BECAUSE APPLE NOTHING – THAT IS NOT MY POINT!  Life has trade offs for both people and corporations. Apple like all other corporations must pick a tipping point between user-experience/product-control that creates the best balance for their target customer. If you prefer a different balance, fine, choose a different company/product that best fits your preferences.  I am not stuck on Apple products. It is just very frustrating that all the potential competitors are such chowder heads. They refuse bit the bullet and spend the R&D money required to serve up a well balanced, conscious, customer focused, decision about what user-experience/product-control tipping point would best serves their target customers. If they could manage this simple insight we would all have more competitively priced premium products to chose from.  So my question is, why do myopic Apple haters, like yourself, continually attack Apple in defense of others companies/products that have even more offensive lock down trade offs than Apple?  All of these other set top boxes, internet capable TVs, cable boxes, or satellite boxes all have far more corporate lock down than an iPad circuit base Apple TV solution would have. They are more proprietary and offer far less features. Those TVs brands and set top boxed all have proprietary DRM, far less open access than Apple, most offer no software upgrade path and there is no full web browser in these locked down consumer products. They will not offer a TV industry wide standard runtime environment nor a TV industry wide App Store. Apple may control the App Store but you still have far more choice than these products with no App Store or serious development community.  As an example my shaw cable box is one of shaw’s new Pace boxes. To enable PVR functionality, I had to purchase a standard external 1GB western digital hard drive costing $150, about $50 more than I could buy it any where else, but you must buy through them or one of their official resellers. You connect it up and phone shaw to activate it. You can not even move this to another one of their own cable boxes in another room to watch a show. Talk abot lock down! No body even questions this stuff.  Now if Apple forced users to call and have their new hard drives authorized before it would work and would not enable it because you had not bought the drive from Apple, people like you would go endlessly ape S**T all over these tech blogs. I sure have not hear much from the tech blog equipment police about these large company lock downs.  Apple must struggle with this complexity of balancing the interests of it’s commercial partners, it’s shareholders and it’s customers. Apple is not a democracy. It is a corporation and like all corporations it’s first priority is to it’s shareholders. This requires that Apple make a business decision and commit to setting a balance or tipping point between THE INTERESTS/RIGHTS/FREEDOMS OF IT’S INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPERS and THE INTERESTS/RIGHTS/FREEDOMS OF IT’S CUSTOMERS AS A GROUP. This tipping point is a corporate judgement call. Each company consciously or unconsciously sets this tipping point. Apple is keenly aware of the importance that this process has on the over all customer experience. Apple has chosen, rightly or wrongly, to set this tipping point where it will be most comfortable and beneficial to the average DIGITAL APPLIANCE consumer. Unfortunately this is out side the comfort zone for most of the, digital geek, gadget loving, pocket protector crowd that frequent these tech blogs.  So, if porn is your top priority when purchasing a hand held smart phone or tablet you might want to stick with a google phone. That google phone will exercise less control, so you can benefit from the wall of location base digital billboard ads that every App will push in your face as you pass through the neighborhood and the next he neighborhood and the next he neighborhood! But that is OK, because you do not want to make any user-experience/control trade offs. That delusion will be a tough less for you and google and in the end they will start to lock somethings down, that is real life, you must make some trade offs.
Walmart has acquired online movie service Vudu, just over a month after rumors about a deal first surfaced.