I am afraid that you are wrong on this one. I will be purchasing iTV for the simple reason that I will be transferring my entire movie collection of DVD’s, tapes and hard drive files, in conjunction with my cassette tapes, lp’s, cd’s and itunes purchased music all to one place — an imac mini. This will be attached to a 1 terabyte drive and I will be able to access anything at anytime with the imac mini remaining on for 24 hours at a time.

If the price drops to say $100 or $150, I’ll purchase another one.
The idea of being able to keep all of your old films and music in one place is absolutely amazing. One could talk about windows media, but to be honest it just doesn’t work well.

I am expecting itv to work right out of the box. Anything else, wouldn’t be Apple. Additionally, the best compression on the market is easily AAC 256+ and Lossless for music and H. 264 really destroys wmv or avi. The file sizes are just small enough. Of course, I would have liked to see DIVX, but I guess that’s asking too much.

This will succeed because of the fact that you can use it with a wired and wireless lan at very high speeds.

Nice Blog.

Richard,
Converted from Windows to Mac October, 2006. With No Regrets.

You can find some facts and figures on what resolution you can discern, based on viewing distance, screen size and quality of your vision here:

http://www.burnyourbonus.info/hdtv-faq/faq3.html

I can not agree with your opinion, marketing wil only take you so far, a compelling product that addresses the need of the customer will result in a hit..

10 years, back when the MP3 revolution started, we had the same discussion.. The Thomas Hawks of the time doomed the digital revolution, because we already had the music in better quality media (namely the CD), yet here we stand 10 years after and the majority of the people resigned sound quality to get the convenience of having access to their whole collection at their fingertips..

We fianlly developed the technology that will allow us to do video the same way, this will indeed change the whole game all over again, this time for the movie studios.. We are already exchanging content around, now we would like to watch the content, of course apple’s marketing will play a huge role, but a compelling, easy to use product will be the reason we will deem our DVD player unusable, just as we are doing with our CD player a while ago

I also doubt that they want to make more money on the video content. As with iTunes/iPod, their goal is probably to again drive demand for the hardware. Regardless, they better get a rental or subscription service going if they want to make much headway in video.

This coming from a guy who refuses to pay $10/month for data service on his cellphone or $15/month to listen to Howard Stern…

I stick with my earlier comments, but as for CableCARD support, it might be a nice addition, but it seems to me that Apple is not trying to sell a cable tuner or a tuner/TiVo combo device. It appears they are looking to get your TV to play your computer’s content – movies, photos, music, etc.

This is a similar discussion to the one where people complained that the Mac mini didn’t have the right ports and software to be a real media center PC. My reply was that Apple was selling a small footprint computer for those who need a small footprint computer and already have a keyboard, mouse and monitor or want to buy them separately.

Apple did not make the mini as a media center and … oops, forgot to add the software and hardware to make it a real media center! They made it what it was and they did it for their own reasons.

Same with the iTV. It is what it is (or it will be what it will be). It will suit the needs of some, who will buy it, and won’t suit the needs of others, who will stick to what they have or will add stuff other than the iTV to what they have.

If it doesn’t meet your needs, don’t buy it, and you will be doing your own part to contribute to it’s success or lack thereof.

Anonymous. I call them like I see them. If Steve Jobs has a secret agenda to turn the iDongle into the next great HDTV delivery device I would think he would commit to this when deciding to preannounce months in advance.

Personally I think it’s a stretch to assume that this thing will initially support HDTV content due to content, bandwidth, wireless and DRM restrictions.

The problem is that the only decent content that’s been announced are crappy quality movies at $10-$15 per pop. If I want to watch crappy quality movies right now I can get them on demand from my cable or satellite provider for $3. If I want higher quality I can subscribe to Netflix. The content does not represent value to the consumer. Yes, maybe this is not Apple’s fault. Maybe the content owners are saying to themselves after the screwing they took last time over the iPod that it’s not to happen again.

Whatever.

Bottom line this thing is dead in the water — at least in the livingroom without attractively priced high quality video content.

If Apple decides to be more forthcoming about their secret HDTV plans in the future maybe this will change my opinion.