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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I agree that this is the direction Apple will probably take, but I'm not sure I like it.

When I sit down on the couch my brain thinks "I want to watch The Walking Dead" not "I want to watch AMC's The Walking Dead."

Think of how poor the interface would be on the TiVo if, instead of show titles, you were presented first with folders of television networks to select from.

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We may start seeing shows as apps, not channels as apps. So I can get The Walking Dead app, or the Battlestar Galactica app.

Television networks are like book publishers. They're not really needed anymore when content creators can sell their stuff directly to a willing audience.

It would be like the Windows Start Menu where you had the likes of Start -> Programs -> Muffleklumpf Software Ltd -> Picture Editor.

It led to a searchable start menu.

Mac OS X 10.4's Spotlight led to a searchable start menu in Vista.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)

This is why search needs to be a huge component of a successful product in this area. For Google, it's their tried-and-true search bar. For Apple, it seems like Siri is their entry point.

The Networks would _love_ this though, so I could see them being "happy" with it working that way.

The problem isn't the networks, it's the infrastructure owners. They don't want to sell commodity bits through a dumb pipe, they want to provide premium content bundles.

A bit like mobile operators, pre-iPhone. All of them tried to push their own value-add, operator-specific app stores etc.

I imagine Apple aggregating all the TV channel shows into a TV guide sort of interface, nothing to different than current cable offerings. So, it'll be very similar in experience. Just turn on TV and you'll see all the channels playing (all your channels at top and then other channels following). Choose what you want to watch, bam... you're watching it. The added benefit, is that you'll be able to watch past content somehow. Maybe it'll track your favorite shows and automatically show you all past shows you haven't watched as well. There's lots of possibilities. But I think whatever Apple does, they'll want to improve on the current TV experience, not degrade it.

I've never used Tivo but I do navigate to AMC to watch The Walking Dead on my cable box.

I'd agree that the situation is not ideal but I wonder how much Siri would play into this considering the NY Times report of integration of Siri and an Apple television.

Once you are on TiVo or something like it you don't know when something is on or even what channel it is on.

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