(a) AppleTV is not (yet?) correctly thought of within Apple. It should not be thought of a fancy Roku, it should be thought of as “iOS for the big screen/iOS for the house/iOS for the family”. This opens up new possibilities — things that seem related to iOS but that work better on a big screen, or a communal screen, or stationary to the home rather than mobile to the person.
(b) BUT the other big problem Apple has is that the TV that aTV connects to is so damn awful. In particular the toggle between “other TV” and “anything aTV shows” is too much hassle, requiring a trip to the *TV* remote and a switching between HDMI1 and HDMI2 (or whatever). Likewise you need that extra remote to switch the TV off. And god help you when the cat steps on it and the TV starts displaying S-video or whatever — then you get the call from the parents about “the TV is broken and how to fix?”
( c) THIS seems to me a substantial part of where Apple hits friction. For those of us who are comfortable with gadgets, aTV seems like a trivial addition — plug it in, switch to aTV when appropriate, and at other times switch to liveTV/cableTV/a blueRay player or whatever. But for most people (who, remember, have been given a DVR and a ghastly Scientific Atlanta PoS box by their cable company) this is a constant mess of “what remote when”.
(d) So how does Apple fix this? MY suggestion is that what is needed is a second box by Apple. aTV has the OS/UI logic and is (mostly…) fine. The TV itself displays the content and is (mostly…) OK. What’s needed is an apple HDMI box that’s just a few HDMI connections, maybe the speaker connections, basically everything that plugs into a TV. AND some big, easy to read buttons or switches on it.
What does this give you? The idea would be that you connect your DVR, antenna, DVD player, whatever, to the apple HDMI box which is then controlled by aTV and plugs into the TV’s HDMI1.
Ideally you now have a SINGLE point of control, by Apple, of the TV itself, with no need ever for the TV remote. (This requires the ability to switch the TV off and configure it through out-of-band signals on HDMI1 — if no such spec exists, Apple should really get together with Google, Roku and everyone else in the space to define such a spec, and push very hard that the TV’s with it “work well” with these devices while other TVs are stuck in the past.)
Basically what you’re doing now is disintermediating the TV, the way the cell carriers were disintermediated, no longer responsible for maps, payment and other services provided by the smart phone. Likewise aTV (plus aHDMI) will have apps that control the TV image itself (“torch mode”, “contrast control”, etc), the DVR itself (run an aTV app that controls the U-verse DVR or the DirectTV DVR or anything else), the switching between these (“Hey Siri switch to DVD player”) and so on.
With the aTV as the single controller of the physical display of the TV, Apple now has more freedom to, like I said, grow tvOS as iOS for the family, iOS for the big screen, iOS in every capability except that the UI is primarily focus-driven [TV remote control] rather than primarily touch-driven.
