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If AppleTV is 1/3 of the market, who's selling the other 2/3?

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Jeremy Toeman

A few blogs are reporting about Strategy Analytics’ recent claim:

Strategy Analytics projects that the market will reach almost 12 million units globally this year, with Apple alone predicted to sell nearly four million devices.

Wow. Pretty bold claim.  Let’s deconstruct it.  Let’s assume it’s a correct prediction:

AppleTV will sell 4 million units, leaving ~8 million for “the rest”.

what do you mean "and the rest"?

Here are “the rest”: Roku, Western Digital, D-Link (Boxee), and… er… I don’t know, how about Logitech? Maybe a few other smaller players, but nothing you and I are buying in a Best Buy, Target, Walmart or Amazon – the only places that matter at all for moving these kinds of numbers.  Yes, there are some other odds and ends in the bizarre category known as Internet Set Top Boxes, but they aren’t mustering up sufficient sales to count here.

Roku: I’ve heard all sorts of things, but lets use publicly available information: as of last January, Roku hit 1 million devices sold.  I’ll assume they’ve at least doubled that in 2011, possibly as much as tripled, due to new products, more viability, and lower prices.  That said, they are now up against an ever-improving AppleTV product.  Even so, let’s assume they can hold pace against the world’s largest marketing machine for digital lifestyle products, and sell another 3 million units in 2012.

Western Digital: You probably haven’t heard of it, but that little gadget your buddy has for watching photos on his TV is called the WDTV Live, and they’ve sold somewhere in the 1-3 million unit range (I know that’s a big range, but it seems pretty fair based on some poking around).  Not a bad showing for a company known for making hard drives.  But in the presence of both Apple and Roku, it’s a pretty fair bet that they aren’t edging out of third place for future market share.  I’ll again be kind with 1.5 million units sold in 2012.

From these guys, only for your TV. Perfect.

D-Link (Boxee Box): Disclosure: I was a core part of the launch teams for both Boxee and the Boxee Box by D-Link, and wish to see them extremely successful, though I am no longer professionally engaged with either company in any way.  And that said, I don’t think they’re anywhere close in numbers yet, and don’t see them hitting the million unit mark any time soon (specifically in regards to unit sales, this has nothing to do with downloads, active community, or positive thoughts). Optimistic high end prediction in 2012: 750K units.

Logitech: $100 million loss.  Let’s move along shall we?

Have the factory spin up about a bajillion of them, nothing will go wrong.

Everyone else: I’ll generously band them all together, and predict they maybe move 500K units.

Unknown entry by traditional consumer electronics brand: Look, anyone can make a media streamer, in fact you can make an adequate one by buying off the shelf parts and licensing open software platforms.  But even the formerly mighty Sony and the young stalwart Vizio is going to have a tricky road in getting a product out in this category that doesn’t include a full end-to-end solution.  And there just aren’t enough to go around.  Maybe Amazon could have some kind of Kindle Fire: Home Media Edition or something, but something tells me they are still getting their feet wet in hardware and aren’t going to jump too rashly into the space (though I’ve been known to be wrong about Amazon and hardware in the past).  Top guess: 250K units.

Grand Total Units Sold, Highly Optimistic Prediction Mode: 6 million units.  Giving Apple TV, with 4 million sales, a 40% market share.  And that’s me being *quite* optimistic, and I’d wager it’s more like a grand total of 4 for the rest.  Or less.  Giving Apple TV a significantly larger potential – and by the way, it’s not exactly Apple’s strongest product.

But their math was so good!

This whole story just reminds me of the time when I was reviewing an analyst report for the *exact same space* back in 2003 when we had just shipped the HP Digital Media Receiver (the first mainstream Internet Set Top Box, by the way).  This was, by the way, before consumers had Flips or other simple video recording devices, digital cameras were mostly a novelty, and there was no YouTube, Netflix streaming, or pretty much anything else to watch on the darned thing.  But still, the potential!

The analyst predicted hundreds of thousands of “streaming video boxes” sold in 2003.  The only snag was, we were literally the only game in town, and we had predicted tens of thousands at best.  When I spoke with the analysts, they said they predicted several years forward, based on consumer interest, to arrive at several million units a year.  Then, they backtracked it into 2003 and, boom, hundreds of thousands.  What could possibly go wrong with this kind of logic?

They sold literally dozens of them

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Posted in General | Tags: analyst, Apple, apple tv, appletv, boxee, d-link, digital media receiver, fail, google tv, HP, internet set top box, internet tv, logitech, predictions, roku, streaming media, wdtv, wdtv live, western digital | 2 Comments |

Netflix on the new XBOX 360 Live – disappointing so far

Posted on November 23, 2008 by David Speiser

On a scale from 1 to 10, the Netflix / Xbox experience is slathered in weaksauce.

I have an Xbox 360. When I heard about the new Xbox Live experience (new UI, new architecture, more features, more customization, etc.) I thought it sounded really cool. I’ve always thought it was a neat product, but I also thought there was a better interactive experience waiting to be enjoyed, if only someone would come along and develop it. Last Thursday, November 20, 2008, that experience became available for everyone.

One of the features I was most interested in was the Netflix streaming directly to your Xbox 360. I believe that digital home media have a long way to go. Networked media PC’s are a pain to set up, streaming media servers even more so, and Apple TV (even with Apple’s vaunted user-experience) isn’t an elegant or simple solution. But I have an Xbox 360, a computer (for all intents and purposes,) already hooked up to my television and with an HDMI connection.   Netflix streaming directly onto my TV? Sounds excellent.

I even resurrected a membership for this. I had Netflix a long time ago, and ended up canceling because I just didn’t get enough value from it. I get lots of movies from the Library (I know, laugh all you want, but’s it free) and I felt like I was always forgetting to return the Netflix discs and just throwing money away on the membership. So I canceled. But this Xbox partnership seemed like a good reason to renew the subscription, because of the ease, convneience, and my sheer exuberance at the prospect of streaming it right on to my Xbox. Then reality set in.

I just re-subscribed to Netflix, activated my account on the Xbox, and added (hang on) 39 movies to my queue. Thirty-nine movies. Of those, not one is available to stream the Xbox 360.  Not one.

Now that, my friends, is weaksauce.

And before you retort smartly, let me say that this is not just a bunch of brand new, extra fun movies.  Among others I have indies (Run, Fat Bot, Run – 2007), thrillers (Revolver – 2005), TV (How I Met Your Mother Season 1 – 2005), Action (Blade – 1998), Sci-Fi (Resident Evil: Extinction – 2007), and comedy (Forgetting Sarah Marshall – 2008) to name just a few.  There’s a good blend, in my opinion, of older and newer, hotter and less-hot choices in my list.  And none of them are available to stream.  That’s not acceptable.

After searching diligently I did finally find one movie, National Treasure 2, that was available for streaming to Xbox Live, and I wasn’t wholly opposed to watching it.  It worked flawlessly.  I’ve never watched any of the National Treasure movies, but my wife convinced me that I might like them, so I gave it a shot.  Truthfully, I enjoyed the movie.  Low expectations help a lot, and the history is a lot of fun.  But more importantly, the Netflix experience on the Xbox 360 was fantastic.  Moments after adding the movie to my queue, the Xbox Live page displayed it as available.  I asked to watch the movie, and in 15 seconds it was ready to go.  The picture quality was excellent, and the controls all worked perfectly.  I was REALLY satisfied with the experience of using Netflix.   Unfortunately, there’s not much for me to watch.

Netflix and Xbox have bragged that there’s a library of 12,000 shows to choose from and stream to your Xbox 360.  That’s not real helpful, if I don’t want to watch any of them.  I am sadly unimpressed, and if I were forced to give this a numeric rating between 1 and 10, right now it would get a 4.  I like the idea and the service worked well, but there’s no content I’m interested in seeing.  No bueno.

Some Related Stories & Links:

News 4 Gamers

Gizmodo

CNET News

Tom’s Guide

—————————————

Update 11/30/08:

I’ve been thinking about this situation some more.  Jivebotic and Wunder both left very good comments (on 1to10) about what movies are available, and the benefits of the Xbox / Netflix experience.  I agree with both of them.  The way I see it, there are two major problems:

1. There’s still not enough good content available on the Xbox.  Jivebotic pointed out some good movies that I can watch, sure enough.  But they’re still not the ones I want  to watch.  I don’t know why that rubs me the wrong way, but it does.  Out of 40 or so movie titles that I want to watch, I should have been able to find a couple that were available.   For me, there was not one.  

2. Netflix needs to add some kind of serach and identification mechanism, and that right quick.  Currently they do identify their “instant” titles, but there are 4 or 5 different “instant” mechanisms for streaming movies, and not all titles are available for all mechanisms.  I need a way to search for Xbox-compatible films, they need to visibly tag those films with an Xbox logo, and they need to quickly add more titles if they want to keep my business.  

This post is also available on 1to10reviews.

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Posted in Gadgets, LD Approved, Video/Music/Media | Tags: Netflix, streaming media, Xbox 360 | 3 Comments |

About

Jeremy Toeman is a seasoned Product leader with over 20 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, smart TV and consumer technology. Prior ventures and projects include CNET, Viggle/Dijit/Nextguide, Sling Media, VUDU, Clicker, DivX, Rovi, Mediabolic, Boxee, and many other consumer technology companies. This blog represents his personal opinion and outlook on things.

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