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Television Needs To Be Reinvented, Says Apple SVP (businessinsider.com)
Eddy Cue, Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Service at Apple, isn't happy with the current state of how people watch TV. He said we currently live with a "glorified VCR," the interface of our current TV is the problem and we need to reinvent it. Cue pointed out a number of other issues he has with today's TV:"It's really hard to use [a cable box or satellite TV]. Setting something to record, if you didn't watch something last night, if you didn't set it to record, it's hard to find, it may not be available. There may be some rights issues," Cue said. "It's great to be able to tell your device, 'I wanna watch the Duke basketball game, I don't care what channel it's on.' I just want to watch the Duke basketball game. Today you got to bring in the TV, go through the guide, find which sports programs or whatever -- it's just hard to do."
...if Apple has a new product to help with that
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The headphone jack.
The rights holders are the problem and will never allow this.
The fragmentation of media into smaller entities is a good thing and while the complexity goes up, the result is a buffet of entertainment for any mildly skilled geek due to the broken technologies that resulted from this lack of coordination. Apple can talk and talk about fixing the brokenness but nothing is going to happen. Mainly because no one can figure out how to make money off of it except Apple.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Now bout we re-boot how TV is served up today and go back to not having the words in the corner of the screen, animated things while the show is on, and lighten the commercial load to what it was like in the 60's?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Your cable DVR uses voice commands for that stuff... You just call Comcast on your phone, press 0, then just keep saying "Duke basketball game" until it appears on your TV.
He's right. The broadcast method of content delivery made sense in it's time, but it is obsolete in the modern world of streaming. The future, should corporations allow it, is watching what you want when you want, not whatever happens to be on whenever you can manage to be on that timeslot.
That being said, I don't particularly trust Apple to be the ones to do it right.
TV doesn't need to be reinvented, it's a passive medium that is a waste of time.
X1 Voice Remote from Xfinity. Say "Duke Basketball Game." If it is on, it'll switch to that channel.
And TV was never broken, either, and didn't need to be reinvented for digital broadcast except to make idiots some more money, either.
Sounds like Apple has some remedial technology to catch up on.
Alternatively, you could just ditch the TV altogether and go read book.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Netflix already reinvented it, at least for many of us. You're not going to pull another iphone success story this time around.
And the friendly folks at Apple are willing to take a paltry 30% cut off the top of your cable bill for providing you with a one-size-fits-all solution that you have absolutely no control of whatsoever. Nothing could possibly go wrong!
sports blackouts, lack of channel choice, forced to use and rent there hardware or pay outlet fess.
Are the real things that need to be fixed.
Also the pay TV distributors that cram ad's on each F* page of the guide need to go as well.
I want to watch Apple SVP muddle around with his entertainment system trying to watch a basketball game.
I don't have any problem with this. Neither does anyone else I know.
My wife is not technically advanced, and has no issues finding the shows she wants to watch.
I don't buy the theory that TV needs to re-invented and that it is the reason for driving change. The powers that be wan't people to believe that though. I think its probably more about being the first to introduce new technology and whoever does that (as seen by Google and Facebook) will 'control' the new distribution model. That is what its really about.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Don't get me wrong, I agree television/cable box UIs could use a rethink, but can somebody please please explain to me why all the current UI designs trends revolve around simplification via killing off menus and obscuring all of a device's features behind a single text/voice search interface? Maybe I've just gotten so old I can't understand the new hotness, but do the "kids" today really have trouble navigating a menu of hierarchically organized items? I just feel like we're barrelling down the road to that one Star Trek TNG episode where the crew happens upon a world where the inhabitants have lived with their technology for so long that nobody knows how it actually works anymore.
All TV should be pay TV, and you just rent the programs you want to watch when you want to watch them! Come on, doesn't that make more sense?
Yeah, no thanks. I don't know about the rest of you, but my version of 'cutting the cord' involved installing an antenna on the roof and not paying anything for TV ever again. I'd rather not watch anything at all than ever have to pay for TV shows. I also mercilessly scoff and mock the whole idea that using a TV and a program guide of any kind is 'too difficult' and that it needs to be simplified; are we really becoming so dumb and slow that we can't even figure out how the TV works? I know I have no problems with it, what about you?
You don't need TV. But the companies that profit off TV need you to watch TV. And if the way to do that is to "reinvent" it...
Seriously, cry me a river. I've hear millennials whine less.
I bet this guy's solution to the problem is a spin on the failed-abortion that they call iOS!
Set it up so that each hour watched costs $1.00. To avoid being charged ridiculously high fees, make it so that you have to confirm you're watching each time the program switches over, or make it confirm every hour that you're still watching. This gets rid of the issue of worrying about what channels you do or don't subscribe to... because you won't need a subscription!
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
I invented the TV Note 7.
It will be released July 4th.
Table-ized A.I.
As mentioned, Tivoli and DTV and Comcast already do this. Now if he mentioned changing NTSC to PAL, you'd have my attention.
I just go and grab the torrent if I missed it.
What needs to change is BULLSHIT copyright laws.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
>> "It's great to be able to tell your device, 'I wanna watch the Duke basketball game, I don't care what channel it's on.' ...which is exactly what I've already been doing for years (and for $0.00 give or take a few watts) with my Linux-based media PC that is running MythTV and plugged into an OTA antenna.
... Suggests walled garden is solution to trivial problem.
Uh,content owners want to overcharge you for that. I mean, they know you are desperate to see some show so why not make some money off that? It's like buying bottled water after Katrina. We'll sort of, but without the malice.
They know you want it, so why not make some extra money off that? Why not charge you for the convenience of watching it later?
The only reason VCR is allowed is because the Supreme Court forced it on the TV networks.
What with Netflix; both streaming and DVDs, YouTube, 4 different MMORPGs I alternate between (Guild Wars 2, Neverwinter, Star Trek Online, and Champions), weed being legal for recreational use in this state (including being able to grow up to 4 plants at a time), a huge backlog of totally free classic books sponged off Gutenberg; getting into various little projects that we have talked about doing all our lives, enjoying engaging in unimportant discussions on forums like Slashdot and elsewhere, and even coming up for air frequently in order to go out and about in the real world and interact in person with others; the TV industry will have a long road ahead of them to get people like me interested enough to take the bait.
And yes, I am aware that the above is an exceptionally long run on sentence. As an envoy of the Duchy of Don't Give a Shit, I do not give a shit. :D Now off to go get today's shipping and shopping done and grab a bite to eat, then come back for an early 4:20 and work on photos for my next round of Etsy, eBay, and eCrater sales.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Commercials are what is really wrong with TV. When the commercial air time is so obtrusive that it interrupts the enjoyment of the primary content you wish to watch then it's no longer about tv shows but solely as an avenue to sell advertising time. I wouldn't have cancelled TV if the commercials were limited to something like 2% of any show length. Sometimes on rare occasions the commercials were playing more than the content I wanted to watch. Can only take so much of that compared to the internet or HTPC where there are no commercials. I ditched TV for HTPC years ago. The only reason I had a hard time leaving my TV behind was the NFL. I recently got TV again because it basically came free with digital voice... and immediately found nothing has changed in 3 years with regards to programming. So I don't even watch TV except for occasionally 2 hours on Sunday. TV to me is almost worthless. They could have used it as an educational platform instead it's mostly reality shows with practically zero intellectual stimulation. So I go to YouTube where regular people make videos of themselves working on projects and I can learn something interesting or useful to enhance my life as a human being. If TV was predominantly like that I might watch TV more and YouTube less. Internet video upload sharing sites like YouTube are superior to TV in every way for watching content you want, when you want, without commercials.
How do you expect a centralized source to be able to do it? Even here Seattle which is a pretty big TV market, most of the stations list a generic term "football" or "basketball" for college instead of listing the teams. I'm a UNC fan, so it sucks having to turn on my TV to check to see if they're showing my team.
The ultimate UI already exists, and it's called Sickbeard plus whatever file manager that you're most used to.
I pity the fool who is about to downgrade from that to whatever the fuck Apple is scheming to come up with. Remember iTunes! Anyone here ever try to use iTunes for playing music?
No, it's not.
My television, cable box, and surround sound system are EASY to use. I have a DVR with an external hard drive and I've never had any problem finding what I've recorded. And choosing what to record is so easy a six year old can do it.
What is Eddy's problem? Is he just that dense or does he want to hype a new product from Apple?
it's just hard to do
Duh? We all know it sucks. What's actually hard is fixing it. Fix that, Apple.
Opaque, maybe over the screen itself, 24" diameter.
Then we can spend 45 minutes programming the DVR and brag about it.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
...but I'm not allowed to comment for commercial reasons. Hence the anonymous.
There are two types of TV, linear and on demand.
Linear typically is live TV, sports events, news and the like. TV "as it happens".
On-demand is everything else. Episodic series, documentaries, cooking shows, whatever.
We (aged 30+) are used to everything being linear, and adapting consumption of on-demand as part of linear (TiVo, HDD recorders of any kind). It's what we're used to. But the next generation expect everything to be on-demand. Youtube is grabbing a huge market share of the next generation with subscribers to what is essential episodic.
So yes, "Glorified VCR" is the essence of capturing episodic material delivered live, but there are enough on-demand alternatives to defeat that, long term. "Live" will never be replaced, though the mechanism for transmitting it will evolve. It is now and it will continue to do so.
I work for a global broadcast equipment producer that has its roots in linear live TV, and we're all rather scared of on-demand. But, it's adapt or die. Embrace both on demand and linear TV. In the TV world, we're living in Interesting Times.
ad:content ratio is pretty bleh
Which is WHY it's so hard to watch just the program you want to watch.
I can't see Apple changing that dynamic.
Yes. They've treated their cash cows so bad that most of them have left to greener pastures. And all their fences are pretty much worthless. And Apple thinks a wall will work better........ Ahahahaha!!!!!!!
cable and satellite providers is what needs to be 'reinvented' -- with ala carte programming, in-home clearqam distribution of at least broadcast channels, and fair and honest (hahaha) services and pricing, with no fine print gotchas, no below-the-line billing scams, no 'bundles' and no contracts or term commitments. they bill in advance, so no snooping on credit histories and other shit either; and no selling our data to anyone.. not even to neilsen "in aggregate form". if providers weren't such greedy fucks, people wouldn't be fleeing from their clutches in droves.
Awww, are AppleTV sales too low for your shareholders liking?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
but the needed reinvention is less about being able to record the input than it is about the quality of the input being recorded. For all the dozens of channels I have in my cable package, there is precious little input worth recording or watching.
linquendum tondere
Like pretty much everything coming out of Apple these days, this translates to:
"You have money you're not giving us. And even worse, you're giving it to someone else, you Satan worshipping devils. And equally bad, you're doing things we can't keep a record of to sell to advertisers. How dare you keep secrets from your deciduous overlords!"
If only Apple made something to change the interface to television, oh I don't know, an Apple TV...
Stop complaining and start coding!
BTW Comcast X1 is gaining a lot of useful features, such as "Team Reminders" for sporting events, "People Also Watched", Custom Playlists for DVR, etc.
I don't care what channel something is on. I just want my TV to present me with a slection of programmes I do like - given my watching history - and some suggestions for others I might like. When I choose one, just show me the dam' programme. That's all! If I then specify that I want more, don't ask me any questions: just get it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It'a so hard that ppl throws themselves out balconies or bridges.
The ad-ratio and crap-content-to-wothwhile ratio drove me off it long ago.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Not sure I see the need for reinvention here. TV is not about the newest coolest gadgets every month, it is about entertainment, the user interface makes for a tiny fraction of the time someone spends with their TV. Netflix as well as various TV boxes have reinvented the VCR about as much as is required at this point. Portable media players, Smart Phones and tablets needed reinvention, you could make the most awesome perfect interface for a TV and it still won't be (or shouldn't be) the primary selling point.
The built-in EPG is slow and difficult to navigate. But the real issue is streaming: Both the paid and free sites don't have a standard interface for searching content. Tv sets can't become 'smart' devices until they can seamlessly pull data from a web-site. Then we need a web-site that contains the master list of streaming web-sites. The vendor's primary interests are first-to-market and vendor lock-in, not providing infrastructure that the competition can use. This is why cable has been so troublesome.
There has been many systems already for years that record everything on every channel available for 1-4 weeks backwards on a server, and you can then select what you want to watch from your virtual interest list against this database.
Combine that with Netflix-style on-demand, and that's the newborn TV.
Apple removes channel & volume buttons, SVP calls it "brave."
When you're too stupid for root, you're probably too stupid for headphone jacks, channel & volume buttons too. In short: if you're too stupid to think, then you're too stupid to choose. LOL.
Now we need to shame all the linux lusers who demand root be inaccessible. Look at me, mofos, I'm running as root and y'all can go fvck yourselves.
TV was originally broadcast for free across the air, supported by ad revenue.
Then they "reinvented" it, forcing most people to pay for access to local channels, and bundling in 400 other channels that no one ever watches. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
We're in the midst of a second reinvention with the increasing popularity of Hulu, Netflix, SlingTV, and others. This one seems to be going over much better.
If we listened to pirates like we listened to hackers we might make some headway in content delivery like we did to security, respectively. Then we could figure out the finances of it as we go.
I still like to channel surf. The problem is everything has its own guide and they need to be integrated into one. He's right about not caring about channels, although the channels themselves do care because they want you to be aware of what channel is providing some content you are watching. I'd like my basic cable from cable and sling tv channels and hulu and whatever else all in a single guide that just knows how to get what i click on.
They can start by getting rid of the drag queen newscasters on the 5:00 news. Yes, I live in the USA.
Cue said. "It's great to be able to tell your device, 'I wanna watch the Duke basketball game, I don't care what channel it's on.' I just want to watch the Duke basketball game.
I don't care how convenient it is, I will not have a device in my house that has been designed to listen in on my private conversations. I remember a year or so ago that Samsung recommended to owners of their smart TVs not to have private conversations where the TV could hear because they couldn't control who all was listening in. Enough devices are spying on me already, I have to draw the line somewhere.
sports blackouts
OMG yes. I bought my wife an MLB.tv season pass because she loves watching baseball. What do you get for $109.99? Every game on TV except the ones in your home market. You can watch the Twins suck any time you want, so long as you don't live in Minnesota. Oh, and no postseason: that's a separate subscription.
Who the fuck came up with those ideas? I'll be damned if MLB ever gets another penny from us.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Apple is going to reinvent your TV by making it thinner. They will remove everything but the screen and give you a bag to hold all the dongles and parts they removed that the TV requires to work.
Channel owners want to lock you into their channel, regardless of which device you use to watch it.
Device manufacturers want to lock you into their device, regardless, of which channel you will watch on it.
It already got reinvented. It's called the internet. Only the things they describe in the second paragraph were made illegal.
If I try to watch a TV-show that aired last night (or two decades ago) by downloading it from some torrent site, I'm an awful pirate. If I instead record it from TV and keep the record (and let's say I also strip the advertisements from the recording before someone makes this point), there's nothing wrong with that. Somehow the fact that recording from TV is less efficient makes it better.
If the existing power structures behind TV broadcasts were willing to give up the control they have now, TV would have been abandoned already.
Apple just wants to make television apple only (and block everyone else from it and sue like hell)
...god forbid people have to actual learn how to do anything rather thean just randomly say "I want xxxxxxx" and it just happens for them....
As for "rights" issues, eliminate copyright, problem solved
I just to go titan tv, look up what I want, and if it is something I want to record, click the record button. 1,2,3 done.
I find the current programming LESS convenient in some cases. Yes, having a guide and being able to select things is great, but if I want to program a special event, or two programs back-to-back, I just want to set channel + time + length and be done with it. That's not an option.
NHL center ice is the same way, it really pissed me off when I couldn't watch the playoffs.
If Apple is the one to reinvent it, it'll be a closed off tightly controlled ecosystem where they take the lions share of any profit and charge far too much for the experience. If TV needs to be reinvented, it doesn't need Apple to be the one to do it.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Eddie Cue can fuck right off, as far as I'm concerned. I'm perfectly happy with how I watch TV, when I happen to do so. None of the "issues" he whines about bother me in the least.
Frankly, if you find watching television so difficult that you need a speech interface and search engine to accomplish it, perhaps television is not for you. You might want to take up recreational drooling.
That's the message I get from this. Which message is exactly in line with Apple's previously demonstrated opinion of it's customers.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"