Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

programminggeek

Have you seen the new iMac?

Now, imagine apple making that thin and beautiful of a screen at 32", 42", and 50". They could price them at $499, $749, and $999. People would buy that.

There are 2 things they could do to really pull people in - make TV easy and put iOS apps on your television.

Make TV easy - have a beautiful UI that makes it easy. Less clutter, easier to read channel guide. Simple setup. Etc. Maybe channel search via Siri. "Siri, I want to watch Fringe." And Siri finds you that episode via maybe a built in DVR, Apple's catalog, Hulu plus, or the cable company's on demand stuff.

iOS apps on your TV. Seriously, $1 games on your TV. Even $6 premium games like Infinity Blade. Compare that to $60 games like Halo 4 or even "cheap" Xbox 360 games at $15 or so. People would go bananas for that. The trickiest part for apps is the control mechanism, but for games, most of them could be made to use a game controller similar to what OUYA is doing.

If Apple can get those two things right, they will be able to charge a real premium for a TV. The reason TV's have low margins right now is that they have no value adds or differentiation. It's hard to justify spending $1,000 on a "smart" tv when a $400 tv has the same picture quality for the most part and every $50+ add on box and blu ray player has "smart tv" apps like netflix, hulu, amazon video, picasa, etc...

These are two hard issues though.

1) The main thing people are complaining about in "TV" UIs is the cable box UI. If you want to replace that, you need to do the whole CableCard thing, and now DVR is a requirement since most cable boxes have that. And your TV doesn't work for satellite TV, sorry.

2) You integrate the game hardware into the TV and now you have lifespan issues. Is Apple going to support games on your TV for the 10 years you own the TV, as hardware continues improving? Or are you just going to end up with something that theoretically can play games but none are actually supported on your old hardware?

You don't integrate the game hardware into the device. It's relatively easy for the cableco to give you fast, low ping bandwidth to a local cable switch within their network. That's where you put the game hardware. You create a new gaming platform and virtualize the console to a cluster hosted by the cableco. This game-rendering cluster is scalable, upgradeable and on demand. You don't need to distribute a lot of expensive, loss-leadin, power-hungry silicon to every house - that ends up sitting idle 90% of the day.

I agree generally with what you said, but:

> Even $6 premium games like Infinity Blade. Compare that to $60 games like Halo 4

There is a huge gulf between Infinity Blade and Halo 4. What iOS developers do best is beautiful, simple games – games with easy gameplay that've been polished to hell. There's still nothing resembling the top platform titles from recent eras – hell, I haven't seen an iPad game as good as Halo One, let alone the more recent games to come along.

There are many ports of AAA PS2-era games, like GTAIII, GTA:VC or Max Payne, so there's nothing inherently impossible in making complex iOS games.

Of course, those are (relatively) low-cost ports, so question whether it's economically viable to create an entire GTA-scale game from scratch for iOS still stands.

Have you seen the price on a cinema/thunderbolt display? No way a tv would go that cheap if they make one.

Also, does anyone actually use Siri? Like daily. I used it ones or twice when it was new and cool but screaming at devices is not something I prefer.

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