Daniel posted a blog a few months back making the case for opening up the Apple TV via a public SDK, similar to the iPhone SDK. I like the argument, but as I think about it, I wonder about another option:
What if the next Apple TV were to be an iPhoneOS-powered device?
Imagine this. Start with the current Apple TV, but replace the OS with the iPhone’s touch interface, and then use a motion-sensitive pointing device like the Wii remote:
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Then, just as you point at Wii UI items like channels and buttons today, you’d drive the Apple TV UI more or less like you use today’s iPhone. The accuracy of the Wiimote is about as good as the touch screen, and certainly quicker than the pedestrian up-down-left-right remote used today. Moving through lists of TV shows or podcasts would be far more pleasant with a flick of the wrist to fling the menu, just like a finger-flick on the iPhone.
Multi-touch wouldn’t be practical, of course, but you probably wouldn’t need the major multi-touch action — pinch to zoom — on a big HDTV screen, and the remote could incorporate some equivalent functionality, like a slider for zooming for example.
Big picture: open up the Apple TV to all the apps that are being written for the iPhone SDK (minus apps whose functionality is meaningless in a non-mobile setting, of course), broaden the reach of the iPhone SDK to developers, get more Apple TV boxes into houses and further the reach of the Apple-centric standards like H.264 and enhanced-for-iTunes podcasts.
Apple Insider reported on Apple filing a patent for a Wiimote-like controller, and speculated it might be for an Apple TV. Point it at a Cocoa Touch interface on an HDTV, and the result could be all kinds of awesome.
“One More Thing” for WWDC? A little doubtful after the redo that Apple TV got just a couple months ago, but if it’s the right product, why not?
So, while I was at Anime Weekend Atlanta, I went by the Funimation booth, where they had some Apple TV’s demoing the anime shows they’ve put on iTunes. I’d bought Rumbling Hearts that way, and was pleased with it on the iPod. But with the Apple TV showing their stuff on 19″ LCD HDTV’s, the shows didn’t look very good, and I imagine they’re worse on big HDTV’s.
And that’s not too surprising, I guess. The episodes I bought were encoded at 1045 Kbps. By comparison, the MPEG-LA used to boast that H.264 could achieve broadcast quality at 1.5 Mbps, i.e., 1500 Kbps. So, if you figure you’re running at 2/3 of that bitrate, then subjectively, you should expect a picture that’s about 2/3 the quality of broadcast SDTV.
Thing is, with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD bogged down in their format war, a downloadable high-def service could potentially trump them both, and the combination of the iTunes Store and the Apple TV could easily be that service. Not only is the Apple media platform (iTunes + iPod + computer and/or Apple TV) already far more popular than either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, it’s also far more obsolescence-proof than either: if the HD disc formats die, owners are screwed, but nobody expects Windows or Mac OS X to go away in the next 10 years.
The catch may be that to serve up HD content, iTunes TV shows and movies would have to be encoded at a far higher bitrate, and what’s good for Apple TV is bad for the iPod — the iPods don’t have enough pixels to render the HD picture, and the bigger files would consume CPU and storage resources (imagine filling a 4 GB iPhone with a single HD movie).
If Apple were going to do this, maybe they could sell a bundle of an HD movie for your Apple TV and a smaller iPod-optimized version. Question is, do they want to? Would they really move enough Apple TV’s to make it worth the effort, and could they get content if the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD camps kept their stuff proprietary to their own formats (e.g., Sony keeping their studios’ movies Blu-Ray only and off the iTunes store).
So it’s an interesting option, but I doubt we’ll see Apple pursue it.
