Apple Hopes to Re-enter the Living Room - NYTimes.com
I’m convinced Apple will relaunch AppleTV. They already have a decent chunk of the lap, desktop and pocket markets and the iPad is clearly a way into bedrooms and sitting rooms.
Combine iOS with a TV and you’ve got a large touchscreen device ready to stream any content you wish. Combine that with an iPad and you can control your media-centre right from your lap.
Ever since the iPad was announced I’ve seen it as a ‘remote’ device — it’s not a computer replacement it’s just a way for Apple users to interface with their other Apple devices and datastores.
What does AppleTV need to be?
At minimum the device needs:
- HDMI (to screen or projector) for high definition output
- Graphics card to run 1080p
- Wifi to connect to everything else in your house
- Basic ‘Bonjour’ or VNC interface
What the iPad needs:
- An iPad/iPhone app that allows you to navigate either on the main screen or on the device itself.
- A killer app for me would be to ‘push’ (or maybe ‘fling’) content from iPad/iPhone/iPod to the AppleTV
- I’m watching something on the train home, I pause at my stop, when I get home I almost literally ‘throw’ it from the iPad to the AppleTV. This new gesture tells AppleTV to play the content from the place I left off.
- The same in reverse: Watching a big game, have to go out, the game follows me on my iPhone if I want to check in with the live stream. It knows I want to watch it, because I left in the middle of the game.
- Or I’m feeling too tired to watch in the lounge and I go to bed and pick up where I left off.
PREDICTIONS:
- Apple TV to come back
- As an iOS device
- New gestures/modes of interaction, including concept of one ‘entertainment event’ being watched (and synced) on multiple devices
- iPad display for additional content, no longer will we have to ‘press the red button’ to get a different camera view or page of statistics, we can get that on our device while the main screen keeps focused on the action
- iMovie integration… get home from a holiday and the whole family can decide, passing the iPad around, choosing which clips make it to the ‘final’ edit — with the concept of ‘final’ edit becoming less and less relevant to the family themselves.
