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Steve Jobs's Big Miss: TV
jfruh writes Steve Jobs was a well-known audiophile and music lover, which helps explain why Apple transformed the music industry in the '00s with the iPod and iTunes. But according to a new biography soon to be released, Apple may have failed to do the same for TV because of Steve Jobs's disdain for the medium. One of his first acts upon returning to the company was to kill the flashy, expensive 20th Anniversary Macintosh, in part because it had a built-in TV tuner. "Apple will never make a TV again," Jobs declared.
It's gotten lackluster support across the board. For a device with a lot of potential, it's got a lot of ugly bumps.
#SickNotWeak
I agree with him, he was %100 correct in this regard.
Only the bean counters would want to dabble in that banality.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This just in... Steve Jobs has bad judgment. Details at 8.
"Jobs, as it turns out, was completely wrong about the integration of television and computers.
.Shame on all you niggas all on the Instagram stuntin' for them bitches frontin' under pictures!"
â€oeWe donâ€(TM)t think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge,†Jobs told Macworld in 2004 when discussing the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh. â€oeWe think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.â€"
Now most of them use the "computer" to discuss weighty matters like how "this one for my niggas, I woulda said it was for the bitches but I dont got shit for bitches...
Heady stuff from @DocFromDaGloâ--ï¸
Or perhaps Pearl Jam were "Steve Jobs" fans
or more likely, they've never known each other
While Pearl Jam received four awards at the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards for its video for "Jeremy", including Video of the Year and Best Group Video, the band refused to make a video for "Black" in spite of pressure by the label. This action began a trend of the band refusing to make videos for its songs. Vedder felt that the concept of music videos robbed the listener from creating their own interpretation of the song, stating that "Before music videos first came out, youâ(TM)d listen to a song with headphones on, sitting in a beanbag chair with your eyes closed, and youâ(TM)d come up with your own visions, these things that came from within. Then all of a sudden, sometimes even the very first time you heard a song, it was with these visual images attached, and it robbed you of any form of self-expression. "Ten years from now," Ament said, "I don't want people to remember our songs as videos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
The big Internet suppliers have done a bang up job of turning the Internet into TV anyway. Even better than TV from the perspective of the advertisers; you only see one advertisement at a time when watching TV. On the Internet they are able -- with the cooperation of the web page designer -- to have you seeing as many advertisements that can be fit on the screen. Content? Heck... that stuff just gets in the way of -- and takes away space for -- more advertisments. (More and more web sites seem to have used http://websitesfromhell.net/ as a design manual; especially some of the advertisement-heavy examples.)
The pathetic thing is that I don't know of a single person who clicks on ads -- except by accident.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Stop the name calling, you insensitive jerk! How would you like to be called an audiophile?
pandering to appeals of the broadest possible audience can make you a lot of money
news at 11
Really?
A miss?
Are you confusing TV with watching video content on your computer because those are two entirely different things and Steve supported the latter. He probably realized that slaving PCs to broadcast/scheduled TV was a non-starter... Just as making PCs have built-in FM/AM Tuners would've been.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
I'm not saying Steve was a prophetic genius as he certainly made mistakes and it's wholly possible he disdained TV because he didn't want the cable companies like Comcast to get a foothold into his control of the industry. But this was far from "a miss".
People are thinking less than they used to. It's primarily because of television. People are reading less and they're certainly thinking less.
[...]
When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.
[...]
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html
TV is dead anyways. I am no fanboy but this makes me like Steve Jobs a little more. The fact that he liked some things and hated others gave the company a vision and gave him a passion. Google could learn from this instead of scattershotting with everything with 'me too products' that fail and just hurt the brand ( and waste money). TV in that era was especially bad, I can't stand people that like sitcoms. protip=friends, the big bang theory, and cheers are all the same show. A bad one.
TV does not offer a company like Apple much opportunity. There's no UI problem that keeps people from being able to get the most value out of their TV. People won't buy an easy to use TV at a big premium over a regular TV. This is why Apple was never going to make a TV.
The only thing people really want from their TV is cheaper, more conveniently delivered content. Apple has no TV content, and there's no way for Apple to make money offering others' TV content at a cheaper price. And there's no way to sell a new premium TV based on cheaper TV content -- the premium you gained on the TV would be more than lost on the content discount.
You can get pretty much any size and style of TV from a number of different vendors in a wide price range to fit any need whatsoever. You can even buy a projector if you want to turn your entire wall into a TV.
All that Apple needs to make is a little box that plugs into the HDMI port on that TV. That's IT. Once that's done, when you turn on the TV you get the "Apple experience" and full access to their ecosystem of TV shows, movies, and music.
The reason Apple hasn't made a TV is it's not a product segment where they can really make a difference. It would be equivalent to Apple making a power strip.
TV in that era was especially bad, I can't stand people that like sitcoms.
I'll agree with you on sitcoms, but not all TV of that time was terrible. The early nineties to the mid 2000's produced a lot of good sci-fi. Star Trek: TNG, Farscape, Battlestar Galactica remake (which was pretty good up until the last season), and of course Firefly. I don't really see a lot of good sci-fi any more, outside of Doctor Who.
You know something else I've noticed? A lot of science fiction from that era had an optimisim to it that seems lacking today. Anything remotely sci-fi today is almost always set in some desolate dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic setting filled to the brim with corruption, ruin, and despair. Sci-fi from a decade or two ago seemed more concerned with envisioning what possibilities the future might hold and the spirit of exploration needed to reach them, or with the resiliance and ingenuity of the human race when thrust into the unknown. You know what else? It's depressing, but all the above is simply a reflection of where Western civilization was a decade ago (back when nations weren't going broke and barbarians weren't visibly lying in wait at the gates) compared to today.
I use a monitor that has built in speakers with an HDMI cable to the box provided by my IPTV provider.
The built-in tuner that that monitor has is completely useless because the only places in Saskatchewan that still have TV broadcasts are Regina and Saskatoon -- the towers in every other location across the province were shut down when the switch to digital was made.
You can't use the digital tuner with the IPTV or cable providers here; you have to use audio/video or HDMI inputs.
Let's face it: outside of a few metropolitan areas, broadcast TV is already dead. Once the broadcasters got a taste of cable companies paying them carriage fees, OTA broadcasts were doomed.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's gotten lackluster support across the board.
I'm curious why you think an HBO exclusive deal to stream without a cable subscription on AppleTV is "lackluster". I wasn't ever going to get an AppleTV myself but that sealed it (along with the price drop).
The only thing the AppleTV is missing that many people might want, is Amazon Prime... and there's a lot of overlap between them and Netflix, which Apple does have.
Apple has been treating AppleTV as a hobby, sure, but that doesn't mean the support for AppleTV has been at all lackluster.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That model of Macintosh was a Road Apple. It had specifications that put it in line with Macintosh models that cost half as much. It was notoriously bad for what it cost, what was in it, and how it held up in real world usage. In 1998, Apple released a Macintosh model for 1,299.99 called the "iMac" that performed better than the $7,500 20th Anniversary Macintosh.
It had nothing to do with the TV tuner. That Mac was junk.
TV is dead anyways
Not only are people cutting the cord, but the new generation is not even buying the large screen to put in their living room. Instead, they're using their laptops and tablets.
Steve Jobs had a habit of looking 10-20 years into the future for where Apple would move to in product use. Cable with 300 channels is doomed and SJ saw that. Why do I need a TV to view the one or two programs I want to see at night? Why do I need a "big screen" for news?
Young people are more interested in mobile and sharing clips, than most older people and that is evolution. Older retirees often look at TV as a companion or avocation in lieu of something/anything else to do.
I see cable and even fixed mega-size TVs as dinosaurs. You want a big screen, go to a movie house.
He was also CEO of Pixair and clearly got movies.
Nowadays it's all about recreating movie atmosphere in your living room.
TV is dead anyways. I am no fanboy but this makes me like Steve Jobs a little more. The fact that he liked some things and hated others gave the company a vision and gave him a passion. Google could learn from this instead of scattershotting with everything with 'me too products' that fail and just hurt the brand ( and waste money). TV in that era was especially bad, I can't stand people that like sitcoms. protip=friends, the big bang theory, and cheers are all the same show. A bad one.
I agree, the future of visual entertainment is streaming, not selling people an obscenely expensive and bloated package of crappy TV cannels just so they can watch a handful of them to catch their favorate shows. If the Steve saw that coming over a decade ago thn swearing that "Apple will never make a TV again" sounds more like farsigtedness than an oversight. There is a reason people use bittorent and it's not that all bittorenters are cheapskates (althoug may motivate some of them) it's more that they like the convenience of the on-demand delivery mechanism.
No TV tuners thou
I think the future is subscribing to shows instead of channels. I'd rather pay $20 a month for a couple dozen really good shows to watch, than $100 a month for those same good shows, plus 200 other shows I never watch.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Sounds like he didn't "miss" at all. He made a deliberate decision, and stuck with it. This is just one of those things where some moron looks backwards and assumes things had to be a certain way.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Was it really a big miss? Or was it intentional? Maybe the reason why Steve Jobs steered Apple away from making a TV was that he foresaw the complete disaster in the TV and cable industry, and saw everything moving online. Even with iTunes, you've been able to buy TV episodes and movies there for at least a decade. And TV viewing is shifting towards online streaming on other devices that Apple has dominated (iPhones, iPads, etc) for several years now. There's already plenty of manufacaturers making large screen televisions, and in the past 10-15 years, that has shifted from CRTs and analog to flat screens and digital. There was no reason for Apple to get into the business of making large screen TVs when all that was going to shift anyways. Apple TV was sufficient to allow those that cared to bring digital content to their big screen TV, but Jobs didn't care much for that medium, so Apple stopped at that.
Really don't care.
If the future of the Web is 'television' then he didn't miss much ...
Almost Human was pretty good Sci-Fi in the standard sense. Every episode was about exploring the societal impact of speculative technology. Unfortunately, this is what killed the program.
for all of its "apps" the thing is a portable tv screen.
If it was bad then it is worse now. You had TV Series. A lot was sitcoms sure but you had sci-fi, action, etc as well.
Today you have reality shows and news you've read on the Internet two days before.
Skipping conventional medicine and trying to treat his cancer with alternative medicine for as long as he did was a much bigger mistake.
The market sucks, low margin, slow replacement. Dumb of Apple to get in that market, and their not dumb.
Content is run by near monopolists, a grip hard to break. Hard to fault them too much for that.
The AppleTV could use a hardware and software update to stay competitive though.
Seriously, $30 retail for a DVB-T tuner to watch free to air digital...
Another FUD article denigrating the great leader? Jobs missed nothing.
Of course Apple ][ machines used TVs for output via RF modulation.
At least, I was assume it was in his biography (as I never read it). But when it came out, there were quite a few reports that Jobs said he had figured out TV interfaces:
It's entirely possible that because he didn't like the TVs, he had come up with a better UI ... but we haven't seen a dramatic revision of the Apple TV since he died ... so we might never know what it was that he came up with.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Just because Apple hasn't released a TV solution beyond the AppleTV doesn't mean they are not working on it. Just because Jobs killed a TV project also doesn't mean anything. Jobs killed absolutely every project except for Pro laptops & desktops and Consumer laptops & desktops when he took over as CEO. Apple was about to collapse, they were about 4-6 weeks away from financial ruin. Drastic measures had to be taken.
Apple is the only company that can disrupt the TV/Movie industry and deliver such an experience to the regular consumer. No one else can pull it off. The problem is cutting deals with the networks and content owners. HBO is one of the first. HBO has finally realized that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show on the Internet. That is because there are a hundred million plus people who wish to see it but cannot for various reasons. Most of them would pay if there was a way to do it without needing a cable or satellite contract. They have finally opened their eyes and seen the light. They can make more money selling direct worldwide then they ever could by bundling with cable and satellite. Once their sales numbers release, it will begin to make sense to other networks. They might be restricting the streaming to AppleTV and perhaps just the USA for the moment, but they should be ramping up their ability to stream to people worldwide. Because thats were the money is and that's where your customers are. Someone in South Korea, Germany, etc. should be able to connect to HBO Go and subscribe.
The level of piracy is constantly increasing and what's worse for the dinosaur media is that it is getting easier and easier and more and more user friendly. So much so that the executives for these companies should not be sleeping at night. The new consumers want the content but they want the freedom to view it on their own terms. They don't want DRM, they don't want restrictions nor barriers, they don't want annoying ads and they are willing to pay but not too much.
I've never been pissed off about a show being cancelled before. This one did it, though.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
What you are talking about is HBO Go, which requires the streaming application to verify you are a valid subscriber - only right now that verification system is failing on Comcast:
"Comcast doesn't really give an answer other than to say the massive (and soon to get much larger) company only has so many people available to ensure TV Everywhere authentication works on new devices"
HBO Now (I think that's the new name) is a totally new AppleTV only app, that you pay HBO directly for a subscription - it has its own authentication system, and is basically just like Netflix only with HBO. There's no reason to think it will not work.
Personally, I think it's insane HBO has two different systems, but there you have it...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
TV is a declining medium. 15 years ago, when I removed the TV from my home, I was an exotic. Since then, more and more people I meet also don't have a TV, especially young people. And a lot of the others use it to watch movies from DVD or download/streaming, not any TV station.
It's big still and thanks to exclusive deals for events like olympics and world cups, it will stay around for many more years, but it's a medium on the way to exit, and two generations from now it will be part of media history like gramophone records or cassette tapes.
Innovation in this area will only speed up its decline. Heck, even the "Apple TV" thing doesn't really do television - it replaces television with iTunes media consumption.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
TV tuner cards have been available for ages but hardly anyone bothers to put one in a PC.
the HBO deal, is the death of cable tv companies as we know it. they may even know it. this is really huge and a big win for everyone. no government imposed fake, net "neutrality" needed, the quasi free market working it out.
when the consumer can pick and choose the channels they really want to watch, and only pay for those, you win and the producers of real content win.
I wonder if this deal was in the works when Steve Jobs was still around, because if so, he really did revolutionize tv as we know it in the late 20th and early 21st century.
those of you not understanding the significance of this deal, you will in a few years. wait for it...
I agree, the future of visual entertainment is streaming, not selling people an obscenely expensive and bloated package of crappy TV cannels just so they can watch a handful of them to catch their favorate shows.
I worked on an "IPTV" project 10 years ago when it was all new and whizz bang, but unfortunately it requires a half decent Internet service, which sadly even 10 years later most people don't have access to.
television programming is shit.
It didn't start with the Apple TV or even the Anniversary Mac. Apple got straight into delivering on demand TV into the home with the advent of broadband: There are no definitive details on how or why the project was cancelled, but it's right around the time Jobs made his comeback. Personally, I think he liked the idea of the project but knew it was sub-standard and didn't yet know how to do it 'the Apple Way'. Once the iPod came along and changed the way we listen to music, he had the means to change the way we watch TV and the Apple TV was born (an iPod for video). Remember the distinction between TV (as in broadcast programming) and TV (as in the device). The former is analogous to the record labels - Apple is neither a record label nor a TV channel, but makes a great technological middle-man. The latter is the means by which Apple gets into the living room (much as it did with the Airport Express for music) but it couldn't do that adequately until the technology became available.
(audiophile). In the context of iTunes, which sells low-fidelity recordings in mp3 format, I do not think it means what you think it means. I'm no golden-ear audiophile, but even I can hear the difference between an mp3 and any of a half dozen lossless codecs. For all practical purposes, one can not buy quality audio in digital (no physical media) form. The reason for that is mp3, and the blame for that we may rightly lay at Apple/Jobs' feet.
Unfortunately, I couldn't afford the MacTV or the 20th Anniversary..Keep in mind that this was when Macs were bloody expensive, and there was NO you tube, no easy way to watch TV on a computer.. although the idea really appealed to me. I've I tried installing TV tuners in the past, and tried other tricks.. I even got ahold of a Compaq that had a built in TV tuner. It was pretty much the best of the bunch , but it had pitiful Ram and processor power.. Watching TV on a WIndows WfW3.11 was both a treat and a nightmare.. with the well known gdi bug.. I still haven't got access to TV on my computer although apparently there's options now, it being all digital. I don't watch at all, now. Rather, I just watch the episodic shows on those websites that air them, and also Youtube, Dailymotion Veoh etc. Get my news also, many of these news networks have a YT channel, after all. I'd really rather have a TV tuner though, but can't fit it in my iMac.
... the iPad?
What is that, if not a TV?
Not OP, but I can take a shot at that, though I realize it will sound to some people a lot like "no wireless, less space than a nomad, lame."
Basically, I don't give a flying fuck about any proprietary streaming at all. That's essentially luddite tech, the way things worked before people started telling publishers "No, it's going to be my way or the highway," and offered a simple "take it or leave it" deal in exchange for our money. If I wanted to play things as they're coming in, so that you get a pretty-much guaranteed hiccup in playback if there's any failure or speed degradation -- even a very brief one -- anywhere between you and the originator, I would still be watching OTA broadcast TV. So HBO's newest snakeoil elixer is irrelevant to the topic at hand, as it only addresses one use case (and it's a dubious value one) and ignored dozens of others. Seriously, you don't want to talk about HBO services if you're trying to make someone sound like a key player in getting things working.
Now, back to Apple.
Apple's media products (not just the TV thing, but their portable music player too, as well as their desktop software) have always fit the words "lackluster support" to perfect Tee, because they're just not very good at playing whatever you have. iTunes still can't play Ogg Vorbis, after, what is this now, 14-17 years (depending on from where you measure)? Got FLAC yet? No, despite the fact that it's now one of the most common ways to encode CD rips?
Ok, so maybe you don't have music in that form, but plenty of people do, and you know that with a typical media player, the attitude is usually that you just add support for anything and everything that you legally can, just because you can. So that people can use it. That one attitude is the only possibly way to avoid the words "lackluster support." Because not having the right attitude, to make your product good for the user, is pretty much how you get to lacklaster. It's not just about my favorite formats; it's about them all. Apple'smedia playershandle very few formats. Just compare Apple's stuff to nearly anything else. (And no, I don't mean Sony or Microsoft.)
Then Apple comes along with a TV thing, which can't mount NFS shares or play Matroska files. At least OS X can talk NFS, but its quicktime player still can't handle Matroska? WHAT YEAR IS THIS? I understand when Playstation users get all whiny that they can't handle modern file formats, but the Playstation is sort of supposed to suck. OS X isn't intended to suck (and for the most part, if you don't try to use it out-of-the-box as a media player, it doesn't suck). But the Apple TV and the iPod, unlike OS X, are harder for the user to modernize. And out of the box, they really are pretty much useless for a lot of very common cases.
Like with music, it doesn't matter if you don't need NFS support. I realize we all have totally different systems. Maybe you use SMB/CIFS. Or netatalk. (That's right, one of Apple's own protocols.) And still the answer is probably no. Because they have lackluster support, instead of wide support.
These players are really only intended to get people to use Apple's media store. So they have so little support for anything else, that the word LACKLUSTER is one of the least obscene words that come to mind. You gotta admit, it's an apt description. If you have something non-Apple, there's a good chance that Apple's stuff won't work with it. They're not as bad as Sony, but they're roughly in the same ballpark.
HBO streaming. I can't believe you cite this one little store, and it's someone who still won't just sell people the files they want, as a significant counter-example. And since it's nonstandard, it's something that c