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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."
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...if Apple can get the right combination in features, price, and usability, many consumers may be ready to eat it up
This is often true. If a product can be designed, priced, and produced so that it succeeds, then the product may be a success. Thanks Slashdot!
The moment they bring back Walker: Texas Ranger is the moment I'll buy this product.
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.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
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.
Damn straight! Who needs syndicated television, anyway? As long as you have an ounce of AV skill, you can make your own multimillion dollar television content for your own personal enjoyment. No need for all those fancy-schmansy shows like Stargate and Battlestar Galactica! If we want to see Stargate, we can make our own Stargate show! Do I hear an 'Amen'?
I can't hear you! DO I HEAR AN 'AMEN'?!?
*ponder*
Wait. What was the subject again?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
No kidding! Just as people were trading around digital music for years and years before the labels had the bright idea to try and sell it that way, the powers that be are finally catching up to all the P2P traders of TV episodes.
Personally, I only follow a couple of shows, and all my TV content for the past several years has been either DVDs (watched on a computer,) downloads (P2P-style,) or authorized streams (bless you, Adult Swim!) I haven't owned an actual television for years.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I'm still waiting for free TV online to take off. Just like you can sponsor TV shows with advertisements, so you can sponsor online content with them. Let users select what they want to watch when they want to watch it, then stream it to them. Put in a few advertisements on the interface or even inside the stream, and you'll be collecting revenue.
This sort of thing exists (at least it does in the Netherlands), but it doesn't seem to be taking off. For me, the reason is that I haven't yet found a service that I can use. Most of them are all MSIE & WMP and ActiveX required - and we refuse to even try to give you service if your system fails the test. There's no way I'm going to install all that crap on my system, but I can't imagine it would be too hard for content providers to use more interoperable technologies.
I would love to be able to watch a movie whenever I feel like it, without having to depend on one I like being broadcast in the few hours a day when a few TV channels broadcast them. I'm sure this goes for plenty of othe people, too. Right now, many people are getting their DivX movies from the shady corners of the net, but who wants to wait for hundreds of megabytes to finish downloading, hoping that the quality will be ok, subtitles will be in sync, etc. etc. if they can get free movies off reputable sites, and start watching right away?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
So, which is cheaper Tivo serivce or buying all my content from the iTunes Store?
Say there are 4 shows I really like @ $2 a show for 20 episodes = $160. That is $13.33/mo
Say there are 8 shows I really like @ $2 a show for 20 episodes = $320. That is $26.66/mo
Yes, ease of use and the cool factor will be a draw; however, economics will be the driving force.
Which model is kicking ass in the legal music word: buy your digital music or subcribe to a service and "rent" the music?
P226
>It's cheaper and easier for me to watch the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica on SciFi rather than wait two weeks for iTunes.
2 weeks for BSG ep's? If i remember corectly last seasion they were available the next day (BSG is the only reasion i started using itunes since i gave up my dvr i had to watch ep's somehow and firday night isn't allways the best time for me to watch tv)
I thought they called that "Xbox".
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
iTV is a great idea (or a great implementation of an existing idea), but I have one major problem with it; it needs to look the same as other AV equipment. This seems to be a recurring problem with all the tech companies that try to create an AV device. They create these designs that while looking great, just don't fit in with the rest of the components. Please lets have a version that is 19" wide that comes with either brushed aluminum or black, and give it a LCD display so that you don't have to have the damn TV on to browse your music collection.
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.
Plus its a mac, we mac users just lap this kind of shit up!
Jonathanjk.com
The Daily Show can be bought either $1.99 an episode or $9.99 for the next 16 new episodes., that's about $0.63/ep.
I paid $9.99 to get Comedy Central for a year.
Don't know about the rest of you, but when I watch 24, or Lost or any other drama they are usually shown once a week. However if you miss that one episode you're screwed because every episode leads to another episode. This would be fine except for the fact that if you don't see this one episode you're lose the thrust of the story, and every episode is important to understanding the show.
So let's say you're driving home at 6:51 and you're car breaks down, you're show is on at 7:00, you've missed it, so either you have two options, download the episode (legally/illegally) or skip the rest of the season because you don't want to spoil yourself.
But wait what if we have DVR? Ok that works.
Come home at 8:00 all mad at the mechanic for overcharging you and find that there was a cable outage and your DVR didn't record the program, you're still in the same place.
The way TV shows works now the only option is to have something where you can see the episode so you can keep watching the show so the advertisers will keep paying for advertising. The part I disprove of is the fact that they charge you for the right to watch the show again, and will scream bloody murder if they find out you downloaded the episode for free, personally I find the system to be broken and Apple is only a stopgap.
Why do TiVo, when you can MythTV? Spend $50 on a PVR-150, and record all the shows that you want. Drag them onto your laptop when you get around to it. That, and the other 90% of MythTV really makes the television something interesting again -- it's got shows I want to watch.
Plus, it eats the commercials -- how cool is that?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
My Tivos have missed about 3 shows in the last 2 years combined.
Not seeing the problem here.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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').
While I probably won't use iTMS for video content, I have been continuously archiving several hours of various tv shows onto my new 80GB iPod ever since it arrived last week. Not only am I ripping content from DVDs I own, I've also been collecting up several shows onto a digital video recorder and then transferring that content onto my computer for export to the iPod. This has proven to be a great solution for keeping an organized collection of shows you can't otherwise through other sources.
In my case, the bulk of my collected content has been animated shows that are currently very difficult to obtain, such as "Rocko's Modern Life", which have yet to be released on DVD.
However, being an animator myself, having the ability to archive and organize large amounts of animated content serves a purpose beyond simple entertainment. It allows me to access any scene, in any episode, of any show on demand, and then lets me examine the scene in question for ideas that I can use within my own work. This is extremely useful, since I no longer have to interrupt my workflow to locate examples of various techniques used in the industry. As long as I know what episode and approximately where in the episode the scene I need occurs, I can bring it up in a matter of seconds.
I could see this having applications in other fields as well. For example, auto manufacturers could create a video-database of how to repair/replace certain parts of a vehicle, and then allow auto mechanics to store this database locally onto an iPod style device. Then, as the mechanic is working on a vehicle, if something comes up he can't quite figure out, he can simply pull out the device in question, go to vehicle's manufacturer/make/model in the database and bring up video relevant to the problem he's trying to fix. It's definitely not something cool like "augmented reality goggles", but it's certainly a step up from having to climb up out of the pit, and then flip through a 1,000+ page book to locate the needed info.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Yeah, I'm dreaming all right, dreaming about getting rid of a stupid monthly subscription that gives me 200 channels I don't want just so that I can get the few shows I actually watch.
Honestly, I have no idea what percentage of the market Apple's iTV (whatever it is actually called in the end) will get. Given that only around 10% of households use DVRs, it probably will not be much at first. What I do know is that things are going to change dramatically once this technology becomes easy-to-use and the average consumer becomes aware of it. Yes, the cable companies will have to respond to Apple and others that will sell programing via downloads. Maybe they finally will have to offer a la carte pricing. I am all for that.
And, I resent how the cable companies have fought cable card techology. Unless they give me choices I want, I will happily bolt.