Over at his Decabled blog, Jeff MacArthur of MGI Media and commandN fame has posted some thoughts on how the forthcoming Apple Tablet may offer “text” podcasts & help revitalize the Apple TV. While Jeff is only speculating on the possibilities that the Tablet offers, I haven’t seen these arguments presented anywhere else and they’re definitely worth a read.
“Text” podcasts: embracing text-based content in the iTunes ecosystem means the ability to deliver daily news & info in a simpler, more user-friendly way than RSS feeds provide. Not only would this interest the big newspaper publishers, it might lead to the rebirth of the Zine, not to mention appeal to comic artists / cartoonists and indy authors.
Apple TV lives: I’ve long felt that the Apple TV gets a bum rap in the media. It is often criticized for its lack of DVR functionality. But if you look at today’s popular set-top boxes like the Roku or Western Digital media players, you’ll see that they too lack DVR capabilities and instead stream video from the network or local computers. Just like the Apple TV does.
To me, it always seemed that the Apple TV was Steve Jobs’ pet project (he referred to it as a “hobby” when it was first introduced). As Jeff points out, when Steve Jobs’ health took a turn for the worse, progress on the Apple TV languished. Now that Steve is back and making deals with the media companies for the new tablet, I expect we’ll see some Apple TV action as well.
Head over to the Decabled blog to read the full article.
Mike is a former sysadmin and embedded developer, who worked on several prototype tablet devices way back in the dot-com era. He's also a non-practicing physicist and a big fan of anything resembling a tablet computer (or a telescope).