I'm pleased and intrigued, just enough to consider one, even without games in the picture. With the RAM and CPU it's packing, I have to assume it's significantly snappier to use than the previous-gen model I have already, and that's the real draw for me, since the current ATV is not the quickest little beast ever to grace the earth, to say the least.
I can't believe I actually thought about dropping directv for this. At the end of the day, live sports always wins the heart of fans (and wallets).
DirecTV is certainly the cheapest live sports option, no question, but you can really blame that on the leagues making it prohibitively expensive and restrictive to watch live sports without cable or satellite. They have the option and simply refuse to take it. NHL Game Center pricing is a fucking joke/travesty. But if they get a SlingTV app on Apple TV, then I guess the joke ends up being on the leagues.
That's the thing though, most TVs now have all this. The navigation and voice control looked pretty sweet, but let's say you got one of the Samsung/Sonys from the past couple of years. They have all those apps already, including some games like that Rayman one... Do you think the general consumer will see the product as something they should buy to make what they already have a bit better?
For most people, a TV is a 5-7 year investment. So there's a LOT of people with TVs in the wild that don't have SmartTV-esque functions.
And as with everything Apple does, the devil is in the little details for consumers at times. The Siri functions look incredibly slick, easy to use and very on point in a way that is more clearly demoed than most SmartTV functionality, as does bringing their brand of touch navigation into the picture.
But iPhones now shoot 4K video. You'd think they'd go hand in hand being all the talk of an Apple ecosystem.
When the content is ready for the iTunes Store, 4K will get the push. But bandwidth caps also place this outside of the range of most people to really utilize, so that could have been part of why they aren't on the bleeding edge there. Because until bandwidth caps improve, that's what online 4K content is: bleeding edge, accent on the "bleeding".
This is the biggest problem with cord cutting; the experience isn't great or easy because of the fragmentation. It'll be interesting to see how Apple's TV service is.
Well, they're at least making an attempt to make the fragmentation a lot less visible to the end user by letting Siri search cross-service like it did in the demos, which I imagine is going to be a decent part of the appeal, so long as it isn't searching services I'm not logged into and don't want to pay for.
Other devices have tried to make this a selling point and either seen modest success in return or failed. The cheers at the event today when it was shown off tell me that people have confidence in Apple to make it a marketable feature, albeit with trepidation.
That's why I went back to cable about 5 years ago. I don't want 15 different logins for different services. I just want live TV (including local channels), Youtube and Netflix on a single device. Paying for all the TV related services like Hulu or HBO Now or Sling or PS Vue eventually adds up to what my cable bill is.
I hope the Apple service is appealing. We are very entrenched in their ecosystem.
OR my other hope is Time Warner somehow adds Netflix and Youtube access on their cable boxes.
I've found the iTunes Store to be pretty compelling in its own right for ditching cable, but that's just me and I've discussed that to death already in other threads.
