Planned leak, will be interesting to see if this trial balloon has lift:http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/apple-wants-its-own-path-on-comcast-network-for-video-service-wsj-says/
But -especially- this:Apple now has everything they need to disrupt the game console industry in a way that none of them see coming. I predict that we’ll see a new AppleTV update (and hardware) this fall along with a new app extension type for AirPlay. AirPlay will become about more than just streaming video to your AppleTV - instead that’ll simply be one of the things you can do with it. Apps (mostly games, I suspect) will be able to bundle an AirPlay extension inside - just like how apps can now bundle photo editing or sharing extensions as of iOS 8.
We've pondered similar things before but this kinda seals it for me, if and when a real big screen app store comes about you can bet that all prior phone apps will work in some way on it and can be -optimized- for the experience by developers very quickly. Anything short of that is madness. It's one iOS app store.If that customer buys an iPhone or iPad later, all the games they purchased on their AppleTV would also work on their shiny new iPhone or iPad because Apple would require all games to support normal touch-only controls - just as they have always done even for apps that support the existing game controller APIs. This would be a huge win for Apple, of course, but also for customers - buy the game once and it’s always yours on any device no matter how you want to experience it. There would be no AppleTV-exclusive games in the AppleTV Store - only normal touch-enabled iOS games that happen to also bundle an AirPlay extension. No fragmentation.
Fully agree about "getting" it as a "force multiplier". Not sure they get gaming as gaming. Not the way that Nintendo gets it, or Valve or Microsoft. The ugly and useless Game Center continue to indicate that to me. Last year's Keynote focus on remote-controlled cars showed that.Sam Posten said:I definitely think Jobs warmed to gaming with iPhone and even more so with iPad. I think Apple 'gets' gaming today, at least casual gaming, and considers it a force multiplier. Whereas pron used to drive format adoption in the past I think gaming and social does it even moreso today.
Apple TV has to win on merit.