Many investors expect that Apple (AAPL) will be the dominant force in television. Conquering the living room is often thought of as the last frontier for Apple. However, when one looks at the numbers, the dominant player in the living room might actually be Microsoft (MSFT).

For example, Microsoft X-Box is largely used as an entertainment console. It is not strictly a video game console.

"Yusuf Mehdi, who heads up marketing and strategy for Microsoft's Xbox business, said households now spend an average of 84 hours a month on the Xbox Live online service playing games, watching videos and listening to music. That's up 30% from a year ago. Just over half that time is spent on videos and music."

In other words, a large part of what Apple TV aspires to do is what Microsoft is actually doing right now.

The content roster on the X-Box is impressive as well which is why the user time is increasing at such a fast clip.

The X-Box gives you access to Netflix, ESPN, Hulu, Vudu and YouTube. In the near future, X-Box Live will also offer video applications from HBO Go, Major League Baseball and Comcast Corp.'s Xfinity on-demand video service.

Wall Street continually promotes Apple TV as a key pillar of growth for Apple and a large part of the justification for the $575 billion market cap. However, Apple TV has been a bust thus far. Apple and Google are only expected to ship 12 million entertainment consoles this year. However, this would hardly dent Microsoft's leading position with over 60 million consoles that have been shipped. It does not appear that Apple TV can play catch up fast enough.

The Strategy of Ben Graham – Warren Buffett’s Mentor

From 1923 to 1957 Warren Buffett’s mentor, Ben Graham, followed a strategy of investing in net-nets. He said: “It always seemed, and still seems ridiculously simple to say that if one can acquire a diversified group of common stocks at a price less than the...net current assets alone…the results should be quite satisfactory. They were so in our experience, for more than 30 years.”
Today net-nets are rare. They are collected under GuruFocus’ Net-Net Screener. GuruFocus also publishes a monthly newsletter which recommends the safest net-nets. All of these are included in GuruFocus Premium Membership.

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