An Inside Look at Why Apple Hasn’t Revolutionized Television
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Most analysts have no clue what it takes to run a business, they are focused on balance sheet and income statements separate from the reality that created them (which is the exact opposite of what Buffett does). The Apple Watch was about as successful as was possible (probably the best selling watch in history by revenues), and some analysts flipped out that it wasn't as big as the iPhone (even though Apple Watch outsold iPhone in their first year).
The latest AppleTV is great, a substantial improvement to the previous model, and very competitive in every way other than cost (it's ease of use premiums is worthwhile though IMHO). I use Siri, play games with my kids, subscribed to HBO/Netflix, etc. The only reason sales declined over the previous model is that it's significantly more expensive. But the reality is the hardware can't ever be a big product for Apple, other than opening the door to getting a piece of subscription revenues for streaming content.
The only thing left holding back AppleTV, Xbox, Roku, Fire, Google, et al, is access to live and current tv content. Apple hasn't been able to crack the code to get live TV channels yet, but neither has most anyone else. The real problem is the cable business model, and it needs to fracture a little more before it breaks entirely and all the set top boxes get access to all the content.
There's two reasons I don't think anyone has cracked live TV. The obvious one is technical: cable companies don't want to give away the keys to that kingdom because they make a ton of money in equipment rental still. (With the change of guard in the FCC, it doesn't look like that will change, now.)
But the other problem is more social. Even when the cable companies had a mandated technical solution (CableCard), "no one" used it. There are plenty of reasons given for this, but I think the main one is that "live TV" is probably a red herring. Outside of sports, certain types of "events" like award shows, and maybe news, no one actually seems to want Live TV. We'd all much rather have the option to pause, to rewind, to skip fast forward. Cable companies aren't differentiating themselves on how live their content is, they are competing for who offers the best DVR and/or On Demand platforms.
Of course, they'd be doomed to be easily beat by the cable cutters and the smarter software solutions of Netflix, Hulu, et al, if they weren't also gatekeepers to internet access at all on the one side and ancient content contracts on the other side. Which is why, as you point out, the real problem is the cable business model and the fact that we let the cable companies conglomerate into just a few monopolistic megacorporations that own giant vertical slices of content and internet access.
Cynicism suggests the cable companies aren't going to fracture or break: they will need to be regulated or destroyed.
And with no 4K UHD support. That's the one stopping me from buying an Apple TV.
This hybrid app model feels like a winning recipe for me. It seems to be only a matter of time before the content providers offer this directly without a bundled cable subscription.
This is reason I will never buy an Apple TV device again. There are regular "updates" to Apple TV. Those updates entail putting new crapware on the home screen which when you launch them want your Cable TV login. Why if I had cable TV would I use the Apple TV to access content I already have on Cable TV without the Apple TV?
IMO the new Apple TV is substantially better/more usable than the old Apple TV. It made me hate my cable box & DVR UI even more.
> "Why if I had cable TV would I use the Apple TV to access content I already have on Cable TV without the Apple TV?"
Because cable TV UI sucks super hard. Cable TV UI is slow, unresponsive, confusing. Pausing, rewinding sucks. Apple TV has an nice analog scrubber feel to it, which makes it quick to jump around and rewind an episode. Did I mention it's slow, and gets slower the longer the cable box has been on?
I can watch non-live HBO on Apple TV and cable TV. Whenever possible, I use the Apple TV. Closed captions render better and more pleasant with ATV. I have an easy way to activate "loudness"/"compression" for nighttime viewing, instead of having to fudge with my amplifier's settings to accomplish the same.
I use my cable box because I have to. If I want to watch the "Daily Show" the same night it aired, I have no choice but to use the cable box DVR. And then there's the live TV.
Unfortunately, because there is no effective competition in the cable market, and because consumers do not complain loudly about shitty technology (cable box user experience), and because cable companies do not seem to care either, we are stuck in god knows how many more years of terrible cable box UI.
Meanwhile, I'll be trying to use my Apple TV whenever I can.
In my opinion this is yet one more reason to get rid of Cable TV altogether. However if you use the Apple TV like this you still have to pay a monthly charge for that ugly cable box and te remote uses 1980s technology. What does a cable box rental cost these days 8 - 10 dollars a month? And the remote rental(yes you pay for that separately) 2 dollars a month?
I'm not sure complaining to the company about their hideous cable box/UI/remote would do anything. The loudest complaint you can make is to cancel TV service. It's a dying business and it can't die fast enough in my opinion. I think as soon as ESPN comes around for live sports it will go much more quickly.
I cut the cord 5+ years ago because it's not worth $50+ a month to me. That said, I definitely miss having a DVR and cable. Cutting the cord is becoming a worse and worse experience as the content has fragmented behind multiple paywalls, forced ads have been added to many of the free offerings, and cable companies have resisted any attempts to make this all easier (for example, the slow/pathetic roll-out of Apple's single-sign on feature).
I agree, and that's that's not even that pricey by cable standards. I know plenty of people that pay much more.
I think you can do pretty well these days without cable, live sports aside with Hulu, Netflix, Amazon etc. I'm surprised think its miserable. What all streaming services are you using?
As for the updates, the previous generation of AppleTV didn't have an app distribution model, so adding new apps via updates was the only way they could do it. The current one that's been out for the last few years doesn't do this - if you want the CBS or NFL app you go to the app store and download it yourself.
Maybe you don't want to pay the monthly fee for another cable box. Maybe you're on vacation and brought your Apple TV. Or maybe the on demand access sucks (U-verse) and you can get full access to HD shows via AppleTV apps.
Once these apps allow a DIRECTV now or SlingTV login I'll never buy cable again.
They haven't really cracked the on-demand channel problem yet either. imo Apple TV is the best platform in terms of technology as a TV set top box but Amazon Fire TV is superior because Amazon cracked the content issue. They even have add-on channels now
Apple hasn't offered the same, but all these other services do. Overall none of exciting to me, as I just want and need Internet and watch things thru my TV connected to my Mac Mini (free & oodles of stuff to watch).
Apple the TV Provider assumed Apple would be able to make iTunes like deals to get TV and Movies like they got Music. This didn't come to fruition, so we got a pretty standard media streaming device with pretty standard prices.
If you use other Apple products, AirPlay is probably the best screen sharing software out there. Try to get a Windows computer to do that with an Xbox without at least an hour of Googling and shady streaming software.
In the last 2 decades Apple has made a single revolutionary product, the iPhone. The rest have been polished version of existing products. The Apple TV falls into the latter category.
My TV has Miracast, which is natively supported by my Android and Windows PCs and casting on the TV is literally a button away, but neither my iPhone nor my Mac supports ... and Miracast is a better technology.
As an aside I'd also highly recommend "Sofaplay" which is by far the easiest way I've found to beam video to my Samsung Smart TV from my MBP. Literally "just works" dragging a file onto a drop-target. Does the transcoding and everything with '0' fuss.
I would consider products like the iPod, Mac Air, iPad, hell even iTunes or the App Store concept (which wasn't released at the same time as the first iPhone, but shortly fast-followed), to be "revolutionary" If, as an example, you're going to claim that the iPod is just a polished WalkMan or Mp3 player, that's a _real_ oversimplification in a way that can be applied to the iPhone = a polished cell phone with a bigger screen (touch screen cell phones were rare, but around before the iPhone.)
The iPad and mac air are not revolutionary. They are evolutions of iphone and mac book. A good idea don't make something revolutionary. Making something bigger or thiner is not a revolution unless you talk about 2 orders magnitude.
iTune and the app store concepts are not revolutionary. They are just paid version of existing concepts. Linux had official software repo for decades. We used pirated music download services online for years.
Apple products are never revolutionary. This word is just, literally, the one used in all their PR and people repeat it again and again.
They take good existing idea (touch screens finger control, phone PDA, mp3 players), use them, make them better, integrate them better. They build great hardware, add solid software on top of it and design friendly beautiful UI to use them.
The only apple revolution is their ability to always improve the user experience. Not their products.
The apple watch has a poor user experience, and hence nobody uses it.
This is not to diminish apple's merit. What they do is hard. It's just not revolutionary. Inventing the paper print is. Inventing the vaccine is. Inventing Internet is.
Creating a better phone you manipulate by touching the screen years after Palm existed is not revolutionary. It's innovation.
It was not a superior product to the iPod.
But I agree with your general point about there being a difference between "revolutionary" and excellent polish/UI/integration.
If all of that is so easy, why didn't anyone else do it?
> This is not to diminish apple's merit. What they do is hard. It's just not revolutionary.
You don't need revolutionary to be great.
People confuse "apple has a great impact in their industry and society" and "apple products are revolutionary".
"revolutionary" is marketing. And reading your comment, good marketing. It works.
And furthermore, Apple had unique wealthy user base, somewhat locked(songs,apps,messaging) and stronger marketing power than others and we're a strong status symbol, and that allowed them to things that others could not - like selling expensive phones,build great app ecosystems, getting content rights, and selling expensive watches.
Similarly the Macbook Pro for raising the bar in terms of what users could expect from the high end (aluminium body, sleek bevel, rock-solid reliability, high performance).
Just to underline iTunes a little more - hand in glove with the iPod and eventually the iPhone completely turned the music industry upside down and gave it a new impetus since being destroyed by illegal downloading.
App Store and iPhone revolutionised lifestyle computing (ad hoc: there's probably a better term) by getting the balance between the walled garden and innovation just right (various others had attempted this before but fell between these two stools).
Also iCloud deserves a footnote for the automatic cloud backups if nothing else, which is still one of the killer features that keeps me with the platform.
It's an interesting correlation that most of these innovations (perhaps all?) proceeded under Steve Jobs' watch. Interesting that not much has happened since ... the watch maybe is kind of cool but I don't think we're seeing the same kind of stellar revolutionary uptake and ROI with these other products.
I wonder if he was around still would apple have made inroads into TV yet? Not much higher walled gardens than Film (Pixar), Music or Telecomms ... it would at least have been interesting to watch.
Many say he wasn't the nicest guy going but for me that's beside the point. Innovator on a global scale.
RIP
As a matter fact the only thing I want plugged into my TV is a Windows computer. It's the best. I get all the content that I want plus video games. I feel bad for people who are stuck with locked down walled garden devices.
Apple TV is one of my more disappointing purchases.
Then I went to a friends house, and used his xbox one. It does everything all of these systems do, streams every major provider, and uh, it's also an xbox. Since then we've ditched every other device in the living room.
Yeah, if you play games, it makes sense. But, for straight media streaming, I'll take the Apple TV.
It would've been the middle ground. Not just streaming, but not as hardcore as an XBox/PS4 (which weren't $250 when the AppleTV launched.)
The big mis-step of the 4th gen AppleTV is that they didn't pick any direction for it. It's a bit like the first-gen Watch. They just threw a bunch of crap at the wall and expected the early adopters to sift through it.
Apple hired Amazon's Fire TV chief to run its TV operations. He brings hardware and content experience and this may signal renewed focus on Apple TV.
5th gen ATV is currently being tested that may release as soon as this year, codename: J105. Supports 4k streaming and HDR sources say.
The ATV improvements are needed to stay competitive as 4K TVs become mainstream, but these alone probably will not make it a groundbreaking, iPhone-caliber product.
Apple engineers have repeatedly been forced to compromise on their vision of revolutionizing the living room sources say.
Apple's difficulties in this space are a combination of difficulties negotiating iTunes style efficient/cheap deals and innovative, fast competitors
I'm deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem (Macbook Pros, iPhone, Apple TV), and now I feel locked in to the device because of my decision to buy a lot of content through the iTunes store. I now have a large library of movies and TV shows that cannot be accessed via Roku, XBox, etc. It's partly because of this that I root for Apple and their TV products to succeed.
We don't have cable. My wife is much more picky about technology than I am and also watches way more TV than I do. She loves the thing. The apps have all of the shows that she used to watch when we did, and things like Siri make it easy to pull up whatever you want without having to dig through apps to find it.
The bigger issue is this: a couple can watch TV in the middle of Oregon at decent quality without having fast Internet. You need fast Internet for the Apple TV to function. Much of America doesn't have access to this.
People have been nipping at Apple for this crap for ages, and they just keep printing money. They're capitalized higher than giant oil conglomerates at this point.
When I see quotes like: "To a certain extent, the Apple TV is handcuffed by its parent's addiction to fat margins. Apple is constitutionally allergic to losing money on a product..." you need to eyeroll.
The product is probably a moderate success, and is really a margin enhancer product.
What a stupid thing to say. With the iPhone, one can:
Pay bills
Play games
Text your friend in another country
Call your mom
Check your bank statement
Deposit checks
Call you dad
Tweet your grandmother
Watch a video
Play music
The list goes on, all while being completely mobile.
Apple TV? Not so much.
The next iPhone-caliber product will be whatever comes AFTER smartphones. And it likely will have absolutely NOTHING to do with TV.
Apple TV is way too cumbersome for most people for a dying medium.