Biz Daily: Will Apple TV be a core gaming device?

hello and welcome to Biz daily I'm John Jordan so the big news today is all about Apple TV so Apple has announced a new Apple TV which is a little bit kind of as expected so it's um it's the same kind of design and shape as the old Apple TV um but some significant differences so the main difference is it has an App Store now um so that's kind of brings it into line um with what we've seen for iPhone and iPad and that will also be reflected in the sense that it supports so there's a new um OS called um TV OS um and that kind of supports game senser so it's kind of interesting for game developers that now they can do a universal app that supports iPhone iPad and Apple TV um and that's really interesting in terms of how people can um play games and interact with games because you can play your games say you play a game on an iPhone come back home and then stop playing it on the TV now will people do that a lot kind of hard to say obviously

it's not out yet um not out until October the Apple TV but um I think it does make it um interesting from from a gameplay point of view in the sense that you won't be perhaps treating your Apple TV as a primly as a gaming platform but if you have the opportunity so of an evening or of a weekend maybe not every weekend if you or even for particular games that you want to play on a big screen you can do that and you can um kind of get the get the uh advantage of playing on a big screen but equally if you want to and someone else wants to watch the TV you can go back and justplay on your on your iPhone or iPad so that's kind of a quite a nice um expansive kind of option if you want to obviously the big problem we've kind generally had with with Smart TVs and gaming is is uh controls so the Apple TV comes with a new remote control um it's not designed for gaming at all um overtly but it is interesting that is it is like a a Wii remote so it has accelerometer and it has um a gyroscope so one of the games that was shown was from harmonic the the uh us developer

who does lots of music games Guitar Hero and they had a game called beat Sports and that was very much like a wh we Sports type game they were Shing baseball element um set to music like a rhythm part to it and the person was playing kind of swinging their their the remote for the Apple TV um to hit the ball so you can kind of see that that kind of Wii Sport mini game kind of all the family having a go that would work kind of well um on Apple TV it obviously wouldn't really work on you could do it on iPhone as well but but wouldn't really work so well I guess the interest the thing the interesting thing will be will game developers kind of make not exclusive games track TV but games that work really well on Apple TV and not quite so well on other platforms or will or will they assume that people will generally be playing on on iPhones um and iPads and and maybe you just using the bigger screen size on occasions another kind of game that was shown was crossy road so there going to be new version multiplayer version of crossy Road it uses the obviously the bigger screen um and you can use use

your iPhone to control that so two players there working cooperatively or probably more competitively to push each other into the traffic and get the high score so that was pretty neat and in general it was kind of interesting that across the whole press conference Apple had a lot more game developers than they have had in the past who were who none of them were particularly you wouldn't say massively high profile quite a few Indies really but it was kind of good a good mix of of kind of types of games and kind of showing a bit more kind of apple apple love for games and perhaps we've seen in the past so the other thing to say about Apple TV is um pricing Wise It's maybe a bit more expensive again than people hes $150 for the entry level one $200 for the for the 64 GB version and that makes it a bit less of a um of an Impulse buy than perhaps the and the current version is still around actually so the Nona store version is still around for under $100 um so it's interesting apples not phase that out um so yeah it's kind of I guess less radical a proposal than than perhaps kind of Gamers or game developers would have thought apple is certainly not pro positioning the Apple TV as a as a gaming platform it's

obviously does um the usual kind of kind of TV streaming and there's lots of things about how apps would kind of interact with TV so so um gaming part of it but probably not to the four unless kind of people start using their Apple TVs a lot for gaming we have to wait and see partly that's due to developers um the kind of games they they decide to make for Apple TV so um yeah certainly interesting stuff we'll get kind of a better view I guess as obviously when it comes out and people start using it over the holiday period so we'll uh keep our eyes on it and see what happens then come back tomorrow and see what the news is in see you then