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Apple TV Slow To Take Off

by Darren

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Not everything Apple touches turns to gold. The Apple TV concept is lagging. Apple TV was originally touted to change the way people watched TV forever. This was the famous convergence the tech industry always talks about. But so far the units have not made much progress in the marketplace.

“That category of devices is so nonexistent,” said Ross Rubin, an analyst with The NPD Group, which tracks almost every imaginable retail segment. “It hasn’t really evolved to the point where we’ve been tracking it as a category.”

As a result, it’s difficult to get a sense of how many Apple TVs have been sold. Apple employees were given last week off for the Thanksgiving holiday, and company representatives were therefore unavailable to comment.

Apple doesn’t report shipment totals for Apple TV like it does for Macs, iPods, and iPhones. Revenue from Apple TV is lumped in with a number of other segments on Apple’s financial statements, and it’s also recognized on a subscription basis over a period of two years. But it’s clear that Apple TV is quite a bit lower on the company’s priority list behind the Mac, iPod, and iPhone divisions: Jobs even called it a “hobby” during the D: All Things Digital conference.

Apple, so far, joins a long list of companies that have attempted to sell the same concept to the consuming public. Whether that changes remains to be seen.

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