extended by Apple TV. Heck, drop the low-res Quicktime home movies to your iTunes library and Apple TV will send them to the big-ger screen.

Sure, the more purchases through the iTunes store, the more big media will be available in it. From a marketing perspective Apple wants to exchange our dollars for their DRM. There’s a whole bunch of video I’ve created that I want to send to the TV. Extending iTunes to my TV is the easiest way for me to do that.

Rubel continues:

“Apple TV won’t have the any kind of impact on TV advertising.”

Well, it’ll extend the impact Netflix and DVD players have had on TV advertising. In the words of Douglas Adams – “You’ve got to build bypasses.”

ELSEWHERE

The ability for me to ‘subscribe’ only to specific shows and forgetting about the whole concept of a channel (which is essentially a hang over from broadcast) makes a damn site more sense to me.” – Karl Long

“Note that everything they are talking about is Big Machine Media, which I also have no intention of watching. I’m wanting to watch Strong Bad Emails and Ask a Ninja and Tiki Bar TV on the phone” – Dave Slusher

12 April 2007

“If you’re technically proficient enough to read this blog, AppleTV is not for you” – Dave Winer

30 May 2007

Beginning in mid-June, Apple TV will wirelessly stream videos directly from YouTube and play them on a user’s widescreen TV. Using Apple TV’s elegant interface and simple Apple Remote, viewers can easily browse, find and watch free videos from YouTube in the comfort of their living room.”

Note to Steve Jobs – the invoice for my consulting is in the mail 😉

Internet-to-TV: How to Beat TiVo

“Sling Media’s entertainment division, told B&C that through SlingCatcher, users will be able to…bring online video content to the TV.”

[via Fimoculous]

The idea of getting any internet-delivered video presented on a television is something I’ve talked about here and here.

ELSEWHERE

“the SlingCatcher is different from other digital media servers because it just relays whatever is on your PC screen to your TV, without file conversions.” – Om Malik

“One way or the other, the line between broadcast/cable TV and internet TV will disappear and quickly.” – Jeff Jarvis

UPDATE
Apple TV just made TiVo obsolete. Sure, it’s tied tightly to iTunes. But I as long as I can avoid the DRM of the iTunes Store, the TiVo can collect dust.

Apple’s up 7.5 points on the announcements.

Solving Math Through Podcasting

With apologies to all the godcasters, the “Nine Wives” episode of Numb3rs uses a religious leader’s podcast to track him down.

I can’t believe how many times I heard the word “podcast” used in bad dialog….and this is after I was baffled why they didn’t have an iPod in the Prius.

Crazy TV.

Blurring Identity to Clear It Up

“What if there was an agreed upon microformat…that would telegraph to others our capabilities, experience, strengths, knowledge and, especially, our availability to be hired?” – Steve Borsch

Must be something in the warm Janurary in MN air. A lunch earlier this week – unfortunately without Steve (need to remedy that) – was all about the need and value in increasing the visibility of expertise, availability, and reputation.

In a very primitive, rudimentary, and analog form – the barometer Steve asks about already exists; participation in peer communities like forums, professional organizations, and generally impressing people with how hard your rock – are all reputation builders and indicators. Primitive, because it’s still pretty hard to find people that can vouch for you. Google, LinkedIn, eBay, and the comments on your own blog, are all ways to others gauge your status.

For better or worse – all the measurement systems listed thus far are isolated and non-portable (pointing your eBay rating at a potential consulting client means little). Maybe I should dust off my Identity XML thinking. Managing access to a bunch of Identity.xml files sounds far more useful than YAIS (Yet Another Identity Silo).

Many of the attributes Steve lists in his question above are most accurately declared by others – verses self. The world…er…marketplace…creates my identity as much as I do.

So, Steve, I’ll declare what I know of you, if you declare what you know of me. 🙂

Re-reading this, I think RSS is the microformat in question.

ELSEWHERE

“It took a few years, but it’s great to see software actually being built around the identities that aren’t vendor controlled.” – Dave Winer

I need to poke around MyOpenID.