D-Link plans Apple TV rival
It seems that D-link will be the first manugacturer to take the plunge and launch an Apple TV rival … althought it isn’t clear why!
Apple has consistently failed to market apple TV in any meaningful way. In fact most people don’t even know what it does! This is reflected in sales and in Apple’s financial results in which the TV box doesn’t even make an appearance. In a recent conference call with reporters and anylists when asked about Apple TV sales Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s Chief Financial Officer, would only say:
We don’t announce that level of product detail … It’s a separate category. It’s reported in the other music category as an accessory.
(transcript courtesy of SeekingAlpha)
Well you do for other products, Peter: 1,764,000 Macintosh computers sold, 9,815,000 iPods sold. It seems that the ‘level of product detail’ depends on how good the news is. Looking at the numbers we can speculate that Apple TV sales for the recent quater were very roughly 100,000.
D-Link may speculate that their advantage is in the marketing that they can put behind the product in terms of a) pushing the product and brand but most importantly b) convincing people that they really need another box on their TV so that they can view stuff already on their Mac — but at a lower resolution.
