Is Apple TV a success? Compared to Tivo, it certainly is

Technovia: Is Apple TV a success? Compared to Tivo, it certainly is:

Don’t count Apple TV out. While I decided not to get one, in favour of getting a Mac mini and putting together a custom system, for a lot of people it’s a perfectly good option.

I was thinking about this a bit more today, and Ian nailed a point I didn’t make, but wish I had.

One reason for the perception of the “failure” (or whatever) of the Apple TV is that there isn’t a lot of talk about it on the blogosphere. To some, that therefore means it’s not succeeding.

In fact, it’s a classic example of the echo chamber in action; the Apple TV is a consumer device, and the geeks go off and build their own alternatives; if you listen to them, those are the real successes.

Except, of course, the Apple TV is selling a lot of these, just that these units are going to people who simply plug them in and use them. Not geeks. Therefore, it falls outside the view of the echo chamber we all live in here.

That’s very different from the iPhone, where in reality, there IS no geek alternative, and the geeks are therefore screaming for the ability to geek the phone. Apple TV doesn’t have that noisy demand, because all of the folks who might have done that bought Mac Mini’s and built their own.

Me, I’m one of those that was blown away by the idea of the Apple TV, and then didn’t buy one (in large part because I left Apple in the meantime and got busy doing other things for a while); I still say it’s very likely I’ll own one within the next year. To me, the gating item right now is whether I’ll be able to replace Netflix with it. For me, that gating factor is how deep the backlist in the upcoming iTunes rental store is; contemporary movies are actually a small percentage of our NetFlix queue (we’re much more likely to have something like Have Gun Will Travel than, say, Knocked Up). If I were only doing current hits, I’d probably use DirecTV Pay Per view instead of paying a monthly fee — and my perfect world would be to be able to have the NetFlix back list AND a per-title rental fee instead of a monthly fee. Not sure even Apple can make something like that financially viable, but I can hope…

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