[gfodor]

Yup. The opportunity that will be there when I can hack out an app to run on millions of TVs is going to be as much a paradigm shift as the phone. (and yes, i know about the console attempts, but they are shit execution and only applicable to games really.)

The TV ecosystem is basically the Apple playbook to a T: let the competitors try to design a more computer-esque smart version of a dumb device. Laugh heartily at their shitty UX that is limited by their lack of vision and unwillingness to take real risks, and let them do the market research for you. Make one that doesn't suck and is ridiculed by the media since those products "already exist." Get 80% market share in a few years while competitors scramble to keep up and suddenly all new TVs lift Apple design features. Settle in on the high end consumers who are willing to pay for attention to detail with margins that would make your competitors blush.

"Smart TVs" right now are Android before the iPhone. Slightly more polished yet fundamentally flawed versions of an old paradigm. People seem to forget that the early versions of Android were basically "open source Blackberry OS."

When AAPL plummets because people think they do not have an economic moat, I look at the lack of true innovation in the TV market as evidence that no, in fact, nobody has been able to replicate the core of Apple's design genius yet. The iTV is going have to invent new interaction methods that are much more natural and intuitive for people sitting on a couch channel surfing than buttons on a laggy infrared remote control. As per the iPhone/iPad, these design interactions are going to require a fundamental re-thinking and re-building of the entire user interface of a television. You can bet that these things will be copied aggressively (and poorly, at least initially) and lawsuits abound.

[jfb]

The problem here is that the TV hardware business is chicken feed compared to the TV content business. And while Apple is very, very good at negotiating with content owners, the money in TV is tied up in really, really complicated and retrogressive contracts, and the TV people perceive Apple as predatory, entirely missing the point of what happened to the record industry.

[gfodor]

Well, yeah. That's why it's 2013 and we still don't have our iTV. My prediction is at launch the contracts with the content providers will be fairly unappealing to consumers, once the fine print is understood, and the media will yawn. (HN will predictably announce iTV as a dud because of the content payment model being inferior to X, Y or Z.)

But the UX will be compelling and there will inevitably be a few "killer apps." Once the iTV is in the living room the experience will be frictionless enough people will probably start buying content that is technically more expensive than on competing platforms anyway. (all-you-can-eat vs pay-as-you-go, Apple will probably go for pay-as-you-go to start out.) That'll drive adoption so that Apple will build marketshare quickly enough to provide leverage to pull the content providers into the 21st century. But even the starting point they need to be to provide a MVP is probably tough to get to.

This has nothing to do with the fact that if and when it ever exists Apple will have basically rendered the current "Smart TV" user experience an embarrassment to the industry.

[jfb]

The idea of an app ecosystem for TV content is enormously appealing to the consumer, but in a world where one half of the internet access duopoly buys a content licensing company, the resistance from entrenched interests is going to be Stalingrad bitter.

[semanticist]

SmartTVs aren't even Android-before-iPhone, they're Windows Mobile.

I had a Windows Mobile handset, and while the hardware was fantastic, the user experience was horrific. That accurately describes any attempt to use the 'SmartTV' functionality on my Samsung BR/PVR box.