Let's talk a bit of history...
iTunes and the iPod began as concepts around 1997 immediately upon Steve Jobs' return. About that same time, I wrote a research paper exploring internet distribution music. Progressive Networks had just released the Real Player and Quicktime became capable of streaming CD-quality audio somewhere around that time.
iTunes launched in 2001 and iTunes Music Store two years later, in 2003. Finally iTunes Music Store is proving a formidable retail channel, #2 only to Wal-Mart... and it has taken more than ten years to get there.
AppleTV has been shipping for exactly one year. One year in, iPod was deemed a me-too product. It took another three years before iPod sales began to skyrocket.
Part of the problem with this type of product revolution is that people have to be eased into new concepts. Few companies want to commit to that kind of product development roadmap. If it can't make money in one fiscal quarter, most companies don't believe in it.
Granted, other portable media players had been around but none of them really took the market by storm. What Apple had to do was build an ecosystem around the product, taking a little lesson from the telecom failure of the early 1990's... Telecom companies beefed up their networks but it took several years before anyone figured out that what was going to DRIVE demand for bandwidth was content, not the other way around.
Apple's playing it smart, though. Steve Jobs did one very great thing when he became CEO. He canned all extraneous projects and got Apple focused on a very short list of products and roadmaps... These products were not "all out" products, but a series of successive baby steps toward a larger concept that has their product development roadmap loaded for the next ten years.
The concept? In a nutshell: Technological convergence. The goal? I'll come back to this further below.
Broken down, however, we can look back and see what Apple did.
Phase I involved corralling their skillsets and technologies into a digital "lifestyle"... the iLife suite as it's now called. Getting people used to the idea of content creation and management, where their computer would be the hub for a digital lifestyle. In that sense, its the appliances, not the hub, that matter.
Phase II required development of appliances to utilize these tools. iPod was the first. AppleTV the second. iPhone the third. You could look at this phase as being broken into successive steps. First it meant bridging content directly with "offline" appliances like iPod. Then they extended the boundaries of the digital hub to your home theater and now your mobile existence. I think that a subsequent goal may be also to bridge your home network and your mobile existence in a user friendly way... say, streaming movies from your AppleTV to your iPhone over a high bandwidth 4G mobile broadband.
Phase III involves deploying the content and access to it. This is where things get very tricky because the ecosystem is no longer entirely within Apple's control. But in Phases I-III of iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, etc. they have realized that these models simply cannot flourish without content.
This is where the industries furnishing the content get tepid... because if you've paid close attention to what else Apple is doing, you realize that piracy is not the biggest concern. The question to which my research inexorably led was this, "If such an ecosystem were to enable the user to create, distribute and exhibit their own content to the broader market, who would need a record label or a studio?"
Needless to say, if the public didn't see it with the inclusion of Podcast feeds on iTunes and AppleTV, they're starting to see it with the distribution model of the App Store for third party apps on the iPhone... Apple is opening a door to making record companies, movie studios and even game distributors obsolete. In the conventional sense, anyway.
This is what the holdup is... the record labels, studios, etc. know they have a problem because they're competing against a distribution model no one entity can control or monopolize. The internet levels the playing field between big distributors and independent artists. The big guys can't win, so they throw lawyer after lawyer at the problem... hoping only to slow down the inevitable and possibly lobby Congress to cut the legs off internet distribution as a viable medium through Copyright "reform" under the guise of anti-piracy.
That, however, is starting to wear thin and people are fighting it. DRM is also failing. The industry is faced with a critical problem... how to make entry into a channel they don't control, don't understand, and still come out making money. Well, the short answer is they can't win and they know it. They CAN participate, and it may mean that they'll make only gobs of money, not obscene gobs of money. That is a reality they are going to have to get used to... or find a job in a different industry.
Manufacturers like Apple have to remain committed at chipping away the roadblocks as they did with iPod/iTunes Music. We as consumers have to do the same. Your pocketbook is what speaks... and if you really want to see this model flourish faster, the only thing you can do is what I did... reject the other models. Sure it may limit you, but you can't have both... you can't complain about lack of content and simultaneously keep falling back on Netflix, etc. just because you absolutely have to watch some show. That gives them no incentive to change. And you can't just resort to piracy because that still gives them no incentive to change, because piracy undermines the argument that internet distribution can be profitable... giving them no reason to care that they should give Apple more content to distribute. If you don't have the discipline to tell the studios with your pocketbook, "I'm not watching this show or listening to this song unless you distribute it over the internet, without DRM, at a price I accept," then you're not using your power as a consumer to make change... and you'll have to accept the status quo.
We live in a world where on a shoestring budget, people can record albums, make movies/tv shows, etc. and distribute them to millions on the internet. We have devices like AppleTV that can deliver thousands of podcasts into your living room in HD. There's something going on here and it's far bigger than most people realize. It's just in its infancy, but with time, the ultimate motive of Steve Jobs and Apple will come to the surface. This is and always has been about one thing: The decentralization of the information economy.
That has more implications than you watching the latest episode of "Lost"... The decentralization of the information economy is the single greatest threat to tyranny in the history of humanity. I don't know about you, but that's an objective for which I'm willing to hang in there no matter what.
TV. It's great to have an iPod for my TV. As I mentioned in another post, I feel the only true drawback is not being able to buy movies directly from the iTunes store. Quality of content is good to very good. Not great, but I'm o.k. with that. (I realize that this is a deal breaker for some, and can appreciate that.)
