The back-end technology that broadcasts IPTV and broadband video. These articles discuss the technology and workings behind the platforms that bring us television over the internet including both hardware and software.
If you believe the old adage that there is no smoke without first then the it’s a case of when rather than if Apple is going to release a television set. New rumors have emerged recently that suggest the product is certainly in the pipeline.
It’s been a few years since rumors of an Apple television set began cropping up. The thinking was that Apple would try and do for the television market what it has done for the mobile and computing markets. It would certainly be an obvious next step for the company to take.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson just before his death last year that he had “finally cracked it,” the “it” being the television set and how Apple could disrupt the market. Which suggests something new, innovative, and enough to warrant a high price.
Rumors at the end of last year suggested that Apple was preparing to launch the Apple television set, possibly named iTV, at the end of 2012. That now seems unlikely, but you would have to be very cynical to believe the product doesn’t exist, even if it’s just in prototype form for the time being.
It looks exactly the same, it does pretty much the same things as it did before, and even under the hood little has changed. But we should still be getting excited about the new Apple TV.
Apple TV is a set-top box which enables anyone to stream video content to their television set. The product has been with us for some time, but in 2010 Apple rebooted it into the small, elegant black box pictured above.
In the two years since then Apple TV has enjoyed strong-yet-unspectacular sales. And it’s still regarded as nothing more than “a hobby,” as described by Steve Jobs several years ago.
However, a new version of Apple TV was unveiled today alongside the new iPad 3. And it’s…
Roku sees a future when we will all have a Roku Streaming Stick plugged into the back of our televisions. It has to be the future, however, because most televisions are currently incapable of powering the device.
The idea of streaming video content directly to a television set was pie in the sky just a few years ago, but now there are numerous methods for achieving this, and more are being added all the time.
Roku is an established company with an established product. Its set-top box started life in 2008 as a means for Netflix subscribers to watch content on their TVs. But Netflix expanded to multiple other devices, while Roku added more content.
There are now a range of different Roku set-top boxes available, and the company is breaking out of its self-imposed U.S. borders to launch in the U.K. and Canada sometime in 2012.
It’s well known that Apple has been planning to develop a television set for some time now. Or at least it was the dream of late founder and CEO Steve Jobs to do so. But the plans are taking a long time to materialize, and dripping through to the public rumor by rumor.
After Steve Jobs’ death earlier this year it was revealed he felt he had solved the conundrum of how to bring Apple’s design sensibilities to the television market. With a simple, “I finally cracked it,” Jobs spelled out a vision for a future Apple television set.
Despite his death Apple is carrying on with his vision for the future, and an Apple television set is now all but guaranteed. Not that we know what form it will take. But with an ear to the ground we can attain some strong clues.
If you have your Xbox 360 hooked up to the Internet, and why wouldn’t you, quite frankly, then it will update itself tomorrow to the latest version of the Xbox Live dashboard. And this upgrade brings television and movies galore to the games console.
We have known this large and rather impressive Xbox Live upgrade was coming since the beginning of October, and it’s finally set to land on the Xbox 360 consoles of gamers tomorrow (Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2011).
Everything is pretty much as expected, with a host of broadcasters and content providers partnering with Microsoft to have their movies and television shows available to watch directly through the online service. Bravo, ESPN, HBO, Syfy, BBC, Canal+, FOXTEL, MediaSet, and ZDF are just a few of the names launching on Xbox Live, with many in the U.S., others in countries around the world.
They’re not all free: an Xbox Live Gold subscription is a must, while many of the individual companies have their own subscription packages. But that doesn’t take away from the joy of having all these services available on the one set-top box. One which has 35 million users.
Roku is heading international, with its set-top boxes becoming available to buy outside of the U.S. for the first time in the new year. As always content is king, and the hardware will be nothing but an expensive brick without partners providing content.
Roku made its debut in 2008 as the Netflix Player before adding many more content partners and evolving into the rather neat little set-top box pictured above. In the U.S. there are a range of boxes available, with prices ranging from $49 to $99. International pricing has yet to be announced.
In many ways Roku was the forerunner to the current-generation Apple TV and Google TV. These big-name companies saw an opportunity developing to deliver video content via the Internet using a small, unobtrusive, connected set-top box, something Roku has been doing for several years.
But Roku isn’t standing still while other companies try to catch up. Instead it’s heading international, which somewhat signals a return to its Netflix roots.
Google TV is still waiting in the wings trying to find its market. Google will hang in there waiting for consumers and content owners to catch up with its ambitions, but other companies are bailing out now. And I can’t say I really blame them.
Google TV was unveiled in the middle of last year after a little teasing from Google. The two main partners were Sony and Logitech, the former integrating the software into television sets and Blu-ray players, the latter releasing a set-top box named Revue.
Unfortunately Google TV didn’t take off for many reasons: The unfinished nature of the software, the price of the hardware, and, worst of all, the fact that all of the big television networks and other premium content owners blocked Google TV access to their programming.
The writing was on the wall from that moment forth.
