More Thoughts On An Apple Television
After Steve was quoted as saying “I’ve cracked it!” in the Isaacson biography, lots of speculation has continued on an Apple TV proper. The latest addition comes from the New York Times in regards to Siri being a really excellent way to interact with a TV — simply your voice — just say “I want to watch the latest episode of Parenthood” and the TV does the rest.
Our TV currently has (just) an Apple TV and a Roku box attached. The latter has Hulu+ which the Apple TV lacks. The spouse recently wanted to watch Grey’s Anatomy, which led to the explanation of what buttons to press on the remote in regards to how to get there. The Hulu+ interface on the Roku is different than the Roku Box and the Apple TV — a lot to remember just to get to a particular show.
So yeah, Siri could fix this, but then again — the spouse later picked up the iPad and figured out how to get to the exact same show via the Hulu+ app there with no explanation. Tapping is much easier than pointing with a remote.
So another thought would be to stick an iSight camera on this TV, enabling Kinect-like gestures for swiping through a wall of icons, and then add ginormous FaceTime sessions as another feature.
That takes care of the UI, but even as technology falls into place, the recent woes of Netflix point out the biggest hurdle to an Apple television: content. Meaning, it won’t do any good to ask for stuff you want to see if the studios keep their content from making it onto the device in the first place.
There are several ways the Apple TV could ensure a supply of precious content. It could act like a giant DVR, sucking up video and recording it for later through your standard cable connection. Then add in video on demand from the Apple Store. And streaming content from services like Netflix, Hulu, or the studios proper, in the form of “apps.” And your locally networked content. And perhaps all this would be made transparent to the user — you just say what you want to watch and the TV serves it up the fastest way possible. You don’t care where anything is stored.
The tricky thing is most consumers would prefer to pay for cable content ala carte rather than a package of channels. And an Apple TV without a cable connection would be simpler and more elegant in terms of set up and ease of use. Imagine pulling your television out of its box with just a cord for power and another for Internet, like the iMac of old.
It might seem totally nuts for Apple to put out a television that has no input for standard cable, and only plays content delivered over the Internet? Maybe not, if the content were there and the user experience so incredible that the studios fell all over themselves to get content onto it. Have Siri, FaceTime, content from the iTunes Store, apps (video games). People may have plenty of use for the device above and beyond just watching TV shows. And really push home to the studios that it’s in their best interest to pipe content through Apple’s interfaces via apps rather than through various boxes as in the first example. Maybe discovery by Siri could be used as the bait (if your stuff is on an add-on box, Siri won’t find it?).
Which starts to sound like the same strategy used for the iPad. Leverage all the content from the iPhone; build a really cool device and the content-holders will come. All the iPad-specific video and reading content is evidence of this strategy.
There are plenty of video apps for the iPad (Hulu, Netflix, PBS, NBC, etc.). Maybe an Apple TV proper that is “just a giant iPad” would do the trick.