Disney Chief likes the iTV September 21, 2006
Posted by flung in : Hardware , trackbackWell this is no real surprise - Disney Chief Robert Iger told various analysts at a Goldman Sach’s conference on Tuesday that the newly announced Apple iTV is a very “compelling” device. Why did he think it was compelling? It all came down to business of course. With the iTV, Iger noticed that content owners can now charge for a PVR like experience. What does he mean by this? Well if you missed a television show and you forgot to record it on your PVR, you can now purchase the show on iTunes for a nominal price. In the past, these shows would only be viewable on your PC or iPod but with iTV in place, you can now view the purchased show on your television set as well. Of course let’s not forget that you could simply wait for the show to come back on repeat but then that’s not much fun when it comes to American Idol right?
But is it really any surprise that Iger would like the iTV? I mean.. Jobs is ONLY on the board and iTunes happens to also be selling Disney movies like hotcakes!
OK.. so maybe the iTV product is cool.. (and yes we do think there is merit for such a device even if it reminds of the Media Center Extender or really any other media streaming device ALREADY on the market) but it’s not an original idea of course. The real key to Apple’s success in this arena is going to come in usability. Just like any other product that Apple comes out with - it’s all about the user experience. There may be other more powerful devices, but Apple almost always wins the user experience. If I can easily view and access my media content from a single device without any lag or worries about installing codecs etc, then this will be a cool device indeed.
One other interesting thing - Iger mentioned that there was a hard drive inside the iTV. This isn’t entirely confirmed yet but we wouldn’t be surprised if there was some storage space on the device to hold downloaded content. It’s really no big deal unless someone wants to hack the device and gain access to the space (now there’s a thought!).
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