Apple's Moment — Consumers Want To Download To TV

ack154 writes, "With so much recent news surrounding Apple's upcoming iTV system, their timing may be nearly perfect. Ars Technica gives the rundown on a recent report, released from Accenture, stating that about half of users surveyed across the globe are now looking to get downloadable videos, movies and other content onto their TV. Based on the article, if Apple can get the right combination in features, price, and usability, many consumers may be ready to eat it up. Macworld has more speculation on Apple's potential living room dominance."

Comments

It really does work.

[AKAImBatman]

I've been shying away from iTunes television for awhile now, mostly because they're so slow at getting the content on there. It's cheaper and easier for me to watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica on SciFi rather than wait two weeks for iTunes.

However, I have long considered that if iTunes was a bit faster at getting the content (or had exclusive content!) I'd hop on the bandwagon in an instant. To that end, I was one of the many who downloaded the Aquaman Pilot to check it out. For a pilot, it was quite good - though a bit too "hip and edgy" in Stargate 200 kind of way. Still, if there were more episodes I would have seriously considered downloading them.

Then iTunes got Eureka.

For those of you who don't know what it is, Eureka is a SciFi Channel original TV Show that is on during weeknight timeslots. Exactly the type of timeslots I don't manage to catch very often. I've been curious about the show for a while now, but wasn't curious enough to pay a $1.99. But then iTunes had a special. The Pilot Episode could be downloaded for FREE, as in at no charge. (A promotion that I'm sad to say appears to be over.) So I downloaded it.

Suffice it to say, this show was GREAT! It was like Stargate hits Andy Griffith, if you can imagine that. All the humor and technobabble of a SciFi show, but combined with a traditionally rooted character who's trying to make the adjustment. As of yesterday, I have now purchased and watched every Eureka episode available. The quality is good, and the price is right. If iTunes would just carry Stargate and stop making us wait 2 weeks, I'd cancel my cable. Even at a $1.99 an episode, I would probably save money over what I pay Comcast today.

I don't know about anyone else, but I just don't watch the TV enough to make cable worth my while. Which means that I'm paying a premium to watch shows like Stargate, BSG, and Star Trek Enhanced. :(

If there's any complaint I have about iTunes its that its video player is still somewhat immature. I often like to watch shows in a small window while I work. (I have a TV card for a TV.) Unfortunately, iTunes still lacks an "Always on Top" feature to prevent the show from getting obscured by the corners of windows. Also, the size controls are a bit random If you undock the window from the postage stamp in the corner. For example, if I minimize the main iTunes window (what else am I going to do with it while I'm watching a show?) the "Fullscreen" control will redock the player rather than switching between full screen and windowed mode.

These aren't MAJOR issues, but I do hope they get fixed in the near future.

Re:It really does work.

[Acidictadpole]

If they do manage to get the stuff up-to-date, with a big enough database. I think this is something that I would go for aswell. It seems very useful to be able to come home, sit in front of the television and pick out things you want to watch, go make a sandwich or something and come back and start the show while the rest downloads.

Re:It really does work.

[drewzhrodague]

640 * 480 is low res if you've got a DVD player.

If you're using a tube-based NTSC television, you're only seeing ~200 lines of resolution anyway. This is why I record my shows (MythTV for me!) at a much lower resolution.

Re:It really does work.

[Bauguss]

In a way, you hit the nail on the head.

You downloaded a pilot for free to check it out. You decided it was a great show, you bought the rest.

iTunes needs to figure this out. Forget about free being a promotion. Free needs to be the first 2-3 episodes of a show. This lets people try shows, decide if they like them. Move on if they don't. This is the only way people can find new shows without already having cable television.

Perhaps Apple already knows this but can't convince MPAA or whoever that this is the way it should be.

Re:It really does work.

[KingSkippus]

I do like the idea of extra content; it could really help the format take off. I seriously believe that unless Apple really screws this up (and I don't think they will), it could revolutionize the industry.

The example structure I gave was just that—an example. I'd leave it up to the marketing gurus to decide the exact final prices and structure, but the general concept was to charge a premium rate for one-off high-demand content, give a discount for buying an entire season, give a discount for people willing to wait for a show, and give a deep discount for stuff that's so old that people who normally wouldn't care to watch it might buy it just because it's so cheap.

At any rate, I think that the really interesting thing is that it could totally do away with two middlemen: the television networks and the cable/satellite companies. Studios could market and sell their stuff directly to us, the public. That would take the power to decide what we watch out of the hands of pinhead network executives and put it where it belongs: in our hands, the actual consumers.

If enough people buy a show like Firefly, for example, that they pay their costs and make a little bit of profit, there's a strong incentive to keep making it. There's no idiot in the middle with decision-making power like the guy at Fox who said, "Cancel it." There's no accountability to sponsors. There are no networks fighting for space among a limited cable or satellite bandwidth. There is no mentality that a show must be watched by millions and millions of people to be worth being made. Good stuff all around!

Re:It really does work.

[conigs]

I have to agree that adding an anamorphic flag in the video file would be the best way to go. I'm not really sure why that hasn't been done, other than laziness.

Oh, and don't even get me started on people not knowing how to set up their TVs/DVD players to display 16:9 images properly (or even 4:3). I can't tell you how many homes I've been to with people watching SDTV broadcasts on their new LCD HDTVs and have the image stretched out because they don't like the black bars on the side. And it's as useless trying to explain that concept as it is trying to explain how widescreen versions of DVDs dont' actually cut off any picture compared to their full-screen bastard step-children. Some concepts people just can't wrap their head around.

This is why Apple "Gets It'

[Tavor]

First they came out with the iPod and iTunes at a time when the 'geekery' (us) and the 'general public' wanted MP3 players and a convenient download service, even though the RIAA cried wolf.
Now, we all want downloadable television/video content (as seen by YouTube, et al.) and iTV seems to be just that.
If the Form Factor is right, the price point is right, it should work.
(UI Omitted, as being Apple the UI *will* be right...)

Full disclosure: I am not an Apple fanboy. And the names give me an iHeadache.

A la carte

[jasoneisen]

For those of us who for years have demanded a la carte pricing plans from cable companies, we are now finally getting a step closer.

Apple's biggest challenge: wireless LAN

[snowwrestler]

They want to use wireless to pull near-DVD-quality video/audio off of a Mac and display it on a TV. Problem is the entire rest of the industry is shying away from wireless LAN for this use because it is so difficult to make it work reliably. Data rates are sufficient but error handling and latency are NOT. This is for sure the reason the "iTV" is not ready for prime time yet.

The problem of syncing-up the audio and video latency alone is tough to conquer (and is most likely the reason you can't stream iTMS TV show audio over AirTunes now). On top of that is the much bigger problem of making sure the packets arrive on time, in a home environment that is increasingly bathed in interfering radio signals. Both of these problems can be addressed by caching at the TV end, which is undoubtedly the reason for the large form factor of the iTV (compare to the size of the AirPort Express).

Finally there is the user experience to consider--right now for example, when I change the volume or equalizer settings on my iBook, it takes about 1.5-2 seconds to be manifested in my stereo speakers over AirTunes. How will this be solved on the iTV? I'm used to pausing my movies the instant my finger hits the remote. I guess the remote could command the iTV, and the iTV could communicate the command to the Mac (thus keeping the latency hidden from the viewer). But this would mean that you could not control your movies or TV shows from the Mac itself, which sort of breaks the paradigm of the Mac as the center of your digital life.

Steam like content

[BMonger]

You know how you could download most (if not all) of Half Life 2 before it was out, then on release day BOOM you could play it?

Why not the same with TV shows? Get a Season Pass to Lost, it preloads the morning of and knows that at 7pm in your time zone (or whatever time it's on) that you are now allowed to watch that content from your iTV.

I know a lot of people here want to pick what cable channels they have and pay a smaller price... it'd be almost nicer to just pick the shows.

Re:You'll be disappointed: no bandwidth

[AKAImBatman]

Go on and try to get all of this great content.

Um... ok.

*click* *click*

(Waits 30 seconds...)

*click* Play>

So... what's the problem again? As I said in the first post, I've watched an entire season of Eureka off of iTunes, presumably in 640x480 - H264. I am able to start watching my show within seconds of the download starting. I am not seeing any of the bandwidth issues you're referring to. Even doing back of the envelope calculations shows that there's more than enough bandwidth on a cable line.

You do know that this stuff is transmitted in a compressed form, right?

TiVos rarely miss

[PRMan]

My Tivos have missed about 3 shows in the last 2 years combined.

Not seeing the problem here.

Re:If market manipulation doesn't cancel it out

[@madeus]

It sounds obvious to a Econ101 student, but in the "MP3" electronics field there are many good products that had the qualities mentioned that haven't come close to iPod sales

I agree there are a lot of players very nearly as good as the iPod (and in some cases, better), but as an owner of both the first commercial available portable MP3 player (the 32 MB Diamond Rio) and the first model of iPod (the 5GB one, followed by a 15 GB, 20 GB and 60 GB one - largely due to losing them/dropping them a lot) and as someone who has endured using a Mini Disc, I think it's wrong to paint it as 'another Engineer vs Marketer issue'.

That's because there is one big, IMO crucial difference between the iPod and every other player.

The quality of software that comes with it.

Not the software on the iPod, but iTunes, which was the first (and only) package most users have ever used to 'rip' a CD. It makes the process really painless, and it even makes it easy to burn your own CD's (to the extent that even my 50-something year old mother is happy with it, is very happy to buy music via the iTMS, and she still can't work out how to use the channel browser on her digital TV set top box).

Now I don't think for a minute that users make a conscious decision to purchase an iPod on the basis of iTunes nor do I think users even give a second thought to iTunes (i think that's part of the 'magic' of good software that's targeted at a mass market audience), but I do think that iTunes has been and is absolutely crucial to the product's success, and that if Apple had tried to ship it with the same horrible quality Rio Jukebox BS that Creative did, or the crap that Sony provide, their is no way it would have gained the momentum and be in the position it's now in.

I also think, by the same token, that vendors like Sony and Creative have been hurt by their poor quality products- perhaps in a way that's difficult to measure directly, but because their products have failed to become know as being being 'easy to use' (which is killer when your trying to sell a new type of product most consumers are still a bit confused by and wary of).

I think that the advertising campaign has of course definitely been instrumental in the iPod's meteoric rise to dominance, but I think it's one product where the magic - the underlying reason for the whole success of the product - really is in the software (just perhaps, not in the obvious place - that is, not on the iPod itself but in the seemingly coincidental bundled software that makes it 'just work').