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  • Supermodified

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    • The genius is in the beats. Amon Tobin creates fantastic, groovy beats behind beats. "Supermodified" rolls through your expectations of breakbeat music, and turns them up a bit. It's a mellow album, p
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News

A Sanity Check on Improving Apple TV

Several observers of Apple have suggested that the Apple TV is a failure and needs to have its business model and/or hardware tinkered with. Daniel Eran Dilger at Roughly Drafted took a look at Apple’s options and put the subject in clearer perspective on Wednesday.

The first item in the analysis pointed to the fact that Apple has an enormous lead in paid TV show downloads, holding 99 percent of that market. For movie downloads, the number is 42 percent. With those kinds of numbers, its not likely that Apple is going to make dramatic changes based on uninformed suggestions from pundits.

Item by item, Mr. Dilger analyzes the suggestions made by others to "fix" the Apple TV. The problem is, those fixes are either not technically feasible (HD downloads) or not necessary. Certainly, turning the Apple TV into a TiVo, a company that has struggled to make money, or a Microsoft Media Center, an expensive product that hasn’t sold well, is not the answer.

"There simply is no practical way to offer a universal DVR tuner that works with all the features of every cable system and satellite provider in the US, let alone a worldwide product. If DVRs were selling like smartphones and music players, it might make sense for Apple to target those markets. Since there�s already too many DVRs all fighting over a limited market, it makes more sense for Apple to create an independent service that directly delivers the TV programming consumers want, rather than salvaging through the river of content to dredge up clippings of TV from a provider�s raw feed," Mr. Dilger noted.

Basically, the issues surrounding the Apple TV are more complex than the average observer understands, and Mr. Dilger appears to suggest that any fixes that are needed for the Apple TV will be both evolutionary and revolutionary as opposed to simply repeating the mistakes of the present by others.

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