From this Business Insider post:
Eddy Cue, speaking at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit:
> “I do think television needs to be reinvented. Today, you live with a glorified VCR,” Cue said. “The problem is the interface.”
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> “It’s really hard to use [a cable box or satellite TV]. Setting something to record, if you didn’t watch something last night, if you didn’t set it to record, it’s hard to find, it may not be available. There may be some rights issues,” Cue said.
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> “It’s great to be able to tell your device, ‘I wanna watch the Duke basketball game, I don’t care what channel it’s on.’ I just want to watch the Duke basketball game. Today you got to bring in the TV, go through the guide, find which sports programs or whatever — it’s just hard to do.”
The state of television is in flux. Unlike the music industry, which moved to online purchases and then streaming, the dominant TV business model has yet to emerge. Apple is exploring all sides, trying to find their place in the emerging model. Apple TV, as currently implemented, is a portal. But Apple is also dipping its toes in the waters of original content.
Netflix has definitely found success with original content that is not dependent on cable companies for distribution. HBO has original content but is straddling the lines of the a la carte (HBO Now) and the more traditional bundle (as part of a cable package). Hulu and Amazon have their own approaches. Sports and more traditional programming add another wrinkle.
All of this adds up to a mish-mosh of standards. What’s needed is a unifying force to make it possible to watch all this content on demand while, at the same time, making the content universally and intelligently searchable and schedulable.
Seems to me that Apple TV is well placed to be that unifying portal, but an irresistible force is needed to bring all these disparate elements together.
Cable companies have fought tooth and nail to prevent this from happening, but the writing’s on the wall.
Cable companies will become full-time ISPs and charge $200/mo for high-speed access + data caps.
I think Apple should seriously consider building out a fiber network and circumvent the cable companies altogether. They have the resources.
And yet TV 4 doesn’t really solve interface issues. It’s a grid of apps with Siri and Siri is not always reliable. When I turn on my TV I want an interface that tells me what’s on NOW that I might be interested in watching based on previous things I’ve watched. I want an interface that says season x of show xyz is now available on Netflix. I want an interface that easily at a glance shows me current weather, traffic and sports scores for my favorite teams/sports. I don’t to turn on my TV and just see a grid of apps. When’s Eddy going to fix that?
Translation: Make an Apple TV app!
Apple TV is great but, man, the video apps for it are almost universally terrible. Hopefully they will improve with time, but, like Eddie says, TV based interfaces have been crap for decades, so app improvement isn’t necessarily insured.
It’s funny, but the two things that would make this happen are both from non-Apple sources. Years ago, there was a company called Boxee. At one point they had a UI that let people see the shows and movies they wanted, as the primary interface, burying the sources. That is, of course, how we think about things. “Show me the NLCS game” or “Show the latest episode of [TV SHOW].”
The irony is that the Comcast X1 voice UI does this really really well. Of course, it indexes everything Comcast (and recently Netflix) but not other services because, well, it’s Comcast. However, it does illustrate that voice is probably th way to unify this vs getting networks to sign off on hiding their branding etc.