14 DAY TRIAL // Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen made some predictions at an event in New York City last week, including one regarding the much hyped iTV from Apple.
“There's a pattern in our industry,” said Andreessen at the DealBook conference on Friday, adding that “Apple crystallizes the product and the minute Apple crystallizes it, then everyone knows how to compete.”
Andreessen is using mild wording to deem Apple’s competitors as copycats, noting that “Microsoft and Google will start adjusting their strategy” when the iTV comes out, according to Business Insider.
Andreessen is well connected in the Silicon Valley, but even he doesn’t know when Apple plans to take over our living rooms with a big screen TV. He forecasts that it will happen by 2015.
In fact, according to the publication, he is convinced that the product will become a reality in the next three years.
Apple’s major problem with the television business hasn’t been hardware-related, nor software-tied. The reality is that Apple’s full-fledged iTV plans are slow to materialize simply because of the established content distribution model.
Currently, live TV everywhere in the world requires a contract with a cable operator, and Apple has had trouble getting the cable companies to sign deals to put this content on its $99 / €99 set-top box.
For Apple to release a big-screen TV that costs $1,000 or more, the company needs to promise customers everything from video-on-demand to live broadcast services, and that is proving troublesome.
But the general consensus might change as analysts seem more and more interested in connected-televisions – TVs that use the Internet. And Apple knows quite a bit about that.
Combining the two models will be difficult, but Apple has the expertise and the software to do it, not to mention the App Store which could well make the device a gaming console too.
In other words, all they need is to pick the perfect timing to launch it.