Kenny Hemphill
With the iPad’s launch out of the way and Google announcing Google TV, now is the perfect time for Apple to concentrate on its favourite ‘hobby’.
It’s official: the iPad is every bit as successful as even the most bullish commentators had predicted. Two million sales in just 60 days for a device that’s not only a brand-new product, but creates a whole new market is, by anybody’s standards, pretty remarkable.
To put those figures in context, the original iPhone took 74 days to sell one million units. And Apple currently sells just shy of one million Macs per month. Analyst predictions of 1.5 million sales by the end of June now look very conservative.
According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, the company has been working on the iPad for several years, so now that it’s shipping, what next for the Cupertino company?
Apple occupies a very healthy, if small, share of the desktop and laptop computer market, a growing chunk of the smartphone space, and has created a completely new sector with the iPad. Is there anything left for it to conquer?
Well, yes, actually, there is. And to find out what, we need look no further than the company’s favourite ‘hobby’, Apple TV. That little silver box has been shipping in modest numbers for three years and has had precious little attention from either customers or its manufacturer.
That could be about to change, though. Now that Google has thrown down the gauntlet with Google TV – an Android-based platform that will run on set-top boxes or televisions, and enable you to watch streaming video from the web in your living room – Apple may feel inclined to respond. And with the iPad launch out of the way, it’s in a great position to make its move.
All the pieces are already in place: the iTunes Store, super-efficient H.264 encoding, and the Apple TV hardware and branding. While Google TV, like the Android smartphones, is an open system that will run on hardware from multiple manufacturers, and supports both Flash and HTML5 video, Apple TV will follow the same closed model as the rest of the company’s products. Both the hardware and the software are made by Apple, and you can bet, barring some quantum leap in Flash’s performance, it won’t run Flash video any time soon.
The next version, however, will have to do more than just run YouTube videos and content from the iTunes Store and locally connected computers if it’s to compete with Google TV. It will need to be able to function as a means of browsing and searching the web for video content and allowing it to be played back on a television. Google’s vision, based on its experience in web search, is that Google TV will be a means of navigating video content on the web, a kind of on-demand, always-on video player that can source and play almost any video clip, movie or programme you can think of. Imagine Virgin, Sky or BT’s on-demand video services, but with every piece of moving footage you’ve ever seen or wanted to see available immediately. That’s the kind of scale on which Apple, if it wanted to compete, would need to operate.
Even if it persuades web developers and content owners to switch to HTML5 for delivering video, and thus overcomes the problem of not supporting Flash, Apple would have other obstacles to navigate in order to take on Google. Most significant would be the business model.
Currently, Apple makes a healthy profit on the hardware, and sells downloads and rentals through the iTunes Store. In order to grow the platform, however, it would need to cut the cost of hardware and broaden the range of content.
That may mean, for example, striking a deal with the BBC to provide a version of the iPlayer that allows you to view programmes online and download them to Apple TV. But if it really planned on standing toe-to-toe with Google, that wouldn’t be enough. It would need to build an interface and a back end capable of indexing video content all over the web and presenting it to viewers in a coherent, easy-to-navigate fashion. Until now, it has relied on a combination of iTunes and YouTube, both excellent at organising and presenting content, to do that job.
None of that sounds like the company into which Apple has evolved. That company is about controlling the user experience. It’s about creating a walled garden where nothing it considers undesirable can enter. And so, while Apple TV may well evolve into some form of IP TV, it will continue to rely on iTunes and the iTunes Store as the primary delivery mechanism, and on Apple products, such as the Time Capsule to provide storage. It will be criticised for being closed, where Google TV is open, and for being expensive and having limited content. But Apple is well used to dealing with those sort of criticisms and the iPad shows that they don’t matter a jot when it comes to sales.
