Joe Rosensteel, Six Colors:

I have to search for a lot of movies to watch on my Apple TV because I have a movie podcast. If a movie is located within a service that I’m already paying for, then I’d like to get that.

Amen. Far too often, I search for a movie that’s available on a streaming service to which I already subscribe, and I get pointed to a place to rent/buy the movie instead.

But it gets worse:

Recently, I asked Siri to display “Fight Club,” and was presented with a button to start watching it right away in Prime Video. So easy!

Unfortunately, when it started playing, it was a very compressed, blocky stream, and I could immediately tell something was amiss. I pressed the back button and discovered that what I had clicked on was actually “Popular Movies and TV — Free with ads” within Prime Video. In other words, Amazon had embedded its ad-supported IMDb TV service inside of Prime Video, with very little to differentiate the two very different presentations.

Yup.

But in fairness, it’s also possible that some of these cases are simply caused by underfunded tech staffs at billion-dollar companies where money is spent wildly on the next big swords-and-sorcery streaming series but not on the developer who has to maintain an AppleTV app and interact with a huge back-end media database.

If Apple wants to be the hub for all movie/TV streaming, they need to solve this problem, make the user experience richer, do a better job identifying the user’s current context (I’m already watching the movie on, say, HBO, so find that before you offer to rent me the same movie).

I recognize that proprietary data might be a big part of the problem here, that Netflix/HBO/Amazon/Disney databases might be incompatible with Apple’s, and that third parties enthusiasm to make the Apple TV experience rich might be limited.

Great writeup, Joe.