Want To Know Why Apple TV Is Still Steve Jobs’ “Hobby”?
Sep 17th, 2008 | By James Lewin | Category: Digital Video Downloads, Streaming Video, Video 
Want to know why Steve Jobs is still calling Apple TV his “hobby”?
New research by The NPD Group offers an explanation:
- 41 percent of dollars budgeted for movies and video is spent on DVD movie purchases;
- 11 percent for purchases of TV programs on DVD;
- 29 percent on DVD rentals including Netflix and other video-subscription services;
- 18 percent is spent on movie tickets;
- Just 0.5 percent is spent on renting or purchasing TV shows or movies in digital format from the Web.
“Everyone is guessing when video on demand and digital downloads will spell the end for packaged media”? says NPD’s Russ Crupnick. “At this point, though, digital video is still an extremely small part of overall consumer entertainment spending.”
While digital video purchases have yet to take off, people are flocking to free video sites. Just 2 percent or those surveyed by NPD had purchased a digital video download from the Web, but more than half (52 percent) reported visiting sites likeYouTube, in order to watch streaming video.
“Though the near-term talk of a digital revolution is probably overblown, as we’ve seen previously in the music industry, new content delivery sources can quickly take root among consumers,” adds Crupnick. “That’s why many home video companies are aggressively pursuing digital strategies, because the inflection point will come — it’s just not coming tomorrow.”
DVD sales are going to follow the pattern of CDs – they’re going to drop hard and digital video sales are not going to replace them.
The opportunity will be in creating new categories of paid content for television.
Apple’s figured this out with the App Store. Digital music downloads aren’t going to be as big a market as CDs, but they’ve built a portable media platform that can run all types of apps, which looks like it will be a huge market.
There is definitely a market for boxes like AppleTV, the question is whether Apple can add enough functionality to make it “must have” and reliable enough to always be available. I have one and it’s reachable without rebooting everything about 75% of the time.
[…] out of the gate for its HD TV show launch last month, but I guess the Apple TV is still just a hobby (or, perhaps, more correctly an […]