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Next year marks the 10 year anniversary of Apple TV, which created a new market by providing an easy way to wireless display personal video content on the big screen. It was groundbreaking product at the time.

Looking back The Motley Fool’s Jeremy Bowman sees a missed opportunities and a “trail of disappointments” for what Steve Jobs hailed as the "DVD player for the 21st century," which launched as Netflix was just starting to make streaming available and predated Amazon streaming service by four years.

Bowman's analysis is excerpted here:

Given Apple's brand power and its head start in streaming, the iPhone maker could have been the clear leader in this industry today. Instead, it's been elbowed to the side by competitors like Alphabet, Amazon, and Roku.

….With billions in revenue over its history, the product hasn't been a complete dud, but next to Apple's marquee devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, those numbers aren't much more than a rounding error.

Adding to the disappointment are the many grandiose promises the company has made about TV that have gone unfulfilled….

Meanwhile, Apple's rivals have moved past it.

Even with solid growth from Apple TV last year, research firm Parks Associates estimated it to be fourth behind Google, Amazon, and Roku in streaming device sales last year….

Those companies all jumped in the streaming fray after Apple, and Netflix's new deal to be included on Comcast's X1 set-top box may be a further signal of Apple TV's waning relevance. Apple VP Eddy Cue said in a recent interview that Netflix was not a competitor, but the statement alone seems to be a reflection of Apple's failure in TV. After all, why would management not see the leading video streamer the same way it views Pandora or Spotify in music?

As Apple struggles to find its footing nearly a decade after Apple TV's launch, two mistakes in particular stand out.

Missed opportunity No. 1: failure to make a smart TV
What do the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and iPod all have in common?

A screen. Those are the kind of products that Apple makes: high-tech gadgets that people interact with through a screen. A smart TV would seem to be the missing member of this family, and it seems to be a mistake for a company known for its aesthetics to miss out on a chance to provide the centerpiece for your living room.

Apple spent nearly a decade researching how to make an ultra-high definition television but let go of the idea in 2014, believing it couldn't create a product compelling or innovative enough to take over the highly competitive market.

That sounds like a surprising acknowledgement of impotence from a company that's synonymous with innovation to many of its fans. Instead of making a smart TV, Apple has focused on improving its set-top box, but even as it loses share to rivals, streaming devices are being eclipsed by smart TVs, which had 120 million shipments last year compared to just 42 million for Apple TV and its ilk….

Missed opportunity No. 2: failure to develop and sell content
Apple was ahead of the curve with its set-top device and had a content platform in iTunes to complement it. Together, the company could have built a Netflix-like ecosystem out of the two—a video-based partner to Apple Music—but such a project has yet to materialize, and streamers like Netflix and Amazon continue to become more entrenched….

Apple has the customer base, the hardware, and a starting point for a content library in iTunes, but it was never able to connect the three into a viable service that kept customers in its own ecosystem. Netflix has 83 million subscribers today, and Amazon has tens of millions on its Prime service. Apple has a box to watch them for $149 on Groupon…

Read the full article here.