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Apple TV As An iOS Gaming Platform? Not Likely.

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Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, long-time Apple TV proponent, believes that it is it's not a case of "if" but "when" Apple will release a television.

He cites the following factors as evidence:

  • Supply chain this week and over the past two years.
  • Tim Cook’s interview at the D: All Things Digital conference.
  • Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, which contains a few sentence on how Jobs believed he'd cracked the TV problem.
  • Various third party reports.

I've talked at length about how I just don't see how a TV fits into Apple's future, so rather than cover that same old ground I want to pick up on a specific point made by Munster.

That point is in relation to Apple's App Store and games.  Munster believes that Apple's television will allow users to download games, music and other content to their TV. He believes that gaming in particular will be of particular interest to the large group of iOS game developers.

Immediate, I can see several problems with this idea.

The first is that I can't see a way for existing games aimed at the iPhone and iPad will work on a television. Think about it, the iPhone and iPad are touch devices, and it's hard to replicate touch in a controller, especially if it is a multi-touch gesture made up of several fingers. I can't see how even a game like Angry Birds in its current iOS configuration wouldn't work on a television unless it had a touch screen. I'm certain that the game could be retrofitted to work on a television, but that would involve time and effort on the part of the developer.

This brings be to my second point. How interested are developers going to be in designing bespoke content for a television set that is unlikely to command much of a market share for a few years when he or she can just as easily target a market consisting of millions of iPhone and iPad users instead?

Finally, why does Apple need to make an entire TV in order to bring apps into the living room? It doesn't. It could accomplish the same thing with a hardware update to the Apple TV set-top box. This way, Apple could bring apps to any TV with an HDMI connector at a much lower cost to the consumer compared to buying a whole new TV.

I'm also interested in how Munster shoots down the idea that an Apple television would bring anything new to the table.

"While many believe content will be the key differentiator for the Apple television, we expect at launch Apple may not necessarily revolutionize the content industry," he writes. "Ultimately we believe that consumers and Apple want unbundled channels and more options including time shifting to watch content, but note that content owners are hesitant to change."

Is he seriously suggesting that an Apple television will sell purely on the brand name initially, and bring nothing new to in terms of the content? That seems to go against to how Apple currently operates. I know that Apple buyers have a reputation for buying based on the brand, but I don't think that will extend into products with a $1,500 to $2,000 price tag.

Munster has been talking about how Apple will release a television for more than four years now, confidently predicting that the product would be available in 2011. He also predicted that Apple would sell 6.6 million Apple TV set-top boxes in 2009 when in truth Apple was barely selling 3 million units by 2011.