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hi everyone welcome to reporters roundtable i'm rafe needleman in San Francisco this is our show on a single tech topic each time and this week of course was Apple leak apple just announced a new iPad called the new iPad and also a new version of the Apple TV now everybody has an ipad according to apple's data and now they're all going to upgrade but i think the more important product here at that announcement was in fact the apple TV because it affects it has more potential from this point forward to upset the consumer electronics industry the apps industry the content industry and the cable the isp industry and so i want to focus today not on the ipad which everybody talks about but on the apple TV and i've got two great guests to dive into what the apple TV means both this product and future products and apples space in the in the content industry or placing the content industry to talk about how this is all going to play out and these guests are both cnet experts in new york first John Falcone who runs reviews in New York John thanks for joining us thanks for having me and also a Matthew Muscovy akoo reviews all this stuff again for seen it reviews in New York Matthew thanks for making the time thanks for having me right now do we actually have the video working this time through this is a second take here let's put it back smile hey he's moving this time all right right on hey Matthew again thanks how you reviewed the new Apple TV affect you I think you've reviewed all of the Apple TVs and say since they started coming out tell us about this product how good is it and should people think about getting one uh you know the apple TV is actually it's it's one of the top boxes it's out right now even though Apple only calls it a hobby it's kind of neck and neck with our editors choice the roku LT in that space now Roku has a lot more content partners so you're going to be able to you know watch videos from say Hulu Plus which you can't watch on the Apple TV but the killer feature on the apple TV is really airplay so if you have an iPad or an iPhone you can stream video right to the apple TV and that's really nice if you're invested in the apple ecosystem now does Apple continue to say that Apple TV is a hobby I know in the first came out they said that but are they still saying that because it seems like an important product to Apple I think I saw Tim Cook said that recently in a recent event and it is surprising but I feel like you know the thing is that the Apple TV isn't quite as polished as the other products and you know if they were putting more attention towards that you would think they'd already have something like an app store or maybe they would have integrated Siri for say you know video search because you know searching for things using an on-screen keyboard is still kind of a pain so until you kind of get that full attention I do think it does feel like a hobby even though it's still one of the better products in that space John what's your take is this a major product from Apple or just kind of a side note in the sea consumer electronics industry I think they're still dipping their toe in the water on this I mean it seems clear there's two or three things they could do to make the apple TV box the ninety nine dollar box that they just refreshed they just add 1080p video they upgraded the processor but it's really exactly the same otherwise as the existing box a few upgrades that could make that everybody keeps begging them for is more apps or more channels stuff like Hulu Plus or Amazon or HBO GO all those things that are already on the roku and on some of these competing game consoles and other little boxes and you know the other thing is do they really want to add a subscription service of this thing that doesn't really exist outside of Hulu Plus right now and you get kind of a feeling there's a little bit of a cognitive dissonance with Apple on this because the more cool apps they add to the apple TV the less incentive you think is there for people to buy the episodes by episodes on itunes for instance yeah it's really an interesting problem that i think apple is trying to figure out with the apple TV i agree with you kind of see the an inherent conflict built in there that you know they can bring the apple user experience to the living room but what people really want in the living room is content from everywhere isn't it yeah and I think they don't want to figure out which app they have to go to to get it which is what you have to do right now with Hulu Plus is only ABC NBC and Fox most stuff you know if you want HBO stuff you go to HBO Go if you want CBS stuff you have to go to CBS com it's it's kind of a mess right now and there's except for iTunes which is an you know pay-per-view service basically there's there's not a lot of good options on the Apple TV right now so I'm Matthew you've been looking at this thing what's your take on consumers I mean you review this the way I mean we all review products are everybody here including me who does product reviews which is you know we try to put ourselves in the mind of the consumer of the buyer but what's your take is this a product that is ready for the mainstream I know it is kind of mainstream but I mean really mainstream for everywhere you go into somebody's house you don't know and chances are they're going to have one is this product ready for that yet I i think it's it's not quite ready there to be in on the same level as you know an iphone or even an ipad it the weird thing is that you know a lot of people get it primarily just as a netflix streaming box even though you can get that on a lot of other devices but i think you know they need to put a lot of the pieces together like John was saying they really need to have something like a cross-platform search or the ability to kind of use voice so that you can just say hey I want to watch arrested development and then it goes find it whether that's on netflix another service or on itunes and that's kind of the big missing piece that all of these new connected TV devices have and some are doing better than others to do it but you get the feeling that that's what Apple is going to do to make this a mainstream product what's Apple going to do to make this mainstream product I think they're going to have to use something like Siri in terms of being able to say you know I want to watch this movie and then it's just going to find it whether that's on iTunes whether that's on netflix or whether they add other services now and yeah good well there's a little bit of that with Kinect on the Xbox you can give voice commands in search and Google TV does a good a pretty good job of being able to search some other content sources but that interface is kind of clunky and it doesn't work as well as you'd want it to we're going to get back to that in a second but I want to talk about one of the most interesting parts and I think and I think you'll agree with me Matthew one of the most important features of Apple TV which is airplay I want Johnson opinion on this too why is air play such an important thing in this product airplay is great because it's it's the DLNA everybody really wants what is why i stopped sup sup what deal what exactly you know every networked entertainment box has this feature basically called DLNA which stands for start gritting your teeth now digital Living Network Alliance and if you set everything up correctly you can use your pc or something as a server to stream video and photos and audio to these boxes airplay is basically an apple only version of that that works seamlessly and well and has a cool name and doesn't confuse the heck out of people and I'll just give you an example when I was at my brother's house on Christmas Eve he had his Apple TV set up and all it was doing was pulling music from his pc so nice holiday music and the photo screensaver was showing all these great photos of his family and my little niece and everything and that was just playing in the background and working seamlessly and when he wanted to pick a different song he popped open his iphone which you can use as the remote picked a new song and bam it was going mm-hmm now Matthew other products can do that but very few of them do it as well and as seamlessly as Apple TV Matthew what's your take them you're the one who mentioned Apple t airplay here tell us why this matters yeah well the thing that you know we always criticize the apple TV is the lack of content sources but with airplay you can actually get around a lot of those so Apple TV doesn't have Pandora but you have pandora on your iPhone and then you can just stream pinned or right to your Apple TV and whether that's you know Rhapsody or you know the other music services you can take advantage of them without having the native apps you know on the Apple team I want to get drive a little bit more into apple TV I unless unless they block them of course like HBO yes don't get me started on HBO GO I am so mad at hbl go can I just make a little side note here does anybody care if I make a sidetrack okay I have a what is it uh I forget which device it is either the Roku or the boxee I got both of them and one of them has HBO GO uh and I I was really excited because i have now i have HBO go on a set time now you're gonna say it's blocked on Comcast yes what and on and on time warner it works it works for time warner on the ipad but not yet on the roku i want to kill these guys I don't know who to kill but if I can figure out who your days are numbered all right anyway so listen airplay back to that now I have I'm very excited when I got my new entertainment system I got a dent on a VR something that has airplay built-in and it's very exciting because I can go and I can do the Pandora or Spotify or downcast which my podcast player and just hit a button and boom it goes straight onto the my entertainment system so it's really cool that Apple is putting making airplay available but they're not making all of airplay available that's reserved for the apple TV matthew am i right about that and why does that matter yeah you know if you want to do video video yeah yeah you're limited to the apple TV right now although boxy does have some ability to do that and I'm not quite sure how that works because i don't think it's officially licensed but it is interesting that they're holding that back i don't know if that's something we'll see this year were other products can you say bill you know maybe build it into an AV receiver i think a lot of people would be interested in that but as of right now they are holding it back as a apple TV exclusive feature so that's that's kind of the big reason for for some people i think to get the apple TV so you can do you know the videos from your your phone just blast them out to the living room and i think we really have to mention sorry that mountain lion the forthcoming OS 10 upgrade never the max is also going to add full airplay support so it already does audio now but it's going to add screen mirroring which means basically anything you see on your Mac you should be able to project right up on the TV screen so Apple TV is a really core part of the whole Apple ecosystem the walled garden where the height of the walls is variable depending on how Apple is feeling when in given year why why is Apple being so successful at building this out and why are the TV companies failing so miserably and the c/e companies feeling so bad at building products that make it so easy to incorporate content from you know my home movies or whatever I think at a lot of ways it comes down to software when you look at the other men of the regular you know standard TV manufacturers like your Samsung's and your Panasonic's and them they don't get you know software and the user experience the same way that Apple does so you know when you use a lot of these other content portals it's clunky they're hard to use its hard to find things and they don't feel polished you don't see kind of the thought put into them as you do on the Apple TV which has nice animations between things and it's easy to just see oh there's movies there's TV shows there's music it's very straight ahead and easy to use so do you guys think that Apple needs a TV i mean not an apple TV puck but an apple TV or an actual box so is that would that be a good idea for Apple would people buy it I mean I don't sure people would buy it but I don't think they really would be able to roll it out the way they want to until they could make some of these content bills because my joke with the apple HDTV was always that they would show it had all these great bells and whistles amazing interface great industrial design and the presentation would end with and every show is only 399 and and without you know at least more apps or at least more content or a subscription service it yes people would still buy it but it would have such a premium compared to I mean we're testing a 60 inch sharp TV in the other room that's $1,500 that I'd couldn't believe how low that price was for such a gigantic television that looked really good to my casual I are and you have to think the Apple TV would have like at least I don't know a thousand dollars on that one maybe I'll tell you what I would pay a premium for the content itself I mean a 599 episode if they could make the end ending of Battlestar Galactica better so one of the big parts of apples move here and why I find it so weird that this whole thing is called a hobby is because they are d they're playing with the big boys they are dealing with Netflix they've got a very interesting relationship with Netflix they're fighting with comcast and it's an interesting battle let's talk about the netflix deal first I don't know which of you guys is more up to speed on this but with Apple TV now you can not just use netflix but actually do your financial transactions with netflix through apple TV i think that's kind of major I think you guys want to get into that for a bit that would be a no well I mean they change it so you can sign up for netflix right through the TV screen which you could not do before but this is a big deal because this puts apple in the money collection category cuz now you're paying for it through your apples apple account right yeah i think it's just one less barrier to entry to have the apple TV on your TV seeing netflix and saying hey I want to try that out you can do it without having to know sign up on another computer put in your credit card information and do all that stuff you can just use up with the same you know Apple ID that you used to buy movies and you know TV shows on iTunes so it just makes it easier for people to write out and then once you're subscribe you know it'll just keep building your account which is of course what Netflix wants and Apple by the way will continue probably to get their cut because anytime you use an apple system for payment service they take a slice off the top so anyway so go ahead sorry yeah I'm not exactly sure how it breaks on the netflix deal I know they're taking from some content sources and not from others but I'm sure they're going to be getting some cut for using their back end for the transactions now speaking of interesting deals with contra providers one of the other interesting things is that comcast has said you know were what they said we're not going to offer this is about Netflix we're not going to offer Netflix so there seems to be this battle for who runs who controls the content who's the gatekeeper now Apple wants to be the gatekeeper they're opening up to Netflix comcast is saying no no netflix it will have their own service do you have any sense of how this is going to play out over the next say 12 months for consumers when it comes to them figuring out how to get the content they want on their internet connected in living room I mean I've always thought the cable companies are the ultimate barrier here because they kind of have you coming and going there they're controlling the largely what you're seeing on the cable TV system and and this is the key they're also your broadband provider for most people so the example we always used to give is if you do finally decide to cut the cord you chop off your TV service you just have broadband a month later you get a letter from your cable provider it says hey we just noticed your your broadband usage has gone up four thousand percent we're happy to upgrade you to the super premium plan that costs 150 dollars instead of 50 and you're right back to the same bill you had before you chopped your your cable TV service that's a that's a worst-case solution what real world are is that going to happen i get i guess in a sense we already notice it where for example i'd love to cut the i'm happy to pay comcast for my you know my internet broadband i like not to pay them for cable but then this HBO Go block thing kind of you're right it puts me back in this spot where I need if I want to get to the entertainment i'm used to i need to continue to pay them what can break the back of that that that horrible situation ruin where we can't get the content we want and we're happy to pay for just not a ridiculous amount i mean i think one of the interesting things is that you know some of these on video services are starting to actually produce their own content like Netflix and that actually may make things worse i'm not sure it seems like everything's getting more and more fragmented to the point where i am a cable cutter and i have to subscribe to you know several different services just to kind of put all the pieces together and that includes having over-the-air TV to make it work so there have been you know some solutions you know like everyone a lot of people can talk about that area over-the-air TV service and I feel like we're the appletv kind of fits in is that you know they have moved to an interface that looks a lot more like app based so if you have a collection of different apps through one unified interface that may be some way to kind of push the cable company that is it a little bit and you can get the content you want without needing you know a cable subscription Matthew you just touched on a couple of really interesting points I wanted to get into one is live content an area was kind of a part of that none of the set-top boxes I think with the exception of boxy offer a live component either live unique content or over the air now there is Aereo I want to take a little sidetracked into Ariel that's a really interesting little product it is only in New York but for people who don't know it's a grid of individual antennas that's bizarre that you can so that you can get your over the air content on are we ever going to see something like that on a cord cutters box like an Apple TV well area is going to be available to Roku and I've already tested that out and it works pretty well so that's going to be a pretty interesting solution of course it is New York only right now and I think the big thing about Aereo is that whenever I talk to people about cutting the cord one of the big problems is always the antenna you got to set up an antenna in your house or in your apartment and it's a pain so getting rid of that antenna and just being able to use it as an app where you can watch live TV or recorded content is a pretty big hurdle that they're getting over and assuming they don't get sued out of existence could be in a pretty major development for cord cutters now the other thing that you talked to a touched on there is apps roku boxy and your computer and your iPad etc all have apps the apple TV doesn't John Matthew when do you think we're going to see an Apps Marketplace open up for the Apple TV as soon as they can cut the deal basically I mean all the content providers want to protect their revenue stream and as long as Apple or anybody else can I think more or less guarantee that that revenue stream is going to stay static or possibly even ramped up that's when something like that could happen but they're not going to trade you know a fifteen dollar a year a month subscription for a five dollar one it's just not going to happen I don't know if I was an app developer I'd be pretty pretty excited about an apple an app marketplace for Apple TV by the way if I was real fast going to point out that i believe all the the three soon four major sports networks all have live programming on roku and other devices ah and on the roku i know you can get the live al jazeera feed and i think fox news does a web-only live feed for like five hours a day from around 10 a.m. eastern to 2 or 3 p.m. so it is so there is some live content out there and it's more a decision the content providers are making and let's do about the technology and the big upset exception which sports always is that you can't watch any in market content which is you know pretty big drawback for most people let's get back to the products themselves uh we have mentioned briefly both the roku and the boxee matthew give us a handicap that the race here now I I said I am I had a rogue a boxee box lying around it was a demo unit and I finally got an HDTV and I plugged it in and I thought wow this does a lot of stuff that man is a complicated so I went out and I got a roku 4 49 bucks and so this is an amazing product but I got to tell you something and this is not common wisdom the boxee does so much more I find it almost worth the effort how did the boxee in the roku and the apple TV kind of play off against each other and what are your recommendations there we talked to the top about Roku vs Apple TV but looking at the roadmap for these products does boxee have a chance can Roku compete if Apple decides to drop its prices to forty nine dollars where are we going with these these three products and others that might be in the market you know the big thing with the boxee box has always been the price it's a hundred and eighty dollars now compared to these other boxes that are a hundred dollars or fifty dollars I think the latest thing they've brought out is that live TV dongle where you can hook up over-the-air TV and watch it through your boxee box that on its own isn't that exciting because you can already do that with pretty much any TV by hooking in an antenna but they are talking about possibly adding a DVR to that and that could make it all of a sudden worth you know that price bring them over the other boxes because if you want to cut the cord you really do need to have a live TV component if you know you're want to replicate the kind of TV experience you already have because local sports news or any kind of big event like the Oscars of the Emmys you need to have live TV to watch that and Roku can it continue to fight the good fight there I think it can I mean the fact that it's only 50 bucks for the roku LT is pretty pretty huge I mean that's you know people pick them you know up a couple of them just to kind of spread around their house they have so many different content sources that you can kind of tune in to kind of anything any kind of each content that you want to check out I think their biggest thing is that there's so much when you go into the channel strip or is kind of overwhelming luckily you can kind of filter that out for your home screen but anyway for them to make it easier to find that top top level content will really help that box as we near the end of this discussion I want to bring up a couple of other alternatives for people one of which is TiVo I have an old tivo box TiVo keeps seems to be finally getting more aggressive and updating their user interface and their content deals but the the common knowledge or the common conventionalism is that TiVo blew it and there are not as force in this market and what do you guys think I couldn't Matt's been yeah yeah I've been testing than the tivo premiere box kind of as an over-the-air cord cutter solution and it's the new interface is really impressive it's a huge update from what was there before and they do have a lot of streaming services the big thing there is still the monthly fee and I think that's when people talk about tivo blue it is that people don't want to pay you know twenty dollars a month for a tivo subscription now they have been making separate deals for core cutters if you buy it through a certain antenna websites where the fee is only ten dollars a month and that's a lot more attractive if they can make that a standard plan I think we could see a little bit of resurgence from tivo from the court cutting community finally one of the big options that we have only briefly touched on here but I think is a real power in the Apple TV space is the game console the Xbox of is I think the premiere game console that is also a good media hub where does these companies these products playstation never nintendo does where do these products fit in in the Apple TV market I think they fit in pretty well it's amazing how much more the ps3 and the xbox especially Wow is that an old picture of me yeah we lost your video feed we're obviously using Apple technology here but they have a lot of the same in I think its own cases more channels and sources then the Apple TV does and the ps3 for instance now has NFL Sunday Ticket so that's you know it's very expensive obviously but it's the exact same service you'd be getting on direct TV which i think is really impressive and an amazing offer that didn't exist you know a year ago I think our one qualms with the xbox for instance is that you still have to pay sixty dollars a year to subscribe to xbox live just to get into all that video stuff and with the roku LT only costing fifty dollars all in it's kind of like wow that is a pretty crazy premium if you're not going to be playing like a lot of head-to-head gaming and things like and these products by the way the the hardware on the game consoles I'm i think the newest one you can get is five or six years old the hardware design the software keeps getting upgrade upgraded so there's a lot of we could see some pretty interesting upsets in this market pretty soon and it's it's arguably that the netflix interface on the ps3 and the xbox is two of the best experiences out there Anjali I just have to say this by the way another side note here I have I think five devices in my living room that will stream netflix it's really remarkable how they of all the company we might be talking about Apple TV but netflix is the one that is freaking everywhere it's just remarkable too bad the project is as good as Amazon's III whenever it's like Oh comcast is going to kill off netflix with this stream pics thing or something that's all fine and good but they have to get on all those boxes first and Netflix is literally pretty much the default thing on everything yeah tough to compete with any final words and any recommendations for you know the grandma poughkeepsie who's looking for something that's just does a little bit more than her cable company can provide I mean my standard recommendation is kind of between the Apple TV and the roku box and it's like if you have a lot of apple products already the Apple TVs kind of what you want to go for but if you're looking for a lot of different content sources the roku box is you know extremely affordable and it's pretty easy to use all right guys hey listen thanks very much for the time I expect we will have you both back on soon when Apple finally surprises us all by doing a TV and you know what I think they could do it because the apples that they would have to sell them through the Apple stores but that is a good channel I mean that those things are set up for selling tvs i just believe it so anyway any any final comments before we wrap up here well i just i would just say if you uh the fact that these prices are now 50 to 100 dollars just makes these things are really great impulse purchase and it's kind of hard to go wrong with that price i would say yeah they are great they're amazing products for the for the money i Roku or an apple TV john Falcone matthew miskovic both of us e nut reviews teams in new york thank you guys so much for joining us thank you see for producing thanks everybody for watching live who did we will see you all next week next week a very interesting topic we're going to be talking about new ways to do startups and invention we have one of the founders of Kickstarter and a guy from tech shop where you can make your own stuff here on reporters roundtable talking about the future of invention it's going to be a great show don't miss it see you then