How appleTV is failing ..

and how we are helping to save it with channl.tv

Louis Gray has made a list of 8 reasons why the thinks the Apple TV is not living up to what it could have been.

The reasons he brings up are :

1. No Compelling Exclusive Content
2. No Flexibility In Displaying Content
3. TV is Free, Stupid
4. Purchasing Movies Makes Little Sense
5. Apple Is Distracted
6. Apple Isn’t Supporting Eager Developers
7. iTunes is Losing the Video Streaming War
8. iTunes and the Apple TV Have No Answer for Rentals

Louis has also listed some possible actions Apple could take to turn the box into a success :

1. A Solution for Movie Rentals is Needed Now
2. Cut Exclusive Deals With Movie Studios
3. Make the Box Something New: A Game Device?
4. Open the Box Up to Developers and Support Them
5. Act Like You Care About Apple TV
6. Watch What the Industry Is Doing and Learn

I think up until now the Apple TV has tremendous potential waiting to be tapped, the fact that there is no compelling content available on it doesn’t convince you into buying it. When everything you want to watch on your television needs to be accessed/collected through iTunes you are limiting the viewer experience to those of iTunes which turns some people off. And since this enforces the limits exposed in displaying whatever it seems the Apple TV is prevent its adoption by consumers.

But the good part of the story is that thanks to the BackRow SDK created by Alan Quatermain we have been able to create our own extension on the Apple TV platform so that we are able to integrate with the webapplication at channl.tv so that we can sync channel information between the website and the Apple TV. The extension we created gets the video from the internet and caches the video on the local hard disk before playing it on screen so you will not experience any of the “buffering.. ” annoyances that you get when watching large video files in your browser. The video you watch using your channels on the channl.tv website is not the same file that you watch on your television, the file that gets downloaded to your television will be the highest resolution file available so that you get the best quality on your television screen.

I am a strongly in favor for Apple to Open up the box to developers like us that want to bring content and a user experience to the Apple TV box. So Apple , if you can create an SDK for the iPhone why not create one for the Apple TV ?