Samsung doesn't think Apple can compete in the TV market. That sounds vaguely familiar...

Now, I'm an Android fan myself (I like the more openness of the Android OS vs. Apple's closed iOS).

HOWEVER...if I were buying a smartphone for someone like my Grandma, I can tell you right now it would be an iPhone.

My limited knowledge on the subject is going to keep me from posting too much in this article beyond the simple, based solely on personal preference opinion that after having experienced both Apple's and Samsung's technology, I'd be extremely interested in (and receptive to) seeing what Apple could come out with in the TV market.

The other reason for dropping by was to say I'm glad to see you contributing again, Brian.

I agree that the comments by the Samsung rep are not really considering the loyal fan base that Apple has, but that being said, I would not equate that individuals comments to Samsung failing to recognize Apple as a potential TV competitor. I think Samsung is a lot better run and more in-tune to what is going on and to their current and potential competitors than Palm ever was.

Samsung is exploding in multiple fronts and their advances in their smartphone and ability to put out improved products at a faster rate than Apple, is slowly eating into Apples share of the phone market. The speed of product releases is a big thing in today's market because consumers always love the latest gadgets. Although, Samsung has to tightly manage their growth and expenditures because it could turn around and bite them.

Here is an interesting article about the growth of Samsung:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-26/samsung-poised-to-win-market-share-on-42-billion-capital-investment-tech.html

Samsung sound exactly like RIM and Palm in 2006.

What they don't realize is that all Apple has to do is to take the TOP END of the market in ANY market.

Apple isn't seeking to get the largest marketshare.  All it wants is a small marketshare - the top of the market where most of the profits are.

In the PC Market, Apple makes 90% of the profits for computers costing $1000 or more.  

In the Cell Phone Market, Apple makes 75% of the profit with a less than 5% marketshare.

In other areas - where Apple dominates - Apple takes the lion's share of the profit.  These are the Tablet market and the MP3 player market.

Of course, when Apple came out with the iPod, there were also critics who said it couldn't compete in the MP3 player market.  Most are gone now.

The top end of the TV market is where Apple's guns are targeting.  There is nothing a competitor can do about this.  

Competitors usually are cutting each others' throats in a race to the bottom.  Apple doesn't play that game.  Apple aims for the top and stays there.

Yeah, no one has ever been unhappy with the usability of their TV. No one.

Not to get nitpicky, but...

 loyal fan base that Apple has

Yes, Apple does have a loyal fan base. But it's not the "fan base" that's making iPhone the best-selling phone on the market or that it's the only PC maker that's grown in the last 2 years. It's the people who don't have a stake in the Mac vs PC or iOS vs Android war.

The speed of product releases is a big thing in today's market because consumers always love the latest gadgets

Continued strong sales of iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 clearly suggest otherwise.

Hahaha :) Samsung will be dead in the water and won't be able to compete even 2 years after an apple TV comes out!

Hardware wise Samsung can do wonders, but today and tomorrow is not about hardware! It's about software and content delivery! And thats where apple is king!

Let me explain this for a second!

Do you think in 10 years time with the evolving cable and dsl speeds TV channels as we know them will exist? I bet you not! It will be all about content delivery on demand!

Apple is one of the biggest content delivery providers, it's not only apps,books, Music, but also movies, tv shows and music. Samsung does not have that! Apple spend the last 10 years starting with the iPod in order to build that ecosystem. There is no single company that can match that today! And it won't be tomorrow! And it won't be Samsung.

It's not about the big dumb monitor sitting in front of you it's about the content you consume on hat big monitor! Apple already has that ecosystem, Samsung will never have that, they are a hardware company!

Samsung is nuts. The difference in picture quality between similarly priced units from LG, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, etc. is really very small. It's certainly not enough to justify spending an extra $100 or having to deal with an inferior user experience.

I have a Samsung mainly because it was on sale. My wife and I looked at all the brands and when we'd found 3 at the same price point with the same feature set we used picture quality to break the tie.

One thing we couldn't test in busy stores was sound and our Samsung totally sucks in that department. My wife almost made me take it back to the store and exchange it for a different brand. For movies we run the sound through an external amp and speakers, but I can't justify using twice the electricity for my kids' cartoons.

Think about what it was like buying a cell phone prior to the iPhone. Now think about how people buy televisions now, and how that could change with an Apple TV product. In 2007 cell phones were still in the early stages of coming up with ways of dealing with the possibilities of the Internet. Most interface approaches were clunky to the point of uselessness. Televisions are in some ways at the same point.

People want their televisions to do more, but they also need them to be simpler. If you're going to root for picture quality to rule the field, you need to remember what happened to the superior acoustics of the LP...or even the CD, for that matter. It lost out to accessibility and convenience.

We used to say the exact thing about picture quality and that everything was secondary.

It's not about picture quality, it's not about the device at all. It has to do with selling content. Apple wants to control both the platform and the content.

Why would Apple want to create a great product like Final Cut Pro, and sell it at the ridiculous price of $300? It's a pro product that can be mastered by a novice. A high school kid can produce a TV series. Which means an out of work or moonlighting team of media pros can produce a movie very cheaply. And the obvious way to distribute media now is as an iOS app, through iTunes/iBooks, with Apple taking a 30% cut. The content will already exist on Apple's servers in iCloud, and the app will run on any of the customer's devices and can stream the content from iCloud.

So we are living in a post PC and a post TV world thanks to Jobs. This is what Jobs meant when he said he cracked the TV problem. The device and SIRI are just a part of the answer. And what it further means is that Apple will develop an insurmountable lead in entertainment and advertising. They don't want to sell TV's, they want to own TV.

This is pretty much saying it all:

"How smart they are...great, but let's face it that's a secondary consideration."

Translation:

"We can't think of anything that would add value to a TV. We just can't figure it out."

Yet the TV user experience by and large sucks. That's why Apple is coming. Apple knows they can't up the ante on picture quality that much. But they clearly think that they're going to add huge value to the TV, using their software and data services - iOS and iTunes/Hulu/Netflix. It's not a guaranteed success. But betting against Apple might be unwise, given their track record.

You don't have to be a genius to see that Apple only needs to figure out a killer way to leverage its already unstoppable entertainment and content ecosystem to pull the rug out from under the TV market in the same way they did with music players, music sales, book sales, phones and tablets. The guys at Samsung should have sat up and paid attention the day the first AppleTV rolled out. That was a tip off and few industries get such a blatant heads-up when Apple decides to move in. If Samsung hasn't been working their butts off to secure content deals and build up infrastructure to deliver it to their customers, they're sitting ducks.

Good thread. Not sure what more I can add that already has been remarked upon.

The way I see it, Apple has been creating these "jig-saw" pieces over a period of time, meshing some together, and uniting these with the new at the appropriate juncture in time. The puzzle is not complete, but the structure is in place to shortly complete it in say 2 -3 years. In the future we will have iPhones, for mobile devices, iPads (fixed/mobile) and Apple TV. Heavy users, such as professionals will use MBA, that have taken over from MBP. The unifying force will be Siri and iCloud. That is all we will need.

Dinosaurs such as m$ will be slowly dying, RIM will be gone, as will HTC. Motogoo will be around, scamming for ads and data mining and constantly watching over their shoulders for the next law suit.

iOS7 or 8 will be out. No more Google, 3D brilliant Maps, all SIRI driven. Apple will have purchased Wolfram and Yelp at this stage and poured in a few $Billion to gel everything with SIRI. So no need for Google ever again - paradise at long last. Google will begin a slow descent into oblivion as mobile searches (where they make most of their money from iOS devices) will no longer be the cash cow it once was.

Apple will be raking in the money, while at the same time delivering magical devices and software.

Yes Apple lost the PC race, but will win the mobile race easy, all the others will either shrivel up and die or mutate into niche.

Hi,

First time poster, but I actually think samsung has a point here! This is from a UK perspective...

The previous ways in which Apple has impinged on others marketplace (the comparisons with Palm and RIM being prescient) were in quite specific areas. Changing the fairly niche style smartphone market is one thing, but doing something to the enormous and ubiquitous TV market is something else. The problem for Apple is TV markets and content and, as Samsung said, quality.

Firstly, I don;t see how a new interface is going to be clever enough to cover all scenarios. For example, with HDMI control my Panasonic remote can control my ps3, PVR and TV. Let's say Apple goes with a Siri like interface. So, what would I say? "Apple Tv…can you switch to AV 1, then go over to the PS store and choose new releases, then…." Really? As for regularly TV the idea of SAYING "Switch to bbc 2, which on Freeview HD is channel 102 and turn the volume up 10%" seems like a greater hassle than a remote control. Also, this assumes that Siri can understand you. In my experience in the UK on the 4s Siri is a useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.

But, regardless, lets assume Apple can do something with the TV interface. My bigger problem is content and two issues with quality.

First, content. In the USA where there is a much more diverse and regional media landscape I can see how Apple offering a-la-carte TV content could work. But in Europe this is much less likely. For example, in Britain with have terrestrial tv, where almost all TV is on at the same time across England, then Scotland and Wales etc. Then Murdoch's Sky TV which is a subscription service through a satellite dish. Both those approaches offer a lot of channels, but generally the programming is on the same time everywhere. We have Virgin cable, but that just offers all the same channels (mostly) as sky / terrestrial.

The point is there is no TV culture in Britain of watching much regional programming and more importantly pay-per-view tv. Sky is pay tv, but it's NOT pay per-view. Even the big US dramas that tend to be on something like Showtime or FX are almost always on 'free' channels here (either as part of a satellite or cable package or, or on the free terrestrial channels).

So, in the UK Europe Apple has a huge job getting enough content to replace what people are used to. The stuff on the iTunes store at present in minuscule and is missing so much. And, as I said there is the very ingrained habit of expecting programming to be on at a certain time (even with a PVR). Things are changing, but we still can have programmes watched by a fifth or sixth of the WHOLE population at one time. That's a very different market for Apple.

Of course, some people said the same thing about music "everyone buys albums so how can iTunes work". Well, no, plenty of people bought singles as well and the KEY thing is that plenty of people also ripped off music. I think a key story of the success of iTunes is how easy it was in the past to pirate music; tape-to-tape an then napster - how mobile (so to speak) music was - and so iTunes created a legitimate source of this kind of content. The problem is I just don't see that many people pirating TV - files are still too big and network connections still too slow - to equate it with iTunes…yet.

Also, this gets to the first problem of quality. I have an AppleTv gen 2. I use it for music (via the very impressive iCloud) and, um, photos. I find the quality of TV shows and movies entirely unacceptable. This might have something to do with PAL TV being higher quality than NTSC and my Freeview HD reception being very good (I dunno). But, to me, TV through the iTunes store is overpriced and lower quality. So, I don't bother. Of course, I'm hardly an accurate example of an entire market, but from my perspective Apple has an awful long way to go.

Then we have the issue of TV screen quality. A TV is a big purchase and not something people upgrade once a year. So, I DO think because of this people expect a certain level of quality. Also, the big manufactures are so competitive on price that they are making high quality sets at stunning prices.

Put it this way, I own the top of the range 32" Panasonic LED tv, with class leading 3D, a very nice motion handling system and a nice super thin bezel. The retail price of this is just over £1k. I got it from a UK high street retailer for £525. If Apple can compete with that then they will have a real chance. But, unless they have a magic source of panels (as far as I'm aware the only manufactures of TV panels ARE the tv manufacturers themselves, for example Panny plasmas are only made by Panasonic) then how can they up them on quality?

Also, the tech in iPhones, iPads and Macs is essentially computer tech. This is what Apple are so extraordinary good at. But, TV tech (upscaling systems, motion handling etc) is a new area for Apple. I mean, how good are Apples PAL DVB-T, DVB-S systems going to be? Systems that are NOT compatible with North American equivalents.

I love Apple stuff, but at the moment to be the idea of an Apple HD Tv feels like the second coming of the iPod Hi-Fi.

P.s. can someone also explain what is so complex about using a TV? I mean, I connect everything to my TV with HDMI cables, and the tv then controls everything with its own remote and even when I press the off button turns everything else off (noticeably the only thing I have that I need an extra remote for is my AppleTV because it doesn't have HDMI control).

I mean, I can even control my tv without looking - I can't do that with my mac or iPhone.

Smartphones were hopeless pre Apple (though my old Nokia classic was easier to make calls with than my iPhone) but I just don't see what is so complex and challenging with most TV remotes. I always find using my XBox's Kinect HARDER than the Xbox media remote.

Since when is picture quality the most important thing in a television.

I can't even count the number of times I have walked in on my wife, friends, family and found them watching a standard definition channel on their HDTV and they don't even notice.

I notice, point it out and change it to the corresponding HDTV station and they could care less. They think I am strange for noticing.

So, no, I would argue for the general population, quality is not the most important thing.

Steve Jobs claimed to have "cracked" the TV interface. Given his recent string of successful interface releases, I'm inclined to believe him. I also have an suspicion that they were able to mock-up enough of the interface for him to actually pre-record a keynote that will be used for him to posthumously reveal his final revolutionary product. How is that for "One more thing..."?!?!

Another thing on the simplicity. With my TV I plugged in the arial cable, turned it on, it then auto-tuned and was ready. Pressing the guide button gets me the TV guide, pressing it again gets me out of it. Moving the four way controller moves me about menus (like Apple's existing ATV controller).

Within one minute of turning the TV I was presented with the first channel on list and changing channels is instant.

In what way is all that complicated?

Actually, isn't it MORE complicated to have to login to an iTunes account, set up iCloud, wait for your chosen channel to stream / buffer. Surely we all know that setting up an iPhone, even with iCloud is not that easy if you don't know what you are doing. If it was why do apple need to offer help when you buy one?

With my TV I was asked ONE question "Do you want to tune channels? Ok?"

Also, what happens when your router stops for some reason? The only way I lose TV reception is if something happens with the local transmitter or if a thunderstorm knocks our my areal or dish - this has happened ONCE in my life and the TV was back on in 20 mins.

Moreover, if you get SKY in the UK someone comes and fits everything, sets up your TV and you never even need to know how it works, I know this because I've seen some terrible installations! :)

Samsung definitely do not get it if they truly believe it's about the screen quality. For pretty much any TV now, that's "good enough". Any Apple TV would probably use a Samsung screen anyway.

The mention of setting up and auto-tuning and guides and so on above show how difficult it is to imagine TV differently. As an iOS device, an Apple TV would just make everything an app. Broadcast TV would be an app (or even each channel), so would PVR functions, program guide and movies. As an integrator of all possible content the device would be infinitely expandable through apps, and people would be quickly comfortable with that new way to use TV because they already use their phones that way. So-called "Smart" TVs right now are a joke, with extremely limited internet functionality and execrable user interfaces - picking characters from an on-screen alphabet using the left-right-up-down-ok approach makes it worthless.

To my mind the biggest technical challenge is remote control. You need a proper keyboard, so I'm not sure how Apple are going to solve that one - while a minimalist remote might work for many media watching functions, you also need text input that is almost transparent. Maybe that's what Steve Jobs meant when he'd "cracked" it - solving the remote control issue. The iOS+apps model is surely a given.

Looking ahead to an Apple TV (and all the Android TV clones that will follow, once they see how it should be done), I think the ones who have the most to lose are commercial broadcast TV networks. They rely on advertising, but let's face it, who actually wants to ever watch an ad? They are intrusive, loud, irrelevant and just something to be put up with. Since their non-advertising content is mostly movies and made for TV series, the ability to watch those uninterrupted by streaming them from iTunes (or other sources) for a low cost or subscription fee is very attractive. When every channel is just another app, it's going to be a choice of do I click the one that gives me uninterrupted viewing of what I actually want to watch (and charges me quietly and unintrusively) or is it going to be the one that gives me the endlessly annoying ads and pop-ups? Ad money is going to abandon those networks in droves.

If I were a commercial broadcaster, I'd seriously be looking at where I'm going to be in a few years' time. Dead and gone, I reckon.

Samsung would be insulted to be compared to Palm - I feel like I became dumber after having read this article.

Brian-

Great article!

Re: @SeattleBoob- don't feed the trolls ;-) The primary reason Samdung is "doing so well" in the smartphone market, is that they so closely copy the look of Apple products, including using a stolen OS that tries to parrot the look of Apple's iOS. They are simply profiting off of Apple's success, and I look forward to the day when Apple is able to shut down their shameful behavior through successful actions in the courts of law.