The Xbox One in the Sky
Or Sky TV more precisely.
Sources familiar with company plans have informed games industry magazine MCV that the box could include a Sky satellite tuner or act as a video recorder in the future, but we’ll also follow suit and suspect only the latter is more probable. The subscription from Sky could well be centred around an Xbox One and pre-installed Now TV or Sky Go application. Couple this with SmartGlass support and you’ve got a winner.
Microsoft want to own the living room. So why not replicate the subsidy model used in mobile to gain an advantage over the Playstation’s, Nintendo’s, and mythical Apple TV 2’s of the world?
If its got Freeview Youview type DVR function with the ability to archive programs off to an external server (in an open format) I would be very interested. No interest in Sky though.
For really interesting comment on TV see
http://stratechery.com/2013/additional-notes-on-tv/
Basically he sees current TV as significantly entrenched and reckons Apple is going to ween viewers by providing more tempting ios content. Personally I can’t see the point since anything on the family TV needs to be shared by the family and most ios content is individual focussed and delivered very well on an ipad (unless you are watching film or tv series together – for which plenty of alternative platforms exist).
The one area I do see opportunity is gaming apps where you have a single game being delivered with different screen content on the main tv and iphone and ipads. Basically taking the wii U idea and making it work. Apple are superb at making existing ideas work (ask Nokia!) and that is my guess for WWDC.